The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History

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Vladimir's region of Novgorod and Kiev was the genesis of Ukraine. In 2016, after his annexation of Crimea, Putin famously recognized Kievan Rus' as the origin of Russia and Saint Vladimir as the father of Russia. This recognition was in the form of a statue of St. Vladimir elected in Moscow, near the Kremlin. The "Monument to Vladimir the Great" is a massive 58-foot statue of warrior-saint Valentine, sword in one hand and cross in the other, overlooking his Russian landscape. It has become a meme for Putin. Plokhy besteedt in aparte hoofdstukken verder aandacht aan de totstandkoming van de onverwachte eenheid in het Westen tegenover de Russische agressie en aan de ambigue rollen van China en Turkije. Over a year into Russia’s grotesque full-scale invasion of Ukraine, disinformation and misconceptions of the conflict — fuelled both by the Kremlin and by political actors abroad — continue to permeate public debate. "The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History" by Serhii Plokhy takes aim at many of these myths, demonstrating how Russia’s centuries-long imperial obsession with Ukraine created the conditions for Europe’s largest land war since 1945.

De vraag of sprake was van een ‘intelligence failure’ of ‘error of judgment’ dringt zich niet alleen aan Russische kant op, maar ook aan Oekraïense. “Among those most surprised by the Russian all-out invasion was the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky,” aldus Plokhy. (155) Tot op het laatste moment hoopte Zelensky dat de onderhandelingen tussen zijn chef-staf Andrii Yermak en Poetins vertrouweling Dmitry Kozak een oorlog konden afwenden. “But Kozak failed to convince Putin to accept Ukraine’s assurances not to join NATO and called Yermak that morning to demand a surrender. Yermak swore and hung up. The negotiations were over.” (156) De Oekraïense militaire top verwachtte evenmin dat Rusland Oekraïne over de gehele linie zou binnenvallen. “To the end,” erkende de Oekraïense bevelhebber van het noordelijke district, generaal Dmytro Krasylnykov, “we believed that our enemy would not intrude with large-scale aggression on every front across all lines.” (157) In het zuiden van Oekraïne richtten de voorbereidingen van de Oekraïense autoriteiten zich bovendien op een herhaling van het Krim-scenario van 2014: “The Ukrainians were preparing for a police exercise, not a military operation.” (203) Plokhy onderstreept dat een grote meerderheid van de Oekraïners hoe dan ook niet geloofde dat een oorlog op handen was, in weerwil van alle Amerikaanse waarschuwingen. De schok en de verontwaardiging waren navenant groter. Der Verfasser erzählt und erklärt mit Herzblut. Er macht deutlich, dass sich die Welt verändert hat und Moskau sich nicht mehr alles erlauben kann. Er sagt aber auch, dass es ein Fehler der freien Welt war, auf die Annexion der Krim bloß mit lauwarmen Worten zu reagieren, nur um Russland nicht zu erzürnen, denn, „mit der Annexion der Krim wurden Imperialismus und Nationalismus zu zentralen Elementen und Triebkräften der russischen Außenpolitik“. Ebenso war es ein krasser Fehler, der Ukraine auf dem Bukarest-Gipfel 2008 den Weg in die Nato zu verweigern, denn dadurch war die Ukraine, die zuvor auf ihr Atomwaffenarsenal verzichtet hatte, schutzlos. Doch die Souveränität der Ukraine ist wichtig für Europa und für den Frieden in der ganzen Welt. Plokhy stellt natürlich auch dar, wie sich China positioniert, wie die USA, wie Indien, der ferne Osten, die europäischen Länder - und erklärt auch warum. Plokhy maakt in opeenvolgende hoofdstukken duidelijk hoe vanaf 1991 de politieke ontwikkeling van Rusland en Oekraïne steeds verder uiteenliep, een divergente ontwikkeling die de dynamiek tussen Moskou en Kiev diepgaand zou gaan beïnvloeden. Terwijl het democratische experiment in Rusland een kort leven was beschoren, schoot deze in Oekraïne geleidelijk aan wortel (in weerwil van de wijdverbreide corruptie en van Russische beïnvloeding). I felt the author did not pay enough attention to the intellectual, emotional effect Alexander Dugin has on Putin. Putin's program according to the author is the continuation of Russia's imperial past from that of the tsars through the communist regime of the U.S.S.R. This is true in general because Russia has not had its moment of being a mighty imperial power like Great Britain, France and the U.S. It is also true that Dugin is supplying the intellectual and emotional frame work for Putin's vision of imperial power. The further from 1991 we move, the further the rift between an increasingly autocratic and neo-imperialist Russia and a democratic Ukraine, orienting itself away from the old imperial metropole and towards Europe and the Atlantic. The current war is one result of this rift: Russia tried to reassert its dominance and Ukraine resisted subjugation by the old imperial overlord. The Russo-Ukrainian war is a delayed war of Soviet succession.

