A casual observer of old speeches and books on Russia might notice something interesting: Russia was commonly referred to as “The Russias.” Historically, the three Russia’s were Russia Proper, White Russia (now Belarus), and Little Russia –Ukraine. This archaic term reveals something lost to most Western observers: that Russia is not a cohesive nation-state like those in Europe but a vast realm forged in conquest bound together by a shared national identity. In this sense, Russia is similar to the United States, both starting off as small countries that would go on to conquer their frontiers — just as America conquered the West, Russia similarly conquered the east past the Urals. Russia and America have many other similarities, prominently their rise as opposing superpowers in the 20th century. One can even make the argument due to their similarities that Russia and America are akin to Venus and Earth, two sisters remarkably similar that turned out extremely different. Nearly a quarter into the 21st century, the geopolitical landscape is now again dominated by strife between Russia and the American led west, playing out in the War in Ukraine. This is a conflict that never had to happen and largely comes from a lack of understanding of the ethos and history of Russia. In this article, I will attempt to provide a brief history and give my two cents on current affairs.
The history of Russia and Ukraine is long and complex, but here is the condensed version: In the 800’s, the Verangian Vikings sailed down rivers in Slavic lands and founded settlements such as Kiev and Novgorod. These settlements would grow into the medieval kingdom of the Kievan Rus, the predecessor of the Ukrainian, Russian, and Belarusian nations. Under Prince Vladimir the Kieven Rus would convert to Eastern Orthodoxy, creating the spiritual foundations for the Russian and Ukrainian nations. In the 1200s, the Mongols would overrun the Kievan Rus, and the Russian people would come under the dominion of the Golden Horde, where many different fiefdoms would continue to exist under tribute to the Golden Horde. Out of the tributary states, Moscow rose above the rest in prominence and by the early 1400s gained independence from the Golden Horde. The Grand Duchy of Moscow would expand and found the Tsardom of Russia. The Russian Tsardom would continue to expand at the expense of both the Tatar Khanates and the dominant regional power of the time, Poland-Lithuania.
Then, in the 1700s, a seminal event in human history happened: the Great Northern War. Sweden was the dominant power in northern Europe, and when Swedish King Charles XI died in 1697, his 15 year old son Charles XII was crowned King of Sweden. The rest of the power players in Northern Europe, sensing weakness all declared war on Sweden led by Peter II, the Tsar of Russia. Peter was an avid admirer of the West who wanted Russia to adapt to Western customs and join the rest of the European powers as a player. Peter saw the way to do this by establishing a seaport on the Baltic at the expense of Sweden. Yet, Peter and the rest misjudged Charles, a gifted military commander with a lust for glory in battle. In November 1703, Charles destroyed the army of Peter the Great at the Battle of Narva. Yet Peter learned from his defeat and knew that Russia would emerge as the dominant nation in Eastern Europe if he could defeat Charles. Then in 1709, When Charles tried to invade Russia, his army was soundly defeated at the Battle of Poltava. While the war would drag on for another couple of years, Russia won the war and gave birth to its empire on the field of Poltava. Peter, called the great for his victory, built his city St Petersburg, on the Baltic as a great port through which Russia could take its place among the other nations of Europe. Yet this Port froze over in the Wintertime, driving a desire for a warm water port somewhere on the Black Sea.
