An image of Vladimir Putin. Illustration: Sam Green
The revenge of history in Ukraine: year of war has shaken up world order
A shared sense of national history is proving to be a crucial weapon, spurring on Ukraine resistance and Russian soldiers
Last modified on Tue 27 Dec 2022
The
Ukrainian writer Oksana Zabuzhko recalls a quote attributed to Otto von
Bismarck: “Wars are not won by generals, but by schoolteachers and
parish priests.” It’s a country’s taught collective memory, its shared
sense of its own history, that are the decisive instruments for
mobilisation, and are as important on the battlefield as weaponry.
Few
conflicts have been so shaped by the chief actors’ sense of their own
national story as the Ukrainian war that began in February. It is the
competing grand narratives of the past, not just in Russia and Ukraine,
but in Germany, France, Poland, the Baltics, the UK, the US, and even the global south, that make this war so hard to resolve.
Indeed, sometimes this war feels less like the end of history and more like the revenge of history.
Georgiy
Kasianov, the Ukrainian historian, puts history in the cockpit of a
conflict that may create a new world order. “Russian forces have been
smashing their way through Ukraine spurred in large part by historical
fiction,” he wrote
in Foreign Affairs. “But history also propels the fierce Ukrainian
resistance. Ukrainians, too, harbour a particular understanding of the
past that motivates them to fight. In many ways, this war is the
collision of two incompatible historical narratives.”
Photograph: Russian Defence Ministry/AFP/Getty Images
Putin
is sometimes described not as commander in chief, but as Russia’s
historian in chief. The ground for this war was prepared by the Russian
president’s pseudo-historical essay
On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians, published in July
2021. In this document, Putin argued Ukraine was, historically,
indistinguishable from Russia, citing Oleg the prophet’s 10th-century
dictum: “Let Kyiv be the mother of all Russian cities.”
Radosław
Sikorski, the former Polish foreign minister, said he became sure an
invasion would happen when he read that essay and learned Putin had
ordered it to be sent to every serving Russian soldier. “The plan was to
do again what Russia had repeatedly done to Ukraine
in the past: extermination of its elites, Russification of its culture
and population and the subjugation of its resources to its own imperial
needs. Ukraine could be permitted as peasant folklore but not as a free
and democratic nation choosing its own destiny and allies.”
When
Putin talked about Ukraine needing to disarm and making Russian its
second official language, it was not only about restoring Ukraine as
part of Russia, but a staging post to the full reinvention of the Russian empire.
Police
officers detain a demonstrator during a protest against Russia’s
invasion of Ukraine in Moscow on 24 February. Vladimir Putin is
sometimes described not as commander-in-chief, but as Russia’s
historian-in-chief. Photograph: Alexander Nemenov/AFP/Getty Images
During his Victory Day speech
in Moscow in May 2022, the president told Russian soldiers back from
the Ukrainian front they were “fighting for the same thing their fathers
and grandfathers did” – for “the motherland” and the defeat of nazism.
The Ukrainian revolution of 2013 was a fascist “Banderite coup”, the
government in Kyiv a “junta”, Nato enlargement an Anschluss, and the EU a
decadent threat to Russian culture. Russia in 2022, according to Putin,
was like the USSR in 1941, threatened by an invasion from the west.
A
boy looks at a poster with the likeness of the Russian president,
Vladimir Putin, as he visits an outdoor poster exhibition titled Victory
Day at the National Museum of the History of Ukraine in the second
world war in Kyiv, Ukraine, 9 August. Photograph: Roman Pilipey/EPA
Zabuzkho
argues that this deep historical sense of injustice and betrayal drives
not just Putin, but the whole of Russian society. “One wants to find
Russians who are not preoccupied with self-pity right now. The feeling
of injustice is one of the most distinct symptoms of the moral breakdown
that characterises so much of Russian society today.”
