By: Jeffrey
Mankoff
Photo by:
beritabaru.co
Russia’s
invasion of Ukraine constitutes the biggest threat to peace and security in
Europe since the end of the Cold War. On
February 21, 2022, Russian president Vladimir Putin gave a bizarre and at times
unhinged speech laying out a long list of
grievances as justification for the “special military operation” announced the following day. While these grievances included the
long-simmering dispute over the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the shape of the
post–Cold War security architecture in Europe, the speech centered on a much more fundamental issue: the
legitimacy of Ukrainian identity and statehood themselves. It reflected a worldview Putin had long
expressed, emphasizing the deep-seated unity among the Eastern Slavs—Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians,
who all trace their origins to the medieval Kyivan Rus commonwealth—and suggesting that the modern states of
Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus should share a political
destiny both today and in the future. The corollary to that view is the claim
that distinct Ukrainian and Belarusian
identities are the product of foreign manipulation and that, today, the West is
following in the footsteps of Russia’s
imperial rivals in using Ukraine (and Belarus) as part of an “anti-Russia
project.”
Throughout
Putin’s time in office, Moscow has pursued a policy toward Ukraine and Belarus
predicated on the assumption
that their respective national identities are artificial—and therefore fragile.
Putin’s arguments about foreign enemies
promoting Ukrainian (and, in a more diffuse way, Belarusian) identity as
part of a geopolitical struggle against Russia echo
the way many of his predecessors refused to accept the agency of ordinary people seeking autonomy from
tsarist or Soviet domination. The historically minded Putin often invokes the ideas of thinkers emphasizing the
organic unity of the Russian Empire and its people—especially
its Slavic, Orthodox core—in a form of what the historian Timothy Snyder calls
the “politics of eternity,” the belief in an
unchanging historical essence.
The
salience that Putin and other Russian elites assign to the idea of
Russian-Ukrainian-Belarusian unity helps
explain the origins of the current conflict, notably why Moscow was willing to
risk a large-scale war on its borders when
neither Ukraine nor NATO posed any military threat. It also suggests that
Moscow’s ambitions extend beyond preventing
Ukrainian NATO membership and encompass a more thorough aspiration to dominate Ukraine politically, militarily, and
economically.
It also
helps explain Russia’s military strategy. Moscow appeared to calculate that
enough Ukrainians, at least in the
eastern part of the country, would accept some form of reintegration into a Russian
sphere of influence because of shared
cultural, linguistic, religious, and other ties with Russia. Despite pre-
war polls showing large numbers of Ukrainians willing
to take up arms to defend their country against a Russian invasion, Moscow’s wager was not entirely
implausible given the recentness of the shift and the persistence of family and other ties across the
Russian-Ukrainian border. Nonetheless, Russia’s war has become bogged down in no small part because this
calculation about Ukrainian identity has proven dramatically wrong.
The
past three decades—and especially the years since the 2014 “Revolution of
Dignity” and ensuing Russian annexation
of Crimea and intervention in Donbas—have witnessed a significant consolidation
of Ukrainian civic identity. This Ukrainian
civic nation encompasses not just Ukrainian speakers in the western part of the country, but much of the Russian-speaking but
increasingly bilingual east as well. A generation has grown up in an independent Ukraine that, for all its flaws, has
maintained a robust democracy and is becoming increasingly
European in its outlook (thanks in no small part to Russia’s aggressive
meddling), even as Putin’s Russia remains fixated on quasi-imperial great-power
aspirations. If anything, the current war has further united Ukrainian citizens from all regions and linguistic
and religious backgrounds while reinforcing the split between Ukrainian and Russian identities. Thus,
whatever happens on the battlefield, Russia is almost certain to fail in its bid to establish lasting control
over its neighbor.
“Russia’s
war has become bogged down in no small part because this calculation
about Ukrainian identity has proven dramatically wrong.”
Putin and Russia’s Imperial Identity
While
his February 21 speech was particularly vitriolic, Putin has long claimed that
Russians and Ukrainians comprise
“one people” whose common history implies that they should also share a common
political fate today. During a 2008 meeting with
then-U.S. president George W. Bush, Putin reportedly remarked that “Ukraine is not even a country.” He also
described Russians and Ukrainians as “one people” in his March 2014 speech to the Russian parliament (Duma)
announcing the annexation of Crimea and has come back to the theme in subsequent years,
notably in a 6,000-word article titled “On the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians” published in July 2021.
