Putin Is Still Wrong: Ukraine Is a Nation

A fter a year’s wait and just hours before a speech by President Joe Biden in Poland, Vladimir Putin gave his first “State of the Nation” speech since the invasion of Ukraine. In the nearly two-hour address, the Russian autocrat promised to press on in Ukraine, calling the “existential” conflict a “war” for the first time and asserting that the West had started it. He attacked the leaders of the Ukrainian government as “neo-Nazis,” and addressed the West directly, mocking its economic sanctions as a failure and accusing it of normalizing pedophilia, among other social ills. He also made news by officially withdrawing from the New START nuclear-weapons treaty, although Russia had not been in compliance with the treaty for some time.

Subtly referenced in the speech, and undergirding the whole thing, was a message that the Kremlin and its supporters have reiterated again and again over the last year: the notion that Ukraine is a fundamental and historic part of Russia. Putin stated that the invasion was meant “to protect the people in our historical lands, to ensure the security of our country,” and presented Russian forces as “defending human lives and our common home” (emphasis added). He praised the denizens of the Ukrainian regions Russia has attempted to annex, saying “there has been nothing stronger than your intent to be with Russia, with your Motherland.” This view of Ukraine as a territory of Russia, the prime justification for the invasion, was most directly apparent when Putin addressed the Ukrainian people:

We are together again, which means that we have become even stronger, and we will do everything in our power to bring back the long-awaited peace to our land and ensure the safety of our people. Our soldiers, our heroes are fighting for this, for their ancestors, for the future of their children and grandchildren, for uniting our people.

In this respect, the “State of the Nation” address echoed the profoundly ideological speech Putin gave a year ago, in which he attempted to establish a casus belli for the invasion.

On February 21, 2022, just three days before the invasion began, the Russian dictator delivered a stemwinder of a speech that described the rationale behind his nation’s belligerence. It detailed Russia’s antipathy to NATO expansion and its opposition to Ukrainian treatment of the Russian Orthodox Church, and ended with the recognition of Donetsk and Luhansk — integral parts of Ukraine — as independent “people’s republics.”

Its most important message, however, was that Ukraine is not and has never been an independent nation, and that it has always been a vital part of Russia. Putin stressed the purported falsity of Ukrainian nationhood throughout his 2022 speech, but several passages stood out for their direct assertions of Russian sovereignty over Ukraine, as well as their specific historical claims. He stated outright that “Ukraine has basically never had a stable tradition of genuine statehood,” claiming that its use of “foreign models, detached from its history and Ukrainian reality,” had undermined its case for sovereignty. (Left unsaid, of course, was that if borrowing governmental models from other polities undermined the case for a state’s sovereignty, Russia itself would be in trouble: Its history is replete with such “copying,” from the Muscovite adoption of Mongol political techniques, to the Westernization process of Peter the Great, to the Western political assistance received by Moscow in the 1990s.)

Early in the address, Putin asserted what he considered the historical binding of Ukraine to Russia:

I would like to emphasize once again that Ukraine is not just a neighboring country for us. It is an integral part of our own history, culture and spiritual space. . . . Since the oldest times the inhabitants of the south-western historical territories of ancient Russia have called themselves Russians and Orthodox Christians. It was the same in the 17th century, when a part of these territories was reunited with the Russian state, and even after that.

This canned history conveniently skipped over the centuries when Ukraine — then often known as Ruthenia — was either an autonomous polity or a part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. It also glossed over the complex religious history of the region, as well as the violence of the “reunification” process, in which Russian forces ran roughshod over the Ukrainian landscape.

PHOTOS: Russian-Ukraine War

Continuing in the same vein, Putin claimed that Ukraine was a product of the Soviet era, calling it “Vladimir Lenin Ukraine” and naming the Bolshevik dictator as “its author and architect.” He said:

So let me start with the fact that modern Ukraine was created entirely by Russia, more precisely, by Bolshevik Communist Russia. This process began almost immediately after the 1917 Revolution, and Lenin and his comrades-in-arms did it in a very crude way with Russia itself — by secession, cutting off parts of its own historical territories. Of course, no one asked the millions of people who lived there for anything.

The dismemberment of the Czarist empire and its reassembly by Lenin into a confederation of socialist republics was “not only a mistake, but far worse than a mistake,” especially “in view of the historical destiny of Russia and its peoples,” Putin said. He added:

The bacillus of nationalist ambition had not disappeared, and the original mine that had been laid to undermine the immunity of the state to the contagion of nationalism was just waiting to explode. This landmine, I repeat, was the right to secede from the USSR.

He argues that this problem became “absolutely obvious” after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, as formerly U.S.S.R.-aligned nations freed themselves from Russia’s orbit. These anti-nationalist arguments may seem odd coming from a man who has called himself “the most proper and true nationalist,” but they were cynically used here to denigrate the national sovereignty of Ukraine. According to Putin, Ukraine has abused its post-Soviet nationhood by seeking to loosen the bonds tying it to Russia, thwarting the revival of a new Russian power in Eastern Europe:

At the same time, from the very beginning, I would like to emphasize, from the very first steps, Ukrainian governments have started to build their statehood on the denial of everything that unites us, they have tried to distort the consciousness and historical memory of millions of people, whole generations living in Ukraine. Not surprisingly, Ukrainian society was confronted with the rise of extreme nationalism, which quickly took the form of aggressive Russophobia and neo-Nazism.

It is telling that Putin sees a reasonable response to centuries of Czarist and Soviet domination — Ukraine’s assertion of its unique national culture and political interests — as “aggressive Russophobia and neo-Nazism.” No Ukrainian nationalism can ever be appropriate in his eyes, as Ukraine is not a nation, but merely an appendage of Russia. These ahistorical claims ignore the facts of both the Ukrainian past and the Ukrainian present.

In his pre-invasion speech, Putin asserted that “there is still no permanent statehood in Ukraine.” A few days later, Russia’s military subjected that claim to the ultimate test. Over the past year of war, Putin’s regime has put his ideology into practice, working to destroy Ukrainian culture, language, and nationhood. Russia has attempted to illegally annex several regions of Ukraine, kidnapped thousands of Ukrainian children and forcibly removed them to Russia, and committed deliberate massacres of Ukrainian civilians. Despite repeated military setbacks, Putin has doubled down on the war effort, surging conscripts to Ukraine in an effort to turn the tide.

Has this effort been successful? It has not. Indeed, a year later, it is as obvious as it’s ever been that Ukraine has its own unique national identity, as evidenced by Ukrainians’ proud and steadfast efforts to protect their country’s sovereign borders.

Indeed, Russia’s invasion did not result in the collapse of a house of cards that Putin was expecting, but was instead met with the fierce resistance of a determined people. Ukrainian nationhood has been reforged by Putin’s war, with the internecine disputes and partisan politics of the pre-war period falling rapidly by the wayside. Politicians and civilians from across the political spectrum have dropped their disagreements and picked up weapons to fight on the front lines. By some estimates, since the war began, Ukraine has killed or wounded up to 200,000 Russian troops — and destroyed massive amounts of matériel and armor — despite being the smaller of the two sides in the conflict.

This resolve against a genuinely existential threat has proven Ukraine a far stronger nation than Vladimir Putin assumed. No matter how the war ends, Russia’s effort to destroy Ukrainian nationhood has had the opposite effect: It has made Ukraine’s national bonds permanent, as reflected in polling that shows huge majorities of Ukrainians refusing to countenance any territorial concessions to Russia.

Putin wasn’t just mistaken about Ukrainian history. He was dead wrong about the strength of the modern Ukrainian nation — and he’s paid dearly in blood and treasure for his error.