In the late 1700’s under the leadership of Catherine the Great, Russia properly came into possession of what we now call Ukraine. Just like Russia was historically called The Russias, showcasing its pluralistic and vast nature, Ukraine was historically called The Ukraine, signifying its history as a geographical region — the word Ukraine literally meaning borderland. The ancestral home of the Kievan Rus, the steppes of the Ukraine had become a borderland between the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth and Russia and a refuge for people fleeing the autocratic nature of both regimes would go for independence. These people living in Ukraine were known as the Cossacks, and their lives are largely nomadic and centered around horses. In the 1600’s under the leadership of Bogdan Khmelnytsky, the Cossacks revolted against Poland-Lithuania and allied themselves with Poland’s traditional enemy Russia. After winning their independence from Poland, the Zaporizian Cossacks established a loose state, which can be interpreted as the first foundation of the Ukrainian Nation. However, it always had fielty to Russia
. The Cossacks did attempt a revolt under Ivan Mazepa coinciding with the Swedish invasion, a moment signifying the first break between Russia and what would become Ukraine. During Catherine’s reign, Russia would come in possession of all of the Ukraine, as well as partitioning Poland with Austria and Prussia. Catherine would pursue a policy of Russification toward the Ukranian lands, imposing Russian settlement and Russian customs. Within the next 100 years, cities such as Kiev and Odessa would become Russian cities in the same way as Moscow or St. Petersburg, and the Cossacks integrated a large part in Russian Military Life.
At the turn of the 20th century, The Russian Empire, now the largest land empire on earth, was rocked with internal crises. After the abolition of serfdom in 1861, Russian cities had to deal with large populations of destitute factory workers ripe for revolution. The first rumble came in 1905 with a failed revolution. Then in 1914, World War One started in Europe largely over Russia picking a fight with Germany and Austria-Hungary in defense of Serbia. After initial successes, the Russian army suffered a massive defeat at the Battle of Tannenburg, and things would only deteriorate from there. With the situation in the cities deteriorating and the army collapsing, a revolution in March 1917 overthrew Tsar Nicholas II, ending the Russian monarchy. Yet the shortlived democratic provisional government of Alexander Kerensky would not last, itself being overthrown in the October Revolution by Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks (communists). After the October Revolution, Russia collapsed into chaos, and the Russian Civil War began as Lenin’s Bolsheviks would fight the Anti-Communist White Army. The Bolsheviks largely in control of western Russia succeeded in making peace with the Central Powers, signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, recognizing the creation of Ukraine and Belarus as independent nations — yet they were little more than German puppet states. The Central Powers (Austria-Hungary and Germany) had used the concept of Ukrainian Nationalism as a weapon to weaken Russia and in the age of nationalism, the idea of a Ukrainian Nation had come into the popular imagination. Then in 1918, the German and Austro-Hungarian empires both collapsed, ending World War One, causing them to pull their troops out of Ukraine, leaving the region in chaos. The new Ukrainian State was left more or less powerless, fighting a war of Independence against Russia, both Bolshevik and White as well as against Poland while internal civil wars between communists, anti-communists, and popularly the anarchists, just to list a few. The Ukranian nation was powerless to resist, and, among the chaos was reconquered into the new Bolshevik empire of the Soviet Union.
The Soviet Union would soon come under the control of Joseph Stalin, one of the most evil men in human history. While born a Georgian, Stalin identified heavily with the Russian Nation and Russian Communism and had genocidal desires for the many minorities of the Soviet Union. Poles, Jews, Tatars, Kazakhs, Volga Germans, and many other ethnic groups were ethnically cleansed by Stalin’s regime, yet no group probably suffered more than the Ukrainian People. Stalin’s regime created a massive manmade famine in the Ukraine by seizing all the region’s grain, intentionally murdering through starvation up to 5 million Ukrainians in what would be known as the Holodomor. When Nazi Germany launched its invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, the Wehrmacht quickly overran the Ukraine, and many Ukrainians welcomed the Nazis as liberators, willingly collaborating with the Reich. The Nazis, who viewed Slavs as subhuman, committed countless atrocities in Ukraine, most notably the Holocaust of Ukraine’s Jewish Population. At Babi Yar alone, 33,771 Jews were massacred in two days. It is estimated that up to 1,600,000 Jews were systematically murdered. Many Ukrainians took part as collaborators, seeing Ukranian Nationalism as compatible with National Socialism. Groups such as the Banderites, who were fascists, fought to establish a Ukrainian Nation-State alongside the Nazis committed numerous atrocities. Many Ukrainians also fought on the side of the Soviets as partisans and were subject to brutal reprisals from the Nazis with Ukraine losing more people than any other Soviet Republic with an estimated 12 percent dying in the war. In 1944, the Red Army regained control over most of Ukraine, and the Banderists largely fled abroad or went underground, but the legacy of Ukrainian Nationalism would now be tied to fascism. Ukraine retained its status as its own Republic in the Soviet Union which had been granted by Lenin. After the war Stalin continued to heavily Russify the Ukraine’s important Russians into the eastern half while deporting Ukrainians, leading to most of Eastern Ukraine taking on a heavy Russian identity.