In his pre-invasion address, Putin further claimed
that the current Ukrainian state was a creation of the Soviet Union and should
be renamed for its supposed “author and
architect,” the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin.
Putin’s
historical excursions tend to provoke bewilderment in the West—when they are
not dismissed as outright
disinformation. Yet his claim that Ukrainians and Russians (as well as
Belarusians) are “one people” has a long
pedigree in elite Russian circles. It continues to shape not only elite
discourse but political practice as well. As
Ukraine has become increasingly “Ukrainified” in recent years, Russian officials and analysts (few of whom have ever bothered to
learn Ukrainian) were oblivious to the changes.
With
some Soviet-era variation, what the historian Zenon Kohut calls the “unity
paradigm” has been the default view of
Russian statesmen and intellectuals since the early modern era, when the Grand
Princedom of Moscow (Muscovy) began bringing
the disparate East Slavic lands and peoples under its control. During this period of imperial conquest, Russian publicists
such as the cleric Innokenty Gizel redefined the
Ukrainian lands and their people as part of Russia’s own history. They
emphasized the existence of a tripartite “all-Russian” people
comprised of Great, Little (Ukrainian), and White (Belarusian) Russians, a view
promoted in the educational system of the nineteenth-century Russian Empire.
Committed to the idea of the “all-Russian” people, imperial elites believed
that rival powers were deliberately promoting Ukrainian and Belarusian
nationalism as a geopolitical tool for weakening Russia—the same theme Putin has
long emphasized.
As
Ukraine has become increasingly “Ukrainified” in recent years, Russian
officials and analysts (few of whom have ever bothered to learn Ukrainian) were
oblivious to the changes.
While the inhabitants of modern Ukraine
have maintained political and linguistic identities distinct from Russia for
centuries, Ukrainian nationalism—the belief that Ukrainians constitute a
distinct nation that should have its own state—emerged during the nineteenth century,
when what is now Ukraine was partitioned between Russia and Austria-Hungary,
which controlled the western Ukrainian regions of Galicia, Bukovina, and
Transcarpathia. The comparatively liberal Habsburgs tolerated the Ukrainian national
movement—even providing support for Ukrainian forces who fought against Russia
during World War I and helping Ukraine achieve a brief independence after the
Russian Empire collapsed.
The Russian Empire, on the other hand,
persecuted Ukrainian activists and organizations. Russian authorities argued
that Ukrainian nationalism was an artificial creation of Vienna aimed at what a
senior diplomat termed “disruption of the Russian tribe [plemeni].” The
minister of internal affairs issued a decree in 1863 banning publication and
instruction in the Ukrainian language that remained in force until 1905. Ukrainian writers and activists, such as Taras Shevchenko, regarded as the
father of Ukrainian literature, were arrested and exiled.
With the collapse of the
Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires at the end of World War I, Russian suspicions
about Ukrainian identity transferred to other targets. During the Paris Peace
Conference, former foreign minister Sergei Sazonov, a man generally sympathetic
to Slavic national movements, remarked, “As for Ukraine, it does not exist.
Even the word is artificial and a foreign import. There is a Little Russia,
there is no Ukraine . . . The Ukrainian movement is nothing but a reaction
against the abuses of the bureaucracy and of Bolshevism.”
This divide between the
Austro-Hungarian and Russian territories continued to matter long after the two
empires fell. Ukraine secured a brief period of independence during the Russian
Civil War, with nationalist, anarchist, and other groups fighting both Polish
and Russian armies—and among themselves.
By the early 1920s, the regions in the
west formerly controlled by Austria-Hungary passed under Polish or Romanian
rule until Stalin seized them at the start of World War II. Despite a vicious
campaign of communization, western Ukraine remained a crucible for nationalist
sentiment. Western Ukraine was the base of operations for Stepan Bandera’s
Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), who attempted to set up a puppet state under German protection during World War II. It was the
site of some of the war’s worst atrocities—including the German-led
annihilation of the Jewish population, Ukrainian-led ethnic cleansing of Poles,
and Polish retribution attacks on Ukrainian civilians. In the Russian
narrative, Bandera became a figure of
particular hate, his willingness to collaborate with the Nazi invaders held up
as evidence of the link between Ukrainian nationalism, ethnic
cleansing, and foreign manipulation. Putin and other officials claim that Ukraine’s post-2014 governments have
pursued a “Banderite” policy of purging Russian influence under the direction of foreign sponsors.