Ukraine,
too, has its own sense of injustice and points its accusatory finger at
Russia. Olesya Khromeychuk, director of the Ukrainian Institute in
London, argues: “Ukraine’s historical experience – of statelessness and
struggle, repressive external rule and hard-won independence – has
shaped Ukraine into the nation we see today: opposed to imperialism,
united in the face of the enemy, and determined to protect its freedom.
For the people of Ukraine, freedom is not some lofty ideal. It is
imperative for survival.”
Ukraine’s identity
took time to form after it gained independence in 1991. Two narratives
competed – one national and nationalist, the other Soviet nostalgic.
This was not unique among post-Soviet states, but the process was never
more intense or confrontational than in Ukraine.
People
gather in Lviv to commemorate the victims of the 1932-33 Holodomor, a
human-made famine that killed millions of Ukrainians. Photograph: Yuriy Dyachyshyn/AFP/Getty Images
Battles
were fought over school textbooks, monuments, the choice of national
anniversaries, street names, state archives, or the status of the
Holodomor – the human-made famine of 1932-33 that killed millions of
Ukrainians – as a genocide. Under the “historical presidency” of Viktor
Yuschenko between 2005 and 2010, 159 historical decrees were issued, the
vast majority about the de-communisation of Ukraine.
In
the process history was often royally misused. The Ukrainian Institute
of National Memory for instance between 2014 and 2019 came to be
dominated by a narrow group of rightwing nationalists that defined
Ukraine in purely ethnic anti-Russian terms.
Unpopular
leaders such as Petro Poroshenko relied on increasingly divisive and
crude ethnic appeals to patriotism, thinking it was the shortcut to
remaining in power. In 2015 the government even issued a set of “memory
laws” that made questioning the official, deeply anti-Soviet view of
Ukraine’s past punishable with prison terms of up to 10 years.
It
was not until the advent of Volodymyr Zelenskiy and the “independence
generation” – those who grew up after Ukraine left the Soviet Union –
that Ukraine addressed issues of the past, identity and language in a
more inclusive way, as Olga Onuch sets out in her book The Zelensky Effect.
Zelenskiy, a former comedian and actor elected in 2019, understood the
importance of history. Indeed, in the opening series of Servant of the
People – the TV show that made his name – Zelenskiy plays a history
teacher trying to convince his pupils of the importance of Mykhailo
Hrushevsky, the historian who, in 1903, first tried to show how
Ukrainian history was not merely a part of an overarching Russian story.
An
expert of the prosecutor’s office examining collected remnants of
shells and missiles used by the Russian army to attack the second
largest Ukrainian city of Kharkiv. Photograph: Aleksey Filippov/AFP/Getty Images
In
his new year address in 2020, Zelenskiy asked Ukrainians to ask
themselves, “Who am I?”, and not find an answer by simply excluding
others. “Our passports don’t say whether we are the right kind of
Ukrainians or a wrong one. There is no entry there, saying ‘patriot’,
‘Maloros’ [a derogatory term used to describe a Ukrainian native with no
national identity], ‘vatnik’ [a derogatory term for a pro-Russian
citizen] or ‘Banderite’ [a derogatory term for a Ukrainian nationalist].
It says: ‘citizen of Ukraine’, who has rights and obligations. We are
all very different.” The idea was to live together with respect.
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy speaks during his televised new year message in Kyiv, 1 January 2020. Photograph: AP
Onuch
and her co-author, Henry Hale, argue Zelenskiy was critical to giving
Ukrainians a chance to “realise they shared a rich common fate that
transcended linguistic, national and religious diversity”. This
generation did not want just to shed their Russianness, but find a new
Ukrainian civic identity linked to a hard-fought idea of common values.
As a Russian-speaking Jewish person from south-east Ukraine, Zelenksiy
was perfect to demonstrate how Russian-speaking Ukrainians, including
those in the east, could fully identify with the Ukrainian state and
express their patriotism.
That mattered when the war began. The Polish historian Adam Michnik argues that the future of Ukraine as part of Europe
was always going to depend not only on the western cities of Lviv and
Kyiv, but also on the cities to the south and east, Kharkiv and Odesa.
