Vladimir Putin “special military operation” in Ukraine which began February 2022 - the largest invasion since the end of the Second Word War in 1945 – has now taken on the nature of the fictional endless war described in George Orwell’s 1984.
The Russo-Ukrainian conflict has destroyed the European security structure built since the Helsinki Accords of 1975. While the Ukrainian resistance and the advance into Russian territory has surprised the West, fundamental questions persist: What made this war of aggression possible and what made the Ukrainians resist as they did and are continuing to do? What differentiates Ukrainians from Russians?
To grasp the origins of the conflict, one should begin with historian Serhii Plokhy’s The Gates of Europe and The Russo-Ukrainian War — both exemplars of clarity and conciseness.
Plokhy presents the longue durée history of Ukraine from Herodotus to the fall of the USSR and the current conflict. Located at the western edge of the Eurasian steppe, Ukraine has been a gateway to Europe for many centuries, being a meeting place and a battleground of empires - Roman, Habsburg, Ottoman.
He emphasizes Ukraine’s pivotal role in global history: The disintegration of the Soviet Unionin December 1991 was precipitated by the Ukrainian referendum on independence.
The ongoing conflict is not just a contemporary geopolitical struggle but one deeply rooted in history, particularly the contentious legacy of ‘Kyivan Rus’, a medieval polity founded by the Grand Prince Volodymyr (958-1015), a Scandinavian Viking.
As Plokhy observes, most Russians believe that their nation originated in Kyiv, the centre of the medieval Kyivan Rus’ polity, that encompassed most of today’s
Ukraine, Belarus, and European Russia. Kyivan Rus’ existed between the 10th and mid-13th centuries before disintegrating under the Mongol storm.
Volodymyr’s Christianization of Kyivan Rus’ (cited by Putin as the Russian world’s founding moment) culturally connected the region to Byzantium and Eastern Christianity, underpinning Russian claims to Ukrainian land for centuries.
In a 2021 essay, Putin fixated on foreign interference in Russian history, yet ironically, Volodymyr himself was a Scandinavian Viking who imposed Christianity on the Slavs.
The Kyivan Rus’ myth originated in the mid-15th century, with Ivan III of Moscow asserting his dynasty’s Kyivan roots to legitimize his conquest of Novgorod. Ivan’s victory marked the rise of an independent, authoritarian Russian state inherited by his grandson, Ivan IV (‘The Terrible’) who was defeated in the Livonian War (1558-83) by a coalition including Poland,Lithuania, Sweden, and Denmark. Moscow was captured by the Poles and their allies, the Ukrainian Cossacks.
During this time, Muscovy separated itself from Kyiv and the Ukrainian lands both politically and in religious terms with Muscovites no longer regarding Kyivans as fellow Orthodox believers, claiming that they had been ‘corrupted’ by the rule of Catholic kings and becoming open to the West.
In 1648, Ukrainians, led by Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky, sought Russian Tsar’s aid against the Poles, reviving the myth of the Kyivan heritage to protect Orthodox Cossacks from Polish Catholics. But the incorporation of the Ukrainian Cossack state into Moscow again sparked Cossack resistance in 1708, when Hetman Ivan Mazepa allied with Sweden’s Charles XII against
Tsar Peter ‘The Great’ only to be defeated at Poltava in 1709. At the time of the 1991 referendum, neither Gorbachev nor Yeltsin had imagined the Soviet Union without Ukraine, its second-largest republic and a key element of Russian history and mythology.
Plokhy masterfully illustrates how Ukraine’s past has been manipulated by Russian leaders to justify territorial claims, making the conflict a continuation of centuries-old tensions rather than a modern anomaly.
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