Despite
a period of “indigenization (korenizatsiya)” of education, culture, and
politics in the 1920s, Ukraine
ultimately experienced a high degree of Russification, owing to the persecution
of nationalist intellectuals under Stalin,
thin linguistic and ethnic boundaries between Russians and Ukrainians, and the
opportunities for advancement available to Ukrainians
who professed a Russian identity. During the late 1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost (“openness”) provided
an opportunity for the mobilization of
nationalist movements pushing for the breakup of the Soviet Union, including
the People’s Movement (Rukh) of Ukraine.
Gorbachev sought to keep Ukraine within a Moscow-centric confederation he hoped
would replace the Soviet Union.
While
then-Russian president Boris Yeltsin supported Ukrainian independence in the context
of his effort to overcome Gorbachev
and bring down the Soviet Union, he and his advisers clung to the belief that
an independent Ukraine would continue to remain
closely bound to Russia. Yeltsin’s adviser Gennady Burbulis remarked that “It was inconceivable, for our
brains, for our minds, that [Ukraine’s independence] would be an irrevocable fact.” Yeltsin therefore resisted
calls from senior military officials and politicians such as then-mayor of Moscow Yury Luzhkov to “recover” Crimea
or otherwise pursue territorial revisionism
toward an independent Ukraine.
Much of
the Russian political and intellectual elite nevertheless continued to doubt
the legitimacy or viability of
the Ukrainian state. One of the most influential voices in the glasnost-era
debate over the future shape of the Russian
imperium was that of the Nobel Prize–winning novelist and philosopher Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn, who acknowledged being
“well-nigh half Ukrainian by birth” but echoed imperial Russian officials’
claim that “talk of a separate Ukrainian people existing
since something like the ninth century . . . is a recently invented falsehood.” A figure who had long criticized the
Soviet system for inflicting violence upon traditional Russian culture and identity, Solzhenitsyn called for the
formation of a “Russian Union” composed of the Soviet Union’s East Slavic core—Russia, Belarus, Ukraine,
and northern Kazakhstan—while the Baltic, South Caucasus, and Central Asian states would become
independent. He regarded the standardized Ukrainian language as the “distorted” product of Austro-Hungarian
intrigues, “unrelated to popular usage and chock-full of German and Polish words.” Solzhenitsyn therefore
condemned the “cruel partition” of Ukraine from Russia, warning of further waves of separatism within Ukraine
itself.
A
leader who consciously portrays himself as embodying Russia’s imperial
tradition, Putin adopts similar language
to his imperial predecessors’ to describe Ukraine and the
Russian-Ukrainian-Belarusian relationship.
Putin accuses NATO and the European Union of manipulating Ukrainian national
sentiment as part of their own geopolitical
competition with Russia, employing “the old groundwork of the Polish- Austrian ideologists to create an ‘anti-Moscow Russia’” in
Ukraine—in other words, attempting to pry Ukraine
away from its “authentic” identity and alignment with Russia. Similarly,
Putin’s February 21 speech emphasized how
post-Soviet Ukraine’s leaders have “attempted to build their statehood on the
negation of everything that unites us” with the
assistance of “external forces.”
This
rejection of Ukrainian identity and the claim that Ukraine’s desire to separate
itself from Russian influence was
the product of “external forces” seem to be not just Russian talking points,
but a claim that Putin himself (and,
presumably, other high-placed Russian officials) believe. It contributed to the
Kremlin’s confidence that the war could be won easily and quickly—that ordinary
Ukrainians would welcome Russian forces as
liberators once they had removed the “fascist junta” in Kyiv, even though
president Volodymyr Zelensky won 73 percent of the vote in
Ukraine’s April 2019 presidential runoff. Russian hubris rested on a basic failure to grasp not only the deep roots
of Ukrainian identity, but also the extent to which Ukraine itself has changed in the years since the Soviet
collapse.
The Making of Ukraine and Ukrainians
Though
the relationship between Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians remains an
object of contention in all three
countries, Ukraine has made enormous strides in consolidating a shared civic
identity, which includes the bulk of Russian
speakers in eastern and southern Ukraine. The relative success of this project
of “making Ukrainians” has accelerated Ukraine’s
decoupling from Russia, feeding concern in Moscow that time is running out to restore influence over its neighbor
and justify a series of increasingly risky gambles to pull Ukraine back into Moscow’s orbit.
