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101 Foreign Aff. 54 (2022)
Putin's War on History: The Thousand-Year Struggle over Ukraine

handle is hein.journals/fora101 and id is 496 raw text is: «rJ J 54 io rzr i >%Iai x s Putin's War on History The Thousand-Year Struggle Over Ukraine Anna Reid n the evening of February 21, 2022, three days before Rus- sian forces began the largest land invasion on the European conti- nent since World War II, Russian President Vladimir Putin gave an angry televised speech. In it, he expressed familiar grievances about the eastward expansion of NA TO, alleged Ukrainian aggression, and the presence of Western missiles on Russia's border. But most of his tirade was devoted to something else: Ukrainian history. Ukraine is not just a neighboring country for us, Putin said. It is an inalienable part of our own history, culture, and spiritual space. Ukraine's borders, he asserted, have no meaning other than to mark a former administrative division of the Soviet Union: Modern Ukraine was entirely created by Russia. To many Western ears, Putin's historical claims sounded bizarre. But they were of more than casual impor- tance. Far from an innovation of the current crisis, Putin's argument that Ukraine has always been one and the same with Russia, and that it has been forcibly colonized by Western forces, has long been a defining part of his ANNA REID is former Kyiv Correspondent for The Economist and the author of Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine. worldview. Already during the Maidan popular uprising in Kyiv in 2013-14, Putin claimed that the people leading the huge protests were Western backed fshisti (fascists) trying to tear Ukraine from its historical roots. (In fact, the protests caught the West by surprise, and although they included a far right fringe, they were no fascist takeover.) And in July 2021, well before the buildup of Russian troops on the Ukrainian border, the Kremlin pub- lished a 7,000-wxord essay under Putin's byline with the title On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians. Both Russia and Ukraine, it asserted, have not only common roots in lan- guage and faith but also a shared historic destiny. Since its publication, the essay has become part of the re- quired curriculum for all service mem- bers in the Russian armed forces, including those fighting in the current war. According to Putin's logic, all divisions between Russia and Ukraine are the work of Western powers. From Poland in the sixteenth century to the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the nineteenth century and the Nazis in World War 11, they have periodically coerced Ukraine or led it astray. In this reading, Kyiv's pro-Western outlook over the past decade is only the latest form of external interference this time by the European Union and the United States aimed at dividing Russia against itself. Ukraine's forced change of identity, Putin wrote, is comparable . . . to the use of weapons of mass destruction against us. In Putin's meaning, us included Ukrainians. Ukrainians and Ukraine, in other words, aren't just naturally part of Russia; they don't even really exist.

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