In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed at the end of the Cold War, with each republic that comprised the union becoming independent, including Russia and Ukraine. Russia in the 1990s was at an all time lowpoint under Boris Yeltsin, humiliated by the loss of its empire and with a ruinous economy that left everyday Russians destitute. Ukraine, now properly independent for the first time in its history, struggled to find its own identity and place in geopolitics. It was a common view that Ukraine’s best bet at stability would be keeping cordial relations with Russia: George H.W. Bush, who was president during the collapse of the Soviet Union, understood that pushing NATO’s influence into Russia’s backyard was bad policy as it would antagonize the new Russian Federation. and made a promise to Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not expand east. Yet Ukraine, racked by a crisis in national identity with much of the east seeing itself as Russian while the western half embraced a Ukranian National identity, would soon become an oligarchy run by corrupt energy magnates. In 2004, a contentious Presidential election took place where pro-western and Russian candidates Victor Yushchenko and Victor Yanukovich faced off. The election was largely split along regional lines, and when pro-Russian Yanukovich was declared the winner among allegations of fraud, a pro western color revolution known as the Orange Revolution occurred, which forced a new election where Yushchenko won.
As the 2000’s progressed, Ukraine only spiraled further and further into instability, sectionalism, and corruption. In 2010, Yanokivich was elected president in a rematch and embarked on decidedly pro-Russian policies. In 2000, Russia reeled from the weak leadership of Yeltsin, and it elected Vladimir Putin, the former mayor of St. Petersburg and a KGB officer president. Putin made his goal clear to the beginning – the restoration of Russia as a true superpower. Putin quickly embraced his role as an autocrat, rolling back democracy in Russia and attempting to exert dominance over Russia’s neighbors. In 2014, pro-western protests in Kyiv against Yanukovich turned into another color revolution that removed the pro-Russian president and replaced him with a Pro-Western government openly hostile to Russian interests. This event, known as the Maidan Revolution also kicked off ethnic conflict throughout the eastern half of the country between ethnic Russians, who make up a majority of these areas and the Ukranian government as well as extremist Ukranian nationalist groups many of which held Nazi sympathies. Many ethnic Russians began to call for separation from Ukraine to form a new country called Novarossiya (New Russia). It is in this context that the Russo-Ukranian war started with Russia first annexing Crimea and then intervening in the Donbas on behalf of ethnic Russians fighting to create breakaway republics in Luhansk and Donetsk. After years of protracted conflict and the weakness of the United States on full display after Joe Biden’s Afghanistan catastrophe, Putin launched a full-blown invasion of Ukraine in 2022 beginning the present conflict.
This is the context of the Ukrainian War, and its unfortunately largely unknown by the American public. The war is not some great struggle between democracy and tyranny, as the media has framed it. While all wars of aggression are wrong both morally and under international law, Russia’s actions are not nonsensical. The national ethos of Russia has always been autocracy since the nation’s founding, with the tsarist model of government never changing, whether under the crown of the Romanovs, Stalin, or today Putin. Ukraine, by contrast, has always been defined by its opposition to rule from it very beginnings as a refuge on the steppe. In the Russian psyche, Ukraine is an integral part of the Russian nation, one of the three Russias that can never be independent in Russian eyes. Russia’s casus belli for war is largely this revanchism and sense of national honor, seemingly lost on most western observers who fail to understand that in the eyes of the Kremlin, Ukraine should be Russia.
