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Putin’s Ukraine gamble seen as biggest threat to his rule

FILE - President Vladimir Putin speaks in his annual televised New Year’s message after a ceremony during a visit to the headquarters of the Southern Military District, at an unknown location in Russia, Dec. 31, 2022. American and allied sanctions and export controls are constraining Russia’s ability to wage war on Ukraine by degrading its military, a top Treasury Department official says. (Mikhail Klimentyev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

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Russian President Vladimir Putin attends an Orthodox Easter service in the Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow, Russia, on Sunday, April 24, 2022. Putin sent forces into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, appears determined to prevail -- ruthlessly and at all costs. (AP Photo, Pool, File)

Ukrainian soldiers stand amid destroyed Russian armored vehicles in the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine, on Thursday, March 31, 2022. Russian forces shelled Kyiv’s suburbs, two days after the Kremlin said it would significantly scale back operations near both the capital and the northern city of Chernihiv after its forces met with stiff resistance. Russian President Vladimir Putin, who started the war on Feb. 24, 2022, and could end it at any time, still appears determined to prevail -- ruthlessly and at all costs. (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd, File)

Russian President Vladimir Putin holds binoculars while watching military exercises Center-2019 at Donguz shooting range near Orenburg, Russia, on Sept. 20, 2019. Putin, whose forces invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, appears determined to prevail -- ruthlessly and at all costs. (Alexei Nikolsky, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

A giant statue of Mother of the Homeland is seen atop of the memorial on Mamayev Hill in the southern city of Volgograd, Russia, on Wednesday, Feb. 1, 2023, the 80th anniversary of the Soviet victory in the city once known as Stalingrad. The Battle of Stalingrad turned the tide in World War II with the death toll for soldiers and civilians estimated at about 2 million. Russian President Vladimir Putin was on hand for the anniversary of the battle amid the war in Ukraine, which on Feb. 24, 2023, will mark its first anniversary. (AP Photo, File)

Russian President Vladimir Putin meets with Japanese Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida with a painting depicting Russian Czar Peter the Great in the background, in St. Petersburg, Russia, on Friday, Dec. 2, 2016. Putin sent Russian troops into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and appears determined to prevail -- ruthlessly and at all costs. (Mikhail Klimentyev/Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

Then-Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is seen riding a horse in the mountains of the Siberian region of Tuva, during his vacation on Monday, Aug. 3, 2009, . Putin sent Russian forces into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and appears determined to prevail -- ruthlessly and at all costs. (Alexei Druzhinin, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

In this photo released on Saturday, Oct. 30, 2010, then-Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin carries a hunting rifle during his trip in Ubsunur Hollow in the Siberian region of Tuva, on the border with Mongolia. Putin sent Russian forces into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and appears determined to prevail -- ruthlessly and at all costs. (Dmitry Astakhov, Sputnik, Government Pool Photo via AP, File)

Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a training session with his country’s national judo team at the Yug-Sport Training Center in Sochi, Russia, on Thursday, Feb. 14, 2019. Putin sent Russian forces into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and appears determined to prevail -- ruthlessly and at all costs. (Mikhail Klimentyev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

Then-Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin swims while in the Siberian region of Tuva during a vacation on Monday, Aug. 3, 2009. Putin sent Russian forces into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and appears determined to prevail -- ruthlessly and at all costs. (Alexei Druzhinin, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

Russian President Vladimir Putin stands on the ice at the Night Hockey League skating rink next to the GUM Department store in Red Square in Moscow, Russia, on Saturday, Dec. 23, 2017. Putin sent Russian forces into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and appears determined to prevail -- ruthlessly and at all costs. (Alexei Nikolsky, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, drives a motorbike decorated with a Russian national flag, with Crimean leader Sergei Aksenov, in sidecar, and Sevastopol Gov. Mikhail Razvozhaev, behind, during the Babylon’s Shadow bike show camp in Sevastopol, Crimea, on Saturday, Aug. 10, 2019. Putin sent forces into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and appears determined to prevail -- ruthlessly and at all costs. (Alexei Druzhinin, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks in an interview with the Russia-1 TV channel in the Bocharov Ruchei residence in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, Russia, on Friday, June 3, 2022. Putin sent Russian forces into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and appears determined to prevail. (Mikhail Metzel, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, speaks during an interview with American movie director Oliver Stone for a documentary in the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, on Wednesday, June 19, 2019. Putin sent Russian forces into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and appears determined to prevail. (Alexei Druzhinin, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

Russian President Vladimir Putin, center, and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, right, review warships before the main naval parade marking Russian Navy Day in the Gulf of Finland, at St. Petersburg, Russia, on Sunday, July 31, 2022. Putin sent Russian forces into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and appears determined to prevail -- ruthlessly and at all costs. (Mikhail Klimentyev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

Participants watch Russian President Vladimir Putin addressing a plenary session of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in St.Petersburg, Russia, on Friday, June 17, 2022. Putin sent Russian forces into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and appears determined to prevail. (AP Photo, File)

From left, Vladimir Saldo, the head of the Kherson region; Yevgeny Balitsky, the head of the Zaporizhzhia region; Russian President Vladimir Putin, center; Denis Pushilin, head of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic; and Leonid Pasechnik, head of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic, pose at a ceremony to sign treaties to illegally annex Ukrainian territories at the Kremlin in Moscow, on Friday, Sept. 30, 2022, in a sharp escalation of the war in Ukraine. Putin sent troops into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and appears determined to prevail. (Grigory Sysoyev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

Russian President Vladimir Putin, center, speaks to a soldier as he visits a military training centre of the Western Military District for mobilized reservists in the Ryazan region of Russia, on Oct. 20, 2022. Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu is seen back to camera. Putin sent Russian forces into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and appears determined to prevail. (Mikhail Klimentyev, Sputnik, Kemlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

Riot police detain demonstrators at a protest in Moscow, Russia, on Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2022, after Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a partial mobilization of reservists, effective immediately. Putin sent Russian troops into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and appears determined to prevail -- ruthlessly and at all costs. (AP Photo, File)

Russian President Vladimir Putin gestures while speaking during a news conference following a meeting of the State Council at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia on Thursday, Dec. 22, 2022. Putin sent Russian troops into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and appears determined to prevail. (Sergey Guneyev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

Russian President Vladimir Putin listens to the national anthem at a ceremony for the nuclear-powered icebreaker Ural and the launching of the icebreaker Yakutia, via videoconference, at his Novo-Ogaryovo state residence, outside Moscow, Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2022. Putin sent Russian forces into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and appears determined to prevail. (Mikhail Metzel/Pool Photo via AP, File)

Russian President Vladimir Putin, center, speaks as Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, left, and Chief of the General Staff Gen. Valery Gerasimov attend a meeting with senior military officers in Moscow, Russia, on Wednesday, Dec. 21, 2022. Putin sent Russian forces into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and appears determined to prevail. (Sergey Fadeichev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

Russian President Vladimir Putin, second left, listens to Deputy Prime Minister Marat Khusnullin, left, as he visits the Crimean Bridge connecting Russian mainland and the Crimean Peninsula over the Kerch Strait on Monday, Dec. 5, 2022. The bridge was damaged by a truck bomb in October in an attack that Russia blamed on Ukraine. Putin sent Russian troops into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, appears determined to prevail. (Mikhail Metzel, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

Russian President Vladimir Putin looks at the Polikarpov I-16, a Soviet single-engine single-seat fighter aircraft from World War II, at an interactive museum commemorating the 81st anniversary of the Battle for Moscow, at Red Square in Moscow, Russia, on Tuesday, Nov. 8, 2022. Putin sent Russian forces into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and appears determined to prevail. (Sergei Bobylev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

In this handout photo taken from video and released by Russian Defense Ministry Press Service on Friday, Oct. 28, 2022, a Ka-52 helicopter gunship of the Russian air force fires rockets at a target at an unknown location in Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin sent forces into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and appears determined to prevail. (Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP, File)

Ukrainian soldiers fire artillery at Russian positions near Bakhmut in Ukraine’s Donetsk region, on Sunday, Nov. 20, 2022. Russian President Vladimir Putin sent Russian forces into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and appears determined to prevail. (AP Photo/LIBKOS, File)

Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a meeting with mothers of military personnel at his Novo-Ogaryovo residence outside Moscow, Russia, on Friday, Nov. 25, 2022. Putin sent Russian forces into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and appears determined to prevail. (Alexander Shcherbak, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a Christmas service at the Annunciation Cathedral in Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, on Friday, Jan. 6, 2023. Orthodox Christians celebrate Christmas on Jan. 7, in accordance with the Julian calendar. Putin sent Russian forces into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and appears determined to prevail. (Mikhail Klimentyev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

Russian President Vladimir Putin departs a ceremony for the Russian Olympic Committee’s medalists of the XXIV Olympic Winter Games in Beijing and members of the Russian Paralympic team in the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, Tuesday, April 26, 2022. Putin sent Russian forces into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and appears determined to prevail. (AP Photo, File)

Vladimir Putin says he learned from his boyhood brawls in his native St. Petersburg: “If you want to win a fight, you have to carry it through to the end, as if it were the most decisive battle of your life.”

That lesson, cited in the most recent biography of the Russian president, seems to be guiding him as his invasion of Ukraine suffers setbacks and stalemates. The Kremlin strongman, who started the war on Feb. 24, 2022, and could end it in a minute, appears to be determined to prevail, ruthlessly and at all costs.

Stoking his countrymen this month on the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Stalingrad that turned around Moscow’s fortunes in World War II, he said: “The willingness to go beyond for the sake of the Motherland and the truth, to do the impossible, has always been and remains in the blood, in the character of our multiethnic people.”

But so far, Putin’s gamble in invading his smaller and weaker neighbor seems to have backfired spectacularly and created the biggest threat to his more than two-decade-long rule.

HISTORY AND MODERN ROADBLOCKS

He began the “special military operation” in the name of Ukraine’s demilitarization and “denazification,” seeking to protect ethnic Russians, prevent Kyiv’s NATO membership and to keep it in Russia’s “sphere of influence.” While he claims Ukraine and the West provoked the invasion, they say just the opposite — that it was an illegal and brazen act of aggression against a country with a democratically elected government and a Jewish president whose relatives were killed in the Holocaust.

Putin laid the foundation for the invasion with a 5,000-word essay in 2021, in which he questioned Ukraine’s legitimacy as a nation. That was only the latest chapter in a long obsession with the country and a determination to correct what he believes was a historical mistake of letting it slip from Moscow’s orbit. He reached back three centuries, to Peter the Great, to support his quest to reconquer rightful Russian territory.

But rectifying history soon hit modern roadblocks.

“Literally everything that he set out to do has gone disastrously wrong,” said British journalist Philip Short, who published his biography, “Putin,” last year.

Despite armed interventions in Chechnya, Syria and Georgia, Putin overestimated his military and underestimated Ukrainian resistance and Western support. Russian media try to boost his authority with images of a bare-chested Putin riding a horse, shooting at a military firing range and dressing down government officials on TV, but the war has exposed his shortcomings and the weakness of his military, intelligence services and some economic sectors.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, center, speaks as Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, left, and Chief of the General Staff Gen. Valery Gerasimov attend a meeting with senior military officers in Moscow, Russia, Wednesday, Dec. 21, 2022. (Sergey Fadeichev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

Ukrainian forces have liberated more than half the territory Russia seized. The war has killed tens of thousands on both sides, caused widespread destruction, and induced not only Ukraine but Sweden and Finland to seek NATO membership. It has increased the security threat to Russia and scuttled decades of Russia’s integration with the West, bringing international isolation.

Increasingly, Putin seems to be improvising in a conflict much longer and more difficult than he expected. For example, he’s threatened to use nuclear weapons, then backed off. The strategy is familiar from his lifelong passion, judo: “You must be flexible. Sometimes you can give way to others if that is the way leading to victory,” Putin recounted in flattering 2015-17 interviews with American director Oliver Stone.

Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a training session with his country’s national judo team at the Yug-Sport Training Center in Sochi, Russia, on Thursday, Feb. 14, 2019. (Mikhail Klimentyev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

In Putin’s view, an aggressive West wants to crush Russia. His narrative, along with increasingly repressive measures to stifle domestic dissent, has galvanized patriotic support among many of his countrymen. But it runs up against an inefficient, top-down power structure inherited from the Soviet Union, against the interconnected world’s porous borders, and against the sacrifices Russians are suffering firsthand.

AN ERRATIC BUT DETERMINED LEADER

In interviews with The Associated Press, Short, other analysts and a former Kremlin insider describe the 70-year-old Putin as an erratic, weakened leader, rigid and outdated in his thinking, who overreached and is in denial about the difficulties.

They say he seems concerned about waning, though still strong, domestic public opinion — albeit from unreliable polls. Mostly isolated due to COVID-19 concerns and his personal security, Putin speaks with a small set of advisers, but they appear reluctant to provide honest assessments.

Observers see a long, grinding war that Putin is determined to win, with his way out hard to predict.

“It’s not Putin that rules Russia. It’s circumstances which rule Putin,” said Tatiana Stanovaya, senior fellow of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Short believes the Kremlin leader “has painted himself into a corner. … He will be looking for ways to push ahead, but I don’t think he’s found them.” Giving up is unlikely, Short said, recalling that “his character was always to double down and fight harder.”

Participants watch Russian President Vladimir Putin addressing a plenary session of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in St.Petersburg, Russia, on Friday, June 17, 2022. (AP Photo, File)

Fiona Hill, who served in the past three U.S. administrations and is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, believes Putin wanted to win quickly in Ukraine, install a new president in Kyiv and force it to join Belarus in a Slavic union with Russia. A successor would run Russia, she said, with Putin elevating himself to lead the larger alliance.

But now, according to Stanovaya, “It feels like there is not any hopes that the conflict can be solved any other way than militarily. And this is scary.”

WHAT’S AHEAD

Analysts see several scenarios for Putin, depending on battlefield developments. The scenarios, not mutually exclusive, range from what could be his biggest nightmare — a coup or uprisings like those he saw as a KGB agent in East Germany in 1989, in the USSR in 1991 or Ukraine in 2004 and 2014 — to winning reelection next year. That would extend what is already the longest rule of any Kremlin leader since Josef Stalin.

Dmitry Oreshkin, a political analyst and professor at Free University in Riga, Latvia, said Putin could revise his goals in Ukraine, declaring he achieved them by establishing a land corridor from Russia to Crimea and taking over the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in the east. Then he could announce, “We punished them. We showed them who is the boss in the house. We have defeated all NATO countries,” Oreshkin added.

But Kyiv has shown no willingness to cede territory, and for Putin to sell this as a victory, Orsehkin believes “he needs to convince himself that he defeated Ukraine. And he understands better than anyone that, in fact, he lost.”

As military setbacks mount, Russians are withdrawing morally and psychologically, and thinking, “Yes, we see that something is wrong in the war, but we do not want to know,” according to Oreshkin.

Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a meeting with mothers of military personnel at his Novo-Ogaryovo residence outside Moscow, Russia, on Friday, Nov. 25, 2022.(Alexander Shcherbak, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

Such tuning out, along with economic hardships, could blow back on Putin, he said, perhaps this spring, as Russians ask, “You promised victory, so where is it?”

Former Putin speechwriter Abbas Gallyamov said the Russian president doesn’t admit mistakes or defeats, and “desperately needs a victory just to prove the point that he’s a strongman.”

Even some in the military are turning critical, he said.

“When he becomes hated by more than half — and we’re driving in this direction — the chances for a coup, elite coup, military coup, will increase,” Gallyamov said, giving a timeline of 2024 “plus a couple of years.”

