By Dr. David Phillips

Vladimir Putin’s Historical Justification for Control Over Ukraine

In 1991, the Soviet Union broke up into 15 independent states, including Ukraine whose 40 million population made it the largest Republic outside Russia itself. After succeeding Yeltsin to the Presidency in 2000 Vladimir Putin gradually set about constitutional changes including centralization of power. In 2005 he gave a key State of the Nation Speech to the Russian Federal Assembly in which he announced: "The collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century." He believed that the fall of the USSR led to the fragmentation of Russian-speaking populations, economic and social instability in Russia, loss of Moscow’s influence, and weakening of Russia’s global position. On July 12, 2021, a few months before invading Ukraine (carried out despite frequent denials and evasions) Putin also published an essay apparently justifying a potential take-over of that country - “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians”.

In his essay Putin argued that Russians and Ukrainians had a single historical and cultural heritage, and that modern Ukraine has no important historical roots independent of Russia. Much of present-day Ukraine, he stated, was integrated into Russia in the 18th century, and the Soviet Union further solidified Ukraine’s links to and dependence on Moscow, but the modern Ukrainian identity was artificially constructed particularly by Western powers seeking to weaken Russia; he said that the Soviet leadership “created” Ukraine by drawing artificial borders and promoting Ukrainian nationalism; and, that modern Ukraine was altogether an accident of the USSR’s collapse. He claimed that Khrushchev’s gifting of Crimea to Ukraine in 1954 was illegitimate, that Ukraine’s Independence in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed was a mistake, and that that Kyiv does not need its Eastern region. He blamed Western Interference for driving a wedge between Russia and Ukraine and saw the 2014 Euromaidan revolution as a Western-backed coup. He claimed that Russian-speaking Ukrainians have been discriminated against in Ukraine, that Russia and Ukraine are destined to be united again, and those who resist this idea are betraying historical truth. His article celebrates "gathering the Russian world, the Russian people together, including Great Russians, Belarusians and Little Russians,” and Putin’s own historic responsibility for "resolution of the Ukrainian question".

Historical Truth: The importance of Kyiv in Ukrainian History

The area approximately between Kyiv and Moscow became known in the late 9th Century as Kyivan Rus. ‘Rus’ is the origin of the word ‘Russia’ and the Rus were Norsemen believed to have originated mainly from Sweden who traveled south from the Baltic coast along rivers such as the Dnieper. The name Rus is believed to have meant ‘oarsmen’ or ‘sailors’. These people settled along the rivers between the Baltic and the Black Sea, which included areas in modern-day Ukraine, Belarus, and northwestern Russia.

Historical evidence suggests that the Rus played a key role in the establishment of Kyiv. Contemporary chronicles state that Oleg, a Varangian (Viking) Prince, set up his capital in Kyiv because its superior trade and strategic location would allow him to unify the Slavic tribes in the area, Kyivan Rus. He was supposed to have described Kyiv as “the mother of Rus cities”. As seat of the Grand Prince and the Regional Administration Kyiv became a center of trade, culture, and religion, linking the northern and southern parts of the region. Trade took place in goods such as furs, honey, wax, silver, and luxury items between Scandinavian, Byzantine, and Slavic merchants. Later, in 988, Grand Prince Volodymyr of Kyiv converted to Christianity and adopted Byzantine Orthodoxy as the state religion. The Christianization of Rus firmly established Kyiv as the spiritual center of the region. For over 300 years Kyiv represented the unity and identity of the Rus people. Prior to the Mongol Invasion Kyiv, with a population of around 75,000 ,was one of Europe’s largest cities.

Over time, the Varangians assimilated with the local Slavic population, blending their cultures. Around 1011 Kyiv began the construction of Saint Sophia Cathedral. Christianity linked Kyivan Rus closer to Byzantium (Constantinople), and the introduction of Cyrillic script by Byzantine missionaries allowed the translation of key religious texts. One of the earliest written Codes of Law in Eastern Europe was produced in Kyiv. Religious, artistic, and intellectual traditions established in Kyiv later influenced Russian culture. It is notable that Saint Sofia Cathedral was holding services 100 years before the foundation of Moscow, first mentioned in early 12th century chronicles.

