Putin’s Narrative in Ukraine & its Roots in Russian History

Cultural mentality has always been a major factor in analysing how nations conduct themselves and behave in conflict. Russia has been considered a major military power since its creation as a state, and its long history is full of major conflicts that have shaped its cultural identity. In the context of Putin’s war in Ukraine, both the causes of the war itself and the political discourse surrounding it in Russia are constantly informed by the country’s past. In particular, Russia’s experience with conflict and the ideological consequences for the Russian people and state. 

The Eastern Slavic peoples have never been strangers to major wars and conflicts. The geographic nature of the region, from the Urals all the way to Poland and beyond, has been characterised by the fertile and flat land that has made it enticing to all sorts of invaders since time immemorial. The cultural obsession of the Russian people with foreign threats is often cited by many scholars to have its origins in the Mongol invasions of the 13th century, which crushed nascent Eastern Slavic states in order to form client kingdoms. The modern Russian state, born out of the Mongol yoke, obtained a militaristic quality and desire for expansionism that is often cited as directly influenced by the Central Asian Khanates. “Scratch a Russian, and you’ll find a Tatar” went the 19th-century French saying, often to convey the fear of Eastern expansionist hoards. Russia since then, has conducted many wars and campaigns that increased its vast territory and turned it into a major imperial player. In the last two hundred years, however, two major invasions have shaped the Russian psyche decisively for generations. The first was Napoleon’s 1812 attempt to conquer the Russian Empire. A campaign which ended in disaster for the French emperor, but had profound effects on Russia’s view of itself as a victim of Western imperial ambitions. The Napoleonic wars served to intertwine Russia’s geopolitical fate with that of Western Europe, cementing the Russian Empire into a major player in the Concert of Europe from then on.

The second was the Second World War and Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, which marked the major event that would shape the modern Russian ethos. The Soviet-German war between 1941 and 1945 was so brutal, so costly, and so ideologically prescient to the Russian state and people, that its effects have been permanently engraved into Russia’s view of its geopolitical and security realities ever since. The German invasion of the Soviet Union presented an existential threat to the survival of the Soviet Union and Russia as a nation and political entity. Nazi ideology advocated not just for a political conquest of Eastern European and Soviet territory, but also for the complete destruction of Slavs as a people. The war would see the USSR mobilise over 35 million of its citizens, and would cost the Soviet Union between 25 to 27 million lives, or 16% of the total population by most estimates.

It is impossible to quantify the moral and psychological trauma the war inflicted upon Russia and most other countries in Eastern Europe. However, the consequences of the Second World War are vital in understanding the causes and attitudes of the Russian state and nation when it comes to any outside threat since, real or imaginary. A constant glorification of the Red Army and the victory over Nazism has permeated the Russian mentality. Anyone who has visited Russia has seen, plastered around every street corner, town square, or metro station, reminders of “The Great Patriotic War” as it is called, its heroes and victims. However,  this has also created a state of fear and militarism that has shaped Russian doctrine since then. 

Due to its history of invasion, Russia has adopted a view of geopolitical power that includes two things, firstly a very militaristic approach to power (might makes right), and secondly, a very offensive doctrine in the exercising of its power. Since the war against Napoleon, Russia has sought to put as much territory between Moscow and its enemies as possible. This doctrine has necessitated a strong military presence at all times and the subjugation of its neighbours in order to create buffer states between itself and the West. The Russian state has largely managed to maintain this strategy through its various imperial forms (Russian Empire, USSR). After WW2, the USSR maintained, largely through force, a ring of buffer states in the form of the Warsaw Pact, which separated the Western powers from the Russian heartland. If a land war was to be fought in Europe during the Cold War, Russians could be confident that it would be fought in Germany and Poland, and not Russia proper. 

The dissolution of the USSR however, proved to be a catastrophe for the Russian gubernatorial and security establishment. Suddenly Russia lost many of its allies, and even states that were seen as an intrinsic part of Russia, like Ukraine, made the decision to forge their own path, steering away from the “Russian world”. This cast many doubts and raised old fears in Russia over the nation's vulnerability militarily, economically, and culturally. Putin is often cited as having called the dissolution of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century”. While this can be interpreted in many different ways, it signals the view of Putin and many other Russian hardliners that with the end of the USSR, draining Russia of its sphere of influence and geopolitical power, the country was at the greater mercy of powers such as the United States, the EU economic block, or even a rising China. 

For the entirety of his time on the political scene, Putin and his entourage have thus promoted the idea of “Russia under siege”. Portraying the West as envious of Russian natural resources, and NATO intelligence services as being primarily responsible for any social movement or political shift away from the Kremlin by any of Russia’s old satellite states or in Russia itself. Putin’s rhetoric has translated geopolitically as a policy of “fortress Russia”. Stressing the need to make Russia viable without Western trade, to build up Russia’s military strength, and to keep the former member states that made up the Russian Empire into the fold of Moscow's control. 

Years of propaganda and rhetoric by Putin to the Russian people insisted that NATO expansion into formerly communist or Soviet states was an overt act of aggression against Russia. Therefore, signalling NATO’s intent to both undermine Russia and position itself to eventually destroy it as a competitor. The culmination point of such rhetoric has been the ongoing, catastrophic war in Ukraine, which has seen Putin constantly use the imagery of the Second World War as a crisis point in Russian history to rally the Russian people to his cause. Much has been made about Putin’s designation of Ukrainians as Neo-Nazis in the lead-up to the invasion. It was during the 2014 Ukrainian revolution that Putin started framing the fight against Ukrainian democrats as a fight against “nationalists” and “nazis”, justifying his annexation of Crimea and the war in the Donbas as an attempt to protect ethnic Russians from genocidal forces. Indeed Putin cited one of the goals of his military operation this year as being the “denazification” of Ukraine.

This comparison is far from some outlandish mistake or ignorance on the part of Putin but instead serves to do several things. Putin’s framing of Ukrainian nationalism as being akin to fascism is often evoked in order to recall memories of the collaboration of some Ukrainians with nazism during the Second World War against the Soviet Union. While the number of Ukrainians that collaborated with Nazi Germany is disputed (although mostly agreed to be a minority), there was some level of collaboration of Ukrainians with Nazi forces like in any other occupied country in Europe. Many Ukrainians sought to free themselves from Russian imperialism by establishing an independent Ukrainian state, and so saw Germany as a vehicle for such emancipation, albeit mistakenly. Putin has therefore long sought to frame any talk of Ukraine moving away from Russia as an expression of fascist sympathies and a return of ultra-nationalists who are poised on killing Russians. This serves therefore as an attempt to discredit the many legitimate voices in Ukraine that have advocated for their own sovereignty since the First World War. Secondly, this propaganda serves to galvanise the Russian people around the war in Ukraine by promoting it as a preemptive war against “nazi” forces, that Putin insists will seek to destroy Russia once more. 

While the Russian military has been revealing all of its weaknesses, corruption, and failures in the war in Ukraine, historically Russia has performed major military feats when the wars have been total and existential. Putin will therefore continue to press the propaganda and rhetoric of the Second World War in the hope of unlocking the war-fighting spirit of the Russian nation and convincing the population that this war of choice is in fact an existential crisis for Russia. With Putin’s mobilisation effort coming into effect, however, it is clear so far that much of the Russian public is not rushing to defend the motherland and instead seeing the war for what it is. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is in many ways a product of his own insistence to frame his conflict in the West as existential, now being unable to cut his losses without profound humiliation. It may very well be existential for the Russian leader, but not for the Russian nation. A distinction Putin himself may not make.