Restoration of a Glorious Past or Recapitulation of an Ignominious One: The Unexpected Consequences of Vladimir Putin’s Invasion of Ukraine
The threat of Ukraine becoming a member of NATO and thus removing it from Moscow’s influence prompted Vladimir Putin to act before it was too late. His plan was to launch a blitzkrieg-style invasion of Ukraine, occupy the “wayward” former Russian possession, install a puppet regime, and continue his long-term plan to “Make Russia Great Again”, i.e., to restore the large and strong empire of the Soviet era but with the trappings of earlier imperial power. At least, that’s how it seems to have been playing out in his mind. Now, his plans appear to be blowing up in his face.
Putin has famously called the collapse or dissolution of the Soviet Union, “the greatest geopolitical calamity of the twentieth century.” In a matter of months, Moscow’s empire had retreated from its apogee as the Soviet Union, with its post-WWII Warsaw Pact buffer, extending its control well into central Europe, as well as control or influence over Mongolia and other client states around the globe, to being forced back, at least in Europe, to near pre-1721 borders. Russia’s imperialistic and colonial march of enlargement had been halted and to some extent reversed.
Let’s take a moment to appreciate that expansionist march. The year 1480 marks the generally accepted end of Mongol rule over Moscow and its neighbours at the eastern edge of the former Kievan Rus. By that time, however, the western city states of the former Kievan Rus, including Kyiv itself, had come (in stages) under Lithuanian control, beginning in 1295, and fully by 1430. Where Mongol rule was harsh, if sporadic, the Lithuanian nobility were more benign in their attitudes and largely left local communities to their own devices. Nevertheless, the lands which would evolve into Ukraine and Belarus looked west and received influences from the west, while Moscow, cooperating with the Mongols against its neighbours, was tied into the economic and cultural world of Central Asia. Indeed, Moscow’s voracious expansion between 1480 and 1700 was eastward, across the Urals, into Siberia, and onward to the regions from which their former masters had come. By 1689, Moscow’s vanguard had reached the Pacific. Moscow ruled over what was, in effect, an Asian or Eurasian power, not a European one, with only tenuous economic and diplomatic ties to the west.
Nevertheless, by the time of Ivan III (reigned 1462-1505), the twin ideas of “gathering the lands of Rus” and of the ruler of Moscow being the “tsar of all the Russias” were beginning to fix themselves into the political psyche and propaganda of Muscovite rulers. From the name Rus, Moscow claimed for itself “Russia” (Rosiya, from the Greek for Rus). Western maps of this time show the name Russia attached to what is now western Ukraine. Moscow’s dominion is labelled, “Moscovia” or “Muscovy”.
Wresting the former lands of Kievan Rus from Lithuania (and later Poland-Lithuania) became a long-term hope, framed as a kind of restoration of the eastern Slavs to their legitimate rulers. Although Moscow was at the eastern fringe of the former Kievan Rus territory, symbolically, the Muscovites placed themselves at the centre by appropriating two ideas of legitimacy: the heritage of Kievan Rus and that of Rome through fallen Constantinople—possibly one of history’s greatest exercises in identity theft and rebranding.
Despite these claims and the ambitions, it would take 300 years for them to be fully realised. The separation of the eastern and western parts of old Kievan Rus contributed to the moving apart of the different dialects into separate languages. The phoneme systems and vocabularies of Belarusian and Ukrainian are strongly influenced by Polish, German, and Yiddish. Additionally, Ukrainian has borrowed from the Tatar and Turkic languages of the peoples who ruled the Crimea and the adjoining steppe. Contrary to later claims by Russian propaganda, Ukrainian and Belarusian are distinct languages.
Moscow’s expansion westward began under Peter the Great with the Great Northern War (1700-1720) when they gained control of what are now Estonia and northern Latvia. In 1721, Peter formally proclaimed his country, “the Russian Empire”. The greatest expansion into Europe happened under the leadership of Catherine the Great (ruled 1762-1796). She was from Austria originally, and perhaps for this reason, conquest in the west was more interesting to her than in the east. [It is noteworthy that Putin never mentions her, preferring to associate himself with the strong men Peter the Great and Joseph Stalin. Perhaps a woman (and a foreign one at that) does not fit into his image making campaign.] Catherine oversaw Russia’s part in the Partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1772, 1793, and 1795, which brought the eastern half of that great realm under Moscow’s rule.
