Notes for writing a history of Russia's war in Ukraine.
Translated by Oded Balaban balaban@research.haifa.ac.il
1.
The first dilemma that historians usually face when writing a text arises at the moment of delimiting when certain apparently isolated events become a process, understanding by process the chaining of those events. This means establishing causal relationships between them or, for non-causal historians, interrelationships. In simpler words, writing history means putting the facts in their place. Only in this way will it be possible to determine when chained events constitute a historical process. The Russian invasion of Ukraine, the subject that concerns us now, is an event included in a process. It means that this 24.02.2022 was not an isolated event but the culmination of different events.
The invasion of Ukraine, wrote the former German ambassador to Russia, Rüdiger with Fritsch, who is also a noted historian, did not begin on 24. 02. 2022, but on the day when the troops sent by Putin occupied Crimea. However, the relationship between the two invasions, the one in 2014 and the other in 2022, we can establish only now. From there we begin to think again, but in retrospect, the process that led from the Russian invasion of Crimea to culminate in the Russian attempt to take over all of Ukraine. As we come to that topic it will be inevitable to wonder about the reasons that led Putin to start the invasion of Ukraine in 2014 (neither before nor after). Because that decision did not come out of anywhere. It had to do with events that led the pro-Putinist Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych, to be legally ousted by parliament and then flee from Kyiv to Moscow, where he still lives as a refugee.
Yanukovych fled from a revolution. I am referring to that social and political explosion known as the Maidan revolution in alluding to the popular revolts that took place in the same name square (in English, Independence Square). That means that the invasion of Crimea on February 27, 2014, seen from a current retrospective, was the first phase of a process that would culminate with Russia's invasion of Ukraine initiated on February 24, 2022. In the same sense, Russia's invasion of Crimea can be seen as Putin's response to the revolution (in his lying words, coup d'état) initiated in Maidan Square. In such a way, we can now understand this invasion not only as an invasion but, above all, as a counterrevolution by external means—a counterrevolutionary invasion or, if you prefer, an invading counterrevolution.
2.
Any historian attempting to write about the events in Ukraine in 2022 will then be obliged to start counting, at least from 2013. And if he does so, he will not be able to begin his writing if he does not answer three previous and key questions beforehand.
The first question says: why did the Maidan revolution happen? The second one says: why in 2014 Putin limited himself to invading Crimea and part of the Donbas region and not the whole country of Ukraine? And the third says what happened in Ukraine between 2014 and 2022?
Let's go for the first question. The Maidan revolution is also known by the name Euromaidan. That name says a lot. The first demonstrations against Yanukovych started in Kyiv square on November 21, 2013, as a response or reaction to the government's decision to suspend the signing of the Association and Free Trade Agreement with the European Union (EU). Moscow obviously dictated the suspension of those agreements decreed by President Yanukovych. The Maidan events thus assumed the character of a national (anti-Russian) and pro-European protest.
The official version of the Kremlin-controlled media instead points out that it was a fascist revolt because of the participation of the extreme right-wing party Svoboda. What this press did not say was that, in addition, the so-called ethnic minorities (Russians, Tatars, Jews, Georgians, Armenians), the main political parties of the country, most notably Petro Porochenko's Solidarnist, plus student organizations, businessmen and trade unions, and also left-wing parties, and last but not least, numerous members of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, also took part. In other words, Ukrainian civil society was gathered in Maidan Square, which, like all civil society, was populated by various parties of the center, right and left, in demonstrations very similar to those brutally put down in 2020 in Belarus, when the streets were filled with demonstrators protesting against the scandalous electoral fraud perpetrated by Putin's current puppet, Aleksandr Lukashenko.
The mention of Lukashenko is not accidental. According to Putin's plans, Yanukovych was destined to become a Ukrainian Lukashenko. He already was. Against the fierce repression exercised by Moscow's man in Ukraine, the national and democratic uprising erected barricades in the main streets of Kyiv and other major cities. Yanukovych proceeded to dissolve them by appealing to the public force. As is often the case, the brutal repression unleashed strong mass movements. Less than a month later, on March 18, Putin ordered an invasion of Crimea. On that day - we know only now - the invasion of Ukraine would begin.
The weak resistance offered to the Russian troops would surely make Putin think that the table was set to repeat the invasion elsewhere in Ukraine. Why didn't he do it immediately? That is the second question.
The answers could be several. The seizure of Crimea had, in a sense, been a test for Putin. The weak Ukrainian military resistance and the even weaker European protest materialized in irrelevant sanctions, making the dictator think he could take as much time as he wanted while waiting for ideal conditions. After Crimea, he could continue his patient work aimed at turning the whole of Europe into a cluster of nations energetically and economically dependent on Russia, which in fact, happened.
But from 2014 to 2022, very interesting events also took place in Ukraine. And Putin failed to notice this in time. With this statement, we move on to answer the third and most decisive question: what happened in Ukraine between 2014 and 2022?
The nationalist government of the millionaire Poroshenko that emerged from the May 2014 elections was destined to fail, given the connections maintained by the Ukrainian oligarchy, which Poroshenko represented, with the Russian oligarchy. Ukraine could even become part of Russia - as would happen with Belarus - without the need to be invaded. The facts seemed to prove Putin right. One word to characterize the Porochenko government, despite its ultra-nationalist rhetoric, is corruption.
When Volodimir Zelensky took office on behalf of the People's Servants party (May 2019), despite having won more than 70% of the vote in the second round, no one seemed to panic in Moscow. The limited political experience of the new president, his moderate nationalist rhetoric, compared to that of Porochenko, and the dispersion of the nationalist forces, surely made Putin think that Ukraine would continue to appear as it had been up to that moment: a country incapable of generating a stable and democratic political structure that would allow it to join the EU, much less NATO.
