To understand Russia's invasion of Ukraine, look to the Soviet Union's breakup, says professor
Vladimir Putin looks to be trying to rebuild the former Russian Empire, says Paul D’Anieri
As Russia launches an invasion into Ukraine, people are taking a close look at Russian President Vladimir Putin, his motives, and what led to this invasion.
After Putin declared war in a pre-dawn televised address, explosions and gunfire were heard throughout the morning in Kyiv, a city of three million people.
In another speech earlier in the week, Putin implied that Ukraine is not a sovereign country, belonging instead to Russia's history and culture.
The Current's Matt Galloway discussed Ukraine's roots and the implications of Putin's address for other former Soviet republics with Paul D'Anieri, a professor of political science at the University of California Riverside, and the author of Ukraine and Russia: From Civilized Divorce to Uncivil War.
Here's part of that conversation.
Vladimir Putin has said that he launched the attack on Russia to demilitarize the community in Ukraine and that he does not plan to occupy Ukrainian territory. And yet a key point in that speech was that Ukraine is really part of Russia, that its creation as an independent country is somehow illegitimate. How do we read his words in the context of what we're seeing right now?
Yeah, it's very difficult. And as you pointed out, there's sort of this contradiction between this incredibly expansive notion of Russia's ownership of Ukraine that he gave us in that speech on Monday night and that he's expressed previously, with what he's saying now, which is an intervention. It's not about occupation.
In that speech, he said it should be noted that Ukraine actually never had stable traditions of real statehood. Where does that narrative come from, that Ukraine isn't really a country?
It's a pretty standard Russian perspective that alludes to the history that over the centuries, Ukraine was repeatedly invaded and captured by outside actors.
So there's been an independent Ukrainian culture and people and language going back to the 10th century. But since about the 13th century when the Mongols conquered Kyiv, other countries have occupied and controlled Ukrainian territory.
When he talks about Ukraine being integral to Russia, are there communities in Ukraine that would see the relationship the same way?
There are. It's a relatively small number, and it's gotten much smaller since 2014.
Many people in Ukraine had an attitude that is: we're Ukrainians and we want to be in our separate country, but we do have historical ties to Russia, and we'd like to have good relations with Russia.
There's nothing inherently about being Ukrainian that would necessarily make one hostile to Russia. But what's happened through history and especially over the last eight years, has moved a lot of Ukrainians in that direction to basically say, at least for the time being, this is an enemy. This is a country that wants to conquer us.
In your book, you make the case that the crisis has its roots in some ways in the break-up of the Soviet Union.
It does. The Soviet Union turned out to be, in many ways, a continuation of the Russian Empire. That was true territorially, but it was also true in a lot of the ways that things got wrong. A lot of old Czarist institutions got converted into Soviet institutions.
And the Soviets, especially when things got tough during World War II, they started trying to merge Soviet ideology with traditional Russian nationalism as a way of motivating people during the war.
And so when the Soviet Union collapses in 1991, there is a sense amongst much of the Russian elite that the Soviet Union has to go, but not Ukraine, and to some extent, not Belarus.
So when you hear people like the prime minister of Latvia say that what Putin is doing is trying to reconstitute an empire, it's dismissed by some people. But is that really what's going on here, do you think?
That is at least a part of it. I think, trying to sort of definitively state what Putin's motivations are is a very tricky game and I wouldn't want to go too far.
But certainly rhetorically, that is what he is doing. And I think that on some important level, that does inform him, that sense of the natural borders of Russia are in a much different place than where they are right now.
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What does that mean, then, for the other countries that might have been at some point in time under Moscow's rule?
I think they should be worried. And one of the things that worries me is the borders of the Russian Empire up until World War I included much of today's Poland, including the city of Warsaw. It was a much bigger empire than it is today. So it's hard to know.
Do I really see them invading Poland and trying to retake Warsaw? No. But a couple of years ago, I didn't see this happening [in Ukraine] either.
In declaring the attack today, Vladimir Putin said that Russia would de-nazify Ukraine. What does that mean?
It's been a favourite theme of Putin and of the Russian government ever since 1991, but especially since the Orange Revolution in 2004, that Ukraine is full of Nazis and it was a favourite theme of the Soviets, as well as a way of quelling Ukrainian nationalism.
It's one of these things, right? There's just this little tiny grain of historical truth that he then builds this vast edifice out of.
Stalin did this deal with Hitler, and Hitler invaded western Poland and the Soviet Union, invaded eastern Poland and viciously repressed the Polish population and the Ukrainian population in what was eastern Poland.
When the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in June of 1941, there were some people who hoped that the Germans were going to be the liberators from the Soviet Union.
And so there were some Ukrainian nationalists who collaborated with the Nazis, as there were in all of the countries that the Nazis occupied. There were Ukrainians that took part in the Holocaust, and there is a long history of anti-Semitism in the region.
That's pretty ancient history. But it resonates incredibly well with a Russian citizenry for whom World War II and the fight against Nazis is so incredibly important because that war was immeasurably catastrophic.
And so it's very shrewd propaganda on his part, but it's got little connection to contemporary Ukraine.
Is de-escalation still possible?
I think the short answer is no, he's all in now. What we don't exactly know is what "all in" means. So far, what it seems is the goal is to simply capture Kharkiv, which is a major city in eastern Ukraine, and maybe to get into Kyiv enough to depose the government.
The big question will be if that's the strategy. Can toppling the government give him control of the country? And I'm pretty skeptical about that. And so we'll see. He says he doesn't want to occupy the country.
So that's either just a whopping lie or it's wishful thinking. He may be hoping that if he topples the government, most Ukrainians will just fall into place because they want to get on with their lives. We will see.
Written by Philip Drost. Produced by Julie Crysler. Q&A edited for length and clarity.