Stanovaya and Short believe no uprising is imminent.

“Even if people are suffering, and they can be discontented and angry, there is no way to make it political,” Stanovaya said.

Gallyamov sees a way out for Putin if he can gain recognition of “new territories, plus a declaration of NATO that it stops expansion, for example, or Ukrainian introduction into their constitution of their neutral status ... or their declaration that Russian will be the second official language.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin gestures while speaking during a news conference following a meeting of the State Council at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia on Thursday, Dec. 22, 2022. (Sergey Guneyev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

DEATH OR SUCCESSION

Another possibility is Putin dying in office, but CIA Director William Burns is skeptical.

“There are lots of rumors about President Putin’s health, and as far as we can tell, he’s entirely too healthy,” Burns, a former U.S. ambassador to Moscow, told the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado in July.

Short said Putin has established such tight security controls and rival power centers that he’s more likely to suffer “a totally unanticipated heart attack than to be overthrown by the people around him.”

He and Hill believe Putin will eventually look for a successor. Gallyamov lists “technocrats” such as Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin and Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin as possibilities. Hill said Dmitry Medvedev, whom Putin tapped as president from 2008 to 2012, “seems to be auditioning for that role again.”

For the moment, Putin remains very much in charge. In his authorized 2000 biography, he noted: “There are always a lot of mistakes made in war. ... You have to take a pragmatic attitude. And you have to keep thinking of victory.”

When a reporter asked him in December if his “special military operation” in Ukraine has been taking too long, Putin replied with a Russian idiom about big goals being achieved incrementally: “The hen pecks grain by grain.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks in an interview with the Russia-1 TV channel in the Bocharov Ruchei residence in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, Russia, on Friday, June 3, 2022. (Mikhail Metzel, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

Russian President Vladimir Putin listens to the national anthem at a ceremony for the nuclear-powered icebreaker Ural and the launching of the icebreaker Yakutia, via videoconference, at his Novo-Ogaryovo state residence, outside Moscow, Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2022. (Mikhail Metzel/Pool Photo via AP, File)

Riot police detain demonstrators at a protest in Moscow, Russia, on Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2022, after Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a partial mobilization of reservists, effective immediately. (AP Photo, File)

Then-Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin swims while in the Siberian region of Tuva during a vacation on Monday, Aug. 3, 2009. (Alexei Druzhinin, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a Christmas service at the Annunciation Cathedral in Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, on Friday, Jan. 6, 2023. Orthodox Christians celebrate Christmas on Jan. 7, in accordance with the Julian calendar. (Mikhail Klimentyev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

Then-Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is seen riding a horse in the mountains of the Siberian region of Tuva, during his vacation on Monday, Aug. 3, 2009. (Alexei Druzhinin, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, drives a motorbike decorated with a Russian national flag, with Crimean leader Sergei Aksenov, in sidecar, and Sevastopol Gov. Mikhail Razvozhaev, behind, during the Babylon’s Shadow bike show camp in Sevastopol, Crimea, on Saturday, Aug. 10, 2019. (Alexei Druzhinin, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

Russian President Vladimir Putin, center, and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, right, review warships before the main naval parade marking Russian Navy Day in the Gulf of Finland, at St. Petersburg, Russia, on Sunday, July 31, 2022. (Mikhail Klimentyev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

From left, Vladimir Saldo, the head of the Kherson region; Yevgeny Balitsky, the head of the Zaporizhzhia region; Russian President Vladimir Putin, center; Denis Pushilin, head of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic; and Leonid Pasechnik, head of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic, pose at a ceremony to sign treaties to illegally annex Ukrainian territories at the Kremlin in Moscow, on Friday, Sept. 30, 2022, in a sharp escalation of the war in Ukraine. (Grigory Sysoyev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

In this photo released on Saturday, Oct. 30, 2010, then-Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin carries a hunting rifle during his trip in Ubsunur Hollow in the Siberian region of Tuva, on the border with Mongolia. (Dmitry Astakhov, Sputnik, Government Pool Photo via AP, File)

Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

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Contextualizing putin's "on the historical unity of russians and ukrainians".

Russian President Vladimir Putin's recent essay, "On the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians," which was published on the Kremlin's website in Russian , English and Ukrainian , elaborates on his frequently stated assertion that Ukrainians and Russians are "one people." In what Anne Applebaum called “ essentially a call to arms ," Putin posits that Ukraine can only be sovereign in partnership with Russia, doesn't need the Donbas and nullified its claims on Crimea with its declaration of independence from the Soviet Union, and has been weakened by the West's efforts to undermine the unity of the Slavs.

Responses to the 5000-word article have ranged from deep concern to near dismissal , with some likening its statements to a justification for war and others pointing to its lack of novelty and suggesting that the primary audience is President Volodymyr Zelensky as he met with leaders in the West. (Zelensky, for his part, offered the tongue-in-cheek response that Putin must have a lot of extra time on his hands.) The discussions inspired by the essay have explored questions such as: Why is Russia so obsessed with Ukraine ? Where do the facts diverge from myth? What is Putin's motivation for writing this document? 

In August 2017, we published an interview with Serhii Plokhii (Plokhy) about his book  Lost Kingdom: The Quest for Empire and the Making of the Russian Nation , which addresses many of the themes emerging in discussions in the wake of Putin's statements. We are reposting the interview below for those who are interested in learning more about Russian nationalism and the intersection of history and myth, past and present.

In the coming weeks, we will also publish excerpts from Plokhii's forthcoming book The Frontline  in open access on our HURI Books website. 

August 2017 Interview

Covering the late 15th century through the present, this book focuses specifically on the Russian nationalism, exploring how leaders from Ivan the Terrible to Vladimir Putin instrumentalized identity to achieve their imperial and great-power aims. Along the way, Plokhy reveals the central role Ukraine plays in Russia’s identity, both as an “other” to distinguish Russia, and as part of a pan-Slavic conceptualization used to legitimize territorial expansion and political control. 

HURI:  Did you come across anything in your research that surprised you?

Plokhy:  A monument to St Volodymyr/ St Vladimir was recently constructed in the most coveted, the most prestigious, the most visible place in the Russian capital, right across from the Kremlin. To me, this was striking enough that I made it the opening of my book.

St. Volodymyr, the Prince who ruled in Kyiv, is more prominent in the Russian capital in terms of the size and location of the statue than the alleged founder of Moscow, Yuriy Dologorukii. Some pundits say that St. Volodymyr is a namesake of Vladimir Putin, so this is really a celebration of Putin, but excepting all of that, there has to be a very particular understanding of Kyivan history to allow one to place in the very center of Moscow a statue of a ruler who ruled in a city that is the now the capital of a neighboring country. 

That means the things I've discussed in the book are not just of academic interest for historians; the history of the idea of what historian Alexei Miller called the “big Russian nation,” is important for understanding Russian behavior today, both at home and abroad. 

HURI:  Do you have any sense of the attitude of Russian people toward the monument?

Plokhy:  Muscovites protested against the plan to place the monument at Voroviev Hills, overseeing the city, but I do not think anyone said that it honored the wrong person or anything like that.

HURI:  In a book that covers 500 years of history, some interesting common threads must appear. What are some of these constants?

Plokhy:  One common thread is the centrality of Ukraine in defining what Russia is and is not. The historical mythology of Kyivan Rus' is contested by Russians and Ukrainians. But no matter how strong or weak the argument on the Ukrainian side of the debate, Russians today have a difficult time imagining Kyiv being not part of Russia or Russia-dominated space and Kyivan Rus' not being an integral part of Russian history.

Ukraine and Ukrainians are important for Russian identity at later stages, as well. For example, the first published textbook of “Russian history” was written and published in Kyiv in the 1670s. This Kyivan book became the basic text of Russian history for more than 150 years.

In the 20th century and today, we see the continuing importance of Ukraine in the ways the concept of the Russian world is formulated, the idea of Holy Rus', church history and church narrative, and so on.

That is one of the reasons why post-Soviet Russia is not only engaged in the economic warfare, or ideological warfare with Kyiv, but is fighting a real physical war in Ukraine. On the one hand, it's counter-intuitive, given that Putin says Ukrainians and Russians are one and the same people, but, given the importance of Ukrainian history for Russia, it's a big issue for which they are prepared to fight.

HURI:  Can you talk about a few important actions or moments when Ukraine saw itself as a distinct group from the projected pan-Russian nation, and maybe when it saw itself as part of it?

The development of a separate Ukrainian identity, literature, and language was met in the 19th century with attempts to arrest that development. HURI recently published an important collection of articles,  Battle for Ukrainian , which (among other things) shows how important language is for the national formation and identity. The Russian Empire also treated language as a matter of security. That's why in 1863 it was the Minister of Interior who issued the decree limiting use of the Ukrainian language, not the Minister of Education, not the President of the Academy of Sciences, but the Minister of Interior. It was a matter of security.

The battles start then and focus on history and language, but for a long time the goal of Ukrainian activists was autonomy, not independence per se. The idea of Ukrainian independence in earnest was put on the political agenda in the 20th century and since then it's refused to leave. In the 20th century, we had five attempts to declare an independent Ukrainian state. The fifth succeeded in 1991, and then the question was, “Okay, you have a state, but what kind of nation does or will Ukraine have? Is it ethnic? Is it political? What separates Russia from Ukraine?” These are the questions that found themselves in the center of public debate. There’s probably no other country where the president would publish a book like  Ukraine Is Not Russia  (President Kuchma). You can't imagine President Macron writing France Is Not Germany or anything like that.

HURI:  Anne Applebaum said  during a lecture  at the Holodomor Research and Education Consortium, “If Stalin feared that Ukrainian nationalism could bring down the Soviet regime, Putin fears that Ukraine’s example could bring down his own regime, a modern autocratic kleptocracy.” Putin emphasizes the “sameness” of the nations, which would seem to increase the power of Ukraine’s example to undermine his regime. Do you think the the drive to call Ukrainians the same as Russians is informed not only by foreign policy, but also by domestic considerations? 

Plokhy:  I think so. Historically the two groups have a lot in common, especially since eastern and central Ukraine were part of the Russian Empire for a long period of time, starting in the mid-17th century. Therefore, common history is certainly there, and the structure of society, the level of education, the level of urbanization, and other things are similar.

Because of these connections, if Ukraine could do certain things, it would be much more difficult to say it can’t be done in Russia, that Russia has a special destiny, that democracy would never work in Russia, and so on and so forth. That would be not just a geopolitical setback for Russia, but would undermine the legitimizing myth Russia needs in order to have an authoritarian regime. 

HURI:  Are there any important differences between the behavior of Putin and previous leaders?

The policies introduced in the occupied territories in eastern Ukraine or in Crimea offer very little space for Ukrainian language and Ukrainian culture. That's a big difference in thinking from what we had in most of the 20th century, when there were all sorts of atrocities but at least on the theoretical level the Ukrainian nation’s right to exist was never questioned. Now it is. The recent attempt to declare “Little Russia” in Donbas and under this banner to take over the rest of Ukraine, promoted by Mr. Surkov, has failed, but it shows that the Russian elites prefer to think about Ukraine in pre-revolutionary terms, pretending as though the revolution that helped to create an independent Ukrainian state and the Soviet period with its nation-building initiatives had never taken place.

HURI:  How about the mentality of Russian citizens toward Ukrainians?

Plokhy:  When the conflict started, Putin was voicing the opinion of the majority of Russians that there is no real difference between Russians and Ukrainians, but the war is changing that. We see a much bigger spike of hostility toward Ukraine on the side of Russian population as compared to the spike of anti-Russian feelings in Ukraine, which also reveals a lot about the two societies and how state propaganda works.

HURI:  Speaking of Russian nation-building and nationalism, what about the non-Slavic peoples, particularly those living to the east of the Urals? Has their inclusion and sense of belonging in the Russian state (or empire) changed over time?

Plokhy:  I leave this subject largely outside the frame of this book, which focuses mainly on relations between Ukrainians, Russians, and Belarusians, and how the sense of Russian identity evolved over time. But non-Slavs are extremely important part of Russian imperial history as a whole.

Russia today, compared to imperial Russia or the Soviet Union, has lost a lot of its non-Russian territories, including Ukraine and Belarus, but still a good number of non-Slavs live in the Russian Federation. On the one hand, the government understands that and tries not to rock the boat, but exclusive Russian ethnic nationalism is generally on the rise in Russia. The Russians who came to Crimea, the people who came to Donbas, like Igor Girkin (Strelkov), they came to Ukraine with a pan-Russian ideology. It's not just anti-Western, it puts primacy on the ethnically, linguistically, culturally understood Russian people, which certainly threatens relations with non-Russians within the Russian Federation.

What we see is the ethnicization of Russian identity in today's Russia. It has a lot of ugly manifestations, but overall it's a common process for many imperial nations to separate themselves from their subjects and possessions. Russians redefine what Russians are by putting emphasis on ethnicity. We witnessed such processes in Germany, and in France, and in both countries there were a lot of unpleasant things, to put it mildly.

Plokhy:  For a long time, Russian ethnic nationalism, particularly in the Soviet Union, was basically under attack. Russian as lingua franca was of course supported and promoted, the dominance of Russian cadres in general was supported, but the emphasis on ethnicity, on Russian ethnicity in particular, was not welcome because that could mobilize non-Russian nationalism as a reaction, and that was a threat to the multi-ethnic character of the state.

Today, Russia is much less multi-ethnic than it was during Soviet times, and the regime is much more prepared to use ethnic Russian nationalism for self-legitimization or mobilization for war, like the war in Ukraine. All of that contributes to the rise of ethnic nationalism. The government relies more on its support and it provides less of a threat to the state, given that the state is less multi-ethnic.

HURI:  With the belief that Russia's borders should come in line with the ethnic Russian population, doesn't that create a danger with Chechnya and other autonomous republics in the Caucasus having a reason to leave?

Plokhy:  It does. One group of ethnicity-focused and culture-focused Russian nationalists are saying that Russia should actually separate from the Caucasus. If you bring ethnonationalist thinking to its logical conclusion, that's what you get, and that's what some people in Russia argue. They're not an influential group, but they argue that.

HURI:  And what about, say, eastern Russia?

Plokhy:  Yes, in terms of geography, it is easier to imagine Chechnya and Dagestan leaving than Tatarstan. That is why extreme Russian nationalism is an export product for the Russian government, rather than the remedy the doctor himself is using at home. It is used to either annex or destabilize other countries, but within the country itself there is an emphasis on the multi-ethnicity of the Russian political nation. Putin has to keep the peace between the Orthodox and Muslim parts of the population.

The goal is to keep the post-Soviet space within the Russian sphere of influence. In the case of Georgia and Ukraine, the goal is also to preclude a drift over to the West; in the Baltic States, to question the underlying principle of NATO, that countries like the US or Germany would be prepared to risk a war over a small country like Estonia. Large NATO countries don't have the answer to that dilemma yet, and Putin is trying to create a situation where the answer will be “no.” So it's great power politics, it's sphere-of-influence politics.

Putin and the people around him are not ideologically driven doctrinaires. They use ideology to the degree that it can support great power ambitions and their vision of Russia’s role in the world. They jumped on the bandwagon of rising Russian nationalism, seeing in it an important tool to strengthen the regime both at home and abroad.

Ukraine became a polygon where the strength of Russian nationalism as a foreign policy was tested for the first time. The Baltic states have a big Russian-speaking minority where the "New Russia" card can be played if the circumstances are right.

