The Ukraine War Edition

Special Companion to

EastErn EuropE! 2nd Edition

EASTERN EUROPE! 2ND EDITION

Everything You Need to Know About the History (and More) of a Region that Shaped Our World and Still Does

Everything You Need to Know About the History (and More!) of a Region that Shaped Our World and Still Does

The Ukraine War Edition

An FAQ on Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine

“The problem is that history has never known where Russia precisely begins and where it ends. And there is a certain problem in this. Nevertheless, I am a champion not only of individual freedom but also of the freedom of nations.”

—retired Czech president and former communist-era dissident Vaclav Havel, 20091

“C’est pire qu’un crime, c’est une faute.”

(“It is worse than a crime; it is a mistake.”)

Antoine Boulay de la Meurthe, a legislative deputy in the French parliament, upon the execution of Louis Antoine de Bourbon, Duke of Enghien, on Napoleon’s orders, 1804 (often misattributed to French foreign minister Charles Maurice de Talleyrand)

“Russia is Putin. Russia exists only if there is Putin. There is no Russia without Putin.”

Kremlin policy architect Vyacheslav Volodin, in a policy meeting at the Valdai Club in Sochi, Russia, November 20142

“Unwilling to rest on the foot of conscience, my Russia took a few big leaps, pushing everyone around, but then slipped and collapsed with a crash, destroying everything around it. And now it is floundering in a pool of either mud or blood with broken bones and the poor, robbed population, surrounded by the tens of thousands of victims of the most stupid and senseless war of the 21st century.”

—Russian dissident Alexei Navalny (1976–2024) in a statement in a courtroom before he was once again sentenced for political crimes, July 20233

1 “Transcript: RFE/RL Interview With Vaclav Havel.” (2009 March 27). Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty. Retrieved from: https://www.rferl.org/a/Interview_Vaclav_Havel_Global_ Crisis_NATO_Self_Determination/1563288.html

2 Zygar, 2016: p. 309

3 Алексей Навальный (Alexei Navalny). (2023 July 20). “‘Conscience and intellect’. Navalny’s last word in his ‘extremism’ trial.” YouTube. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=7NeQK9HJIvg

I cannot believe there is a war in Europe again. As a student in Hungary in the late 1980s and early 1990s with an apartment on a small side-street, I used to walk to school each day glancing occasionally at the splotches on the houses I was passing where plaster had cracked and broken, and fallen—revealing bullet holes and pockmarks from shrapnel beneath. Though this was on just some little insignificant street in Hungary’s fourth-largest city, World War II had raged down my street once. My landlady, who was a little girl in the 1940s and had grown up on this street, recounted tales of both the German and Soviet soldiers. Why would anyone want to repeat those experiences?

I am cognizant that in releasing this supplement during the Ukraine War, it may quickly become dated, so my goal here is to provide some background on the events and address many of the historical questions that are getting kicked around in the media and by some of the war’s participants. There is, of course, a lot of politics swirling furiously around these events, but I will try to avoid most of that, staying focused on what has happened and what events got us here, and essentially to put the news you see each day about this war into a larger, Eastern European context for you.

• So, Ukrainian isn’t just a dialect of Russian? ..........................

• Isn’t Crimea Russian? Hasn’t it always been Russian? 60

• So how did Ukraine end up with Crimea before 1991? ........ 64

• Why doesn’t Ukraine just give Russia some of its territory (like Crimea or the Donbas), in exchange for peace?......................................................................................

• But isn’t Ukraine corrupt?

• Is Ukraine Nazi or fascist, like Putin claims? ..........................

• Are you biased in favor of Ukraine in this war?

• Did NATO expansion cause this war? .....................................

• OK, so even if objectively NATO didn’t pose a threat to Russia, aren’t Russian perceptions still important? .......... 77

• Did NATO promise Gorbachev not to expand into Eastern Europe?...................................................................

• Why did NATO expand into Eastern Europe? .......................

