How the Ukraine crisis has centuries-old roots in Russian imperialism

Putin sees himself not only as the leader of Russia – but also as the defender of Russians or Russian speakers living in Ukraine and elsewhere, writes David Keys

A Ukrainian serviceman digs a trench at his unit’s position at contact line near the village of Svitlodarsk, in Donestsk region (Getty Images)

The current tensions between Russia and Ukraine have their roots deep in history. Although on the face of it, it is a very modern crisis, its origins lie in the centuries-old nature of Russian imperialism, the remarkable legacy of the Mongol and Byzantine empires and the scourge of slavery and genocide.

Russian national and territorial identity – partly originating in the ethos of the Czarist imperial system – has always reflected the old ideology that, at its core, the Russian Empire consisted of not one, but three Russias: Little Russia (Ukraine), White Russia (Belarus) and Great Russia (Russia itself).

Indeed, the czars’s title was “Emperor of all the Russias” and the head of the Russian Orthodox Church is still called the “Metropolitan of Moscow and of all Rus” (Rus being the original medieval name for the territories of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus). Those three “Russias” were also the core constituent republics of the Soviet Union, until its collapse 31 years ago.

Originally, between the 9th and 10th centuries, much of that Russia, Ukraine and Belarus region had been conquered by a group of Swedish vikings, called the Rus. Those vikings (together with the majority local Slav population) created a series of states, the greatest of which was initially Kievan Rus (based in Kiev in what is now Ukraine), which, in time, went on to control the rest of Rus territory, including faraway early Moscow.

However, that medieval pan-Russian geopolitical system was terminated economically and militarily by the fortunes of two great non-Russian empires – the Byzantines and the Mongols.

The demise of Byzantine power in the 13th century massively damaged the lucrative northern-Europe-to-Constantinople trade route and made Kievan Rus (that route’s main “middleman” beneficiary) economically redundant. Then the rise of the Mongols finally destroyed medieval Kiev and the already-dwindling power of medieval Rus.

Significantly, the Mongol Empire wasn’t just medieval Rus’s final undertaker – it also, in a sense, birthed “modern” Russia. The Mongols selected then-insignificant Moscow as their main tax collecting agent in the region and, as a result, Muscovite Russia grew in power and prestige.

But it was the collapse of the Mongol Empire that generated geopolitical confusion in what had once been the lands of the Rus. The disintegration of Mongol power led to the emergence of a Rus-origin mega-state (namely the Great Principality of Moscow) in what had been the northern half of medieval Rus. But that same Mongol collapse also led to the creation of a Lithuanian empire stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea, which included most of what is now Ukraine, including Kiev. That “empire” was then absorbed by Poland.

And to complicate things further, a remnant of the Mongol Empire (the Khanate of Crimea) retained control of much of what is now southern Ukraine. This complex geopolitical picture was muddled further when, after a long war in the mid-17th century, Russia acquired Kiev and eastern Ukraine from Poland – and in the late 18th century, when Russia took over central Ukraine (when Russia, Prussia and Austria conspired to partition Poland).

All these conquests and acquisitions created a complex geopolitical reality which meant today’s Ukraine and western Russia ended up with very different ethnic and cultural make-ups. The Russian heartland was ethnically and culturally homogenous, while what is now Ukraine gradually became more and more multi-ethnic.

The seizure of much of central Ukraine by Russia (at the time of the 1795 partition of Poland) and the subsequent Russification of the region ultimately led to the birth of Ukrainian nationalism which was suppressed by the czar’s secret police. After the Russian Revolution and the fall of the Czarist Empire, Ukraine declared independence but was almost immediately invaded by a Russian army and absorbed into the Soviet Union.

But worse was to come. In 1932, Joseph Stalin unleashed a genocidal campaign of starvation against the Ukrainians. Known today as the Holodomor, it was a national catastrophe, costing around 4 million Ukrainian lives. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, all the nations within the federation were able to opt for independence. They all did – including Ukraine. The current Russian government, however, does not fully accept those nations’ right to independence.

In 2008, Russia invaded the former Soviet republic of Georgia and established two proxy statelets in the northern part of the country. Then, in 2014, Russia did the same to Ukraine, annexing Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula and establishing two proxy statelets in southeast Ukraine. In each case, Russia took advantage of the ethnic complexity of its neighbours to promote instability, support rebels and seize territory.

In 2018, Russian president Vladimir Putin declared that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century and, alarmingly, indicated that it was the event in Russian history he would most like to reverse.

Just last year he wrote an article describing Russians and Ukrainians as “one people – a single whole”. He said the “true sovereignty of Ukraine is possible only in partnership with Russia” and even asserted it is “crystal clear” that “Russia was robbed” when internal USSR borders were adjusted and redrawn in Soviet times. These communist border changes had detached “from Russia [some of] its historical territories”, he wrote.

Putin sees himself not only as Russia’s leader but also as the defender of Russians or Russian speakers living in Ukraine – and even as the political champion of Slavs living beyond the borders of the former Soviet Union. His ability to destabilise Ukraine is enhanced by the fact that, according to a 2021 Ukrainian opinion poll, 41 per cent of Ukrainians (including 65 per cent of Ukrainians in the eastern part of Ukraine) agree with Putin’s belief that Russians and Ukrainians are one people.

The relationship between Ukraine and Russia is one of the most fascinating in European history. Ukraine’s capital, Kiev, was the heart of the proto-Russian world back in medieval times when, by contrast, Moscow was an insignificant settlement. But the collapse of the Byzantine Empire and the rise and fall of the Mongol imperial system reversed their respective fortunes: Moscow became the heart of the new Russian world, while Kiev languished.

It is these different histories (and, above all, different perceptions of them) that lurk behind today’s Russia-Ukraine tensions – and which threaten to again plunge part of our continent into the horrors of war.