HURI:  Was there a point after the fall of the Soviet Union when Russia turned back to an imperial model of Russian identity? Or was it never going to become a modern nation state?

Plokhy:  The shift started in the second half of the 1990s, but it really began to solidify when Putin came to power in 2000.

The 1990s for Russia were a very difficult period as a whole. Expectations were extremely high, but there was a major economic downturn, the loss of the status of a super power. This discredited the liberal project as a whole, in terms of foreign policy, in the organization of a political system, in the idea of democracy itself. The only thing from the West that Russia adopted to a different degree of success was a market economy. The market per se and private property, despite the high level of state influence, is still there, but the democracy did not survive. The Yeltsin-era attempt to shift from “Russkii” to more inclusive “Rossiyanin” as the political definition of Russianness also found itself under attack. The rise of ethnic Russian nationalism undermines the liberal model of the political Russian nation.

Society’s disappointment in the 1990s led to a search for alternatives, which were found in the idea of strengthening the power of the state and led to the rise of authoritarian tendencies. At the same time came Russia’s attempt to reclaim its great power status, despite an extreme gap between its geopolitical ambitions and economic potential. Today, Russia isn't even part of the ten largest world economies, so its GDP is smaller than Italy’s and Canada’s and is on par with South Korea’s. Think about Italy or Canada conducting that kind of aggressive foreign policy. You see the discrepancy right away.

This aggressive policy is a terrible thing for Ukraine and other countries, but it's also not good at all for Russia’s society, for the Russian economy, for the future of Russia as a state.

HURI:  What do you think of the term "managed democracy"? Do you think that's an accurate term?

Plokhy:  That's certainly the term that you can use to destroy democracy and get away with it.

Post-imperial countries - and that applies to the new nations in the post-Soviet space - face special difficulties in that regard. The majority of countries that were subjects of empires probably go through a period of authoritarian rule, and that's because they have to organize themselves, they have to build institutions. Think about Poland or Romania during the interwar period. You see the same situation in Belarus and Kazakhstan. Russia fell in that category as well. It was running an empire and had a long tradition of institutions, but none of those institutions were democratic.

Ukraine is an outlier in that sense. It's maintained its democratic institutions. It's paying a price for that, but the society is quite committed to keep going as a democratic country. There were two attempts -- one under President Kuchma, which resulted in one Maidan, and one under President Yanukovych, which resulted in another Maidan -- attempts to strengthen the presidential branch and join the post-Soviet authoritarian sphere. Both attempts were rejected by the Ukrainian society.

Foreign factors paid their role as well. But one should not overestimate those. On a certain level, the US was trying to help strengthen the democratic society and Russia was trying to strengthen the authoritarian tendencies in Yanukovych's regime, but in the end, it wasn’t up to outside players. The Ukrainian society made the decision, and in the last 25 years both attempts at authoritarianism failed.

They're issued by different publishers that view their readership differently. The title is the part of the book where the publisher has as much influence as the author, or maybe even more, and marketing people are also involved. The titles reflect the different ways publishers understand what is most important and can be conveyed in the most direct way to the readership.

HURI:  And I would guess it’s the same with the different cover art? What’s the significance of the images?

The same thing with the images. With the American one, there was a number of possibilities, and the publisher listened to my preference. The European one just produced something, and I accepted it.

So it's directly related to the story told in the book, but I also liked it as an image because it's extremely detailed, with a lot of things happening at the same time. It is easy to get lost in these details of battle. It fits the main title of the book,  Lost Kingdom , pretty well. The idea is that with all these wars and interventions, Russia lost its way to modern nationhood.

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9 big questions about Russia’s war in Ukraine, answered

Addressing some of the most pressing questions of the whole war, from how it started to how it might end.

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by Zack Beauchamp

The Russian war in Ukraine has proven itself to be one of the most consequential political events of our time — and one of the most confusing.

From the outset, Russia’s decision to invade was hard to understand; it seemed at odds with what most experts saw as Russia’s strategic interests. As the war has progressed, the widely predicted Russian victory has failed to emerge as Ukrainian fighters have repeatedly fended off attacks from a vastly superior force. Around the world, from Washington to Berlin to Beijing, global powers have reacted in striking and even historically unprecedented fashion.

What follows is an attempt to make sense of all of this: to tackle the biggest questions everyone is asking about the war. It is a comprehensive guide to understanding what is happening in Ukraine and why it matters.

1) Why did Russia invade Ukraine?

In a televised speech announcing Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine on February 24 , Russian President Vladimir Putin said the invasion was designed to stop a “genocide” perpetrated by “the Kyiv regime” — and ultimately to achieve “the demilitarization and de-Nazification of Ukraine.”

Though the claims of genocide and Nazi rule in Kyiv were transparently false , the rhetoric revealed Putin’s maximalist war aims: regime change (“de-Nazification”) and the elimination of Ukraine’s status as a sovereign state outside of Russian control (“demilitarization”). Why he would want to do this is a more complex story, one that emerges out of the very long arc of Russian-Ukrainian relations.

Ukraine and Russia have significant, deep, and longstanding cultural and historical ties; both date their political origins back to the ninth-century Slavic kingdom of Kievan Rus. But these ties do not make them historically identical, as Putin has repeatedly claimed in his public rhetoric. Since the rise of the modern Ukrainian national movement in the mid- to late-19th century , Russian rule in Ukraine — in both the czarist and Soviet periods — increasingly came to resemble that of an imperial power governing an unwilling colony .

Russian imperial rule ended in 1991 when 92 percent of Ukrainians voted in a national referendum to secede from the decaying Soviet Union. Almost immediately afterward , political scientists and regional experts began warning that the Russian-Ukrainian border would be a flashpoint, predicting that internal divides between the more pro-European population of western Ukraine and relatively more pro-Russian east , contested territory like the Crimean Peninsula , and Russian desire to reestablish control over its wayward vassal could all lead to conflict between the new neighbors.

It took about 20 years for these predictions to be proven right. In late 2013, Ukrainians took tothe streets to protest the authoritarian and pro-Russian tilt of incumbent President Viktor Yanukovych, forcing his resignation on February 22, 2014. Five days later, the Russian military swiftly seized control of Crimea and declared it Russian territory, a brazenly illegal move that a majority of Crimeans nonetheless seemed to welcome . Pro-Russia protests in Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine gave way to a violent rebellion — one stoked and armed by the Kremlin , and backed by disguised Russian troops .

The Ukrainian uprising against Yanukovych — called the “Euromaidan” movement because they were pro-EU protests that most prominently took place in Kyiv’s Maidan square — represented to Russia a threat not just to its influence over Ukraine but to the very survival of Putin’s regime. In Putin’s mind, Euromaidan was a Western-sponsored plot to overthrow a Kremlin ally, part of a broader plan to undermine Russia itself that included NATO’s post-Cold War expansions to the east.

“We understand what is happening; we understand that [the protests] were aimed against Ukraine and Russia and against Eurasian integration,” he said in a March 2014 speech on the annexation of Crimea. “With Ukraine, our Western partners have crossed the line.”

Beneath this rhetoric, according to experts on Russia, lies a deeper unstated fear: that his regime might fall prey to a similar protest movement . Ukraine could not succeed, in his view, because it might create a pro-Western model for Russians to emulate — one that the United States might eventually try to covertly export to Moscow. This was a central part of his thinking in 2014 , and it remains sotoday.

“He sees CIA agents behind every anti-Russian political movement,” says Seva Gunitsky, a political scientist who studies Russia at the University of Toronto. “He thinks the West wants to subvert his regime the way they did in Ukraine.”

Beginning in March 2021, Russian forces began deploying to the Ukrainian border in larger and larger numbers. Putin’s nationalist rhetoric became more aggressive: In July 2021, the Russian president published a 5,000-word essay arguing that Ukrainian nationalism was a fiction, that the country was historically always part of Russia, and that a pro-Western Ukraine posed an existential threat to the Russian nation.

• Europe’s embrace of Ukrainian refugees, explained in six charts and one map

“The formation of an ethnically pure Ukrainian state, aggressive towards Russia, is comparable in its consequences to the use of weapons of mass destruction against us,” as he put it in his 2021 essay .

Why Putin decided that merely seizing part of Ukraine was no longer enough remains a matter of significant debate among experts. One theory, advanced by Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar , is that pandemic-induced isolation drove him to an extreme ideological place.

But while the immediate cause of Putin’s shift on Ukraine is not clear, the nature of that shift is. His longtime belief in the urgency of restoring Russia’s greatness curdled into a neo-imperial desire to bring Ukraine back under direct Russian control. And in Russia, where Putin rules basically unchecked, that meant a full-scale war.

2) Who is winning the war?

On paper , Russia’s military vastly outstrips Ukraine’s. Russia spends over 10 times as much on defense annually as Ukraine; the Russian military has a little under three times as much artillery as Ukraine and roughly 10 times as many fixed-wing aircraft. As a result, the general pre-invasion view was that Russia would easily win a conventional war. In early February, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley told members of Congress that Kyiv, the capital, could fall within 72 hours of a Russian invasion .

But that’s not how things have played out . A month into the invasion, Ukrainians still hold Kyiv. Russia has made some gains, especially in the east and south, but the consensus view among military experts is that Ukraine’s defenses have held stoutly — to the point where Ukrainians have been able to launch counteroffensives .

The initial Russian plan reportedly operated under the assumption that a swift march on Kyiv would meet only token resistance. Putin “actually really thought this would be a ‘special military operation’: They would be done in a few days, and it wouldn’t be a real war,” says Michael Kofman, an expert on the Russian military at the CNA think tank.

This plan fell apart within the first 48 hours of the war when early operations like an airborne assault on the Hostomel airport ended in disaster , forcing Russian generals to develop a new strategy on the fly. What they came up with — massive artillery bombardments and attempts to encircle and besiege Ukraine’s major cities — was more effective (and more brutal). The Russians made some inroads into Ukrainian territory, especially in the south, where they have laid siege to Mariupol and taken Kherson and Melitopol.

But these Russian advances are a bit misleading. Ukraine, Kofman explains, made the tactical decision to trade “space for time” : to withdraw strategically rather than fight for every inch of Ukrainian land, confronting the Russians on the territory and at the time of their choosing.

As the fighting continued, the nature of the Ukrainian choice became clearer. Instead of getting into pitched large-scale battles with Russians on open terrain, where Russia’s numerical advantages would prove decisive, the Ukrainians instead decided to engage in a series of smaller-scale clashes .

Ukrainian forces have bogged down Russian units in towns and smaller cities ; street-to-street combat favors defenders who can use their superior knowledge of the city’s geography to hide and conduct ambushes. They have attacked isolated and exposed Russian units traveling on open roads. They have repeatedly raided poorly protected supply lines.

This approach has proven remarkably effective. By mid-March, Western intelligence agencies and open source analysts concluded that the Ukrainians had successfully managed to stall the Russian invasion. The Russian military all but openly recognized this reality in a late March briefing, in which top generals implausibly claimed they never intended to take Kyiv and were always focused on making territorial gains in the east.

“The initial Russian campaign to invade and conquer Ukraine is culminating without achieving its objectives — it is being defeated, in other words,” military scholar Frederick Kagan wrote in a March 22 brief for the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) think tank.

Currently, Ukrainian forces are on the offensive. They have pushed the Russians farther from Kyiv , with some reports suggesting they have retaken the suburb of Irpin and forced Russia to withdraw some of its forces from the area in a tacit admission of defeat. In the south, Ukrainian forces are contesting Russian control over Kherson .

And throughout the fighting, Russian casualties have been horrifically high.

It’s hard to get accurate information in a war zone, but one of the more authoritative estimates of Russian war dead — from the US Defense Department — concludes that over 7,000 Russian soldiers have been killed in the first three weeks of fighting, a figure about three times as large as the total US service members dead in all 20 years of fighting in Afghanistan. A separate NATO estimate puts that at the low end, estimating between 7,000 and 15,000 Russians killed in action and as many as 40,000 total losses (including injuries, captures, and desertions). Seven Russian generals have been reported killed in the fighting, and materiel losses — ranging from armor to aircraft — have been enormous. (Russia puts its death toll at more than 1,300 soldiers, which is almost certainly a significant undercount.)

This all does not mean that a Russian victory is impossible. Any number of things, ranging from Russian reinforcements to the fall of besieged Mariupol, could give the war effort new life.

It does, however, mean that what Russia is doing right now hasn’t worked.

“If the point is just to wreak havoc, then they’re doing fine. But if the point is to wreak havoc and thus advance further — be able to hold more territory — they’re not doing fine,” says Olga Oliker, the program director for Europe and Central Asia at the International Crisis Group.

3) Why is Russia’s military performing so poorly?

Russia’s invasion has gone awry for two basic reasons: Its military wasn’t ready to fight a war like this, and the Ukrainians have put up a much stronger defense than anyone expected.

Russia’s problems begin with Putin’s unrealistic invasion plan. But even after the Russian high command adjusted its strategy, other flaws in the army remained.

“We’re seeing a country militarily implode,” says Robert Farley, a professor who studies air power at the University of Kentucky.

One of the biggest and most noticeable issues has been rickety logistics. Some of the most famous images of the war have been of Russian armored vehicles parked on Ukrainian roads, seemingly out of gas and unable to advance. The Russian forces have proven to be underequipped and badly supplied, encountering problems ranging from poor communications to inadequate tires .

Part of the reason is a lack of sufficient preparation. Per Kofman, the Russian military simply “wasn’t organized for this kind of war” — meaning, the conquest of Europe’s second-largest country by area. Another part of it is corruption in the Russian procurement system. Graft in Russia is less a bug in its political system than a feature; one way the Kremlin maintains the loyalty of its elite is by allowing them to profit off of government activity . Military procurement is no exception to this pattern of widespread corruption, and it has led to troops having substandard access to vital supplies .

The same lack of preparation has plagued Russia’s air force . Despite outnumbering the Ukrainian air force by roughly 10 times, the Russians have failed to establish air superiority: Ukraine’s planes are still flying and its air defenses mostly remain in place .

“The Russian Army was not prepared to fight this war” —Jason Lyall, Dartmouth political scientist

Perhaps most importantly, close observers of the war believe Russians are suffering from poor morale. Because Putin’s plan to invade Ukraine was kept secret from the vast majority of Russians, the government had a limited ability to lay a propaganda groundwork that would get their soldiers motivated to fight. The current Russian force has little sense of what they’re fighting for or why — and are waging war against a country with which they have religious, ethnic, historical, and potentially even familial ties. In a military that has long had systemic morale problems, that’s a recipe for battlefield disaster.

“Russian morale was incredibly low BEFORE the war broke out. Brutal hazing in the military, second-class (or worse) status by its conscript soldiers, ethnic divisions, corruption, you name it: the Russian Army was not prepared to fight this war,” Jason Lyall, a Dartmouth political scientist who studies morale, explains via email. “High rates of abandoned or captured equipment, reports of sabotaged equipment, and large numbers of soldiers deserting (or simply camping out in the forest) are all products of low morale.”

The contrast with the Ukrainians couldn’t be starker. They are defending their homes and their families from an unprovoked invasion, led by a charismatic leader who has made a personal stand in Kyiv. Ukrainian high moraleis a key reason, in addition to advanced Western armaments, that the defenders have dramatically outperformed expectations.

“Having spent a chunk of my professional career [working] with the Ukrainians, nobody, myself included and themselves included, had all that high an estimation of their military capacity,” Oliker says.

