As the conflict in Ukraine moves into the second year of the second phase (having started in 2014 with Russia’s invasion of the Donbas and Crimea), Serhii Plokhy, historian of the region, has written an account that looks back to the historical background from hundreds of years ago, to the break up of the Soviet Union.
Serhii, reading the Afterword of your new book is very moving because you’ve got family members and friends who are fighting and have lost their lives. So this book was obviously very important to you to write?
Yes. That’s where I, after some hesitation, decided that I had to write that book. That was February, early April, when I started working on it, not knowing, of course, what the ultimate result would be. We still are in the middle of the war. It probably is far from over, but what I tried to do in the book is try to figure out for myself and then explain to readers how we got into the war, what the war demonstrated already during the first months, and then during the first year of the hostilities. I think that despite the fact that the war is far from over, we see already a number of trends emerging and can understand the way in which it changed not just Ukraine and Russia, but it changed the world.
One of the first outcomes of the war is already clear that Ukraine has survived and will survive as an independent state. That gave me some confidence in not just going on with the manuscript, but also finishing it. And I think that what the book has to offer is much more than just discussion.
How Russia, Ukraine and the world got into the war, but it can also provide some answers about the future.
Readers may know that Russia has always had territorial intent when it comes to Ukraine. But why that is is probably less clear. This goes back many hundreds of years, but it’s a deep seated assumption, with Putin and many Russians, that Russia should possess Ukraine?
Yes, absolutely. What we see here on the one hand, is a classic war of the disintegration of the empire. The disintegration of the Russian Empire started during World War I. Then the Bolsheviks stitched it together with a new type of ideology, a new level of brutality. It lasted until the end of the Soviet Union in 1991 and then a new stage of the disintegration of the empire was opened. And this war is the war that many observers expected, to a degree, at the end of the Soviet Union. It didn’t happen and it is happening now. So this is one level, the classic empire versus colony versus periphery versus the country that tries to break out from the imperial embrace.
Britain, of course, had enormous empire, but no one in London imagined that the origins of England or Britain were really somewhere in Delhi or in India. But this is the case with the Russian Empire still today. Probably the majority of Russians believe that the origins of Russia, not as an empire but as a nation, are in Kyiv. That’s a very prominent, very powerful historical myth in Russia about their origins from Kyiv, from the mediaeval state called Kievan Rus. And that’s also partially a foundation for Putin’s claims that Russians and Ukrainians were one and the same people. That’s how you claim Kyiv, and that’s how you claim the Kyivan legacy. After the annexation of Crimea, they built a huge statue to Prince Volodymir, who is a namesake of Vladimir Putin. And of course, Prince Volodymir was Prince in Kyiv, not in Moscow, but his largest statue is today in Moscow. So there is an imperial part of the story, and then there is a national Russian identity that is closely connected and linked to a different country, which makes things more complicated and bizarre at the same time.
One of the reasons why the Russian war went so wrong was that complete misread of history, a misunderstanding of today’s Ukraine expectation that the Ukrainians, who allegedly were really Russians, would welcome Russian troops with flowers and they welcomed them with Stingers and other weapons. So history is written all over this war, from the way Putin imagined or reimagined Russian imperial history to the way in which this war shapes a new stage in historical development of the region. And I would say of the world as a whole because we are in a very different place today than we were after the fall of the Berlin Wall. One very important stage. And the global development really came to an end with this war. And the new is just being formed. We don’t know what it will be yet.
Is this the last kick of a dying empire?
Well, I want it to be the last kick, but that’s one of the questions that I pose, but I can’t provide answer. And the reason for that is the stories of the disintegration of the empire is not a one act play. It’s not an event, it is a process. And that process can takes not just decades, sometimes it can take centuries. I already talked about the disintegration of the Russian Empire and gave 1914 as the starting point. You can also think about the Ottomans. Their decline started in the 17th century and the Balkan wars of the 1990s are still the wars over reformatting of the place that was left by the Ottoman Empire on the one hand, Habsburgs on the other. So I really want to be the last kick. I really want to be the last act in that drama of the disintegration of the Russian Empire. I am not sure whether it would be, but I have no doubt that this is a major, major event in that story. It’s a major event in the process of the reimagining not just of Ukraine, but also of Russia as a post-imperial state.
There’s a view by some, and I don’t share this, but there are some who feel that the reason for the invasion is NATO expansion and that’s the reason for the Russian invasion. You don’t agree with that either?
