Putin’s History Lessons
The Russian leader has convinced his countrymen that Russia and Ukraine were always one, laying the rhetorical groundwork for a forever war.
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When the Russians invaded Ukraine on the morning of February 24, 2022, they took over the Antonov Airport near Kyiv. The military installation was meant to be a key capture in the Russian plan to overwhelm the capital in the first days of the invasion. The invaders had planned to seize the heart of Ukraine quickly, thereby forcing President Volodymyr Zelensky and his government to surrender. To prepare, the Russians had previously infiltrated the area with saboteurs who worked to smooth the way to an easy victory.
But easy it was not.
The Russians did not realize that Kyiv had identified some of the infiltrators and taken them out before the initial attack. And the troops dropped in by helicopter were generally unclear about what their operation entailed, as evidenced by what one airport employee, whom I’ll call Oleg Mazurko, said he witnessed.
Mazurko was one of some 150 people working at the airport when the Russians landed. For an hour, Mazurko watched the soldiers—who’d been drafted from the far reaches of Russia—bumble around, unsure of what to do next. Mostly young and some drunk, the men were on a kind of high over capturing the airport.
“They were all fluffed up, looking like cocks,” Mazurko’s wife told me while I was in Kyiv last year. The extent of their infantile antics would be discovered after they had fled the site: Mazurko saw human feces on the top of an engine taller than a man in a hanger, and in a break room teapot.
Mazurko’s wife said her husband had also heard the Russians calling Ukraine “Kievan Rus’,” a historical reference to the Slavic state founded by Vikings in the ninth century. This was the medieval region both Russians and Ukrainians (as well as Belarusians) claim as their cultural forebear. The soldiers used the term as a way to claim that Ukraine has always been part of Russia, a piece of Russian propaganda often repeated by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
On that cold February day, the soldiers cheerfully invited their crowd of hostages to return to the country in which Putin believes Ukrainians belong: “Come join us!” they yelled.
Over the years, Putin has spouted this contorted view of history to justify his drive to “reunite” Ukraine and Russia. In 2021, he wrote on the president’s website that the claim that Ukraine is a separate country is meant to “sow discord among people, the overarching goal being to divide and then to pit the parts of a single people against one another.”
The “existence of a separate and independent Ukraine,” writes the journalist Yaroslav Trofimov in his new book, Our Enemies Will Vanish—a meticulously reported account of Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s invasion—is “an existential threat to Russia’s foundational narrative.”
A Wall Street Journal reporter, Trofimov shows the reader the chasm that separates the two nations and cultures, as well as Ukrainians’ fierce pride in their sovereignty. His discussion of Ukrainian history and his interviews with officials and civilians on both sides of the conflict affirm fundamental differences between Ukrainians, who badly want to hold on to their democracy, and Russians, who are subject to despotic rule and propaganda from birth. Despite the countries’ similarities, “the Muscovite is not a brother to us,” a priest in Kyiv told Trofimov. “It is Cain who has gone after Abel.”
While in Kharkiv in March 2022, Trofimov spoke to the only pediatric neurosurgeon left in eastern Ukraine, Oleksandr Dukhovskyy. Dukhovskyy told the journalist he first decided that Russia is the enemy in 1994 while at a conference in Moscow. Over dinner, Trofimov writes, Dukhovskyy “was stunned to listen to people he had considered colleagues and friends as they mocked the Ukrainian language and asserted that Ukraine was an artificial nation that shouldn’t exist.” That was the moment he “understood that we aren’t brothers and never will be,” he told Trofimov. “We have a different makeup.”
Since Ukraine’s victory at the battle of Antonov Airport, the invasion has dissolved into a bloody stalemate. Among other factors, Russians have improved their defensive tactics on the ground, and Ukrainians lack long-range missile systems to sufficiently disrupt supply chains.
Shifts in military capacity and tactics will eventually give one side an advantage and bring Putin’s “special military operation” in Ukraine to an end. But the profound divergence in beliefs between Ukrainians and Russians has fed a conflict that extends back long before Antonov—and will likely extend long into the future.
This divide implicitly raises a question: Will this be a forever war?
To read the rest of this review, please click over to Washington Monthly.
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