Again, none of this will necessarily remain the case throughout the war. Morale can shift with battlefield developments. And even if Russian morale remains low, it’s still possible for them to win — though they’re more likely to do so in a brutally ugly fashion.

4) What has the war meant for ordinary Ukrainians?

As the fighting has dragged on, Russia has gravitated toward tactics that, by design, hurt civilians. Most notably, Russia has attempted to lay siege to Ukraine’s cities, cutting off supply and escape routes while bombarding them with artillery. The purpose of the strategy is to wear down the Ukrainian defenders’ willingness to fight, including by inflicting mass pain on the civilian populations.

The result has been nightmarish: an astonishing outflow of Ukrainian refugees and tremendous suffering for many of those who were unwilling or unable to leave.

According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees , more than 3.8 million Ukrainians fled the country between February 24 and March 27. That’s about 8.8 percent of Ukraine’s total population — in proportional terms, the rough equivalent of the entire population of Texas being forced to flee the United States.

Another point of comparison: In 2015, four years into the Syrian civil war and the height of the global refugee crisis, there were a little more than 4 million Syrian refugees living in nearby countries . The Ukraine war has produced a similarly sized exodus in just a month, leading to truly massive refugee flows to its European neighbors. Poland, the primary destination of Ukrainian refugees, is currently housing over 2.3 million Ukrainians, a figure larger than the entire population of Warsaw, its capital and largest city.

For those civilians who have been unable to flee, the situation is dire. There are no reliable estimates of death totals; a March 27 UN estimate puts the figure at 1,119 but cautions that “the actual figures are considerably higher [because] the receipt of information from some locations where intense hostilities have been going on has been delayed and many reports are still pending corroboration.”

The UN assessment does not blame one side or the other for these deaths, but does note that “most of the civilian casualties recorded were caused by the use of explosive weapons with a wide impact area, including shelling from heavy artillery and multiple-launch rocket systems, and missile and airstrikes.” It is the Russians, primarily, who are using these sorts of weapons in populated areas; Human Rights Watch has announced that there are “early signs of war crimes” being committed by Russian soldiers in these kinds of attacks, and President Joe Biden has personally labeled Putin a “war criminal.”

Nowhere is this devastation more visible than the southern city of Mariupol, the largest Ukrainian population center to which Russia has laid siege. Aerial footage of the city published by the Guardian in late March reveals entire blocks demolished by Russian bombardment:

In mid-March, three Associated Press journalists — the last international reporters in the city before they too were evacuated — managed to file a dispatch describing life on the ground. They reported a death total of 2,500 but cautioned that “many bodies can’t be counted because of the endless shelling .” The situation is impossibly dire:

Airstrikes and shells have hit the maternity hospital, the fire department, homes, a church, a field outside a school. For the estimated hundreds of thousands who remain, there is quite simply nowhere to go. The surrounding roads are mined and the port blocked. Food is running out, and the Russians have stopped humanitarian attempts to bring it in. Electricity is mostly gone and water is sparse, with residents melting snow to drink. Some parents have even left their newborns at the hospital, perhaps hoping to give them a chance at life in the one place with decent electricity and water.

The battlefield failures of the Russian military have raised questions about its competence in difficult block-to-block fighting; Farley, the Kentucky professor, says, “This Russian army does not look like it can conduct serious [urban warfare].” As a result, taking Ukrainian cities means besieging them — starving them out, destroying their will to fight, and only moving into the city proper after its population is unwilling to resist or outright incapable of putting up a fight.

5) What do Russians think about the war?

Vladimir Putin’s government has ramped up its already repressive policies during the Ukraine conflict, shuttering independent media outlets and blocking access to Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram . It’s now extremely difficult to get a sense of what either ordinary Russians or the country’s elite think about the war, as criticizing it could lead to a lengthy stint in prison.

But despite this opacity, expert Russia watchers have developed a broad idea of what’s going on there. The war has stirred up some opposition and anti-Putin sentiment, but it has been confined to a minority who are unlikely to change Putin’s mind, let alone topple him.

The bulk of the Russian public was no more prepared for war than the bulk of the Russian military — in fact, probably less so. After Putin announced the launch of his “special military operation” in Ukraine on national television, there was a surprising amount of criticism from high-profile Russians — figures ranging from billionaires to athletes to social media influencers. One Russian journalist, Marina Ovsyannikova, bravely ran into the background of a government broadcast while holding an antiwar sign.

“It is unprecedented to see oligarchs, other elected officials, and other powerful people in society publicly speaking out against the war,” says Alexis Lerner, a scholar of dissent in Russia at the US Naval Academy.

There have also been antiwar rallies in dozens of Russian cities. How many have participated in these rallies is hard to say, but the human rights group OVD-Info estimates that over 15,000 Russians have been arrested at the events since the war began.

Could these eruptions ofantiwar sentiment at the elite and mass public level suggesta comingcoup or revolution against the Putin regime? Experts caution that these events remain quite unlikely.

Putin has done an effective job engaging in what political scientists call “coup-proofing.” He has put in barriers — from seeding the military with counterintelligence officers to splitting up the state security services into different groups led by trusted allies — that make it quite difficult for anyone in his government to successfully move against him.

“Putin has prepared for this eventuality for a long time and has taken a lot of concerted actions to make sure he’s not vulnerable,” says Adam Casey, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan who studies the history of coups in Russia and the former communist bloc.

Similarly, turning the antiwar protests into a full-blown influential movement is a very tall order.

“It is hard to organize sustained collective protest in Russia,” notes Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist at Harvard who studies protest movements . “Putin’s government has criminalized many forms of protests, and has shut down or restricted the activities of groups, movements, and media outlets perceived to be in opposition or associated with the West.”

Underpinning it all is tight government control of the information environment. Most Russians get their news from government-run media , which has been serving up a steady diet of pro-war content. Many of them appear to genuinely believe what they hear: One independent opinion poll found that 58 percent of Russians supported the war to at least some degree.

Prior to the war, Putin also appeared to be a genuinely popular figure in Russia. The elite depend on him for their position and fortune; many citizens see him as the man who saved Russia from the chaos of the immediate post-Communist period. A disastrous war might end up changing that, but the odds that even a sustained drop in his support translates into a coup or revolution remain low indeed.

6) What is the US role in the conflict?

The war remains, for the moment, a conflict between Ukraine and Russia. But the United States is the most important third party, using a number of powerful tools — short of direct military intervention — to aid the Ukrainian cause.

Any serious assessment of US involvement needs to start in the post-Cold War 1990s , when the US and its NATO allies made the decision to open alliance membership to former communist states.

Many of these countries, wary of once again being put under the Russian boot, clamored to join the alliance, which commits all involved countries to defend any member-state in the event of an attack. In 2008, NATO officially announced that Georgia and Ukraine — two former Soviet republics right on Russia’s doorstep — “ will become members of NATO ” at an unspecified future date. This infuriated the Russians, who saw NATO expansion as a direct threat to their own security.

There is no doubt that NATO expansion helped create some of the background conditions under which the current conflict became thinkable, generally pushing Putin’s foreign policy in a more anti-Western direction. Some experts see it as one of the key causes of his decision to attack Ukraine — but others strongly disagree, noting that NATO membership for Ukraine was already basically off the table before the war and that Russia’s declared war aims went far beyond simply blocking Ukraine’s NATO bid .

“NATO expansion was deeply unpopular in Russia. [But] Putin did not invade because of NATO expansion,” says Yoshiko Herrera, a Russia expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Regardless of where one falls on that debate, US policy during the conflict has been exceptionally clear: support the Ukrainians with massive amounts of military assistance while putting pressure on Putin to back down by organizing an unprecedented array of international economic sanctions.

On the military side, weapons systems manufactured and provided by the US and Europe have played a vital role in blunting Russia’s advance. The Javelin anti-tank missile system, for example, is a lightweight American-made launcher that allows one or two infantry soldiers to take out a tank . Javelins have given the outgunned Ukrainians a fighting chance against Russian armor, becoming a popular symbol in the process .

Sanctions have proven similarly devastating in the economic realm .

The international punishments have been extremely broad, ranging from removing key Russian banks from the SWIFT global transaction system to a US ban on Russian oil imports to restrictions on doing business with particular members of the Russian elite . Freezing the assets of Russia’s central bank has proven to be a particularly damaging tool, wrecking Russia’s ability to deal with the collapse in the value of the ruble, its currency. As a result, the Russian economy is projected to contract by 15 percent this year ; mass unemployment looms .

There is more America can do, particularly when it comes to fulfilling Ukrainian requests for new fighter jets. In March, Washington rejected a Polish plan to transfer MiG-29 aircraft to Ukraine via a US Air Force base in Germany, arguing that it could be too provocative.

But the MiG-29 incident is more the exception than it is the rule. On the whole, the United States has been strikingly willing to take aggressive steps to punish Moscow and aid Kyiv’s war effort.

7) How is the rest of the world responding to Russia’s actions?

On the surface, the world appears to be fairly united behind the Ukrainian cause. The UN General Assembly passed a resolution condemning the Russian invasion by a whopping 141-5 margin (with 35 abstentions). But the UN vote conceals a great deal of disagreement, especially among the world’s largest and most influential countries — divergences that don’t always fall neatly along democracy-versus-autocracy lines.

The most aggressive anti-Russian and pro-Ukrainian positions can, perhaps unsurprisingly, be found in Europe and the broader West. EU and NATO members, with the partial exceptions of Hungary and Turkey , have strongly supported the Ukrainian war effort and implemented punishing sanctions on Russia (a major trading partner). It’s the strongest show of European unity since the Cold War, one that many observers see as a sign that Putin’s invasion has already backfired.

Germany, which has important trade ties with Russia and a post-World War II tradition of pacifism, is perhaps the most striking case. Nearly overnight, the Russian invasion convinced center-left Chancellor Olaf Scholz to support rearmament , introducing a proposal to more than triple Germany’s defense budget that’s widely backed by the German public.

“It’s really revolutionary,” Sophia Besch, a Berlin-based senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform, told my colleague Jen Kirby . “Scholz, in his speech, did away with and overturned so many of what we thought were certainties of German defense policy.”

Though Scholz has refused to outright ban Russian oil and gas imports, he has blocked the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline and committed to a long-term strategy of weaning Germany off of Russian energy. All signs point to Russia waking a sleeping giant — of creating a powerful military and economic enemy in the heart of the European continent.

China, by contrast, has been the most pro-Russia of the major global powers.

The two countries, bound by shared animus toward a US-dominated world order, have grown increasingly close in recent years. Chinese propaganda has largely toed the Russian line on the Ukraine war. US intelligence, which has been remarkably accurate during the crisis, believes that Russia has requested military and financial assistance from Beijing — which hasn’t been provided yet but may well be forthcoming.

That said, it’s possible to overstate the degree to which China has taken the Russian side. Beijing has a strong stated commitment to state sovereignty — the bedrock of its position on Taiwan is that the island is actually Chinese territory — which makes a full-throated backing of the invasion ideologically awkward . There’s a notable amount of debate among Chinese policy experts and in the public , with some analysts publicly advocating that Beijing adopt a more neutral line on the conflict.

Most other countries around the world fall somewhere on the spectrum between the West and China. Outside of Europe, only a handful of mostly pro-American states — like South Korea, Japan, and Australia — have joined the sanctions regime. The majority of countries in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America do not support the invasion, but won’t do very much to punish Russia for it either.

• Why India isn’t denouncing Russia’s Ukraine war

India is perhaps the most interesting country in this category. A rising Asian democracy that has violently clashed with China in the very recent past , it has good reasons to present itself as an American partner in the defense of freedom. Yet India also depends heavily on Russian-made weapons for its own defense and hopes to use its relationship with Russia to limit the Moscow-Beijing partnership. It’s also worth noting that India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, has strong autocratic inclinations .

The result of all of this is a balancing act reminiscent of India’s Cold War approach of “non-alignment” : refusing to side with either the Russian or American positions while attempting to maintain decent relations with both . India’s perceptions of its strategic interests, more than ideological views about democracy, appear to be shaping its response to the war — as seems to be the case with quite a few countries around the world.

8) Could this turn into World War III?

The basic, scary answer to this question is yes: The invasion of Ukraine has put us at the greatest risk of a NATO-Russia war in decades.

The somewhat more comforting and nuanced answer is that the absolute risk remains relatively low so long as there is no direct NATO involvement in the conflict, which the Biden administration has repeatedly ruled out . Though Biden said “this man [Putin] cannot remain in power” in a late March speech, both White House officials and the president himself stressed afterward that the US policy was not regime change in Moscow.

“Things are stable in a nuclear sense right now,” says Jeffrey Lewis, an expert on nuclear weapons at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. “The minute NATO gets involved, the scope of the war widens.”

In theory, US and NATO military assistance to Ukraine could open the door to escalation: Russia could attack a military depot in Poland containing weapons bound for Ukraine, for instance. But in practice, it’s unlikely: The Russians don’t appear to want a wider war with NATO that risks nuclear escalation, and so have avoided cross-border strikes even when it might destroy supply shipments bound for Ukraine.

In early March, the US Department of Defense opened a direct line of communication with its Russian peers in order to avoid any kind of accidental conflict. It’s not clear how well this is working — some reporting suggests the Russians aren’t answering American calls — but there is a long history of effective dialogue between rivals who are fighting each other through proxy forces.

“States often cooperate to keep limits on their wars even as they fight one another clandestinely,” Lyall, the Dartmouth professor, tells me. “While there’s always a risk of unintended escalation, historical examples like Vietnam, Afghanistan (1980s), Afghanistan again (post-2001), and Syria show that wars can be fought ‘within bounds.’”

If the United States and NATO heed the call of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to impose a so-called “no-fly zone” over Ukrainian skies, the situation changes dramatically. No-fly zones are commitments to patrol and, if necessary, shoot down military aircraft that fly in the declared area, generally for the purpose of protecting civilians. In Ukraine, that would mean the US and its NATO allies sending in jets to patrol Ukraine’s skies — and being willing to shoot down any Russian planes that enter protected airspace. From there, the risks of a nuclear conflict become terrifyingly high.

Russia recognizes its inferiority to NATO in conventional terms; its military doctrine has long envisioned the use of nuclear weapons in a war with the Western alliance . In his speech declaring war on Ukraine, Putin all but openly vowed that any international intervention in the conflict would trigger nuclear retaliation.

“To anyone who would consider interfering from the outside: If you do, you will face consequences greater than any you have faced in history,” the Russian president said. “I hope you hear me.”

The Biden administration is taking these threats seriously. Much as the Kremlin hasn’t struck NATO supply missions to Ukraine, the White House has flatly rejected a no-fly zone or any other kind of direct military intervention.

“We will not fight a war against Russia in Ukraine,” Biden said on March 11 . “Direct conflict between NATO and Russia is World War III, something we must strive to prevent.”

This does not mean the risk of a wider war is zero . Accidents happen, and countries can be dragged into war against their leaders’ best judgment. Political positions and risk calculi can also change: If Russia starts losing badly and uses smaller nukes on Ukrainian forces (called “tactical” nuclear weapons), Biden would likely feel the need to respond in some fairly aggressive way. Much depends on Washington and Moscow continuing to show a certain level of restraint.

9) How could the war end?

Wars do not typically end with the total defeat of one side or the other. More commonly, there’s some kind of negotiated settlement — either a ceasefire or more permanent peace treaty — where the two sides agree to stop fighting under a set of mutually agreeable terms.