The
story of the more than three decades since the Soviet collapse centers on the
gradual diffusion of “Ukrainianness”
across an ever-wider swathe of the country and its people. In a pattern familiar
from both interwar Europe and the postcolonial
Global South, the independent Ukrainian state became instrumental in forging a shared national identity among its inhabitants
through education, official memory, the media, legislation, and other tools. Measured by language use,
religious affiliation, ethnic self-identification, and political outlook, a much higher percentage of Ukrainian
citizens today see themselves first and foremost as Ukrainian, including in parts of the country where
Russian remains the predominant language.
“The
relative success of this project of “making Ukrainians” has accelerated
Ukraine’s decoupling from Russia, feeding concern in Moscow that time is running out to restore influence
over its neighbor and justify a series of
increasingly risky gambles to pull Ukraine
back into Moscow’s orbit.”
A key
element of the process of “making Ukrainians” underway since the late Soviet
era is a blurring of the historical
divide between western and eastern (and southern) Ukraine. Though Rukh and
similar groups’ stronghold lay in western
Ukraine, a 1991 referendum on independence from the Soviet Union was approved by 92.3 percent of voters; even in
Russian-speaking regions of eastern Ukraine, large majorities supported independence.
In the
last years of the Soviet Union, Russian speakers outnumbered Ukrainian speakers
in most of Ukraine’s eastern
oblasts; by 2001, the number of Ukrainian speakers was higher everywhere except
in Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk. Today, more than
two-thirds of Ukrainian citizens claim Ukrainian as a native language; even in eastern regions, a plurality
is bilingual in Ukrainian and Russian. The shift reflects both state policy (as in education), as well as
individual decisions. A language law signed by former Ukrainian president Petro
Poroshenko in 2019—and frequently referenced by Putin as an element in the “genocide” perpetrated by the Ukrainian state—promises
to further “Ukrainify” education, media, and administration.
It designates Ukrainian as the official state language and requires all media
outlets to publish in Ukrainian (they may also
publish parallel versions in other languages). Some of the shift is politically
driven, as individuals increasingly use Ukrainian in
protest against Russian intervention—especially in the wake of the 2022 invasion. It is also the natural result of
over 30 years of Ukrainian independence.
Voting
patterns provide another indicator of Ukrainians’ emerging sense of national
unity. The first several presidential
and parliamentary elections held after independence saw stark divides between
western and eastern Ukraine—starker even than the
divides between blue and red states in the United States. In the 1994 election, Leonid Kravchuk, one of the
signatories to the Belavezha Accords dissolving the Soviet Union, won 90 percent of the vote in several
western oblasts (with a high of 94.8 percent in Ternopil oblast)—while his rival, Leonid Kuchma, who
favored a policy of pragmatic balancing between Russia and the West, racked up 88 percent of the vote in
Luhansk oblast and 79 percent in Donetsk oblast (together, Donbas). Since the Russian annexation of Crimea
and invasion of Donbas, however, pro-Western candidates
Petro Poroshenko (2014) and Volodymyr Zelensky (2019) have won comfortable
majorities in all oblasts.2 Moreover, voting
behavior in recent elections was shaped by bread and butter considerations and hopes for ending the conflict in Donbas, issues
that cut across Ukraine’s geographic divides.
Religious
affiliation similarly suggests Ukrainians’ increasing distinctiveness from
Russians. Until 2014, a plurality of
Orthodox Ukrainians maintained allegiance to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of
the Moscow Patriarchate (UOC-MP), established
in the last days of the Soviet Union as a self-governing branch of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC). However, soon after
independence, clerics aligned with president Kravchuk
set up a rival Orthodox Church headed by its own patriarch in Kyiv, which the
ROC and most of the global Orthodox community
regarded as illegitimate.
Adherence
to the UOC-MP peaked in 2010 at 23.6 percent of Ukraine’s Orthodox Christians;
last year around 12 percent
profess adherence to it, while just under a quarter belong to the Kyiv-based
Orthodox Church of Ukraine (and almost 20
percent of Orthodox Ukrainians say they are “simply Orthodox”). The UOC-MP has steadily lost adherents over its ties to the
ROC, which actively promotes the idea of a
“Russian world” and claims as its “canonical territory” the whole of the former
Soviet Union. The 2018 decision by the
Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople granting recognition and autocephaly
(independence) to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine
remains a sore spot in Moscow—as Putin noted in his pre-invasion speech—but represents another step in Ukraine’s
progressive disentanglement from Russia.