Russia has other strategic objectives. One is gaining Odessa as a major warm water port, a desire that has driven Russian foreign policy since the late 1600s. Undisputed control over the black sea would be a major boost for the Russian economy as it could increase exports of goods such as fertilizer and grain. Another key goal is a monopoly over the region’s vast natural gas and oil reserves and pipelines. Ukraine and Russia have the biggest energy reserves in Europe. If Russia could gain control of Ukraine’s pipelines and gas reserves, Russia could exercise economic hegemony over energy-dependent countries such as Germany. One outcome of this would be damage to the American Petro Dollar a long term goal of Putin as european dependence on Russian oil would hurt the American Dollar thats worth is dependent on the price of oil. Yet, above everything, the main goal of Russia is to stop the expansion of NATO into its backyard. To Putin, Ukraine joining NATO would be a direct threat to Russia as the belligerent west would be on the doorstep of his realm, and thus, he felt a need to intervene to assert Russian dominance in the region. These are Russia’s reasons for the war, not the delusional notion that Putin is hellbent on the conquest of Europe to form a new Soviet Union as is sold by war hawks in Washington.
George Kennan, a gifted American diplomat whose career spanned the Cold War and who probably had a better understanding of Russia than any other American past or present, understood this. Kennan was largely responsible for America’s policy of containment during The Cold War and, until his death in 2005, was considered the leading expert on the region. Even during the onset of the Cold War in 1948, Kennan warned against promoting the separation of Ukraine from Russia as it recognized it would destabilize the region. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Kennan, as an advisor to Presidents Bush and Clinton warned against the expansion of NATO, seeing that it would only antagonize a new Russia and lay the groundwork for future conflict and autocracy in the region. Above all, he was disturbed by America’s push for greater cooperation with Ukraine, which he saw as a coup de grace for peace in the region. He successfully recognized that Russia would never recognize Ukraine as a country worthy of respect, and American intervention would only make things worse. Yet, Kennan was ignored by the new generation of diplomats who pushed to further weaken Russia instead of staying out of the region and letting Russia have a chance at democracy on its own. This was a massive diplomatic failure that helped bring us to where we are today. The current ethos in Washington is that Russia is an existential threat to the United States and must be stopped at all costs — something that simply does not align with the history and strategic goals of Russia. The War in Ukraine does not pose an existential threat to the United States, and the failed wilsonian foreign policy of intervening is not in the best interest of America or the world.
It is important to note that two years into the War, at least 172,000 people have died in the greatest tragedy since World War Two in Europe. Russia’s army has been mauled and humiliated on the world stage, making any new wars in the event of a Russian victory very improbable. With the war in a stalemate without an end in sight, untold suffering and death will continue. In a war of attrition, Ukraine cannot win as Russia vastly outnumbers Ukraine in manpower. The responsible policy is to push for a negotiated peace settlement. With Russia facing instability and heavy losses, Ukraine could gain a favorable peace by retaining its independence at the price of some eastern provinces already under Russian occupation. Putin would be able to claim a victory to his people, avoiding a revolution that would likely collapse the Russian federation — something could be the greatest calamity of the century as different ideologies and ethnic groups would fight a new Russian civil War, this time with control of the nations vast nuclear weapons. Ukraine would get to keep its sovereignty, and the West would have largely checked Putin’s ambitions. Any other policy only risks prolonging the carnage with the risk of Nuclear War, Ukraine being overrun or the aforementioned collapse of Russia.
America should make it our policy to push both sides to come together to create this peace rather than wasting billions of dollars in treasure in an unnecessary war. If the American public and diplomatic corp were to understand the Russian motivations in this war rather than believing the Wilsonian narrative of democracy vs. autocracy or that Putin is somehow doing this as a first step towards world domination. Above all, if America would heed Kennan’s warning and that of our founding fathers to beware of foreign entanglements, we could do our duty to humanity to help end a horrific war and bring peace back to Europe.