It is possible that the Ukraine conflict turns out to be an exception: that Russian morale collapses completely, leading to utter battlefield defeat, or that Russia inflicts so much pain that Kyiv collapses. But most analysts believe that neither of these is especially likely given the way the war has played out to date.

“No matter how much military firepower they pour into it, [the Russians] are not going to be able to achieve regime change or some of their maximalist aims,” Kofman, of the CNA think tank, declares.

A negotiated settlement is the most likely way the conflict ends. Peace negotiations between the two sides are ongoing, and some reporting suggests they’re bearing fruit. On March 28, the Financial Times reported significant progress on a draft agreement covering issues ranging from Ukrainian NATO membership to the “de-Nazification” of Ukraine. The next day, Russia pledged to decrease its use of force in Ukraine’s north as a sign of its commitment to the talks.

American officials, though, have been publicly skeptical of Russia’s seriousness in the talks. Even if Moscow is committed to reaching a settlement, the devil is always in the details with these sorts of things — and there are lots of barriers standing in the way of a successful resolution.

Take NATO. The Russians want a simple pledge that Ukraine will remain “neutral” — staying out of foreign security blocs. The current draft agreement, per the Financial Times, does preclude Ukrainian NATO membership, but it permits Ukraine to join the EU. It also commits at least 11 countries, including the United States and China, to coming to Ukraine’s aid if it is attacked again. This would put Ukraine on a far stronger security footing than it had before the war — a victory for Kyiv and defeat for Moscow, one that Putin may ultimately conclude is unacceptable.

• What, exactly, is a “neutral” Ukraine?

Another thorny issue — perhaps the thorniest — is the status of Crimea and the two breakaway Russian-supported republics in eastern Ukraine. The Russians want Ukrainian recognition of its annexation of Crimea and the independence of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions; Ukraine claims all three as part of its territory. Some compromise is imaginable here — an internationally monitored referendum in each territory, perhaps — but what that would look like is not obvious.

The resolution of these issues will likely depend quite a bit on the war’s progress. The more each side believes it has a decent chance to improve its battlefield position and gain leverage in negotiations, the less reason either will have to make concessions to the other in the name of ending the fighting.

And even if they do somehow come to an agreement, it may not end up holding .

On the Ukrainian side, ultra-nationalist militias could work to undermine any agreement with Russia that they believe gives away too much, as they threatened during pre-war negotiations aimed at preventing the Russian invasion .

On the Russian side, an agreement is only as good as Putin’s word. Even if it contains rigorous provisions designed to raise the costs of future aggression, like international peacekeepers, that may not hold him back from breaking the agreement.

This invasion did, after all, start with him launching an invasion that seemed bound to hurt Russia in the long run. Putin dragged the world into this mess; when and how it gets out of it depends just as heavily on his decisions.

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Odesa Is Defiant. It’s Also Putin’s Ultimate Target.

This most storied of ports remains the Russian leader’s obsession.

Not only because it holds the key to the Black Sea.

But because its openness and diversity embody all he wants to destroy.

President Vladimir V. Putin knows that Ukraine’s fate, its access to the sea and its grain exports hinge on Odesa. Without it, the country shrivels to a landlocked rump state.

By Roger Cohen

Photographs by Laetitia Vancon

ODESA, Ukraine — The Odesa Fine Arts Museum, a colonnaded early-19th-century palace, stands almost empty. Early in Russia’s war on Ukraine , its staff removed more than 12,000 works for safe keeping. One large portrait remained, depicting Catherine the Great, the Russian empress and founder of Odesa, as a just and victorious goddess.

Seen from below in Dmitry Levitzky’s painting, the empress is a towering figure in a pale gown with a golden train. The ships behind her symbolize Russia’s victory over the Ottoman Turks in 1792. “She’s textbook Russian imperial propaganda,” said Gera Grudev, a curator. “The painting’s too large to move, and besides, leaving it shows the Russian occupiers we don’t care.”

The decision to let Catherine’s portrait hang in isolation in the first room of the shuttered museum reflects a sly Odesan bravura: an empress left to contemplate how the brutality of Vladimir V. Putin , the Russian president who likens himself to a latter-day czar, has alienated the largely Russian-speaking population of this Black Sea port, established by her in 1794 as Moscow’s long-coveted conduit from the steppe to the Mediterranean.

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Putin’s war in Ukraine

Editor’s note: This conversation between Fiona Hill and Angela Stent was moderated by Agneska Bloch and recorded in Washington, DC on July 28, 2022 . It is part of the Talbott Papers , a series that assesses the broader implications of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.The conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

AGNESKA BLOCH It is my pleasure to be joined today by two distinguished Russia experts, Fiona Hill and Angela Stent, to discuss the war in Ukraine.

Today, Fiona, Angela, and I will examine the war’s implications for Russia, the West, and the rest of the world. But we will begin with a discussion of history. And more specifically, the version of history that informs [Russian President] Vladimir Putin’s actions and what this means for the months and years to come.

I would like to start by asking each of you to articulate what this war is about and what Ukraine means to Putin.

FIONA HILL Well, thanks so much, Agneska. It’s always just a great pleasure to be not just with you, but with Angela. Collectively, Angela and I have been studying Russia for the best part of a century. So, history is also part of our own perceptions of this. And in fact, Vladimir Putin himself has made it very clear that this is about history and culture. And in his view, the right of Russia as an imperial power — he’s not even saying really as a former imperial power — to have to dominion over lands that once, or in his view, still currently belong in the sphere of influence.

So, Putin’s made a number of statements. Putin himself has explicitly said that Ukraine belongs to Russia. Ukraine is not a stand-alone, sovereign, independent country. Ukraine is a colony, not a former colony, but still a colony. He said that quite recently. And he’s also, of course, said in the last 10 years, that the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century was the collapse of the Soviet Union. And what he meant by that was not the Soviet system, communism, or even the Soviet Union in its previous form during the Cold War, but really the Russian state.

For Putin, like many similar-minded people around him, the Soviet Union was a continuation of the Russian Empire in a different form with a different name. It didn’t include all the territory that had once belonged to the Russian Empire. And that, I think, is the important point to bear in mind here. Some of the territories of the Soviet Union that moved away from Russia after the collapse back in 1991, perhaps Putin doesn’t have the same kind of affinity with, for example.

But he’s made it very clear throughout this conflict, in fact, in the run up to this conflict, that this is all about his vision of what he sees to be the Russian world. And he wants to carry out, in terms of invading and attacking Ukraine, actions that will bring the Russian lands as he sees them, back into the fold.

ANGELA STENT So, if I can maybe continue on that. Putin has recently likened himself to Peter the Great who “gathered in the lands” after he defeated Sweden. We’re talking about the Baltic States. But in fact, I also see Putin in the tradition of Catherine the Great, whose portrait also adorns the Kremlin walls, as well as Peter’s. She famously said, “that which stops growing begins to rot. I have to expand my borders to keep my people safe.” So, the idea of defensive expansionism is something that’s very much written into Russian history of the last few centuries.  And Putin, I think, sees himself as part of that tradition.

Now, interestingly enough, when he first came to power in 2000, he said anyone who doesn’t regret the collapse of the Soviet Union has no heart and then he said, but anyone who wants to restore it has no head. But he has certainly moved beyond that. He doesn’t talk about restoring the Soviet Union, as Fiona said. But he certainly is likening himself more and more in the tradition of the imperial czars.

And the irony is [Russian] Foreign Minister [Sergey] Lavrov has just made a tour of Africa and made a speech saying, we aren’t tainted with the filth of colonialism that Britain, France, and all of these other countries are. The talk [is], “we were never a colonial power.” But, of course, Russia was a colonial power inasmuch as it conquered the peoples contiguous to it. It created the largest country on earth and subjected them to Russification. It didn’t want them to have their own traditions for a long time.

And then Lenin came along and changed that. And this is what Putin accuses Lenin of, creating a Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. As Fiona said, the Bolsheviks didn’t want to appear that they were imperial. They wanted to say, we’re completely different from the czars. But in fact, they recreated the empire.

So, I think that sense of history is very much with him. And I think subjugating Ukraine is the most important piece of this for him because he clearly has articulated that Ukraine and Russia aren’t separate nations.

He published this 5,000-word essay in July of 2021 on that. But it’s by no means the last part of it. He’s talked about the potential restoration of a Slavic empire, which would include Belarus, Ukraine, Russia, and possibly northern Kazakhstan, where a large number of Russians and Ukrainians live.

And so, this is, I think, what animates him now. He’s about to turn 70. He’s presumably thinking about his legacy. But then we really have to ask him, what kind of a legacy is he going to leave after this war is over?

From left to right: Portrait of Emperor Peter the Great (1672-1725), painted by Jean-Marc Nattier; portrait of Catherine II of Russia (1729-1796), painted by a follower of Johann Baptist von Lampi the Elder; montage of illustration from a portrait of Russian President Vladimir Putin, photograph by Jimmy Beunardeau / Hans Lucas.

BLOCH I’d love to come back to many of the things that you just mentioned, Angela. Specifically, we’ll talk in a minute about Lavrov’s trip to Africa and the messaging of Putin and others in his inner circle towards the Global South.

But I want to follow-up with Fiona. One of the many narratives that we’ve heard over the past months is that this war is about NATO. Fiona, you argued in a New York Times piece that was published before the invasion in late January of 2022, that Putin, and I quote, “wants to evict the United States from Europe.” I’m wondering if this view has changed and how you see NATO, the United States, the West, maybe even democracy, figuring into Putin’s view of history.

While we think that the United States together with the allies — Britain, and France, and Russia — liberated Europe, Putin also thinks that both World War I and World War II brought an alien power into Europe, in the form of the United States. Fiona Hill

HILL Well, yes, I mean, this obviously is one of the major issues that has circulated around this conflict. Even Pope Francis has suggested that somehow perhaps Russia was provoked by the idea of NATO expansion. But what we have to think about here is the frame of reference, again, that Putin is bringing to the table. And this is where this idea of empire and the imperial state come in.

I mean, we have our own narratives about World War II. But part of the Russian narrative of World War II, of course, is that it was one of the great victor states, and that it also helped to liberate Europe. In many respects, Putin has seen the United States — and look, other parts of the world see the United States, as Angela was alluding to during Lavrov’s trip to Africa, in the way that he’s articulated there — see the United States also as an empire.

While we think that the United States together with the allies — Britain, and France, and Russia — liberated Europe, Putin also thinks that both World War I and World War II brought an alien power into Europe, in the form of the United States. Rather, as a liberator, America becomes a kind of alien imperial occupier.

Now, I’m sure that people will be confused by that. But look, if you go around Latin America, South America, parts of Africa, and Asia, the United States does appear like an imperial power. In fact, the United States has invaded plenty of countries.

It’s acquired all kinds of territory and has been engaged in imperial wars in the past — despite having been a colony of Britain — with France and Spain.

And so, if you start to play it out there, all this history from Putin’s perspective, he sees NATO as the military wing of an imperial United States. And of course, during the Cold War, with the ideological juxtaposition of the capitalist system, the socialist system, and the communist system, that also fed into the idea. The United States was often called the imperialist, Zionist, capitalist state.

Quite a mouthful because of also its support for Israel and the antipathy between the Soviet Union and Israel back then. That’s another dimension of this, a different story, of course, perhaps for another podcast.

But, you know, here you have Russia depicting the United States as being an occupying force.

And if we think back to December of 2021, it’s hard sometimes to think back to that point because of the carnage and all the events that have happened since. The United States was subjected to a number of demands along with NATO from Russia: Pull out of Europe, take all your bases and missiles with you, and also roll NATO back to what it was in 1997. As well as having Ukraine agree to no longer seek membership of NATO and to be neutralized.

Putin believes that Russia withdrew — under duress, it has to be said — from Europe at the end of the Cold War, but the United States didn’t. So, in his mind, the United States remains in some fashion an occupying force in Europe and NATO is just a U.S. instrument. Putin completely rejects the idea that other members of NATO who joined NATO did so of their own volition and for their own reasons and that they have any agency. So, he depicts — quite successfully outside of Europe and obviously outside of NATO countries — NATO as an instrument of American imperialism.

And now, I’m afraid a lot of people have fallen into that trap as well. Because Putin’s disinformation about all of this denies the fact that Poles, and Hungarians, and Czechs, you know, initially in the 1990s wanted to join for their own reasons. Baltic States obviously did. And a host of other countries at different points wanted to join. He basically denies the fact that they wanted to join something. He essentially depicts this image of something else inexorably expanding and enlarging at everybody else’s expense.

Now, I think the kicker here, and of course, the piece that you quoted I wrote long before this — is the decision of Sweden and Finland to join NATO. And I’m sure Angela would have something to say about this as well, because Sweden just overturned 200 years of neutrality. And Finland, of course, wanted to have the option of joining NATO, but never really actually wanted to exercise that option until now.

And as they have articulated very clearly, they saw the changed circumstances as very detrimental to them. They wanted to join an organization to build something for the future for European security, but also primarily for their own defense and deterrence of Russian aggression.

BLOCH Angela, is there anything else that you’d like to add on this topic of [the] battle between different narratives of the role of the West and the role of Russia in the world order?

STENT I think the essential thing here, and I would say this is mirror imaging, because if we look back at the Soviet Union during the Cold War, of course, it completely dominated the Warsaw Pact.

If we look at any alliance structure, even the Collective Security Treaty Organization that exists, or the Eurasian Economic Union, this is still something dominated by Russia. And so, Putin depicts the United States as exactly the same. The idea that the Poles, and the Czechs, and the Baltic states, and Hungary would have voluntarily wanted to join NATO is something that maybe on some level the Kremlin understands, but they would never admit that.

They have to depict the U.S. very much in the terms that they in fact act, which is as forcing its reluctant European allies to accept American hegemony. And I think during this war, they have sharpened this narrative. Because it’s clear that the U.S. is, of course, supplying the lion share of weapons and things like that to Ukraine. Europeans are as well, but they don’t have the wherewithal to do all of that.

And so, I think that they’ve been reinforcing this narrative now. And that’s what they want the rest of the world to believe. If you read what the Chinese write or listen to what they’re saying about this, they’re all parroting that, including the Indians, by the way.

BLOCH I’d like to pick up on this idea that this narrative has been reinforced, and kind of press you on how long it can last and how long this narrative will work.

Ukraine is usually the fourth largest grain exporter in the world, but since the beginning of the war, Ukrainian grain has been blocked in Black Sea ports contributing to the global food crisis. Will there come a point when countries in the Global South will feel compelled to take a different approach to Russia because of the pain the war is causing them at home? I’m wondering also if this is why Putin seemed to make an agreement to unblock Ukrainian ports to allow the export of grain. In other words, are we seeing the limits of Russia’s strategy of blaming the West for disruptions that they are causing today?

STENT I think one of the reasons why the Russians entered into this agreement — and let’s see if it works, we don’t have any ships yet that have been able to get out from Odesa and get the grain to where it’s really needed — I think one of the reasons was even though much of the Global South is susceptible to this idea that it’s the West’s fault, that this [food shortage] is all happening. The head of the African Union visited Mr. Putin in Sochi and that’s what he was told. They’re susceptible to it. But on the other hand, there are other narratives there and I think the Russians have to be very careful that the tide doesn’t turn. I don’t know if we’ve reached the limits of it yet.

If you look at many African countries, countries in the Middle East — Latin America, which is having more and more left-wing governments now being elected — [there’s] this kind of suspicion of the United States, with seeing the United States, if you like, as a world bully, which was a phrase that the Americans talked about when they talked about the Soviet Union during the Cold War. But that [suspicion], I think, has very deep roots. And the other side of that is for countries in Africa, particularly, but [also] others, they see Russia as the heir to the Soviet Union, who supported them during the national liberation struggles, right?