3.
Soon Putin would begin to notice that the new government was not a simple continuation of Poroshenko's. Unlike his predecessor, the newly elected president had not raised any anti-Russian agenda, and yet he seemed to take seriously the reason for which he was elected: the fight against corruption.
Zelenski had understood that to fight corruption, it was not enough to send three or four oligarchs to jail. A new economic program was needed that would put the free market under particular legal regulation and simultaneously contemplate radical changes that would weaken energy dependence on Russia, as well as open up trade more towards Europe and less towards Russia. But above all, Zelenski realized that to reduce corruption, the country was necessary to re-institutionalize. To begin his project, the party system was reformed, reducing its excessive number and deactivating its extra-state dependencies. He would then try to turn the parliament into what it had not been during the country's brief republican history: a body independent from the executive, in charge of enacting laws and serving as the center of public debate.
To make a simile, we could say that under Zelenski, a Ukrainian-style Perestroika began to be born. Without unleashing anti-Russian rhetoric, he demolished the old Soviet-type structures that survived in the country, including the corrupt, mostly pro-Russian workers' unions. He likewise maintained his fierce resistance to the Dombash domains becoming Russian military enclaves on Ukrainian territory. In short, under Zelensky, Ukraine began to become geographically and politically European.
Soon Putin understood that Ukraine, thanks to Zelensky's management, was slipping out of his hands. Therefore, he decided that the time had come to act. In 2021 he wrote his well-known essay in which he asserted that Ukraine belonged to the Russian national nature by cultural and blood ties. He had no better arguments. From a historical point of view, Ukraine already possessed a history that was not that of Russia. From the political point of view, it had a constitution and an autonomous institutionalization. And, to top it off, thanks to Western aid, an economy that was less dependent on Russia than some Euro-Western economies was taking shape. In short: Ukraine had already become an independent and sovereign nation, a nation in shape as are today, for example, Poland or Romania. Without street uprisings, doctrinaire pathologies, and ultra-nationalist delusions, Ukraine had begun to free itself from Russian tutelage. Ukraine's entry into the EU and later into NATO - if they were to materialize - would only be the logical corollaries of the country's economic and political development.
As most scholars have already emphasized, Ukraine's membership in the EU and NATO was the least important thing for Putin. The most important thing, Putin has reiterated in several speeches, was to avert the danger of Ukraine becoming part of the West. That, by Putin so hated political West.
4.
Think what it would have meant for Putin's Russia if Ukraine had a Western political democracy, with parties, debates, ideas, a real parliament, free and secret elections, freedom of opinion and press, and, above all, alternation in power. All Russian citizens would have lived with their eyes on Ukraine if that had happened. In short, Ukraine would have become what West Germany was for communist Germany. A living utopia, a role model, and a place to leave and never come back. In Putin's eyes, a democratized Ukraine would be a curse for Russia.
When German crowds brought down Willy Brandt's so-called “wall of shame” in 1989, Putin was living in East Berlin. When recalling that glorious democratic episode of humanity, Putin affirmed that the end of the USSR had been the greatest geopolitical disaster of the twentieth century. A phrase so well known that it has ended up not being taken seriously. But Putin did take it seriously. What happened in the former communist world was not only a geopolitical disaster for Putin. He experienced it as his own personal disaster.
With the collapse of the wall, his own internal wall had collapsed: the one that concealed an autocratic, authoritarian, patriarchal, dogmatic communist being yesterday, a dogmatic religious being today. For that former imperial Russia, which he passionately longs for, is nothing but his own self, anchored in the profound obscurities of his tortuous geopolitical visions.
A democratic and prosperous Ukraine would have been fatal for Putin's atomic but archaic Russia. He was not going to accept that because of a small-time actor he despised; his entire worldview would collapse. To prevent this, he had three alternatives: the first was to build a huge wall between Ukraine and Russia according to the recipe of the GDR. But, Putin knew that walls only produce uncontainable desires to break through them. This is the story of one of the greatest novelistic chronicles of recent times. I am referring to Tunnel 29 by British author Helena Merriman (I will soon write an article about this extraordinary book).
A second alternative would have been to try to conquer Ukraine through a policy of peace and cooperation. Perhaps that would have been possible, as the Ukrainian political scientist Natalia Antonova hints in a recent article published in Foreign Policy. But a democratic Putin would have to be in place for that to be possible. And Putin does not have a democratic hair on his head.
Putin, feeling harassed by the advance of democracy (that is for him the West), not only fears it: he hates it. Or, rather, because he fears it, he hates it. That is why he feels that Russia, i.e., himself, is a victim of the West. It may even be that he truly believes that the offensive war he is waging on Ukrainian soil is a defensive war.
Having ruled out the wall or democratic peace with Ukraine, Putin had only one alternative: To destroy Ukraine and its sinful inhabitants. That is the intention behind his “denazification” program, which is nothing but a project of “de-Ukrainization”, to use the term of the Ukrainian poet Serhy Zahdan. As we already know, that was the alternative chosen by Putin. Thanks to that decision, we are witnessing one of the most horrendous genocides committed daily during the history of modernity. Bucha, Mariupol, Sevarodonetsk, and Lysychansk, among so many others, are not only martyr cities. They are great blood stains that cannot be erased when the history of Putin's Russia is written.
History is built according to events that, articulated together, make up processes, as we have already said. We also said that the long and complex process of Ukrainian liberation began in Maidan Square in the Kyiv of 2013. Only God knows how and when it will end. That ignorance we had not yet formulated. Now we do say it.