• Has NATO expansion strengthened or weakened security in

• If NATO isn’t a threat to Russia, why does Putin see it that way?

How has the war impacted the rest of Eastern Europe?

Is it possible this war may ignite other conflicts elsewhere in

• What does all this talk of “decolonizing” Eastern European or Slavic Studies mean?

I. The War

Wherein we’ll try to take the current crisis apart, addressing some commonly asked questions. Some of these answers we’ll delve into in greater detail later in this section, but for now, we’ll just directly address these common questions:

Figure 1.1. A Timeline of Russian-Ukrainian Relations Since 1900

Source: Eastern Europe!, by Tomek Jankowski

Q: Why did Russia invade Ukraine?

A: The short answer is, because Russia once ruled Ukraine before, and Putin feels Russia therefore has an eternal right to rule over Ukraine again. It’s like a British prime minister deciding that Britain can only be great if it rules Ireland again. As explored through Chapters 4–6 in this book, Russia came to rule over eastern Ukraine from 1667 on, and the rest of Ukraine from the 1770s on. When Tsarist Russia collapsed into revolution in 1917 Ukraine almost broke free, but ended up instead being divided in half between the Soviet Union and Poland. After World War II, the Soviet Union regained all of Ukraine, until its collapse in 1991. The slightly longer answer is that Putin and the class of people dependent on him who rule Russia still think of Russia as an empire. They deeply resent the collapse of the USSR, and see that collapse not as the inevitable result of a corrupt and poorly led state disintegrating but instead as Russia’s greatness having been stolen by somebody (or some entity)—the West? Ever since he achieved power in 1999, Putin

has sought to restore that greatness—meaning, rebuild Russia’s empire. Russian nationalists like Putin see Ukraine as Russia’s doorstep, as the first puzzle piece in any Russian empire. Putin believes that if Russia can’t rule Ukraine, it is no longer an empire, and that means (in his Social Darwinian mind) it will end up being ruled by another empire.

Figure 1.2. The Dire Military Situation in Ukraine in mid-March 2022

Source: Institute for the Study of War4

Q: OK, so why invade Ukraine now?

A: This is a good question, and one nobody really knows the answer to (except Putin himself). Why now? Putin claimed in his speech the morning of the invasion that Russia had to stop NATO in Ukraine—either NATO influence in Ukraine, or Ukraine joining NATO?—but there was nothing about to happen on that front in 2022. The idea of Ukraine joining NATO

4 “Time-lapse of Assessed Control of Terrain in Ukraine, February 23rd, 2022, to September 30th, 2023.” Institute for the Study of War (2023 Institute for the Study of War and AEI’s Critical Threats Project made possible by the Dr. Jack London Geospatial Fund at ISW). Retrieved from: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/733fe90805894bfc8562d90b106aa895

Europe: The Ukraine War Edition

was floated in 2008, but it was controversial then in the West, and still was in 2022. Many in the West were wary of Ukraine joining the alliance for a variety of reasons (e.g., corruption in Ukraine, institutional weakness in Ukraine, political instability, a weak army, after 2014 Ukraine’s proxy war with Russia over Crimea and the eastern Donbas region), so there was nothing at all imminent or inevitable about Ukraine joining or becoming closer to NATO in 2022. Even as late as the summer of 2023, more than a year after Russia invaded and Ukraine had proven the progress it had made in terms of political and military reforms, the alliance still only held out vague promises at its summit in Vilnius that maybe, someday, Ukraine will join.