South Africa, anti-apartheid, the African National Congress was supported by the Soviet Union. People trained there. Fiona and I have both been at the Valdai Conference when [South African President] Thabo Mbeki sat on the stage with Putin and they embraced each other and, you know, they’re comrades. They look upon Putin as part of these comrades in arms, not realizing this isn’t the Soviet Union. And we don’t know whether [Russia] would support these kinds of movements anymore. But that runs very deep. So, I don’t think you’re going to — this is not going to change that quickly.

Russian President Vladimir Putin (L) chats with South African President Thabo Mbeki during the group photo of G8 leaders with African nation leaders, on the final day of the G8 Summit in Sea Island, Georgia, United States, June 10, 2004. (JAPAN POOL REUTERS/Eriko Sugita MMR/GN)

BLOCH Is there anything that could change in Russia that would change this perception that there is in Latin America, in Africa, across the Middle East?

HILL I think it’s actually incumbent on us to really try to find ways of pushing back on these narratives. I mean, it is pure disinformation. As Angela said, this is not the Soviet Union of the past. Putin doesn’t come out of that same kind of tradition. He’s never served in Africa, or Asia, or Latin America, for example, when he was in the KGB.

His focus was always on Europe. He knows how to manipulate Europe. I mean, interestingly, his narratives are not getting as much traction as they used to in Europe. So, really the difficulty that we have now is what Angela calls in a book that she’s written relatively recently the West and the rest of the world. And that’s why we have to really concentrate. We have to also accept that we’re not necessarily ourselves the best messengers, meaning the United States, or the United Kingdom, or France, for example: the old colonial powers were the old empires that were active in Africa. Or more broadly in Asia as well. I mean, we do have quite a lot of baggage to overcome there.

So, we’re going to have to figure out how we work with other powers within Europe and the Ukrainians to articulate a very clear message here.

Now, on grain, I think it’s actually worth bearing in mind, as you’ve said, Agneska, very clearly that Ukraine was a major grain producer, but so is Russia. Russia was one of the dominant [producers] and so is northern Kazakhstan, of course. Angela mentioned that northern Kazakhstan is seen by Russia as part of its orbit. northern Kazakhstan, as Angela said, was settled by Slavs, Ukrainians, Russians, and Belarussians as part of the Virgin Lands expansion of agriculture in the Soviet period after World War II.

And if Putin restored control over grain production and exports, and also its fertilizer, potash — salt fertilizer, for example — and other food oils like sunflower oil, which Ukraine is actually the largest producer of, then Russia would also have an enormous amount of leverage.

And as we know, from energy manipulation with gas in Europe and also oil elsewhere, these precious commodities, I mean, food is the most intrinsic important element for human beings writ large. And if you think back to antiquity, most wars ended up with some kind of destruction of crops, agriculture, food, and stores to, in fact, induce famine. It was a way of getting populations to surrender. Putin knows that himself because his own family went through the siege of Leningrad during World War II where food supplies to Leningrad were cut off. And members of his own family almost starved to death in the case of his mother and did starve to death and die of disease in the case of his older brother. And so, Putin knows this. He’s manipulating this. And I think people have to get into their perspective: [that of] African elites and leaders, as well. I mean that they themselves don’t want to create more dependency on a hegemon, an imperial hegemon when it comes something as vital as food and food supplies. They are only increasing their vulnerability to Russia and the manipulation of all these commodity markets. Again, I don’t think we’re necessarily the best messengers for this. And so, I think that we have to be very creative and think very carefully about our public diplomacy and how we conduct this.

STENT Just maybe one thing to add. [Ukrainian] President [Volodymyr] Zelenskyy for a long time was trying to meet with the African Union countries to explain the Ukrainian position to them. When he finally got a meeting with them, I think four of them showed up. So, there’s obviously many African countries that have bought this kind of Russian line that somehow the Ukrainians are at fault, that they’re somehow inferior, and they wouldn’t even bother to meet with him. So, I think that’s an indication of how strong these narratives still are, particularly in Africa.

HILL And I do think it’s also the kind of perception of a lot of countries that they’ve become trapped in other people’s narratives. And that when we talk about approaches, we usually do them from the Western perspective. And so, if we’re going to have a multilateral approach or a multinational approach, doing what was done with the United Nations framing the agreement for Ukrainian grain along with the Turks was pretty critical. But I think other countries want to have a say in everything. They don’t want to be forced to choose sides in this. They don’t want to be, you know, pushed one way or another and they don’t want to find themselves trapped between, you know, kind of these great power clashes as they were in the past.

And certainly, I think you find that a lot of other countries are kind of systems neutral although they’re kind of buying the old narratives from the Cold War again. But they don’t see these bright, shining lines that there kind of used to be between ideologies or systems. And if Russia’s coming forward with things to offer just like China is, and the United States doesn’t seem to be having much of a policy or much traction in their region, they are asking themselves why should we be so supportive? So, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re going to actually help Russia actively in terms of breaking sanctions or in the war, obviously, you know, they’re not really in a place to do that. But they don’t necessarily then want to be taking very strong diplomatic action either.

BLOCH Fiona, I want to press you a little bit on how you’re describing that we’re not the best messengers to fight back against the information and the narratives that Putin and others are pushing across the Global South. And you said that we should be creative in finding ways to help others perhaps push this message. Can you elaborate a little bit on what you could imagine and could recommend?

HILL Yeah, I mean, it’s really like collective, strategic diplomacy; public diplomacy. I mean, we already have a lot of bilateral interactions and some multilateral fora like the United Nations and the General Assembly where we’ve been working. But I think, you know, sometimes we might want to let others get out there with the actual message while we’re providing support for them.

So, the Poles, for example, who have been partitioned and subject to so much imperial machination, including by Russia. The Poles see this as intrinsic for them, vital for them. And they’ve been trying to help the Ukrainians with their messaging. The Balts, for example, the Finns, having now wanted to join NATO, and how they articulate why. I think they’ve been very effective, at least in the European context of explaining why.

You have South Korea and Japan. Now, Japan, obviously, has its own imperial legacy in Asia but not so much in Africa. And both South Korea and Japan have these longstanding traditions of development assistance. They are well-regarded in many developing countries. And so, if they’re able to articulate that now [on] food and issues related to food, trade, [and] climate change, which of course, is all intertwined because we’re already worrying about what climate change impacts will be on food stocks.

And here’s Russia now exacerbating all of this. If those are all tied together as a national security issue, not just as a development issue, and we have some of our other partners. Australia, as a major grain producer, for example has also been a great source of development assistance. Getting together a consortium of other countries, both to help frame and support the United Nations on the grain exports from Ukraine, but also getting the messaging out to the rest of the world that we really need to take this seriously. That we need to pull together for, you know, kind of the greater good here. I mean, that’s a hackneyed phrase, of course. But this is really vital. And I think that, you know, if Putin thinks that he can control grain flows just like he can turn the gas tap on and off to Europe, everyone’s in a whole host of trouble.

STENT Yeah, he’s weaponizing both grain now and energy. And he, even though we can argue about how well Russia is doing in this war, he certainly has a lot of cards at the moment just because of the blocking of the Ukrainian ports and because, you know, Russia was until recently an energy superpower. And, the Europeans are worried about freezing in the winter.

A wheat field which is scheduled to be reaped in three weeks is pictured in Kyiv Oblast on June 30, 2022. Wheats will be stored in a warehouse as exporting is difficult due to the blockade of the Black Sea by Russia. (The Yomiuri Shimbun)

BLOCH Fiona, I want to come back [to you]. You mentioned a few countries in Russia’s neighborhood. You mentioned Poland, you mentioned the Balts. How are these other countries around Russia in its neighborhood, like Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, making sense of the invasion of Ukraine and especially thinking about how it might relate to their own future sovereignty and security?

HILL Well, I think for a lot of those countries, it’s starkly evident that this affects them directly. Belarus, you know, we keep forgetting that Belarus is being practically absorbed by Russia at this point. And in fact, when I was in government, rolling back the clock a couple of years ago, all our briefings were really on Belarus as being the most vulnerable point of weakness. And we seem to have not even noticed. Because Belarus is now being used as this launching pad for the invasion in Ukraine [so] that, to all intents and purposes, Belarus is completely and utterly under the thumb of Russia. Now, Alexander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus, doesn’t really want to be and he’s trying to kind of wiggle his way out. But it’s almost a game over for Belarus, even though there’s opposition there and some different thinking behind the scenes.

Moldova is extraordinary. I am worried, because at one point, President Lukashenko of Belarus had a bizarre press conference in which he had a map of the conflict and he pointed to Moldova as if, you know, Moldova is next. And, in fact, when we see the movement of the Russian military offensive, of course, the shelling of Odesa, and we see what they did back in 2014, after the annexation of Crimea when there was an attempt to spark up rebellions and insurgency against the central government in Ukraine, Odesa and the whole southern part of Ukraine along the Black Sea was also targeted, not just Donbas and areas around the Sea of Azov. And it looked like they were trying to kind of create a contiguous land bridge to Moldova. Angela can talk more about that as well, because it fits into history and to empire. Bessarabia, which incorporated some of modern-day Moldova, was another of the parts that were partitioned and part of it was taken into the Russian Empire.

So, all the countries that have been incorporated at one point into the Russian Empire are deeply worried because of the way that, you know, we said earlier that Russia and Putin have been speaking. And, of course, in the case of Georgia, they were already invaded. We’ve forgotten — again — that Russia invaded Georgia in 2008. And there’s still a lot of questions. Georgia’s been sort of marginalized in all of this.

Russia intervened in Kazakhstan, albeit at the request of the Kazakh president, President [Kassym-Jomart] Tokayev, after protests and what looked like a lot of inter-elite conflict there. Armenia has been recently again in a war with Azerbaijan, in which Russia seemed to have stoked the flames. And then [Russia] intervened and now has peacekeepers on the ground in Nagorno-Karabakh, which both Armenia and Azerbaijan have been trying to avoid for best part of 30 odd years. We’re continuously seeing moves behind the scenes by Russia to make sure that all of the immediate neighbors know that Russia calls the shots, or at least to make them think that they do.

STENT I think the Kazakh case is very interesting because, as Fiona said, Russian troops did intervene to help President Tokayev stay in power when the Nazarbayev Clan [the family of the previous president of Kazakhstan] wanted to try and get rid of him. But he has been singularly independent. I mean, he sat on the stage with President Putin at the St. Petersburg Economic Forum and he said, we’re not going to recognize the independence of Luhansk and Donetsk, the two so-called independent republics there. Just as we didn’t recognize South Ossetia and Abkhazia. And, you know, he has been quite critical of what’s happening.  The Kazakhs refused to send soldiers to Ukraine.

I mean, one of the things is — and I think the same was true with Armenia — the Russians tried to get some of these other countries to send troops and they refused to. And then the Russians retaliated by cutting off Kazakhstan’s access — because, of course, it’s a landlocked country — to export its oil from the Caspian consortium there.

But what’s fascinating in Kazakhstan and it may be happening in other countries, is that younger Kazakhs particularly, to get back to the question about colonialism and imperialism, they’re now saying, hey, we were the victims of Russian colonialism. [Russia] tried to suppress — you know, there wasn’t a Kazakh nation, but there were different ethnic groups or tribes that were part of this. And they’ve been trying to suppress our own history.

And so, again, what Putin is doing in Ukraine I think is sparking this kind of questioning in a number of these post-Soviet countries about their own victimhood to Russian colonialism. I think that could spell trouble for Russia in the future too.

HILL I think that’s right. And another thing that’s happening is that Russians who do not want to be part of this are fleeing in droves to all these countries Kazakhstan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia.

Initially, of course, Ukrainians were fleeing to places like Moldova, as well, on their way out further afield in Europe. So, this is having all kinds of knock-on effects, and they’re not always going to be positive of Vladmir Putin.

BLOCH I want you to both put your policy hats on for a second and ask – I want to talk a little bit about the response of the U.S. and Europe. How would you address the argument, which is being made across the political spectrum on both sides of the Atlantic, and by Sam Charap and our Brookings colleague, Jeremy Shapiro, in the New York Times, that the United States should open channels of diplomatic communication with Russia with the aim of achieving a cease-fire? I want to start with Angela on that one.

STENT Well, first of all, it takes two to tango. And we don’t really have any evidence that President Putin and the people around in the Kremlin have any interest in opening such channels. We do hear today, as we said, July 28th, that there will be a discussion between Secretary [of State Antony] Blinken and Foreign Minister Lavrov about a prisoner exchange with Brittney Griner and Paul Whelan on the one hand and presumably Viktor Bout in the United States. I mean, they haven’t been completely clear that it’s [him]. But there is some discussion going on.

But the idea that the Russians want to sit down and discuss a diplomatic solution is just way off because — Lavrov has said this, other Russian officials have said this — the time for negotiation is over. They had these negotiations in March and early April but because of what the West has done, it’s over now. So, of course, there’s nothing wrong in engaging in diplomatic channels. But if you look, who has tried to engage with Putin? Both [French] President [Emmanuel] Macron and [German] Chancellor [Olaf] Scholz and the Austrian chancellor, some other European leaders, but particularly those two. They’ve gotten nowhere. And they themselves have said that they sit there and they listen to a narrative, which they’ve heard many times before.

And I think the idea that somehow this is going to solve anything at the moment, it belies the real reality on the ground, which is that Putin hasn’t given up yet. You know, the Russians have said that obviously they’re trying to take the whole of the Donbas now. But they haven’t given up other aims. Possibly going back to Kyiv, taking other parts of Ukraine too.

The idea that somehow the United States and its allies are fanning the flames by providing weapons, I think it belies a reality. It’s true, if the West wasn’t supplying weapons, Ukraine probably would by now already have been defeated. But the Russians have made it clear that what they want — and again, they said this — is the capitulation of Ukraine and its surrender. And I’m not sure that that is the basis for a diplomatic negotiation when Ukraine isn’t losing at the moment.

The idea that the Russians want to sit down and discuss a diplomatic solution is just way off — because the time for negotiation is over. Angela Stent

G-7 Summit participants sit at the working session, while Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is connected via video conference. (REUTERS / Michael Kappeler/dpa)

HILL And let me just add to this. I mean, it’s even the framing of this, right? It’s something that the U.S. government itself, this administration said they don’t want to do, they do not want to be negotiating away Ukraine without considering what the Ukrainians want. And even if then, they should not be in the place to negotiate Ukraine’s future with Russia, Ukraine should be.

They have repeatedly said the only thing that they possible can say, which is: we writ large are trying to provide Ukraine with the best possible negotiating position. Because what Putin wants — and I mean, this is what Angela and I are both saying — is very evident. To strip Ukraine of all agency, by first of all, saying it’s a proxy war that, you know, this becomes the Flanders killing fields of World War I.

Ukraine is nothing but a place for trench warfare in a war between the West and Russia. That’s what Russia is basically saying. So, Ukraine is collateral damage.

And in fact, Russians would say that to Ukrainians at the very beginning of the war. We’re sorry this is happening to you. This is between us and the West. When, in actual fact, the Ukrainians are very clear — it’s between us and you. You invaded us and you’ve basically said Ukraine shouldn’t exist. This is a war for liberation of Ukraine after a brutal invasion. What Putin wants us to do is to think that the stakes are too high for everybody and that we should capitulate, as Angela said, and we should negotiate away Ukraine. And, I mean, basically Putin is framing this in a 19th and 20th century way. So, what this is, is really an effort to partition Poland again.