Political
outlooks in Ukraine and Russia are diverging as well. Calls for Ukraine’s
integration with the European Union
and NATO have grown substantially—in no small part in response to Russia’s annexation
of Crimea and occupation of Donetsk and Luhansk.
Support for NATO membership, which hovered below
50 percent prior to the 2014 Russian invasion, has greatly risen, reaching 62
percent in early 2022. Meanwhile, more than two-thirds of Ukrainians (68
percent) support membership in the European Union. Regardless of the willingness of either organization to
admit Ukraine, these attitudes reflect a seismic shift that makes the idea of reintegration with Russia
harder to imagine. They also have implications for Ukrainian foreign policy, insofar as leaders such as
Poroshenko and Zelensky, who have come to power in the shadow of war and occupation, prioritize deepening ties
with the Euro-Atlantic West as a hedge against further Russian intervention.
Despite
the development and consolidation of Ukrainian national identity over the past
three decades, a certain “all-Russian”
or post-imperial consciousness still lingers in corners of Ukrainian (and
especially Belarusian) society. Some
politicians, militants, and ordinary people aligned themselves with Russia,
including the deposed former president Viktor
Yanukovych and Belarusian leader Aleksandr Lukashenko, both Russian speakers who identify more with the
supranational Soviet Union than with the post-Soviet national states they ruled. Both promoted Russian as a
lingua franca, supported religious institutions linked to the ROC, and favored close economic and even
political integration with Russia—but struggled to maintain their legitimacy in the face of rising national
consciousness, especially among a younger, post- Soviet generation. Moreover, during the annexation of
Crimea and the war in the Donbas, some Ukrainian citizens sided with the separatists, including
members of the Ukrainian army and security services.
Preparations
for Russia’s current invasion likewise centered on mobilizing collaborators
from among the population, including
some still serving the Ukrainian state—a stratagem that failed due to
corruption and more general rejection of the
“all-Russian” nation. While some pro-Russian fighters no doubt have financial or other reasons for fighting, others, especially
in 2014–15, appeared motivated by genuine support
for the idea of an imperial Russian nation or belief in the Russian claim that
“fascists” in Kyiv are determined to drag Ukraine away from its
historical identification with the Orthodox, Russian world. Others, perhaps, are willing to support whichever side can
bring peace and stability—particularly in Donbas,
whose inhabitants remain deeply ambivalent about their political future.
Significant support for the Russian-backed
Opposition Platform – For Life (the remnants of Yanukovych’s Party of Regions)
in eastern Ukraine may have helped convince
Moscow of lingering pro-Russian sentiment. For that reason, the extent and intensity of resistance to a Russian
invasion in eastern Ukraine remained an open question at the start of the current war.
The
evidence of the past few months suggests that Russian calculations turned out
to be wrong. Indeed, Russia’s
continued intervention in Ukraine appears to be one of the main factors
accelerating this consolidation of a Ukrainian
national identity at odds with the idea of an “all-Russian” nation based in
Moscow. A similar pattern has held throughout the
Putin era, as Moscow’s repeated interventions in Ukraine have themselves helped drive the emergence of a
Ukrainian national consciousness. Amid Russia’s resurgence as a major power, its most glaring failure—and
the most significant “unfinished business” for the aging Putin—are the repeated failures to keep Ukraine
within the fold. Putin’s risky invasion therefore seems to be a last-ditch effort to reverse the legacy of
previous failures—though if the historical record is any guide, it is likely to accelerate rather than reverse
the process of nationalization and decoupling.
How Russian Meddling Accelerated Ukraine’s
Decoupling
Russian
efforts to slow Ukraine’s Westward drift date to the first years after the
Soviet collapse. Though Yeltsin accepted
Ukraine’s post-Soviet borders, concern about the potential for Russian
irredentism was instrumental in Kyiv’s 1996
decision to align with Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Moldova—three states that did
face Russian-backed separatist conflicts on their
territory—in the Western-leaning GUAM group.