Figure 1.3. The Military Situation in Ukraine in October 2023

Source: Institute for the Study of War5

In fact, there doesn’t seem to have been anything going on in Ukraine in 2022—e.g., imminent foreign alliances, local or presidential elections, foreign troops being stationed in Ukraine—that might have seemed provocative to Moscow. So why did Putin invade in 2022? I suspect the real reasons all lie in Putin’s head. Ever since the botched 2012 elections in Russia, Putin’s popularity has been slowly sliding. Russia’s living standards and economic situation had also been deteriorating for a bunch

5 “Assessed Control of Terrain in Ukraine as of August 4, 2023, 3:00 PM ET.” Institute for the Study of War (2023 Institute for the Study of War and AEI’s Critical Threats Project made possible by the Dr. Jack London Geospatial Fund at ISW). Retrieved from: https:// storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/36a7f6a6f5a9448496de641cf64bd375

of reasons, perhaps causing some concern for Putin. Another important factor may have been Putin’s own ticking biological clock. Remember that at the time of the invasion he was sixty-nine years old—sixty-nine Russian years old, in a country where the average life expectancy for men is seventy-one. Now, he’s a healthy and fit guy by most measures, but still—if he was going to go down in history as a great national hero who expanded Russia’s borders, then he needed to get a move on. Given how easily Russia seized Crimea in 2014, he probably thought in 2022 that taking Ukraine would be a similarly routine smash-and-grab that would revive his ratings at home. In other words, despite Putin’s claims that he was forced to act, in reality he probably just saw opportunity and thought he could get away with invading Ukraine now.

Q: Why has the Russian army performed so badly in this war?

A: How? Nobody expected the Ukrainian Army to last long when Russian forces invaded in February 2022. The truth is that I didn’t. I thought there would be some heroic resistance here and there, but the end result would look like what happened in Czechoslovakia in 1968. I am so happy that I was wrong. But what didn’t I and others across the world see?

• Military reforms: Mark Galeotti6 goes into some detail on the military reforms, but as he observes —for all the rubles spent so far, it hasn’t been nearly enough. The Russian Army still suffers from some Soviet-era operational and organizational maladies. I can confirm this through anecdotes by Western journalists and military analysts as this war unfolded, which described Russian military problems that sounded straight out of the 1970s and 80s Viktor Suvorov books.7 Corruption, poor (or uneven) training and equipment maintenance continued to bedevil Russian forces, for instance.

• Putin: A key ingredient in the Russian army’s failure has been Putin himself. Putin was a mid-level KGB agent with minimal military experience—certainly no combat or unit leadership experience. Western analysts watching the opening stages of Russia’s invasion were astonished because the Russian army wasn’t following its own doctrine or SOPs (standard operating procedures). It appears that Putin and his political cronies did all the planning, without involving or referencing the Defense Ministry or army leadership—you know,

6 Galeotti, 2022

7 Suvorov was a pseudonym for Soviet defector Vladimir Rezun who, after his debriefing by Western intelligence agencies, wrote a series of books on the Soviet Army for Western audiences.

the professionals. Galeotti reports that most Russian generals were not informed that the invasion was happening until a day or so before it launched.8 There were almost no supplies or reinforcements prepared, because Putin apparently believed Ukraine would be a cakewalk. This led to bizarre circumstances like Russian tanks being forced to enter cities unsupported, leaving them sitting ducks—again, against standard Russian military practices.9 Clearly, there were no contingency plans. Most Russian soldiers had to fight through the first winter of the war without adequate winter gear, for instance. Putin has proven he is no military genius. Putin’s incompetence and miscalculations have really gutted the Russian military. A joke making the rounds in Ukraine after the Prigozhin Uprising (July 2023) in Russia went like this: “In 2021, the Russian Army was the second strongest in the world. In 2022, it was downgraded to the secondstrongest army in Ukraine. In 2023, it is now the second-strongest army in Russia.”

USELESS TRIVIA: THE RUBBER DUCK WOULD NOT BE IMPRESSED

Days into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, global satellites spotted a convoy of tanks 10 miles (16 km) long headed for Kyiv. Clearly, the Ukrainian capital was doomed. But instead of those tanks crushing Ukrainian resistance, their convoy stalled, and actually grew over the next several days to be 35 miles (56 km) long by February 28. What were the Russians planning?