These perspectives are not inconsistent with Putin’s claim that Ukrainians and Russians have a distant shared heritage from Kyivan Rus, but Putin does not give any credit for the fact that Kyiv predated by more than half a millennium the emergence of Moscow as Capital of the Russian State, nor for three centuries of cultural, linguistic, and political evolution after the Rus first arrived in the Kyiv area of Ukraine.

The Fall of Kyiv and the Rise of Moscow

The Mongol Invasion of 1240 led to the destruction of Kyiv and other cities in the region, and the splitting of Kyivan Rus into small principalities. Of these Moscow, which was not as badly damaged by the Mongols as other cities because of its lesser importance, emerged gradually within the Suzdal principality under Mongol rule. It finally rose to power in the 15th century under Ivan III (the Great) who ended the tribute to the Mongols, subdued the Russian principalities and became Grand Prince of Moscow, positioning the City as the successor of Kyivan Rus. In 1552, Ivan IV (the Terrible) after victory against the Mongol Kazan Khanate, became the first Tsar (Emperor) of Russia. With Ottoman control of Constantinople Moscow also declared itself as the ‘Third Rome.’ The imperial ascendancy of Moscow occurred about 600 years after the emergence of Kyiv, and about 300 years after the destruction of Kyiv by the Mongols.

During the Centuries between the fall of Kyiv and its ultimate subordination to the Russian empire the region of Ukraine went through several periods of foreign domination, mainly under the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. There was an interim period of about 100 years from 1648 when Ukrainian identity was maintained through the Ukrainian Cossacks, a Christian warrior people who provided protection to Ukraine’s agrarian population. A Cossack uprising against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1654 led to a treaty in which the Cossacks asked for and gained protection of the Russian Tsar in order to retain their independence from Poland. However, further Cossack rebellions continued throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, against both the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Russian empire itself. Ukraine finally came directly under the Russian empire at the end of the 18th century when Catherine the Great subdued the Cossack kingdom and annexed Crimea. Nevertheless, even under Russian control the movement for Ukrainian national identity grew in the 19th century, supported by figures like the artist Taras Shevchenko. In fact because of its concern about the emergence of Ukrainian culture and identity, in 1876 Russia banned the Ukrainian language in publications and performances.

Ukraine’s Brief Independence after World War 1

After the withdrawal of the Russian forces in World War 1 (on the demand of Lenin and the Bolsheviks) Ukraine declared itself a People's Republic and in 1918 it declared independence. However, it became involved in imperial and ideological wars with the Bolsheviks and the White Russians as it struggled to maintain its territory. In 1922 it finally became part of the Soviet Union as the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, while the far western part of Ukraine was incorporated into a newly re-established Polish Republic.

The Horror of the Holodomor

The Relationship between Russia and Ukraine as a Russian dependency was never stable and during the inter-war period an event occurred that scarred probably forever relations between them. This was the ‘Holodomor’, a disastrous famine in 1932-3 whose exact causes are complex but which was seemingly an intentional act by Stalin in the case of Ukraine. This involved the imposition on Ukraine farmers of extreme punitive grain quotas to be extracted by Moscow, enforced by military controls to preventing flight or rebellion during the Stalinist collectivization of agriculture. This event, according to demographic studies, led to over 4 million deaths (about 13% of the population) in what some writers have described as a Genocide. (See ‘The Ukrainian Genocide’ - University of Minnesota, College of Liberal Arts). Apart from massive loss of life the famine caused economic destruction, social upheaval and decimation of Ukrainian intellectual and religious leaders, and other elites, through execution, starvation or exile. This event was hidden from history until 1991 through means such as general censorship and omission from Soviet school textbooks. The memory of the Holodomor surely solidified Ukraine’s resistance to external domination and justified its determination to seek out protective alliances later, such as the EU and NATO, while weakening its links with Russia at the fall of the Soviet Union.