“There is no doubt, under Putin’s rockets, both Kharkiv and Odesa chose
Europe.”
‘Under
Putin’s rockets, both Kharkiv and Odesa chose Europe’. A funeral
ceremony for a Ukrainian soldier in Odesa, Ukraine, in March 2022. Photograph: Sedat Suna/EPA
In short, Putin was invading a country that very much existed – one he no longer understood.
The FSB
told the Russian president that a superior army could capture Kyiv and
decapitate its leadership in hours, as it had in Crimea in 2014, since
it was invading an artificial and politically apathetic country that
distrusted its leaders. Just to make sure, it supposedly spent $1bn
fomenting discontent among the Russophone population in Ukraine and
promoting pro-Russian politicians. Unfortunately, the FSB’s agents
siphoned off some of the money and then fabricated data on pro-Russian
attitudes to please Moscow.
As a result, many
Russian soldiers, poorly briefed on the invasion, seemed genuinely
bewildered by a Ukrainian volunteer defence force determined to protect
their homeland. When they reached cities such as Kherson they were
greeted with shotguns, and not flowers.
Russian
soldier Kulikov Mikhail, 31, sits in a glass enclosure at a war crimes
trial in Chernihiv, Ukraine on 30 June 2022. Accused of violating the
laws and customs of war, he was the operator-gunner of a T-72b tank and
on 26 February received an order to shoot at a residential apartment
building using a high-explosive fragmentation projectile. He has
admitted guilt and repented. Photograph: Carol Guzy/Zuma Press Wire/Rex/Shutterstock
“The
Ukraine in your news and the Ukraine of real life are two entirely
different places,” Zelenskiy warned Russians on the eve of the invasion,
“and the difference is that the latter is real”.
By
day three of the invasion it was apparent to Russian commanders that
serious mistakes had been made from which the operation has never fully
been able to recover. Russia’s hubris and overconfidence led to false
assumptions that sabotaged the mission.
The UK
defence secretary, Ben Wallace, provided a concise summary of the
critical importance of Russia’s initial mistakes. He told a Lords select
committee in November: “This war has exposed the whole pitch about
‘night one, day one’. You might translate it as saying, ‘When the
balloon goes up, you take out the air defence of your adversary and then
you can pick and choose at will and do your targeting.’
A Ukrainian soldier in an artillery unit fires towards Russian positions outside Bakhmut in November. Photograph: Bülent Kılıç/AFP/Getty Images
“What
if you do not manage to do that on day one, night one, and it takes
three weeks, as the Russians found out? On their day one, night one, the
Ukrainians rather cleverly drove out of their barracks, dispersed their
arsenals or used deception in their air defence capabilities. Knowing
that this was going to happen, the Ukrainians used false trails for
where their air defence was so that Russia hit all the wrong places.
Suddenly, day one, night one becomes three weeks, four weeks. You run
out of your complex weapons and you are now where the Russians are.”
Ten
months on from the initial invasion, Ukraine’s extraordinary resilience
and courage has staved off defeat, but not guaranteed victory. Europe’s
post-cold war security landscape has changed, and yet nothing is
settled. This is still a moment of transition.
The
Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov describes the war as “more
like a game of poker than chess. On a chess board, all the pieces are
face up, but poker is essentially a game of incomplete information, a
game where you have to guess and act on those guesses.”
The
most difficult guess is estimating how long the other side can
withstand this level of destruction in terms of manpower, ammunition and
morale. Each side has to increase the cost of war for the other in the
hope the enemy is close to cracking.
Yet the
toll is already massive. The US chief of staff, Mark Milley, claims as
many as 100,000 Russian soldiers have died or been injured. Based on
open-source references, the Oryx site determined that the Russians had
lost a total of 1,491 main battle tanks since 24 February, of which 856
different types were destroyed, 62 damaged and 55 abandoned, and the
Ukrainians had taken more than 518. Russia, albeit involuntarily, became
Ukraine’s most important arms supplier.
Ukraine 'not afraid of dark', says Zelenskiy as Russian attacks trigger blackouts – video
By one calculation, the US has spent 5.6% of its annual defence budget to destroy nearly half of Russia’s military capability.
