On Ukraine, Putin is looking backward with dreams of empire

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 22/02/2022 (940 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

To hear Russian President Vladimir Putin tell it, there’s really no such country as “Ukraine.”

Admittedly, contemporary maps of Europe show an entity with that name. And someone fills the seat labelled “Ukraine” at the United Nations.

But, in Putin’s version, this Ukraine thing is not a legitimate state. It’s part of Russia’s “own history, culture, spiritual space.” Indeed, in this telling, Ukraine’s very territory is just a series of gifts from Russia’s rulers, starting with the czars and continuing through Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev.

It sounds like a delusion, or at best part of an arcane debate best left to historians and ethnographers to sort out.

But as Putin made clear this week, repeating arguments he has made for many years, it’s actually the crux of the matter in the crisis posed by Russia’s military threat to Ukraine.

Much can be debated in this matter, such as whether Ukraine should ever be admitted to the NATO alliance, given its long border with Russia. But if your enemy denies your very right to exist, that’s beyond debate.

Of course Ukraine is a legitimate state, home to a people with its own language, history and culture. It came into existence in its current form in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed and its people voted by a margin of 92 per cent to go their own way.

Indeed, the Russian Federation over which Putin presides came into being at the same time. Both states are remnants of the old Russian Empire, rebranded after the Bolshevik Revolution as the Soviet Union.

Of course, Ukrainians have a long and tangled relationship with their Russian neighbours. And it’s true that its territory changed over the years, with various Russian/Soviet regimes altering its boundaries to suit their needs of the moment.

But to use that as an argument for slicing off parts of an independent country — as Russia did with Crimea in 2014 and is now trying to do with the so-called republics of Donetsk and Luhansk — or dismantling it entirely, violates every international norm. It invites chaos and bloodshed.

One of the most effective ripostes to Putin’s revival of Great Russian imperial ambitions came this week from an unlikely (or at least an unpredictable) source.

Kenya’s ambassador to the United Nations, Martin Kimani, gave a speech to the UN Security Council that immediately went viral. He noted that African countries inherited borders from collapsing empires; many arbitrarily divided cultures and peoples, but through the African Union they decided to respect each other’s sovereignty rather than plunge the continent into endless rounds of bloodshed.

They chose that course, said Kimani, “not because our borders satisfied us, but because we wanted something greater forged in peace.” The yearning to right historical wrongs is natural, he went on, but the right choice is to look forward: “We must complete our recovery from the embers of dead empires in a way that does not plunge us back into new forms of domination and oppression.”

There is a lot of wisdom in these words but Putin is clearly not listening. He is looking backward, apparently determined to correct what he famously labelled “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the last century, the dismemberment of the Soviet/Russian empire.

As long as he is on that course, Western countries, Canada included, must stand with Ukraine. They are right to impose sanctions on Russia to deter Putin from going further. They should also be prepared to provide more direct military aid if the situation warrants.

Putin’s obsession with reviving a dead empire is leading him, and the peoples of both Russia and Ukraine, down a very dangerous path. The rest of the world must raise the price of his folly.