This
dynamic has been far more pronounced under Putin. In 2004, Putin’s Kremlin
inserted itself into Ukraine’s
electoral politics by openly supporting Yanukovych, outgoing president Kuchma’s
handpicked successor. Putin traveled to
Ukraine ahead of the vote and campaigned on Yanukovych’s behalf. Pro- Western opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko was poisoned
in an assassination attempt widely blamed on
the Russian security services. When exit polls indicated that the official
results showing a narrow Yanukovych victory had been falsified, Moscow doubled
down on its support, even as masses of orange-clad protestors took to the
streets in Kyiv and other cities demanding that the election be re-held under
international supervision. After Yushchenko won a comfortable
majority in the new election, Moscow responded
with various forms of pressure—including politically motivated gas cutoffs in
2006 and 2009.
Paying
renewed attention to Ukrainian language and culture, the bilingual Yushchenko
pushed for international
recognition of the Stalinist famine (Holodomor) as an anti-Ukrainian genocide.
He also raised the question, which his
predecessors had avoided, of receiving a Membership Action Plan from NATO. While Yushchenko’s presidency was a failure in
political terms, he and his “orange” allies won substantial sympathy in the West with their portrayal of
Ukrainians as a European nation who had long suffered
from Russian oppression.
The
2010 return of Yanukovych and his eastern-based Party of Regions in a free and
fair election appeared to offer Russia
an opportunity to recover from the setbacks of the Yushchenko era. Once again,
Moscow overstepped. Despite their interest in
maintaining close ties with Russia, Yanukovych and his supporters favored signing an association agreement with the European
Union. The agreement called for establishing a
Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area that would boost Ukraine’s overall trade
and give Ukrainians greater access to
Europe—including courts and banking systems that would help the oligarchs
surrounding Yanukovych protect their assets.
The ambition to sign an association agreement was incompatible with Putin’s call for creating a Eurasian Union that would be “a
powerful supranational association capable of becoming
one of the poles in the modern world” and allow Moscow to deepen its political
and economic influence across much of the former Soviet Union.
After Yanukovych rejected membership in this planned union, Moscow employed a mixture of carrots and sticks to
convince him to change his mind. Though Yanukovych
agreed at the last minute to abandon the EU association agreement, neither he
nor the Kremlin reckoned on the fury of
millions of ordinary Ukrainians who believed Yanukovych had betrayed their aspiration for a European future.
The
initial demonstrators on Kyiv’s Independence Square (Maidan Nezalezhnosti) in
late 2013 were mostly young people
calling on Yanukovych to sign the agreement. Waving Ukrainian and EU flags,
they embodied the idea of a Western-oriented Ukraine
and rejection of Russian influence. Moscow, however,
claimed the Maidan protests were part of a U.S.-backed coup attempt, pointing
to the presence of U.S. officials and
statements of support for the protestors. It also urged Yanukovych to suppress the demonstrations.
Violence
by Yanukovych’s security forces only radicalized the protests, which expanded
beyond Kyiv and took on an
increasingly intransigent tone. Even in Russian-speaking parts of eastern
Ukraine, demonstrators targeted symbols of
Russian domination—notably statues of Lenin, as well as of General Aleksandr Suvorov, who oversaw the conquest of southeastern
Ukraine from the Ottoman Empire. By February
2014, even the Kremlin recognized that Yanukovych could not remain in power and
participated in negotiations for a managed
transition. Yet Yanukovych’s hasty flight derailed the transition agreement and resulted in snap elections, limiting Moscow’s
ability to influence the outcome. The May 2014
presidential election resulted in a comprehensive victory for the pro-Maidan,
pro-European Petro Poroshenko. His signing of
the EU association agreement closed the door on Ukraine’s potential inclusion
in the renamed Eurasian Economic Union, which was
left a shell of what Putin had hoped it would be.
Having
failed to coerce Ukraine back into the fold, Moscow pivoted to partition. Even
before Yanukovych fled the country,
pro-Russian demonstrations had broken out in the Crimean port of Sevastopol;
within days, Russian special forces (“little
green men”) began seizing government buildings and military assets across Crimea. Just over three weeks later, following a
hastily organized referendum, Putin announced the annexation of Crimea in a speech to the Duma. The rapidity
with which Russia swallowed Crimea (where a majority
of the population is ethnically Russian) reinforced Russian assumptions about
the weakness and artificiality of the
Ukrainian state and encouraged Moscow to undertake a similar effort across many
of the Russian-speaking regions of eastern and
southern Ukraine.
To
Moscow’s surprise and frustration, however, the Crimea playbook had limited
success in other parts of the country.
