Is Putin Ready to Move Against Ukraine? (2021)
nationalinterest.org

... Russian President Vladimir Putin has published his hotly-anticipated essay on Ukraine, "On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians." The six-thousand-word treatise garnered no shortage of attention in the West, and for good reason: Putin's comments bear direct if not immediate implications for the ongoing Donbass conflict, which has lasted longer than World War II and claimed thousands of casualties on both sides. But the article carries a deeper set of political connotations that predated Putin by centuries, and may resonate in Russian-Ukrainian relations long after Putin's presidency.

Putin's epic opens with a protracted historical exposition, describing the ethnogenesis of the eastern slavic peoples. Present day Russians, Belorussians, and Ukrainians, notes Putin, are all descendants of Kievan Rus, a loose 9th century federation founded by the Scandinavain-derived Rurik Dynasty. As Putin guides the reader through the Mongol occupation, rivalries between Boyar clans, and the establishment of the Russian Tsardom, a common strand emerges: the peoples who have lived in these lands are inextricably linked by a common faith and language. Russian and Ukrainian are merely dialects of the same underlying language, Putin adds: "Many centuries of fragmentation and living within different states naturally brought about regional language peculiarities, resulting in the emergence of dialects. The vernacular enriched the literary language."

Putin hastens to add that the attempts to challenge this underlying unity came not from within, but from without: first, by Polish elites thirsting for eastward expansion, and centuries later, by Austro-Hungarian officials seeking to undermine the Russian Imperial war effort in WWI by stoking anti-Russian sentiment in Galicia. The late 1910s disintegration of the Russian Empire briefly left Ukraine at the mercy of German Imperial designs, but it wasn't long before Poland made its move by supporting nationalist leader Symon Petliura in exchange for territorial rights to Galicia.

Then came what Putin sees as perhaps the greatest betrayal of all: the early Bolsheviks poisoned eastern slavic unity with their policy of "Ukrainization," foisting a contrived Ukrainian national identity onto people who were essentially Russian. "The Bolsheviks treated the Russian people as inexhaustible fodder for social experiments," he wrote. "So they drew borders at will and handed out generous territorial gifts.' In the final analysis, it no longer matters what guided the Bolshevik leaders in cutting up the country. One can argue about details, the causes and the logic off certain decisions. One thing is obvious: Russia was essentially robbed."

With the historical background sorted, Putin arrives at his denouement: the contemporary Western powers have now picked up where the Poles, Austro-Hungarians, and Bolsheviks left off, latching onto old theories of Ukrainian nationhood to turn post-Soviet Ukraine into a kind of "anti-Russia."

Putin notes that these efforts culminated with the 2014 Euromaidan revolution, which placed Kiev under western suzerainty: "In the anti-Russia project, there is no place either for a sovereign Ukraine or for the political forces that are trying to defend its real independence," he wrote. ...