War, Breakup of the Soviet Union, and Security Guarantees.

A few years later, in World War 2, Ukraine suffered further immense destruction and loss of life from the Nazi occupation. The ultimate capture of Berlin was led by a general with possible Ukrainian ancestry, Georgi Zhukov. In 1945 Ukraine became a founding member of the United Nations while remaining a Soviet Republic. In 1954 it was given a form of self-government under a decree of Nikita Khrushchev. This is thought by some to have been an act of goodwill compensating for the horrors of destalinization but others regard it as another attempt to defuse a nationalist movement. In 1991 Ukraine declared independence following the breakup of the Soviet Union. The 92% overall majority vote in the referendum included over 80% from the Russian speaking Eastern region and even 54% from Crimea.

Following independence an event of special importance in the current crisis was the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, signed by the leaders of Ukraine, Russia, UK, and the US, to provide Ukraine with security assurances under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The main articles of the memorandum read as follows:

The Russian Federation, the United Kingdom and the United States of America:

1. reaffirm their commitment to Ukraine, in accordance with the principles of the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, to respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine.
2. reaffirm their obligation to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine, and that none of their weapons will ever be used against Ukraine except in self-defense or otherwise in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.
3. reaffirm their commitment to Ukraine, in accordance with the principles of the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, to refrain from economic coercion designed to subordinate to their own interest the exercise by Ukraine of the rights inherent in its sovereignty and thus to secure advantages of any kind.
4. reaffirm their commitment to seek immediate United Nations Security Council action to provide assistance to Ukraine, as a non-nuclear-weapon State party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, if Ukraine should become a victim of an act of aggression or an object of a threat of aggression in which nuclear weapons are used.
5. reaffirm, in the case of Ukraine, their commitment not to use nuclear weapons against any non-nuclear-weapon State party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, except in the case of an attack on themselves, their territories or dependent territories, their armed forces, or their allies, by such a State in association or alliance with a nuclear-weapon State.
6. will consult in the event a situation arises that raises a question concerning these commitments.

This document has now of course been honored in the breach by the 2022 Russian invasion.

Ukraine’s struggle against outside control has of course continued into the 21st Century with The Orange Revolution (2004) and Euromaidan (2013–2014). The Euromaidan protests, which culminated in the ousting of then President Yanukovych, were a response to his efforts to bring Ukraine closer to Russia. Protesters wanted Ukrainian sovereignty, European integration, and the end of foreign interference. The current invasion of Ukraine by Russia is the culmination of a very long and often desperate inheritance.

Rebutting Putin’s Case for Russian Control over Ukraine

Putin’s theory of the unity of Ukraine and Russia depends on history. If history were not important then the case for Moscow’s dominance would rest just on its actual power today. History has shown that Kyiv was the center of a civilization and culture that existed for many centuries prior to the ascendancy of Moscow. The centrality of Kyiv lasted for 300 years until its destruction by the Mongols. Despite later centuries of foreign domination the continuity of the Ukrainian culture, language, and religion, and its desire for independence, remained strong. The role of Moscow as a power in the region did not develop until at least two hundred years after the destruction of Kyiv. It only became a significant force in the late 15th century under Ivan III and it only assumed regional dominance in the reign of Catherine the Great at the end of the 18th century. Thus, Kyivan Rus was never under Russian control. Putin’s narrative seeks to undermine Ukraine’s history by emphasizing the later phase of Russian imperial control and ignoring Kyiv’s long term foundational role. In fact, Ukraine's claims to sovereignty are grounded not only in the earlier history but also in centuries of resistance to foreign domination—by Poland, Lithuania, Russia, or the Soviet Union. Ukraine’s

Putin appears to have about four main, and partly inconsistent, arguments about why the Russian State should take control of Ukraine. These are, firstly, that NATO failed to stick to an agreement to cease expansion Eastward; secondly, that Russia requires a buffer state as a security guarantee against NATO aggression; thirdly, that Russia and Ukraine have always been tied together through language, culture, history etc. and should naturally be allied if it was not for Western meddling; and fourthly, that Ukraine, ‘Little Russia’, has always played a natural dependent and subordinate role to ‘Great Russia’ and this should continue.