Pro-Russian demonstrators in the Dnipro (Dnipropetrovsk), Kharkiv, Kherson,
Mykolaiv, Odesa, and Zaporizhzhia oblasts
failed in their efforts to secure control of government buildings and communications infrastructure. Police in Kharkiv arrested
dozens of protestors who had seized the regional administration building; in Odesa,
counter-protestors set the occupied Trade Unions building on fire, killing nearly 40 pro-Russian activists.
To
Moscow’s surprise and frustration, however, the Crimea playbook
had limited success in other parts of the country.
Only in
Donetsk and Luhansk did pro-Russian demonstrators manage to gain control of the
local administration and launch an
insurgency. Attempts to use Crimea-style referenda as a pretext for annexation were scrapped, however—likely because too few
voters supported annexation by Russia. Poroshenko
responded to the rebels’ seizure of Donetsk and Luhansk by launching an
“anti-terrorist operation.” By the summer of
2014, the Ukrainian military was on the verge of surrounding the separatist
forces in the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk
“people’s republics” (DNR and LNR), cutting them off from supply lines linking them to Russia and leaving them
vulnerable to annihilation. Facing the prospect that its proxies would be wiped out, Moscow responded by
invading Ukrainian territory in force in August 2014. While the Donbas War has been costly for Ukraine,
Russia was unable to translate its victory in the field into a favorable political settlement. Military
occupation and control of the border merely allowed Russia to supply the separatist regions and secure them
from reconquest.
Moscow
also failed in its larger ambition to use the breakaway regions as a cudgel to
force Ukraine to abandon its
aspiration for integration with the West. Neither Poroshenko nor Zelensky made
a serious effort to implement the provisions
of the February 2015 Minsk II ceasefire agreement requiring the Ukrainian legislature (Verkhovna Rada) to adopt a “law on
special status” for the occupied regions and to implement a constitutional provision on
decentralization. Both understood that these steps would entrench the Russian-backed separatists within the federal
structure of the state, compromising Ukrainian sovereignty and providing Moscow a veto over Ukraine’s
foreign policy—and that no democratically elected Rada would vote in favor of these provisions.
Though
he came into office promising a more pragmatic approach to Russia and the
conflict in Donbas, perceptions of
Russian intransigence and bad faith led Zelensky to adopt a harder line on
Minsk II. By the end of 2021, he was even
suggesting Kyiv should seek to modify or abandon it should negotiations fail to progress. Zelensky also started chipping away at
the pillars of Russian influence. He ordered the closing of pro-Russian television networks, and his
government arrested oligarch Viktor Medvedchuk, who funded several of these channels and is regarded
as the Kremlin’s main proxy in Ukraine, on treason charges. Zelensky also pushed to reform the security
services, aiming to root out the Russian sympathizers who proved integral to
the takeover of Crimea and have subsequently interfered with investigations
into Russian influence. Despite significant
pressure from Moscow, the bilingual Zelensky also left in place the language law signed at the end of Poroshenko’s term.
The Road to War—and Beyond
The
conflict in Donbas left Russia facing escalating economic penalties from the
United States and the European Union
that stifled its economy. In 2016, NATO responded to the fears of member states
along Russian borders by reinforcing its military
capabilities in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Romania and standing by its 2008 pledge that Ukraine and
Georgia “will become” members. In 2019, the
United States also abandoned the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty after
accusing Russia of noncompliance, a step that would allow for nuclear
deployments in Central and Eastern Europe as well as around the Russian periphery in Asia.
Faced
with this deteriorating security environment and calculating that the West was
too divided and distracted to respond
forcefully, Putin gambled on an all-out invasion in February 2022. Even with
the reported 190,000 troops massed on the
Ukrainian border when the invasion began, Moscow lacks the manpower to carry out a sustained military occupation,
especially in the face of an insurgency sustained by foreign support. The failure of assaults on Kyiv,
Kharkiv, and other cities in spring 2022 extracted heavy casualties and forced Moscow to pivot back to Donbas. U.S.
and EU sanctions have hit Russia hard, with most
of its banking sector cut off from access to the dollar-denominated financial
system and the prospect of default looming.
While the war has boosted Putin’s standing in opinion polls, it has also
prompted a mass exodus of educated Russians
and prompted draconian crackdowns at home.