As it turned out, this wasn’t a convoy but a massive traffic jam. It consisted of tanks, armored vehicles, troop carriers, and supply trucks. And it was stuck, going nowhere. Some of its problems came from the Ukrainians who had destroyed bridges in this convoy’s path and harassed it along its way. Another issue was that winter had turned the countryside into a morass of mud, forcing most of the Russian military vehicles to keep to paved roads. But the larger issue was simply that Russia’s military was not prepared for any of this. It had expected to simply drive from the Russian border to Kyiv unmolested. When it did encounter delays, the Ukrainians

8 Galeotti, 2022: p. 347

9 A tank wandering down an urban street in 1944 unsupported by infantry was essentially committing suicide, and this was still true in 2022, but that is the position Putin put the Russian Army in.

quickly overwhelmed Russian forces and, worse, more vehicles from Russia continued to join it and became trapped in it. They had brought almost no gas or food, and no maps. Engines idling for days overheated and, with no spare parts, quickly became useless. These vehicles were declared dead and pushed off the road, out of the way. Heavy military vehicles also need special tires, and these tires need to be rotated regularly—which they were not, leading to large numbers of trucks blowing their tires and being pushed off roads on their rims. The final piece of the puzzle was very poorly planned communications, so that different units in the traffic jam could not communicate with one another, or with their bases back in Russia. The world kept watching for weeks expecting the “convoy” to lurch forward and take Kyiv but that never happened. Instead, those few Russian forces that did reach Kyiv were unsupported and were eventually defeated, while Ukrainian forces took the opportunity to attack exposed units throughout the traffic jam. Ukrainians also recovered both valuable supplies and critical intelligence from abandoned vehicles. Finally, four weeks after the invasion had begun, the Russian army was able to get enough gas and supplies to bring vehicles back to Russia.

• Peace: Putin’s belief that Ukraine would fall easily led him to commit a Russian army in 2022 that was in peacetime mode, meaning it only had a limited number of personnel and equipment, and many of those personnel were “weekend warriors.” Had the Russian Army been given time to fully prepare and mobilize to a wartime footing, and if Putin had left the planning to people who actually knew what they were doing, things would likely have turned out differently in 2022. After more than six months of excruciating defeats, Putin finally launched a “partial mobilization” in September 2022, but by that point the Russian Army had lost the initiative. In any event, Putin squandered the estimated 300,000 newly mobilized troops by deploying many of them immediately to the front with almost no training and some without adequate equipment. The world expected a major Russian offensive to materialize in early 2023 using these new recruits, but it never happened. Instead, these recruits mostly died in pointless World War I–style frontal assaults as cannon fodder, achieving little. British intelligence inferred in late 2023, and a Russian general confirmed, that Russian front-line troops are not being rotated, meaning those fighting on the front line are not getting any respite or recovery time—this also means they are not receiving any

additional training.10 Meanwhile, rumors have continued to circulate since that at some point Putin will launch another round of total or partial mobilization.

• Morale: A final part of the story is, I think, morale. For all its foibles, the Red Army of World War II days proved (eventually) to be a very effective military force. Yes, it relied on a lot of Western supplies, but Soviet soldiers fought ferociously. An important distinction is that those Soviet soldiers of the 1940s saw themselves as defending their homes and homeland. They were motivated by an invasion of their homeland that killed millions of their fellow citizens and laid waste to their cities and villages. In contrast, for all Putin’s claims of a NATO threat, it seems average Russian soldiers don’t buy it. They see the war more as the poorly conceived foreign adventure it is, rather than the desperate defense of the Fatherland Putin claims. Despite all the polls asserting widespread Russian enthusiasm for Putin’s war, Russian soldiers’ poor morale seems to betray a more realistic understanding of this war, and they know their families back home are in no real danger—at least not from Ukrainians or NATO. Simply said, I think Russian soldiers would be behaving very differently if they really thought they were defending Russia.