The
successive battlefield defeats have damaged the reputation of the great
Russian military. First there had to be the “regrouping” in the north,
when Russia realised it could not take Kyiv and Chernihiv. On 6
September came the stunning collapse of the Russian front in the
north-east in the Kharkiv region. On 11 November Russia withdrew from
the port city of Kherson, retreating from territory it had announced as
annexed and part of Russia only 40 days earlier. The goal of
establishing a land corridor to Transnistria – a Russian-backed
breakaway region of Moldova, one of Ukraine’s western neighbours – is,
for now, abandoned. Since September Ukraine says it has reclaimed more
than 8,000 sq km (3,089 sq miles) of Russian-occupied territory.
![People stand near a car on a destroyed bridge outside Kherson, southern Ukraine, 26 November.]()
Photograph: Roman Pilipey/EPA
Russia
has also paid a toll in lost diplomatic prestige. In meetings with
Central Asian republics, Putin sometimes find himself humiliated and
contradicted, and there is talk of a security vacuum in the Caucasus as
Russian prestige withers. Positive diplomatic support for Russia, as
opposed to hedging, is confined to Belarus, North Korea, Syria and
Eritrea. In one international diplomatic body after another, the “Russia
not welcome” sign is going up. The Chinese defence minister, Wei
Fenghe, in June said his country would not be providing one bullet to
Russia, portraying the relationship as a partnership, not an alliance.
In
the annual Anholt-Ipsos Nations Brands index, published in November,
Russia has fallen from 27th out of the 60 nations polled to 58. The
founder of the index, Simon Anholt, says: “Such a collapse in a
country’s national prestige will cripple the ability of its business,
its government and most importantly its people to trade and engage with
the international community. It will do so for years, if not
generations, and will inflict more damage than any economic sanctions”.
Cumulatively
that has left Putin not looking for a way out, but a way to stay in the
war. Mark Galeotti, the author of Putin’s Wars, believes Moscow has now
clearly moved from winning the war to not losing it, and that requires
trying to outsuffer the west. Orlando Figes summarised it recently: “The
war is now entering a new phase because winter has arrived and the
Russians are going to dig in. That is why they are ceding the western
bank of the Dnieper River. The current phase is to destroy Ukrainian
infrastructure, to create a refugee problem, and start an economic war
against the west. That’s where the war will be played out and everything
will be decided. What determines the outcome of the war will be how
willing western societies are to continue supporting Ukraine.”
Conscripted men say goodbye to relatives at a recruiting office in Moscow, September 2022. Photograph: Yuri Kochetkov/EPA
Again,
national stories will play their part in testing that resolve. Moscow
had bet on a return to American isolationism and a Trump triumph in the
midterm elections in November. The theory was that in swing districts,
Americans would rise up against the cost of gas and the war. It is true a
slow erosion of support for the war among Republicans emerged in some
polls, but Joe Biden seemed to tell a more compelling story about
democracy under threat in the US and in Europe.
As
a result, Biden has been left with greater scope than expected to
continue to shape his own Ukraine policy in the next two years.
At
the start of December, Michael McCaul, the lead Republican on the House
foreign affairs committee, defined that scope by saying Republicans
would not be advocating an end to US funding, but greater scrutiny and
decisiveness. Given Biden has provided Ukraine with more than $18.6bn in
security assistance and $13bn in direct economic assistance, it was
hardly surprising McCaul demanded more accountability for US spending.
But his main point was different. “The problem right now is Iranian
drones are going into Crimea, but the Ukrainians can’t hit those Iranian
drones unless they have the longer-range artillery called the ATACMS
[army tactical missile system]. For some reason … [the Biden
administration] will not put those weapons into Ukraine. When we give
[Ukraine] what they need, they win. If we don’t, it’s going to be a long
and protracted war.” They are not the remarks of a man bent on reviving
the American isolationist tradition.
