Russia's behavior today is returning to what was normal in its Soviet past, and further back into Tsarist times.
– Keir Giles, foreword to the first edition of “Russia's war on Everybody” (2022)
Since the first edition of this book was published in late 2022, nearly everything it tries to explain has been proven correct, or got worse, or both.
– Keir Giles, foreword to the paperback edition of “Russia's War on Everybody” (2024)
On February 9th of this year, American polemicist Tucker Carlsson gave an interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin. While NATO opponent Carlsson might have hoped that Putin would describe how the invasion of Ukraine was due to an aggressive NATO, he instead got a history lesson. Without actually answering the question about NATO, Putin talked for thirty minutes about Russia and the history of Ukraine. His central message was simple – Ukraine “lacks a right to exist, and the Russian president is completely justified in waging an offensive war to reclaim historically Russian territories.”[1]
It is revealing, writes Peter Dickinson in The Atlantic Council, that Putin chose to voice his historical grievances to a polemicist who for years has pursued a generally pro-Russian line in the media. It was, Carlsson commented afterwards, a “frankly expressed opinion of what he (Putin) thinks.”[2]
Putin’s harangue was “complete nonsense” that expressed “Russian imperialist myths” while “conveniently omitting Ukraine’s century of documented history.” He described Ukraine as an “illegitimate and artificial” state, and called the idea of a Ukrainian nation an anti-Russian conspiracy theory.[3]
However absurd Putin's ideas may seem to us in the West, the inescapable idea is that this is actually what he believes.
Two days before the full-scale invasion, on February 22, 2022, Putin signaled that he could not tolerate an independent Ukraine. He called Ukraine an “indisputable part of our history, culture, and spiritual sphere.”[4] Similar descriptions were found in the essay Putin published in the summer of 2021, where Ukraine is described as “entirely a product of the Soviet era.” When the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia was thus “robbed.”[5]
In June 2022, he compared himself to Peter the Great, claiming that “it is our lot to reclaim (what belongs to Russia), and strengthen (the country). And if we proceed from the fact that these fundamental values form the basis of our existence, then we will undoubtedly succeed in the tasks ahead of us.”[6]
In the interview with Carlsson in February 2024, Putin described Ukraine's existence as a "geopolitical and historical anomaly." Putin's goal, writes Edward Lucas, is to annihilate Ukraine as a political, cultural, and linguistic entity.[7]
The Russian narrative of history that Putin emphasizes, according to Ronald Suny, a professor at the University of Michigan, is an “established mythology, invented at certain points in history by Muscovite tsars… The mythology crystallized in Moscow to justify their imperialist grip on Ukraine.”[8]
Julian Waller, an analyst at the Center for Naval Analyses and an adjunct professor at George Washington University, believes that Putin’s historiography is the decisive motivating factor for the invasion. Putin’s main motivation appears to be “historical considerations.”[9] Noah Rothman in the National Review calls Putin’s ideas “Bolshevik historical revisionism.” In the same interview, Putin claimed that Poland collaborated with Hitler, defended Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov, and that the occupation of eastern Poland and the Baltic states was nothing more than Russia reclaiming their “historical territory.”[10]
By Putin’s logic, Timothy Snyder argues, world leaders could claim territory based on their interpretation of history. It would “undermine the entire international order, as it is based on legal boundaries between sovereign states.”[11] The same logic leads to genocide, as those who disagree with Putin’s worldview pose a threat to his historical narrative. When Ukraine strikes back, it only means more Ukrainians must be killed. Russia has “destroyed thousands” of Ukrainian schools, and areas occupied by Russian troops are burning Ukrainian books.[12]
The logic of Russian imperialism is clearly evident in Ukraine today. Five million Ukrainians live under Russian occupation today. Five million.[13] There can be no moral ambiguity regarding what is happening in Ukraine today.
And it's not just Putin.