Putin’s
decision to use force, particularly to carry out a large-scale invasion rather
than the more limited incursions
Russian forces conducted in Georgia (2008) and Donbas (2014–15), smacks of
desperation. Putin’s February 21 speech, as
well as a subsequent address announcing the start of Russia’s “special military operation” on February 24, effectively denied the
very idea of a separate Ukrainian identity and
the legitimacy of the Ukrainian state. Faced with such demands, Ukrainian
resistance was almost guaranteed. Zelensky’s
promise that the invaders “will see our faces, not our backs” was, in effect, a
call for resistance, including partisan
warfare of the kind Ukrainians waged against both Nazi and Soviet occupation forces (and which took the Red Army and Stalin’s
secret police years of vicious combat to defeat).
Russian atrocities will only reinforce the imperative to resist. This time,
Western powers are preparing to support an
insurgency as well.
Since
before the Orange Revolution, Putin has assumed that many, if not most,
citizens of Ukraine remain committed
to the idea of the “all-Russian” nation, and that it is only their “Banderite”
leaders and the manipulation of foreign powers
that have pushed Ukraine away from Russia. For years, that belief has underpinned Russia’s campaign to halt Ukraine’s drift
toward Europe. In 2004 and again in 2013–14, this campaign was met with disaster. Today, Putin is wagering
that military force can succeed where various other
forms of intervention have failed.
However,
the current invasion rests on the same assumptions about Ukrainian identity
that have led Moscow astray in the
past. Ukrainian resistance has already far surpassed what Moscow was expecting.
Russian forces have suffered tens of thousands of
casualties and failed in their initial objective of marching on Kyiv. Meanwhile, even politicians from the eastern-based
Opposition Platform – For Life have come out
against the Russian invasion, as have leading oligarchs. Opposition Platform –
For Life leader Yuriy Boiko, perhaps the most
prominent pro-Russian voice in post-Yanukovych Ukraine, threw his support
behind Zelensky and declared in the Rada, “We have one country—Ukraine, and we
must defend it!” Even if Russian forces take
Kyiv, an occupation regime will be unable to count on even a modicum of
legitimacy among Ukrainian citizens in most of
the country, especially following revelations of widespread atrocities and other war crimes in occupied regions.
Thus, a
month or so into the conflict, Putin’s gamble already appeared to have backfired
spectacularly. Today, over five
million Ukrainians have fled the country, and thousands more have been killed
or wounded. Yet Russia has failed to achieve
any of its stated military objectives and has itself suffered significant losses of both troops and materiel. Even
apolitical Ukrainians—or those like Boiko, whom Moscow suspected would line up on its side—have fought back
or denounced the invasion. Others, like Medvedchuk,
fled. The flood of collaborators Moscow was counting on to run occupation
administrations in places like Kherson has not materialized. The
consolidation of Ukrainians of all linguistic and regional backgrounds behind the government is not only a testament
to Zelensky’s unexpected courage and political
acumen (Zelensky’s approval rating has soared since the start of the war), but
also consistent with the historical experience
of foreign invasion as a catalyst for nation- and state-building.
Russian
determination to bring Ukraine back into the fold despite the enormous economic
price it is paying—not to mention
the prospect of a grinding, bloody conflict that it could well lose—suggests
that the current crisis goes beyond the
question of Ukraine’s relationship with NATO. For all the Kremlin’s angst,
Ukrainian membership was never a near-term
possibility. And it was Yanukovych’s aspiration to sign a trade agreement with the European Union (not NATO)
that precipitated the Maidan protest movement and
Russia’s first invasion. Promises of neutrality, or “Finlandization” of
Ukraine, are therefore unlikely to resolve the
crisis unless they also provide for a much more comprehensive Russian
protectorate than any the Soviet Union ever
exerted over Finland.
Russian
determination to bring Ukraine back into the fold despite the enormous
economic price it is paying—not to mention the prospect of a grinding, bloody conflict that it could well
lose— suggests that the current crisis goes
beyond the question of Ukraine’s relationship
with NATO.
Despite
the unimpressive performance of its military thus far and the potentially crushing
impact of the sanctions it now
faces, Russia could still emerge victorious on the battlefield—but only at a
very high cost. Its odds of maintaining a
long-term protectorate appear to be plummeting with each day Ukraine holds
out. The ultimate outcome of the conflict will depend
on the West’s response and, above all, on Ukrainians’ willingness to fight for a nation Putin believes does not
and should not exist.
Source: csis.org