If the US
is for the moment closed off as a choke point, Putin’s next best option
was Berlin. But the energy blackmail he directed at Germany now looks
as likely to explode in his own face as bring about German
deindustrialisation.
Cologne
Cathedral’s lights are switched off in an effort to reduce dependence
on imported natural gas from Russia and impose energy-saving measures in
Germany. Photograph: Mesut Zeyrek/Anadolu Agency
Through
a mixture of state planning and individual parsimony, Germany has
weaned itself off Russian energy, an extraordinary achievement for a
country that was dependent on Russia for 55% of its gas. German industry
has reduced gas consumption by about 25% since the year’s start, while
production has only fallen by 1.4%. The state has found alternative
suppliers, including in Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium and France.
Given the state of German reserves, blackouts this winter seem less likely in Europe, even if next winter is more worrying.
Germany
has led the efforts to quell anger about rising bills by constructing
hugely expensive subsidy packages. Since the start of the energy crisis
in September 2021, according to the Bruegel Institute,
a staggering €705.5bn (£614bn) has been allocated or earmarked across
European countries to shield consumers from the rising energy costs.
But
will it be enough? The nights are longer, the thermometers have dropped
and energy bills are landing, so the witching hour is here. The
recurring nightmare of Zelenskiy’s young strategic communications team
is that Ukraine’s suffering drops out of the news, and the country, once
synonymous with freedom, becomes a burden. “Our principle is simple,”
says Andriy Yermak, the president’s chief of staff. “If we fall out of
focus, we are in danger.” The attention of the world serves as a shield.
A view of the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv during a partial blackout on 13 December. Photograph: Sergei Supinsky/AFP/Getty Images
So far the drumbeat of rebellion is faint and confined to the fringes on the left and right.
That
has forced Putin to switch tactics again and resort to different tools
of war to weaken Europe’s resolve. The attacks on civilian energy
structure that began in October are not only designed to create misery
in Ukraine, but to make neighbourhoods uninhabitable, so creating an
exodus from the cities and a second wave of Ukrainian refugees that the
west cannot tolerate. The Ukrainian MP Lesia Vasylenko, pointing out 14
million Ukrainians are already displaced, including 7 million abroad,
frankly admitted to British politicians she feared the mood towards
Ukrainian refugees might be about to change. Alarm bells are already
ringing about the bullying of Ukrainians in schools, she said.
But
according to the Polish migration expert Prof Maciej Duszczyk from the
University of Warsaw, 70% of Ukrainian refugees cross the Polish border,
and in Poland,
again for historical reasons, there is no sign of a backlash yet. For
Poland, Russia is synonymous only with conquest, partitions, genocide,
colonialism and communism. Whatever its past or present differences with
Ukraine, the two countries know that in Russia they share a common
enemy, according to Duszczyk. Poland is now home to approximately 1
million refugees from Ukraine (and as many Ukrainians who lived there
before the war). Nearly 60% have found jobs. In elections next year,
Duszczyk does not expect the refugee issue will feature.
Helena and her brother Bodia from Lviv, Ukraine, at the Medyka pedestrian border crossing, in eastern Poland in February 2022. Photograph: Wojtek Radwański/AFP/Getty
That
is not to say the influx is painless. In Warsaw alone, schools and
nurseries have taken 18,000 kids, and Warsaw’s mayor is appealing for
European financial support. Duszczyk says so far the position at the
border crossing is stable, but admits each morning to getting an update
on the weather and status of electricity stations in Kyiv. “Are we, as a
state and society, ready for a second wave of refugees from Ukraine?”
he asks.
If Poland did decide it is full, or
tried to play electoral politics with Germany over the issue, as many as
2 million more refugees could, in theory, move on to countries in
western Europe, predominantly Germany. By one estimate that might cost
an estimated €48bn a year.
Manfred Weber, the
German head of the European People’s party, the pan-European
conservative political grouping, says Germany may be sleepwalking into a
crisis. “Due to Putin’s reign of terror, I’m afraid we are going to
have a dramatic winter of flight. The reception centres in Germany are
full, the municipalities are groaning, also in countries like the
Netherlands, Belgium and Austria. It looks like we will have to open
more gyms in Germany in a few months and restrict school and sports
operations because they could be full. Germany is not prepared for this
situation.”