We often forget how recently the erasure of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth took place—that if Napoleon had invaded Russia as a young officer in the French Revolution in 1790, half the distance to Moscow would still have been Polish-Lithuanian. Or, to put it another way: half of the territory that Napoleon crossed when invading Russia had only been ruled by Moscow/St. Petersburg for a generation or so. For Russia’s imperial ambitions, it was essential for everyone to forget that Poland-Lithuania had ever existed, and to make it seem that the Poles and Lithuanians were non-peoples, destined to be subjugated for all time, and, it was hoped, to become Russified.
On an expansionist roll in Europe (as well as Asia), Russia reached its “classic” imperial footprint in Europe after 1815, when the Congress of Vienna it granted it, as a reward for helping to defeat Napoleon, central Poland (the region around Warsaw, which had originally gone to Prussia in the Partitions) and Finland. As to the latter, it is noteworthy how many centuries of connexion to Sweden were being ignored in this act. The coast of Finland had seen Swedish activity and settlement since the 9th century. Transiting Swedish Vikings travelled south down the Dnieper River to establish the dynasty called Rus with Kyiv as its capital. The Swedes had brought Christianity to Finland in the 12th century, and in 1350 the area was administratively organized under the Swedish crown as Österland, “Eastern Land”. The Finns became Lutheran in the Swedish Reformation but were granted an autonomous church. None of this mattered.
In the 19th century, Russia extended its Asian conquests into the centre of the continent, bringing the Kazakhs, Uzbeks, and neighbouring Turkic peoples under Moscow’s rule. With other European powers and the United States, they pressed China for economic concessions. In two treaties in 1858 and 1860, Russia forced China to cede the eastern portions of Manchuria that now make up the southern part of Russia’s Far East, including the port of Vladivostok. Clearly, Russia had more than paid back the descendants of their one-time overlords by humbling them and taking territory.
With World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution, Moscow’s expansion was partially reversed for a time. While Russia became the main entity in a union of nominally separate ethnic republics (i.e., the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics), Finland, the three Baltic Republics, and Poland became fully independent and began to reintegrate themselves westward in their historical and cultural orientation. Meanwhile, still under Moscow’s control, the former Polish-Lithuanian lands of Ukraine and Belorussia (now Belarus) were granted the status of constituent “self-governing” Soviet Republics. However, for Ukraine, this integration took place only after Moscow defeated the new independent Ukraine that tried to follow its northern neighbours into freedom in the 1918-1922 war for independence.
Arguably, Moscow’s empire reached its apogee in the post-World War II division of Europe. Not only had Stalin managed to reclaim the three Baltic republics (plus a bit of Finnish territory) and taken the eastern third of Poland and put a puppet regime in Warsaw, but it was also permitted to impose Communist regimes on Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia—areas that had never been under Russian control before. And, of course, Moscow was given control of the eastern half of pre-World War II Germany, which it parcelled up between itself and Poland, with the remainder constituting the small German Democratic Republic. Moscow’s imperial ambitions divided Europe down the middle. Indeed, the Soviet leadership had even suggested to the Americans at one point to give all of Europe to Moscow, and America could have the rest of the world. Such are the dreams of Russian imperialism, even when in the guise of Communist ideology.
Given all this, it is understandable that Vladimir Putin would see the unravelling of the Soviet Union and the subsequent retreat of Kremlin influence in the world as a great geopolitical calamity—but it was so only for Moscow. For the Poles, Balts, East Germans, Checks, Slovaks, and others, it was a miraculous liberation! At last, they could follow their own paths, which led them into the European Union. And for fear of Russian revanchism, they also sought the protection of NATO—the Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, and Hungarians leading the way. As for Ukraine and the other former Soviet Socialist Republics, the path ahead was less clear. Their systems were corrupt, taken hostage by former Communist Party functionaries who established the kleptocracies that Putin learned to use to assert his own influence.
Vladmir Putin wanted to restore Russia’s greatness. He wanted the world to take Russia seriously again. When this was not forthcoming from the United States and others, he embarked on a plan to reel the former republics back in by stealth (state capture) or by intimidation (military force). The events of 2013-2014 with the Euromaidan protests which unseated Putin’s chosen agent of state capture, led him to aggress, but still in semi-shadow, with the mysterious “little green men” appearing in Crimea to seize it from Ukraine, and an oddly well-equipped “independence movement” in the eastern Dondas region.