In a November 2023 Levada Center poll, seventy-five percent of respondents said they supported the war. In a February XNUMX poll of this year, seventy-seven percent of respondents said they supported the invasion of Ukraine. Only sixteen percent said they were against the war, and twenty-two percent said it was a mistake for Russia to start the invasion.[14]
Previously, in three articles I have touched on the Russian system as a whole.[15] It is worth reminding ourselves of what this means for Russia, Ukraine, and Europe.
Orlando Figes, a historian at the University of London, argued in his book “Revolutionary Russia, 1891 – 1991 (published 2014) that to understand how the Soviet Union collapsed so quickly, one must examine “not the structural problems of the Soviet Union, but how the regime was dissolved from the top.”[16] The collapse of the Soviet Union was not, according to Figes, a “complete revolution” because, although society had been activated and politicized, “it was not through its efforts that the Soviet regime was brought down; and if history has shown anything, it is the chronic weakness of democracy in Russia – the inability of the people to create real change.”[17]
After the Soviet collapse, the political elite in Russia was not replaced, and in the 90s the business elite was made up of former Soviet party officials. Lustration laws were never created, as in large parts of the former Warsaw Pact countries. [18] The KGB became the FSB without any “substantial personnel changes,” and when a lustration law was proposed by politician and human rights activist Galina Starovoytova in December 1992, it was voted down in the Duma. She was assassinated in 1998, according to some reports, by the FSB.[19]
According to Figes, Yeltsin had an opening to build new institutions and civil society in Russia, but he did not seize it. The KGB was too strong an institution and could not be forced to open its archives. The Constitutional Court was too new to play an effective role, and organizations like Memorial were too weak. In addition, many Russians saw the collapse of the Soviet Union as a “terrible defeat.”[20] and “a humiliation”[21].
In a 2007 poll conducted in St. Petersburg, Kazan, and Ulyanovsk, seventy-one percent of respondents said that Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Cheka (the predecessor of the KGB), had “protected public order and civil society.” In the same poll, two-thirds of respondents said that Stalin had been positive for the country.[22]
Today's Russian system is nothing new that Putin has created from scratch. The repression that exists in Russia today has a long history.
Richard Pipes, in his book “Russia under the Old Regime”, published in 1974, was able to describe in detail the similarities between the old Tsarist security apparatus and that which existed during the Soviet era. Pipes shows with all clarity that since 1845 the Russian criminal code has included political crimes that were defined so imprecisely that citizens could be imprisoned for having had the intention of “weakening”, “undermining”, “creating doubt” or “disrespecting” the authorities.[23] By comparing the Criminal Codes of 1845, 1927, and 1960, the common thread becomes clear. No wonder Pipes can argue that “Chapters Three and Four of the Russian Criminal Code of 1845 are to totalitarianism what the Magna Carta is to freedom.”[24] Already in the 1880s, according to Pipes, “all the foundations of a police state” were present in the Tsarist Empire.[25] At the same time, it was only a “precursor, a rough prototype” of a totalitarian police state[26], which the Bolsheviks began to build immediately after taking power.[27]
In other words, the Russian state-sanctioned repression of “political” crimes has a long history. The fact that Oleg Orlov, one of the leaders of Memorial, was sentenced to two and a half years in prison at the end of February for speaking out critically about the war in Ukraine must be considered tragic, but not surprising. Aftonbladet was able to report that he was accused of having shown “hostility towards traditional Russian religious, moral and patriotic values”.[28]
The most high-profile opposition politician in Russia in the last decade, Alexei Navalny was already in a Russian prison when he was sentenced in August 2023 to an additional nineteen years in prison for, among other things, “inciting extremist activity” and “rehabilitating Nazi ideology.”[29]
On February 16 of this year, the Russian penitentiary service announced his death. His mother stated that when she had met him four days earlier, he was “healthy and happy.”[30] It seems likely that he was, in one way or another, murdered by the Russian regime. His funeral, which took place in Moscow, a city of about thirteen million inhabitants, was attended by a couple of thousand people.[31]
I highlight this because, as I have argued in previous articles, individual Russian dissidents play a relatively small role politically. When the system found Navalny a sufficient threat, he was imprisoned and (probably) murdered. The Soviet Union collapsed when the Soviet elite, including Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Kravchuk, decided to reform or leave the system, not because of demonstrations in Moscow or exiled dissidents in Europe.