A woman is comforted by a friend after arriving on a train from Ukraine’s border at Berlin’s main train station on 2 March. Photograph: Tobias Schwarz/AFP/Getty Images
More
than any other European country, Germany will determine whether the
continent stays the course with Ukraine. Wolfgang Ischinger, the former
German diplomat, says Germany has been the European country most willing
to change its foreign policy and shed its worship of the status quo. At
one level Germany has spent the past 12 months shedding its postwar
mindset. Olaf Scholz’s zeitenwende
signalled €100bn investment in its depleted army. Germany agreed to
send anti-tank missiles and Stinger missiles into a war zone. The
country’s president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, for years the country’s
most vocal proponent of compromise with Russia, went to Kyiv to
apologise. He said Germany’s dependency on Russian gas had been a
strategic error, born of a stubborn misreading of Putin. “In the face of
evil, goodwill was not enough.”
Annalena
Baerbock, the Green foreign minister, went further, arguing the Social
Democrats’ Ostpolitik had been based on a false historical analysis.
Germany’s moral debt of “special responsibility” bound Germany not to
Russia, but primarily to Jews and Poles, Belarusians and Ukrainians, and
only then to the Russians. She argues, in a formula that Scholz avoids:
“We will achieve security only without, not with Vladimir Putin’s
Russia.”
People
from Ukraine, most of them refugees fleeing the war, wait in front of
the consular department of the Ukrainian embassy in Berlin, Germany, 1
April. Photograph: Markus Schreiber/AP
In
so doing she comes closer than Biden, Macron or indeed Scholz in siding
with those who say the war must end with Putin being seen to have been
defeated, an articulation that raises hard questions about Europe’s
future relations with Russia. But Baerbock is not ultimately in charge. “Zeitenwende
is a catchphrase and we do not really have a mental and strategic
shift. Yes, more money is being spent, but it is the same people with
the same bureaucratic cautious mindset running German foreign policy. It
is all about processes,” says Dr Stefan Meister at the German Council
for Foreign Relations.
A family sits in a train during an evacuation from Pokrovsk, Donetsk region, 30 November. Photograph: Anatolii Stepanov/AFP/Getty Images
One
senior Baltic diplomat promises there will be a reckoning when the war
is over that will see a shift away from the Franco-German centre of
gravity. He says “Everyone understands the reasons for Germany’s
pacifism and, yes, often in the end they do the right thing, but only
after they have exhausted every other possibility and in the process
completely damaged their own reputation.”
A
Ukrainian diplomat concurs. “We have to get rid of this constant fear of
escalation in certain capitals. It is what holds us back, and it
misunderstands the nature of Russian and the existential conflict we are
fighting.”
That returns the conflict to Putin’s view of what he described as Russia’s historical future.
A
destroyed Russian tank by the side of the road in Kupiansk, which was
occupied by Russian forces days after the 24 February invasion –
hastened by the surrender of Kupiansk’s Russia-friendly mayor. Photograph: Chris McGrath/Getty Images
Jade
McGlynn, an Oxford academic and author of the forthcoming Russia’s War,
explains why it is so hard for Russia to relinquish Ukraine. “Sergei
Lavrov [the Russian foreign minister], for instance, says that without
Russia, Ukraine does not have any history. But it is actually the
opposite. Without Ukraine, Russia’s understanding of its own identity –
this third Rome, based on Orthodoxy, this gathering of all the lands of
Rus – does not really work. You cannot espouse this state messianic role
if you cannot convince ethnic Russians to join you in cultural
communion and you to have bomb them.
“That is why it is going to be very hard for Russia ever to accept this war has failed.”
This article was amended on 27 December 2022. An earlier version said
that the US chief of staff, Mark Milley, claimed that as many as 100,000
Russian soldiers had been killed in the war. This should have been
killed or wounded.