We must confront Putin’s imperialist project or face Armageddon in Ukraine

While British politicians and journalists raise the roof in Westminster over the rights of the unvaccinated and whether or not Covid rules were broken a year ago, far away on the Russo-Ukrainian steppe the drumbeat of war grows ever louder. Boris Johnson, at least, hears it: yesterday he expressed his “deep concern” to Vladimir Putin and warned that there would be “significant consequences” if Russian forces were to invade Eastern Ukraine.

From the Russian Foreign Ministry, however, came the first explicit warning of military “confrontation”. We could be just weeks away from the most dangerous conflict on European soil since 1945. The breakup of Yugoslavia three decades ago cost about 140,000 lives. In the Donbas region, where a proxy war between Moscow and Kyiv has simmered since 2014, at least 14,000 have already died. A full-scale war between Russia and Ukraine would inflict casualties of a different order of magnitude. What Ukrainians see as a war of independence, Russians see as a war of reunification. That is a warrant for genocide.

In this column, I have repeatedly drawn attention to the imminent threat of war, most recently here last week and here last month. Not many other writers in this country are knowledgeable about or even interested in Central and Eastern Europe. Seldom do the major organs of the British media seem to have the attention span to focus on the region. When they do, they often lack the historical perspective that is essential for adequate comprehension.

The BBC, for example, reported on a Russian documentary that was aired last Sunday, but focused on President Putin’s reminiscence of moonlighting as a taxi driver during the collapse of the Soviet Union. While this “unpleasant” memory is an interesting new piece of Putin’s biographical jigsaw, it is surely less significant than his remarks about the meaning of the end of the USSR. “It was the disintegration of historical Russia under the name of the Soviet Union,” he said. “We turned into a completely different country. And what had been built up over a thousand years was largely lost.”  

This insight into the Russian leader’s thinking adds a new dimension to his strategy towards Ukraine. He sees his mission as the restoration of “historical Russia”, whose origins lie not in Moscow but in Kyiv. As a former KGB man, Putin sees the West as malevolent, determined to divide and rule the Russian people. For Putin, language and national identity are less important than history: in his mentality, the linguistic distinctions between Ukrainian and Russian are trivial compared to the geopolitical importance of reuniting Russia with the land that was once its richest region.

The strategic purpose of Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s genocidal invasion of the Soviet Union, was to secure Ukraine, “Europe’s breadbasket”, for Germany. In Putin’s eyes, by engineering the Soviet implosion, the West succeeded where the Nazis had failed, by detaching Ukraine from the Russian Motherland without a shot being fired. He has no compunction in sacrificing thousands, even millions, of lives to regain control of the Kremlin’s strategic glacis and the seedbed of medieval Russian Orthodox culture.  

The very word “Rus”, hence Russia, derives from the Kyivan state under the Rurik dynasty that endured from the late 9th century until the Mongol invasion destroyed it in 1240. After their conquest of the Khazars, the Grand Princes of Kyiv (Kiev in the Russian transliteration) ruled over a vast territory that stretched from the Arctic to the Black Sea. Russian nationalists, of whom Putin is one, trace the lineage of Muscovy, the true ancestor-state of modern Russia, back to Kyivan Rus.  

Yet these imperialist theories are not only dubious historically but are an absurd basis for territorial claims today. It is as if the British were to lay claim to the Angevin patrimony, comprising most of modern France; or the Germans were to demand the restoration of the first Reich of the Hohenstaufen, an empire from Sicily to Saxony; or the Poles and Lithuanians were to lay claim to their Commonwealth, which included modern Ukraine and Belarus as well as Poland and the Baltic states.

Many European peoples have at one time or another ruled over much greater territories than they do today. All but one have reconciled themselves to smaller nation states rather than imperial superstates. The only difference in the case of Russia is that the memory of empire is much more recent. The Soviet Union was Europe’s last empire and Putin is Europe’s last imperialist.

The West is therefore confronted with a mindset that we have consigned to the past but which in Russia is still very much of the present. Ukraine seized its first opportunity for independence a century ago, but was crushed by Lenin’s juggernaut and starved into submission by Stalin’s artificial famine — the “Holodomor”. Whether this atrocity was a genocide is still a matter of dispute, but Ukrainian nationalists are in no doubt about the matter: they will neither forgive nor forget.

Russian propaganda caricatures them as fascists, linking them to wartime Nazi collaborators who massacred Jews. But the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, is not only freely elected (unlike Putin) but also happens to be Jewish. Zelensky is trying to rid Ukraine of corruption, targeting the oligarchs who still dominate the former Soviet states — and Russia. Most Ukrainians will never willingly go back to the stagnant, authoritarian system presided over by Putin. They will fight for their freedom.  

And so the stage is set for Armageddon on the Dnieper. Macron, Biden and Johnson have all spoken to Putin in recent weeks. He seems impervious to their appeals for a negotiated solution to the grievances of the Russian-speakers in the Donbas. Unless Ukraine capitulates to his demands, the Minsk Protocol, the 2015 truce signed by both states, will be a dead letter. “A lack of progress towards a political-diplomatic solution would mean that our response will be military and military-technical,” according to the deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov.  In other words, the Russians are determined to pursue annexation, either peacefully or by force.

Whether or not Nato acquiesces in Putin’s imperialist project, we risk being helpless spectators of the dismemberment of a European country of 44 million people. The consequences for world peace are unthinkable — but we must think about them all the same. In order to avoid war in Ukraine, we must confront Putin ’ s imperialist project. To do that, we must first understand it.

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