But why does this matter?
Because it shows that we should trust what Putin and others in the Russian ruling clique say. When Dmitry Medvedev says in late February that Odessa should “come home” to Russia, and that Russian troops should not stop until they have taken Kyiv[32], then we should trust what he says.
If we take the Russian political elite seriously, at their word, it becomes even clearer that Ukraine must not only avoid losing, they must win. This requires the return of all occupied Ukrainian territory, including Crimea. Only through a defeat in Ukraine does Russia have a chance to reform and uphold the rules-based international order.
The realization that Ukraine must win seems to be slowly sinking into Europe. On February 50st of this year, Charles Michael, President of the European Council, announced that the EU had agreed on an aid package for Ukraine worth €XNUMX billion.[33] On February 27, the European Parliament confirmed this by approving a revision of the EU's multiannual financial framework.[34]
At the same time, Rheinmetall stated in early February that it intends to send tens of thousands of artillery shells, dozens of combat vehicles, 2024 Leopard 25A1 tanks and a number of air defense systems to Ukraine in 5.[35] A separate Czech-led initiative has led to the first shipment of up to 800 artillery shells (000 500 mm, and 000 155 mm) being sent to Ukraine before the end of March.[36]
Although the US Congress has not yet approved the aid package for Ukraine that President Biden and the Senate have approved, things seem to be moving there as well. CNN was able to report on March 3 that a vote could take place in Congress after mid-March. If there was a free vote among the members, it is likely that the aid would be approved.[37] Although European support for Ukraine is growing, American support is still crucial for Ukraine to have an opportunity to challenge Russia in the near future.
At the same time, it is important to remember what Ukraine has achieved. Although the Ukrainian army has now left the areas around Avdiivka, February 2024 was the bloodiest month for Russia since the full-scale invasion. The British Ministry of Defense was able to report that the average Russian losses per day during February amounted to 983 men.[38] Since the full-scale invasion, Russia has lost an estimated 8800 combat vehicles of various types. In the past year alone, the figure has reached nearly 3000.[39]
In late February, Ukraine reported shooting down thirteen Russian planes during the month, including 10 Su-34s, two Su-35s, and one A-50. Another Su-34 was shot down on March XNUMX.[40] The Russian A-50 radar reconnaissance plane was the second to be shot down in two months, and it is therefore likely that the remaining A-50s are grounded, which is believed to have contributed to the losses of the other Russian air forces.[41]
At sea, Ukraine has managed to sink or damage a third of the Russian Black Sea fleet. This has forced Russia to end its naval presence in the northwestern Black Sea, and to rebase the fleet away from Crimea to Russian bases further east. The intended Russian blockade of Ukrainian agricultural exports has failed, and according to the Ukrainian Ministry of Finance, January 2024 was the month in which it managed to export the most since the invasion began.[42]
Kyrylo Budanov, head of the Ukrainian army's intelligence service, has said that there are several things that speak in Ukraine's favor – "the Russian army was badly damaged in the first year of the invasion, the Russians are using more ammunition than they can produce, and many of the Russian tanks that have been deployed recently are old." By wearing down the Russian army in 2024, a new counteroffensive could then push Russia back in 2025.[43]
Ben Hodges, former general and commander of the US Army in Europe, remarked that “after ten years of war, Russia, despite every conceivable advantage, controls only 18,5% of Ukraine. Their navy and air force are failing at every task, and the Russian army has suffered over 500.000 casualties. Imagine if the US and Germany made it a priority for Ukraine to win!”[44]
Russia, in a recently released report from the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), summarizes that it is at war with the West.[45]
Ukraine is the current front. If Ukraine does not win, Russia will continue on its path. We should trust what Putin and his elite say. Not taking them seriously could cost us all dearly.