Readers aiming to follow the fighting should read the daily news, but for a complete picture, this is the book.

History is normally written from the calm, distant purview that a scholar attains when chaotic events have resolved themselves into some recognisable shape or pattern. It is not usually interrupted by grief for a family member killed as a result of those still-unfolding events. At first, he says, he resisted the idea of a book about the invasion, produced during the invasion. To write such a volume would be “to go against the basic principles of the profession”. “Our wisdom as historians comes from the fact that we already know how things turned out,” he says. An authoritative history of Europe’s largest military conflict since World War II, from the New York Times best-selling author of The Gates of Europe. Whilst Putin envisaged the invasion to be short, swift, and without much European intervention, it is clear that his strategy was more informed by the force of his predecessors' ideas than by the reality of a strong Ukrainian identity and a unified European response. Key invasions, such as those of the cultural capital Kharkiv, Kherson, the Crimea and the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, are shown as gruelling conflicts initiated by a worn-out and paranoid Russian army. Anders dan in Rusland wist het parlement in Oekraïne met vallen en opstaan wél een sterke positie te verwerven tegenover de uitvoerende macht. De vreedzame machtswisseling na de presidentsverkiezingen van 1994, van Leonid Kravtsjoek naar Leonid Kuchma, was een belangrijke eerste mijlpaal in de democratische ontwikkeling van de voormalige sovjetrepubliek. Voor de goede orde: Kuchma bleek als president allesbehalve een voorbeeldige democraat. Net als Jeltsin in Moskou, probeerde hij de grondwet naar zijn hand te zetten. Anders dan Jeltsin, slaagde hij daarin echter niet. Tien jaar later, in 2004, lukte het Kuchma evenmin om Viktor Janoekovitsj, de corrupte pro-Russische gouverneur van Donetsk, tot zijn opvolger te benoemen. Hoe corrupt en verdeeld Oekraïne ook was, de meeste Oekraïners eisten democratie en velen bleken bereid hiervoor hun nek uit te steken tijdens de eerste Maidan-protesten na de gemanipuleerde verkiezingen van 2004. Rusland raakte langzaam maar zeker de greep op Oekraïne steeds meer kwijt. At the time of Ukrainian entry to the USSR, Crimea was included in the Ukraine SSR, leading one to think that Crimea would share Ukraine's status after the 1992 referendum on independence. That was the case – until Putin's 2014 annexation of Crimea by force.In his 2021 Kremlin paper Putin claimed that the notion of Ukrainian independence was the result of a great geopolitical error by Vladimir Lenin when the USSR was created in 1922: Lenin insisted that the document creating the Soviet Union recognize the right of any SSR to secede from the USSR. That assurance – an inducement for individual states to agreed to become SSRs – was a "time bomb" in the creation of the USSR. That bomb went off when the USSR disbanded in 1991 and modern Ukraine – the successor to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic that initially joined the USSR – took the exit door following after a general referendum that included Crimea: Only a minority of Ukrainians were "Russian" but 82 percent voted to secede; a majority of Crimeans were Russian, but still 54 percent voted for secession. Had Lenin's "time bomb" in the USSR constitution been respected, modern Ukraine's independence would have been settled. Instead,Putin chose to treat the right to secede as an error requiring correction. Plokhy, who grew up in Zaporizhzhia and began his academic career in Dnipropetrovsk (both in Ukraine), keeps his outrage about Russia’s aggression on a tight leash. There are no polemics in this book. The historian lets the facts speak. Ukrainians in Kyiv, marking the 31st anniversary of their independence from the Soviet Union. Sergey Dolzhenkoi/EPA