I don’t agree with that. I provide a number of explanations in the book why I don’t think that was the case, but here I just mention one. The war produced results that, of course, Russia didn’t expect. One of them was Finland joining NATO and Sweden breaking with more than 200 years of neutrality and is about to join NATO. This is a new development in comparison to Cold War history. If NATO were be a real threat and if NATO were of real concern for Russia, what you would see today is every single Russian soldier leaving Ukraine and being moved to the border with Finland, because by Finland joining NATO, the Russian border with NATO has doubled. But I am still waiting for evidence of at least one soldier or officer being withdrawn from Ukraine and moved to the border with Finland. What that suggests to me is that NATO was a pretext. The real reason for the war is really deeply rooted in history, imperial history of Russia and also of this confusion about Russian identity, a dedication to historical mythology, about the origins of Russia and Russia coming from Kyiv.
So I put much more emphasis on this bad history than on concern about NATO. I’m not trying to say that Putin was particularly happy about expansion of NATO, but I can’t really make a credible argument that this is a factor. And what happened after the start of the war just confirms it.
One event that happened a few months before February 2022 was the American withdrawal in Afghanistan. Do you think that encouraged Putin? He was always intent on continuing his war in Ukraine because, of course, it started 2014, but do you think that withdrawal gave a green light for Putin?
That’s certainly, I would say, an encouraging factor, because the US really, in his mind, demonstrated absolute incompetence in dealing with the international issues and matters. Things don’t go right, they withdraw. He certainly expected the same sort of behaviour this time around, not just from the United States, but from the Western community as a whole. Withdrawal from Afghanistan and how the Afghan army, that was trained by the United States and allies supplied and resupplied again and again, how it disappeared overnight, that certainly didn’t add confidence to the American and Western intelligence services and politicians with regard to the ability of Ukrainian Army to fight back. Everyone was concerned about the Russian Army, everyone was afraid of Russia. So to imagine that Ukraine would fight back, not just as small partisan groups here and there, but that the armed forces would be able to withstand the attack and then go on the counter-offensive, that was difficult to imagine. Partially also because of the experience of Afghanistan.
This comes across in the book, but I wondered if you could just speak about it, because here in the West we see a lot of Zelensky and he’s a huge hero now, which might give rise to the idea that he’s a major factor as to why Ukraine fought back. But really it’s the Ukrainian people and their sense of identity that is the real reason. And I don’t want to downplay Zelensky’s role either.
Yes, I exactly agree with that nuanced analysis of yours. Zelensky is an important figure and the way he handled himself is very important. Again, speaking about Afghanistan, the president there fled. That’s something that everyone expected. Zelensky, as we know, was offered to set up a government in exile, either in Warsaw or in London, and he refused to do that. So we can downplay him, but Zelensky, in my reading, is really an amplifier. So his talent as a politician comes from his experience as an actor. He can read the audience. He understands the audience or public or his country. The decision to fight with spirit really comes from the Ukrainian people in that context, ‘from the audience’, that he is on the stage, he is reacting to what is happening in the room. At no point polling showed the number of Ukrainians who believed in victory fell below 75%. I would give Zelensky and his leadership anywhere between 15% and 20% in that 75% to 80%, but the rest 55% or 60%. The controlling package really belongs to the Ukrainian people.
The Donbas and Crimea which fell in 2014, it was so interesting reading the book, which I hadn’t realised back in early 1991, at the referendum for the independence for Ukraine, in those two regions, we’re led to believe that there’s a strong Russian identity. The percentage, I think Crimea was 54% in favour of independence and the Donbas much higher over 80%. That’s not really mentioned because we assume that the Donbas and Crimea are ‘Russian.’
Yes, if that were the case, we would have the so-called referendum in the Crimea in 2014 being opened to international and independent observers. We would also have a referendum that was not taking place under the military control, under the conditions of the military takeover. So while I’m not saying that there was zero percentage of the population in the Crimea that probably welcomed the Russian takeover of the peninsula, nothing that we have suggest that there was basically over 50%. Otherwise we would see a very different referendum.
When it comes to Donbas, where the vote for independence was over 80%, there was a military takeover and hybrid warfare. The leaders of the puppet states that were created by Moscow were parachuted from Moscow. The so-called Minister of Defence of the Donetsk Republic was a former FSB officer, Mr Strelkov (or Girkin, his real name), and the Prime Minister was Mr Borodai, a sort of spin doctor and political consultant, also coming from Moscow. That’s an indication, or one more indication, that what happened in Donbas was also part of the military takeover by the Russian Federation. Ukraine turned out to be completely unprepared for that sort of scenario.
Serhii Plokhy is Professor of History at Harvard University and the author of The Russo-Ukrainian War. You can listen to an extended interview with Serhii on the Aspects of History Podcast.