From 2014 to 2022, attitudes and politics in Ukraine began to shift away from a post-Soviet-business-as-usual attitude to one of wanting deeper economic and, ultimately, security integration into Europe. For Putin, talk of Ukraine joining NATO was the last straw. Ukraine, a large land of abundant agricultural production, extensive industrial infrastructure, and considerable natural resources, could not be allowed to be “stolen” by the west. In his mind, Ukraine, the heart of old Kievan Rus, was the spiritual heart of Russia—an inseparable part of the mystical entity he likes to call, the Russkiy Mir, or Russian World. If he wanted to stop Ukraine’s westward drift, he had to act.
Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine was meant to be quick: a lightning invasion, the removal of Zelensky and his government, the installation of a puppet. Ukraine would be tethered back into the Russian World, to become another Belarus, and eventually to be fully united with Russia. No more silly talk about Ukrainian culture and language, which would all have to be suppressed.
But In fact, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine turned out to be the greatest blunder of his grand strategy. In so many ways it has produced the opposite results to his stated aims. The Ukrainian people resisted vigorously, and a great outpouring of Ukrainian patriotism followed. Russia’s military proved to be clumsy, ill-prepared, hamstrung by corruption; and Russian equipment turned out to be poorly designed and remarkably vulnerable in a real fight. The stated enemy, NATO, grew by two more countries—Finland and Sweden—both with very effective militaries. Western counties were much more cohesive and generous with their assistance to Ukraine than Putin had imagined (though not cohesive and generous enough to give Ukraine the victory). Putin’s strategy of getting Europe to back down through oil and gas blackmail did not work. Europe has now largely weened itself of Russian fossil fuels. His ally Iran, by pushing a war with Israel to distract the United States and others, “poked the lion of Judah” and has seen its own proxies across the region smashed, which in turn has led to the collapse of Russia’s key ally, the Assad regime in Syria, which in turn has taken away Russia’s transportation bridge to its operations in Africa.
While all these developments are bad enough for Russia, perhaps the most ominous in the long term is Russia’s growing dependence on China. The longer the war drags on, the more China gets its economic hooks into Russia. The Russian economy and male population are being hit hard by this war. Sanctions and Russia’s various workarounds, together with record military spending—30% of the budget—are driving inflation and shortages of key components. The massive stockpiles of Cold War era tanks and armoured vehicles that have helped to keep Russia in the fight are disappearing. Time is running out for Putin and his war, and so it seems that Xi Jinping is backstopping, but not without limits and not without a price. For example, Chinese firms are being allowed to move into some areas, notably for resource extraction, while at the same time Beijing keeps itself form becoming too dependent on Russian resources.
From 1237 to 1240, the Mongol armies brought most of the central and eastern city states of the former Kievan Rus under their control, destroying some (including both Moscow and Kyiv). By 1241, they were encamped on the Hungarian plain and had already attacked as far west as Vienna. Knightly warfare was useless against them. Only the strong castles and fortresses of western European design seemed to offer any hope. And then, a miracle happened. On December 11, 1241, the Great Khan Ögdegei, still in his early 30’s, died unexpectedly. The hordes withdrew to deal with the ensuing dynastic struggle at home in Mongolia. Western and central Europe were spared becoming subjects of the Mongols. However, Moscow and its neighbours along the eastern edge of the former Kievan Rus were not so fortunate. The Mongols kept a firm hand on them. The power vacuum along the Dnieper River opened the door for Lithuania to extend its power to become (allied and then federated with Poland) one of the largest European empires of the 14th through 18thcenturies. This, in turn, reinforced and deepened the cultural and linguistic divide that still distinguishes Belarus and Ukraine from Russia today.
Vladimir Putin’s war, rather than re-extending the Russian Empire into Europe, seems to be driving Russia into the orbit of China. Instead of restoring his empire, he is returning it to a time when decision makers in the east extracted their tribute. His paranoia, hubris, nationalistic fantasies, and disregard for life are undoing the very things he hoped to establish, and sending Russia, not back to its majestic imperial past, but to a more hard-bitten reality under the tutelage of a power to the east.
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