In response, firstly, no formal agreement was made to keep Ukraine out of NATO. Verbal discussions in the early ’90s were apparently aspirational statements and not part of any formal Treaty. U.S. Secretary of State Baker allegedly told Gorbachev that NATO would move "not one inch eastward” but other reports suggested that this might have been referring to East Germany. Secondly no NATO member has initiated any attack or incursion into Russian territory in the past 80 years and there has been no indication that any such action is likely, rendering the security buffer argument moot, whereas Russia has made incursions into former satellite states such as Georgia. Thirdly, NATO has maintained that membership is open to any European country that meets the criteria and that no third country can veto another country's membership. Fourthly, Putin has perceived Ukraine as ‘Little Russia’, economically, socially and culturally subordinate to ‘Great Russia’, and believed that it should be contained within that role, if necessary through force as we are now witnessing. In the end the central reason is probably a fifth one that Putin set out in his essay - that is, the belief in ‘gathering the Russian World together’ including Great Russians, Belarusians and Little Russians, and taking a historic responsibility for "resolution of the Ukrainian question".

Final Thoughts

Ukraine realizes that Moscow still sees it as a subordinate entity, i.e. ‘Little Russia’, or ‘Ucropia’ (‘dill country’) , or ‘Nezalezhna’ (a mocking usage of the word for ‘independent’). Russia’s imperialist posture is akin to that of Western overseas colonial empires a hundred years ago, except that in this case it is, by a bitter irony, directed at an adjacent, ‘brotherly’ Slavic State rather than the ‘eternal enemy’, a Western or even NATO, State. The Russian assumption of dominance and perception of Ukraine as subordinate is blatantly demonstrated in its arrogance towards peace negotiations. It also echoes the ‘metropolis - satellite’ model whereby the subordinate economy specializes in supplying primary goods to the metropolis which uses them directly or indirectly to produce more sophisticated goods that it exports back to the subordinate, a process that retards economic growth and social and cultural development in the subordinate. This relationship seems close to the apparent Russian perception of Ukraine’s ‘natural’ historical role.

Since 2014, Russia’s aggression has only strengthened Ukrainian nationalism. Many Russian-speaking Ukrainians now identify strongly with Ukraine rather than Russia. There is no conceivable case for Russia’s attempts to erase Ukraine’s sovereignty, force it into submission, or extract children from their homes for ‘re-education.’ Putin’s belief in bringing the Russian World together might look reasonable if it was not for the threat to ‘solve the Ukraine question’ especially in view of the tragic results of previous attempts to do this kind of thing elsewhere. The desperation of countries bordering Russia (such as the Baltics) to become NATO members is most likely explained not by some Western duplicity that has drawn them away from Mother Russia, but from the very simple fact that such countries do not trust Russia’s intentions and want security against aggression. This is surely not a credible basis for bringing together the Russian World.

The core of the argument in favor of Ukraine is simply what history has shown, that Kyiv/Ukraine have been independent and retain the right to be independent, and this has been recognized internationally in multiple treaties. Among these is the key 1994 Budapest Memorandum part of which I repeat here.

“The Russian Federation, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the United States of America reaffirm their obligation to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine, and that none of their weapons will ever be used against Ukraine except in self-defense or otherwise in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.”

So, both past history and recent political action have reinforced the widely held belief in the right of Ukrainians to independence and freedom to find their own way.  

First appeared in EVIDENCE, REASON AND GASLIGHT -

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