This is why the Poles are out there and the Finns are also out there now trying to help the Ukrainians. Because back in previous wars, the great powers got together and divided countries up. And this is basically what Putin’s saying. Here, come on, let’s go and divide up Ukraine.

In fact, if we go back in time to just after the annexation of Crimea in 2014, just after that, and I guess it would be February of 2015, there was a Munich Security Conference. And there were many Ukrainian leaders there and [Russian] Foreign Minister Lavrov, Sergey Lavrov — I mean, remember in Russia most people just don’t change positions. They’re all there in place indefinitely like Putin is. Lavrov pretty much encouraged the audience to carve up Ukraine.

He said Ukraine isn’t a real country. It’s a mishmash of Ukrainians, and Russians, and Poles, and Romanians, and Hungarians. And it was basically “have at it,” and Slovaks as well. And everybody in the audience was taken aback. It’s a rerun of earlier imperial history.

So, what Putin wants more than anything else is the big boys to sit down at the table. He loves Scholz and Macron and everybody, you know, running to see them because he denies that the Ukrainians have any role. And the same thing happened after the invasion of Georgia. The Russians refused to treat the Georgians any differently from the Abkhaz and the South Ossetians and others.

And Armenia and Azerbaijan, they wanted to have equivalency with the Nagorno-Karabakh separatists.  Russia always denies what is the object of its ire: any kind of sovereignty. Again, calling Ukraine a colony. It’s basically now saying it’s a colony of the United States.

I myself, back in 2019, had a rather bizarre experience when I was in government where the Russians proposed a swap for Ukraine and Venezuela. Suggesting that as Venezuela — we were having a crisis with Venezuela, at the time after Nicolas Maduro was, you know, basically trying to stay in power indefinitely — that if we pulled out of Ukraine, they would pull out of Venezuela where they’d sent in some security people to help prop up Maduro. And it just reinforced the way that they think. And we should not play into that way of thinking.

STENT Yeah, and similarly Radislav Sikorski says that when he was foreign minister of Poland, they suggested to him, why don’t we partition. You take the western part of Ukraine, which used to be part of Poland, of course, before or at some point was anyway before World War II in the interwar years, and we’ll take the eastern part. Because Putin always comes back to Yalta. Putin has repeatedly said, you know, the Yalta system was very good. It kept the peace. And so, again, you divide the world up. In that case between the Soviet Union and the United States. Now it would be a tripartite one with China.

That is his vision. It’s a 19th century vision of, this is our sphere of [where] I would take control now. It’s no longer a sphere of influence. That’s what he wants. And then the other great powers have their own sphere. That’s what he’s aiming for.

BLOCH Can you say more about the difference between a sphere of influence and a sphere of control?

We’re in a sphere of control, which is what the Russians want: a government in Ukraine that is pro-Russian and where no pro-Western candidate would really ever win. Angela Stent

STENT Sure. In a sphere of influence, I go back to the analogy of post-war Eastern Europe. So, a sphere of influence would be where the governments say you have a government in Ukraine that was more or less freely elected, but understood that, you know, its foreign policy had to be oriented towards Moscow, that it would give up any attempts to join either the European Union — of course, now it does have an official counted membership — or NATO. But domestically, you know, it would be somewhat different from Russia.

But I think by now we’re in a sphere of control, which is what the Russians want: a government in Ukraine that is pro-Russian and, you know, and where no pro-Western candidate would really ever win. So, the foreign policy. And then domestically, having everything oriented again, toward Russia excepting that Russia has a droit de regard over this region but not seeking any further integration with the West. And that’s what the Russians have said.

I think that’s where we are now. So, we talk about Putin, the idea of spheres of influence, but Putin’s gone beyond that already with what he’s doing in Ukraine and Belarus. I mean, Belarus [is] really being controlled by Russia now.

HILL And it’s not just the West either is it really? It’s because of just Ukraine having any kind of independence or autonomy. I mean, it’s basically now Ukraine would be just a subsidiary of Russia. Which is where, you know, Belarus was headed.

Look, in the period of around 2014 when Armenia was also trying to secure an association agreement with Europe, the Russians told the Armenians, we own you. Don’t even think about it.

Ukraine was already on the track of moving away. But Armenia was incredibly dependent on Russia for security protection, because of the whole war with Azerbaijan and the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh and also [they] had a Russian base there. And Armenia’s economy was completely dependent on remittances from Armenians living and working in Russia. And the Russians literally said to them, we own you. Don’t even think about moving in that direction because they wanted Ukraine as well as Armenia. And what Angela mentioned before, the Eurasian Economic Union. So, in a way, Putin is a monopolist, you know, if we want to think of it in that regard. And he doesn’t want anybody franchising themselves off in a different direction.

BLOCH What should the U.S. and Europe be doing that they’re not doing today in the context of responding to this war if it’s not negotiating, which I have understood you to be saying buys into a lot of what Putin wants? Is there anything else?  Also, because you were saying we’re not the right messengers for countering the information war and the narrative.

HILL I think not negotiating is perhaps maybe too starkly put because, I mean, we do need to have ways of engaging with Russia. Every time you say words like this, one has a negative connotation, or some have a positive connotation. But we’re kind of stuck with the words that we have, right? Negotiation, as Angela is basically saying, implies that we actually have something there that we can talk about and we can compromise on and Russia doesn’t want to compromise.

But in terms of some kind of engagement, it doesn’t mean a positive kind of engagement. We’ve got to figure out where we are with all of this. So, we can’t like basically cut off all channels of connection with Russia. We need to have deconfliction. We need to kind of create some degrees of restraint. There is actually quite a bit of restraint still going on in this conflict. This could be far worse than it already is. It looks terrible enough, but just to be clear, there is some restraint going on here because I don’t think that Russia really wants a full-on war with NATO. They’ve been avoiding that the entire way. They much prefer to do things by covert action. We have to remember we have actually had a shooting exchange with the Russians in Deir al-Zour Province in Syria in 2018, when covert operatives from their paramilitary organization that goes under the rubric of the so-called bargaining group shot at American special forces. And we had very clear lines of engagement and we said to them, if you shoot, we will shoot back. Now, the uniformed regular military didn’t do that.

But, you know, the Russians are always trying to find how far can they go without getting some kind of major response. Now, they are getting [a] response from us because we’re supporting Ukraine in this defensive effort and this is driving Russia nuts. But we still have to keep these channels going behind the scenes because again, as the administration is saying quite rightly, if Ukraine wants to enter into a negotiation with Russia, then we have to give them the best possible negotiating position.

What we have to do is — I mean, we’ve all talked about this — retain our unity. And trying to expand the group of countries that are being supportive of Ukraine and are calling Russia out. I mean, I really do think that at some point if Russia started to find that some of their critical bilateral relationships with the rest of the world were being negatively affected by this, then there might be some change. And we have to be able to constrain Russia’s ability. I think we have to be careful about how we talk about that. That’s the idea of [the American diplomat and historian] George Kennan in fact, during the Cold War: How do you constrain Russia from doing some of the things that it does? You know, how do you head them off at the pass on all kinds of ways in which they can exploit things, on grain, on energy, you know, our own systems, the way that they have done up until now.

STENT I agree completely. I think, yes, we have to maintain some kind of communication with Russia, but we really do have to maintain Western unity. But we’ve seen an example of this where, at the beginning of the war, the Israelis were very wary of criticizing Russia or doing anything because Israel really depends on a relationship with Russia, a deconfliction arrangement so that when it’s attacked by Hezbollah, it can strike back, and [so] that the Russians sort of intervene in a way that enables Israel to do that.

But I think after lengthy discussions with the United States, the Israelis realized that they couldn’t maintain completely a position of neutrality. So, even if they haven’t joined the sanctions, what they’ve said and some of the things they’ve done have really irked the Russians and now we see Russia cracking down on, for instance, the Jewish Agency, which is the agency which, you know, in Russia — well, all over the world — but in Russia too, [people contact if they] want to emigrate [to Israel]. The Russians are not happy that so many people have emigrated there, particularly people with high tech skills. They’re really clamping down and they’re threatening the Israelis. There’s a delegation going there, I think, as we speak to try and work this out.

But that is an example of a country that is a strong ally of the United States and of many European countries. And where even taking a somewhat more critical stance towards Russia than the Russians liked has met with a response from the Russians that the Israelis see [as] potentially threatening their own security.

HILL I think that’s actually one of the things that we need to do. We need to factor in all our other partners’ weaknesses and vulnerabilities and try to figure out how we address them with them. I mean, I think that that’s one of the reasons why the rest of the world — it feels like they really don’t want to commit here or to really do anything. Because are we going to have their backs? Are we going to help them? I mean, we haven’t got a great track record of doing that. Everyone is basically asking here, not just what is in it for us? But are you going to help us, actively, if something goes wrong? The United States has been incredibly supportive of Israel and we’ve got these very close relations. But are we addressing this? Are we trying to help them [to] think this through? We should be. And that’s kind of a larger pattern. Japan, South Korea, you know, many of our other allies and partners, we need to be working very closely with them consulting and trying to figure out how we all work together.

STENT And not have them subject to Russian intimidation because the Russians are very good at this, you know.  Putin is a [former] KGB case officer and intimidation is the name of the game. And they’re playing that quite successfully at the moment.

HILL What the Russians are doing to the Israelis, they’ve also done in a similar fashion to the Finns. Finland had a lot of intermarriage. And Finland is a place where a lot of Russians have gone. Not in the same way that they’ve gone to Israel, of course. But they’ve also played with the same kinds of things. You know, going after Finnish-Russian mixed marriages and the children and laying claim to the children of those marriages. Making it difficult for Finnish government bodies to act across the border, accusing the Finns of stirring up the Finno-Ugric populations inside of Russia itself. These kinds of tactics that they’ve now adopted and turned on the Israelis, this is a classic form. What we need to do is stand in solidarity with everyone and call it out. Say, look, this is what they do every single time. And it’s, if we get picked off, the divide and conquer, then this is exactly where our vulnerabilities and weakness will be.

BLOCH I think we only have time for one last question. And I want to ask, how does this end for Ukraine, for Russia, for the rest of the world? I’m going to start with Angela.

STENT It doesn’t end very soon. You know, you might have the possibility by the end of the year of some kind of a pause. I mean, Russia has a manpower shortage. The Wagner Group that Fiona already mentioned has apparently been recruiting people from prisons to join the fight. The Ukrainians also have a manpower problem. They don’t have infinite numbers of people who can serve in the military. And both sides are losing, you know, the casualty and the death rate is very high.

So, you could have a pause, maybe a cease-fire. But that would only be temporary. Because unless Putin is willing to redefine what he means by victory, and we haven’t seen any of that yet, he will want to continue fighting. The onus will really be to maintain Western solidarity and unity. It’s going to be, as I mentioned before, much more difficult for the Europeans, particularly for the Germans, for instance. This winter, if they’re freezing, if they’re not getting the Russian gas, if they don’t have enough alternative sources of energy, they’re going to say, well, maybe — and there are people arguing that already in Germany — we should take a different tactic because maybe then the Russians will come back and give us more gas. So, this could be a very long, drawn-out conflict. It’s very hard to see, I mean, we don’t know what the definition of winning is for the Ukrainians. Officially, President Zelenskyy and his colleagues there have said it means taking back all the territory from the Russians including eventually the whole of the Donbas and one day maybe Crimea. I think that’s not on the cards. But I think even to get the Russians to withdraw to where they were on February 23 [2022], the day before the invasion, is going to be very difficult.

So, it could be a stalemate. It could be more of a frozen conflict. It’s obviously not a frozen conflict now. It’s a very hot conflict. That might be one outcome further down the road. But it’s very hard to see this ending anytime soon.

There’s a long history over the last 30 years of pressure being exerted on Ukraine and very clear goals of bringing Ukraine back into the fold. And we have to address that and not be deluded into thinking that there’s one fix for all of this. Fiona Hill

HILL I agree with that. And I think that what we have to be very mindful about is not being tempted to [enter] into negotiations when there is [a] pause in the action. That would then just create the space for Russia to regroup and press ahead again, because we’ve seen this over and over again. Since 2014, there’ve been all these agreements, negotiated agreements in the Donbas region, Minsk I, Minsk II. There seem to be endless Minsk agreements that shaped Ukraine’s past, present, and probably its future as well.

And none of those have particularly held. And if we look at other conflicts in the region, in the case of Chechnya, for example, inside of Russia itself in the 1990s, there was the Khasavyurt Accord. I personally worked on it in 1997. It was all, it was just a truce. It became somewhat meaningless because the Russians didn’t want to compromise and they were just waiting to regroup to then press forward with the original sets of goals.

The Ukrainian government has set up a task force, I guess one could call it, to kind of think about security guarantees for Ukraine to figure out how to prevent further outbreaks of war. We saw in the case of Nagorno-Karabakh, of course, you had a ceasefire back in 1994, and then continuous outbreaks of conflict resulting in a war again in 2020 and a complete change of things on the ground. We can’t think that that’s resolved either, unless you have all kinds of other mechanisms put in place. So, I think we have to bear that in mind and think about, what mechanisms can we put together? And how can we ensure that if there is actually some [deal], even if it’s a truce, how could we make it something permanent and not temporary? And not fall into thinking that there will be some compromise that will always resolve everything. I mean, we still have people who will say, well, this war could have been ended if we’d neutralized Ukraine and basically persuaded Ukraine to give up on its NATO accession. But I would argue that there would always have been something where Ukraine would have been accused by the Russians of overstepping the bounds. Because if we go back to the immediate period after Ukraine got independence, they were already in the crosshairs of Russian nationalists, putting pressure on Ukraine over a whole variety of issues before NATO or anything else was even on the cards there. So, there’s a long history over the last 30 years of pressure being exerted on Ukraine and very clear goals of bringing Ukraine back into the fold. And we have to address that and not be deluded into thinking that there’s one fix for all of this.

About the Authors

Senior fellow – foreign policy, center on the united states and europe.

Fiona Hill is a senior fellow in the Center on the United States and Europe in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings. She recently served as deputy assistant to the president and senior director for European and Russian affairs on the National Security Council from 2017 to 2019. From 2006 to 2009, she served as national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia at The National Intelligence Council. She is author of “ There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the 21st Century ” and co-author of “ Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin ” (Brookings Institution Press, 2015).

Angela Stent

Nonresident senior fellow – foreign policy, center on the united states and europe.

Angela Stent is senior adviser to the Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies and professor emerita of government and foreign service at Georgetown University. She is also a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and co-chairs its Hewett Forum on Post-Soviet Affairs. From 2004-06 she served as national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia at the National Intelligence Council. From 1999 to 2001, she served in the Office of Policy Planning at the U.S. Department of State. She is the author of “ Putin%u2019s World: Russia Against the West and With the Rest ” and “ The Limits of Partnership: US-Russian Relations in the Twenty-First Century .” 

Agneska Bloch

Former senior research assistant, center on the united states and europe, brookings, recommended reading.

Putin’s World: Russia Against the West and With the Rest

There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century

Acknowledgments.

Interview preparation: Lucy Seavey and Jonathan Hogan

Editorial: Alex Dimsdale

Web layout: Rachel Slattery

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When Vladimir Putin talks about Ukraine, he sounds like a spurned, abusive husband. A 5,000-word essay that the Russian president published in July, entitled “On the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians”, is full of protestations of undying love for Ukrainians — combined with threats of violence if the love is not reciprocated. Ukrainians are variously portrayed as the blood brothers of Russians and as neo-Nazis.

Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, joked that Putin must have a lot of time on his hands, to be able to write such a long article. But the contents of Putin’s essay look increasingly alarming when read alongside obvious preparations in Moscow for an invasion of Ukraine. There are now close to 90,000 Russian troops, as well as tanks and artillery, deployed near the Ukrainian border. Last week, Putin made a threatening speech, warning the west not to cross Russia’s “red lines”.

Biden administration officials are briefing that Russia is planning an invasion of Ukraine “as soon as early 2022”. Policymakers in Washington and London fear that these war plans show there is genuine aggressive intent in the Kremlin and that it comes from the top.

Searching for the sources of Russian conduct, western officials point to Putin’s July opus , which is regarded as an authentic expression of his deeply-held views. In it he emphasises the ties of history, language, ethnicity and religion that link Russia and Ukraine. He points out that these ties long predate the Soviet Union. Indeed Putin, who is often accused of nostalgia for the USSR, condemns Soviet leaders who set a “most dangerous time bomb” under the ties between Russia and Ukraine — by granting any part of the USSR the right to secede from the union. “Russia was robbed, indeed,” the president fumes.

Putin insists that Ukraine is a failed state being led astray by scheming foreigners. This is where his argument takes a truly alarming turn. The west, he suggests, is playing a “dangerous geopolitical game” and is intent on using Ukraine as a “springboard against Russia”. This argument could clearly be used to portray a Russian invasion of Ukraine as defensive in nature.

To avert a conflict, the Russians are demanding an explicit guarantee that Ukraine will never join Nato. That demand is likely to be central to the conversation between Putin and Joe Biden, scheduled for this week.

Moscow’s demand sounds like something Washington might consider. The reality is that Ukraine is a long way from joining Nato anyway. Making that reality explicit may not seem like such a momentous concession — particularly if it can avert a conflict.

But there are two reasons why the US and its Nato allies will be very reluctant to make that deal. The first is a matter of principle: Ukraine is a sovereign nation. It should be able to make its own choices without great powers making deals over the country’s head.

The second reservation is prudential. Would giving Russia what it wants really end the possibility of a war? The logic of Putin’s love-hate letter is that the very independence of Ukraine is an abomination — a historical anomaly that has to be reversed. Make a concession now and Putin might move on to the next demand. Russia has already annexed Crimea, part of Ukraine, in 2014, and also demands a veto over aspects of its domestic policies.

Putin’s fury about Ukraine seems to be about more than acknowledging a Russian “sphere of influence”. The contrast with his relatively relaxed attitude to Kazakhstan is instructive. Like Ukraine, Kazakhstan was part of the Russian empire and then the Soviet Union, before becoming an independent state.

Putin has attempted to rebuild Moscow’s influence in Central Asia through the formation of a Eurasian Economic Union , including Kazakhstan. But Moscow’s ambitions have run straight into those of Beijing. In 2013, Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, announced China’s “Belt and Road Initiative” in Astana, the Kazakh capital. Kazakhstan now trades much more with China than Russia. Although some in Putin’s United Russia party still assert a territorial claim on northern Kazakhstan, the fact that this former Soviet republic is slipping out of Moscow’s zone of influence has not met with much resistance from the Kremlin.

The Russians would argue that the difference is that Kazakhstan has not cultivated defence ties with China. But the growing closeness between Astana and Beijing has clear security implications.

The real difference between Kazakhstan and Ukraine may be that Kazakhstan shows no sign of becoming a democracy. Ukraine, by contrast, has consistently resisted efforts to set up an authoritarian regime of the type that Putin has installed in Russia. The Ukrainian system is corrupt and dysfunctional in many ways. But the country has elections that are not a foregone conclusion, and a vibrant civil society.

As Putin accurately observes, Ukraine and Russia are closely linked by history and culture. So the fact that Ukraine has taken a different political path from Russia raises awkward questions for the Kremlin — which likes to argue that “western liberalism” is completely unsuited to Russia. Perhaps that is the real reason why Ukraine excites such fury in Putin. Containing that fury, through the threat of massive economic sanctions, is suddenly the most urgent challenge facing the western alliance.

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​Letters in response to this column :

Belgium’s model can be part of a Ukraine solution  /  From Corrado Pirzio-Biroli, Brussels, Belgium

Putin’s policy of dominating the ‘near abroad’ owes a lot to oil ​ / ​ From Daniel Gros, Distinguished Fellow, Centre for European Policy Studies, Brussels, Belgium

West erred by failing to accommodate cold war foe / From Randhir Singh Bains, London IG2, UK

History shows disputes on two fronts risk disaster / From Clive Bellingham, Zurich, Switzerland

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International Edition

Russian troops mass on Ukraine's border. West worries this isn't like the last time.

MOSCOW — It is by now a familiar pattern: Russian troops mass near the Ukrainian border , triggering ratcheting rhetoric and jitters across Europe and the United States that war might be imminent, before a flurry of diplomacy calms nerves .

Officials and experts say that this time is different — and there are several clues giving them genuine concern that the current gambit by Russian President Vladimir Putin might be for real, and the start of a conflict that could drag in Europe and even the U.S. itself.

Putin has deployed more than 90,000 troops along Russia’s border with Ukraine, matching the force that he sent and withdrew in the spring . But whereas those troops maneuvered in open daylight, now they have mostly been far less showy, moving under the cover of darkness.

And Moscow's rhetoric has noticeably hardened in recent months, saying it will not accept what it sees as a deepening of ties between Ukraine and the West.

“Moscow is so positioned that they can move with very little warning,” said John Herbst, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine who is now a senior director at the Atlantic Council, which describes itself as a nonpartisan think tank. “They’re certainly threatening. And they’re in a position that if they want to, they can do it.”

Few people, if anyone, outside Putin’s inner circle know what he’s planning. Analysts say this could be another attempt to gain leverage over Ukraine , and a warning to the West not to meddle in the Kremlin's strategic and spiritual backyard. But some reckon war is far from impossible.

“We’re deeply concerned by evidence that Russia has made plans for significant aggressive moves against Ukraine,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Wednesday in Sweden ahead of a meeting of the the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, an international security organization.

“We don’t know whether President Putin has made the decision to invade,” he added. “We do know that he’s putting in place the capacity to do so in short order should he so decide.”

He added that he thought it was “likely the presidents will speak directly in the future.”

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Saturday that Biden and Putin have plans to hold a video call on Tuesday. "The presidents will decide for themselves" the length of their conservation, Peskov added.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg on Tuesday warned Russia would pay a “high price” if it invaded.

Blinken met Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Thursday at the sidelines of the OSCE meeting in Stockholm. Blinken is also meeting Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba.

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Such an incursion is not hypothetical. In 2014, Russia invaded the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea , while supporting separatists fighting a war in eastern Ukraine that has since claimed 14,000 lives.

Russia's fixation with Ukraine is as much about nationalist emotion as it is about strategy. In July, Putin published a 5,000-word essay arguing Ukraine is part of “historical Russia” and that the two countries were “essentially the same historical and spiritual space.”

Putin has previously called the collapse of the Soviet Union, of which Ukraine was a part, “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”

Russian officials deny they are planning an invasion, saying the troops are deployed for military exercises. The Russian Foreign Ministry, which has previously criticized NATO for military drills in the neighboring Black Sea, accused Ukraine on Wednesday of sending 125,000 troops to the border region.

These tit-for-tat exchanges are commonplace. But what has changed is Putin’s rhetoric. Previously, he has opposed Ukraine joining NATO , something that country has wanted to do for years but has faced opposition from the alliance , which says Kyiv has not done enough to fight domestic corruption.

On Tuesday, Putin said he had new “red lines” — Washington and its allies must not deploy missiles in Ukraine capable of hitting Moscow. “What are we to do in such a scenario? We will have to then create something similar in relation,” he told an investment forum in the Russian capital.

This is “no longer just about Ukraine joining NATO,” Vladimir Frolov, a foreign policy analyst in Moscow, said. Russia is trying to prevent Ukraine from “becoming a NATO aircraft carrier,” he said.

The U.S. has committed $2.5 billion assistance for Ukraine’s military since 2014. The most significant weapons are anti-tank Javelin missiles, given on condition they be stored hundreds of miles away from the front lines.

Still, Putin is operating from a position of relative strength. Constitutional changes in April eliminated Russia’s conventional term limits and will allow him to rule until 2036 . His domestic approval rating, which soared after the invasion of Crimea, is lower now but still sits in the high 60s, according the Levada-Center , an independent Russian pollster.

By contrast, the U.S. has made it clear that China now ranks far ahead of Russia in its priorities. And European countries remain divided on how harshly to treat Moscow, with some cautious not to jeopardize their economic ties with Russia and its dominance over the continent's gas supplies.

Another dynamic that has changed is Ukraine’s claim that Russia is waging an “energy war,” as Ukrainian Deputy Energy Minister Maxim Nemchinov described it to domestic TV in November.

He accused Russia of blocking Ukraine’s thermal coal imports from Kazakhstan. Kyiv also has a long-running grievance that the Nord Stream 2 pipeline between Russia and Germany will circumvent Ukraine as the main gas route into Europe, depriving the country of lucrative transit fees.

Most officials and experts agree war cannot be ruled out .

The State Department “can’t speak to Russia’s intentions,” Karen Donfried, assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, told a briefing last week.

And Washington isn’t the only one kept guessing.

“Anyone who claims they can read Putin’s mind is selling you something,” said Michael Kofman, a senior research scientist at CNA, a research group based in Virginia.

There is just as much chance that this is only another Putin ploy: To gain leverage in Ukraine’s stalled peace talks, to deter the West, and to win another summit with President Joe Biden.

War would come at a huge cost for Russia. Fighting a highly improved Ukrainian army would incur deaths and inevitable Western sanctions. Putin “pays no price for simply bluffing. Whereas he pays a price if he actually goes in,” Herbst said.

Still, given the buildup of troops and increasingly hardening rhetoric from Moscow, “you can’t operate under the assumption that they are bluffing,” Kofman said.

Matthew Bodner reported from Moscow, Dan De Luce and Abigail Williams reported from Washington, Alexander Smith reported from London, and Veronika Melkozerova reported from Kiev.

Matthew Bodner is a producer and reporter for NBC News.

Dan De Luce is a reporter for the NBC News Investigative Unit. 

Alexander Smith is a senior reporter for NBC News Digital based in London.

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History wars: what putin’s attempts to rewrite the past say about russia’s future.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s past came into sharper focus recently with the admission that, in the tumultuous days following the collapse of the Soviet Union, he earned cash on the side as a taxi driver .

“Sometimes I had to moonlight and drive a taxi,” Putin said in an excerpt of an interview for “Russia. New History,” a state television documentary. “It is unpleasant to talk about but, unfortunately, this took place.”

The disclosure, in fact, tells us very little about the post-Soviet fortunes of the former KGB officer. It was fairly common in the economic free-for-all of the 1990s for Russian drivers to pick up passengers for a few extra rubles. In the days before ride-hailing apps, all you had to do to was flag down a passing car and agree on a fare.

Putin’s taxicab confession, then, was not a moment of candor – the Kremlin, after all, closely guards the real details of his personal life. But this minor biographical aside does reveal something about Putin’s overarching political goal: To rewind the tape to 1991 and compose an alternative script for the decades that followed.

Related article Putin rues Soviet collapse, says he moonlit as a taxi driver to survive economic crisis

“We turned into a completely different country. And what had been built up over 1,000 years was largely lost,” Russia’s longtime leader lamented in the interview.

In recent months, Putin’s pet project has been an attempt to rewrite one of the most significant chapters in recent European history: The appearance, in 1991, of a sovereign and independent Ukraine – right next door to Russia.

Back in June, during a nationally televised call-in show, Putin pronounced that Ukrainians and Russians were a “single people.” He then elaborated on the subject in a 5,000-word article that lamented the “artificial division of Russians and Ukrainians.”

Stripped to its essence, Putin’s argument was that Ukraine and Ukrainians are part of a larger “historical Russia” – and that modern-day Ukraine, which gained independence in 1991, was merely the by-product of administrative and territorial boundaries cooked up by the Soviet leadership.

The Russian president made no mention, of course, of the millions of Ukrainians who voted overwhelmingly in support of independence .

No, in Putin’s view, post-Soviet Ukraine became a tool of the West for weakening Russia.

“Ukraine was dragged into a dangerous geopolitical game aimed at turning Ukraine into a barrier between Europe and Russia, a springboard against Russia,” he wrote. “Inevitably, there came a time when the concept of ‘Ukraine is not Russia’ was no longer an option. There was a need for the ‘anti-Russia’ concept which we will never accept.”

Put otherwise, Putin seemed to be testing out a historical justification – should the need arise – for regime change in Ukraine.

Related gallery In pictures: The history of the Cold War

And in the months that followed Putin’s foray into history, the build-up of Russian troops on the border with Ukraine sent a clear signal that invasion was an option very much in play.

Ukrainian security assessments say Russia has boosted troop strength near its borders to 120,000 personnel, and the US has shared intelligence with NATO allies and European partners on troop and equipment movements near Ukraine that US officials believe point to a build-up for a potential invasion.

The Kremlin denies plans to attack Ukraine, and the Defense Ministry says “regular” winter military drills in the military region that partly borders Ukraine are taking place.

And on Thursday during his annual marathon news conference, Putin told gathered domestic and international journalists, that Russia does “not want any military action” but pointed the finger at the US and NATO.

“We asked directly that there should be no further NATO movement to the East. The ball is in their court.” He later added, “I feel like we are on different planets sometimes.”

Call it self-pity as foreign policy. The humiliations of the 1990s – from the loss of superpower status to a side hustle as a taxi driver in St. Petersburg – serve to justify Putin’s Great Russia restoration project.

To be sure, Putin’s grievances over Ukraine are nothing new. He sounded the same themes in his 2007 speech at the Munich Security Conference : The duplicity of an expanding NATO alliance right on Russia’s doorstep and the hidden hand of the West, stirring up street protests in Ukraine.

The president may be playing amateur historian, but his historical memory is decidedly selective.

Prosecutors in Putin’s Russia have moved to shut down the International Memorial Society, a respected civic organization dedicated to documenting and educating the public about the history of Soviet totalitarianism, including the Gulag system of forced labor, the imprisonment of dissidents and the waves of executions that took place in the USSR.

Related article Checkmate. Putin has the West cornered

In his recent Nobel Peace Prize lecture , Russian investigative journalist Dmitry Muratov defended Memorial, calling the organization a “friend of the people” – a fair characterization of an organization that wages an often lonely struggle to preserve the memory of the Soviet system’s victims.

Memorial has been designated a “foreign agent” by the Kremlin.

Muratov also had something to say about Putin’s favorite subject, Ukraine, saying Russia’s backing of separatists in the country’s east had actually scuttled the chances for Russian-Ukrainian friendship.

“Moreover, in [the] heads of some crazy geopoliticians, a war between Russia and Ukraine is not something impossible any longer,” said Muratov, who covered the conflict in Russia’s breakaway region of Chechnya in the 1990s. “But I know that wars end with identifying [dead] soldiers and exchanging prisoners.”

That’s not to say that Putin will invade Ukraine. Pressed in late October about how he proposed to stop NATO’s potential expansion into the Eastern European nation, Putin said: “Unfortunately, I will probably have to disappoint you – I do not yet know the answer to this question.”

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