• Lessons unlearned: One of the most bizarre aspects of Russia’s behavior in this war has been an inability to learn from mistakes and change behaviors. To be fair, the Russian Army has made some important adaptations, particularly in the spring and summer of 2023, that have successfully slowed Ukraine’s counter-offensive. Still, even seasoned Western military analysts who have followed Russia’s military development for years have been astonished by its institutional rigidity and inability to pivot. Some of this is Putin’s fault, simply because politically, he cannot admit defeat and so a pointless war grinds on, costing lives, equipment, and money for no reason other than an incompetent leader’s ego. But the Russian military is suffering long-term damage in Ukraine that will likely take decades to repair, seriously compromising Russia’s real security in the process. Putin deserves primary blame for that, but Russia’s political and military establishments have shown a remarkable lack of imagination, initiative, or leadership throughout this war. Change, any change, really seems to be Russia’s enemy.

• A Chinese viewpoint: Former Chinese ambassador to Ukraine Gau Yusheng put together some observations about the war for the

10 Maria Kholina. (2023 September 21). “British intelligence explains Russians’ low morale and inability to advance.” RBC-Ukraine. Retrieved from: https://newsukraine.rbc.ua/ news/british-intelligence-explains-russians-low-1695281362.html

Chinese foreign service shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, and he listed five core reasons for Russia’s poor military performance:11

{ “First, after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Russia has always been in a historical process of continuous decline; this decline is first and foremost a continuation of the Soviet Union’s decline before its disintegration and is also related to the mistakes of the Russian ruling clique in domestic and foreign policies. Western sanctions have further intensified this process. The so-called revival or revitalization of Russia under the leadership of Putin is a false proposition that simply does not exist; the decline of Russia manifests in its economy, military, science and technology, politics, society, and all other fields, and has also had a serious negative impact on the Russian military and its combat strength.”

{ “Second, the failure of the Russian blitzkrieg and the failure to take quick action indicates that Russia is beginning to fail. Its economic and financial resources, which are a far cry from its status as a so-called military superpower, make it very difficult to support a high-tech war that costs hundreds of millions of US dollars a day. The embarrassment of the Russian army’s defeat due to poverty can be seen everywhere on the battlefield. Every day the war drags on is a heavy burden on Russia.”

{ “Third, Russia’s advantages over Ukraine in terms of military and economic strength have been offset by Ukraine’s resolute and tenacious resistance and the huge, continuous, and effective assistance of Western countries to Ukraine. The generation gap in weapons technology and equipment, military understanding, and combat models between Russia and America and other NATO nations has further highlighted both sides’ strengths and weaknesses.”

{ “Fourth, modern wars are necessarily hybrid wars, covering the military, economics, politics, diplomacy, public opinion, propaganda, intelligence, information, and other fields. Russia is not only in a passive position on the battlefield but has also already lost in other fields. And this has determined that it is only a matter of time before Russia is finally defeated.”

{ “Fifth, when and how this war will end is not for Russia to decide. Russia’s hopes to end the war as soon as possible, while ensuring it achieves vested its vested interests, have been dashed. In this sense, Russia has lost its strategic dominance and initiative.”

11 “Gao Yusheng, Former Chinese Ambassador to Ukraine: The Trend of the RussianUkrainian War and Its Impact on the International Order” (based on a machine-dependent translation into English). (2022 May 10). China Law Translate. Retrieved from: https:// www.chinalawtranslate.com/en/gao-yusheng-russia-war-comments/

Q: How did Ukrainians manage to achieve so much in this war?

A: In stark contrast to the Russian military, Ukraine and its armed forces have shown astonishing resiliency and adaptability. Western military experts have also taken important lessons from the Ukrainian experience, including in how Ukrainian soldiers have used Western technology.

• Past performance is not indicative of future results: One reason nobody expected Ukrainian forces to do well in 2022 is that when Russia seized the Donbas region and Crimea in 2014, Ukrainian military forces were in an awful state. Some 70% of the Ukrainian Army’s forces in Crimea defected to the Russian side.12 Before that war, Ukraine’s pro-Russia president, Viktor Yanukovych, had gutted the Ukrainian Army through a series of budgetary cuts so that on the morning the Crimea crisis began, the army’s total troop strength was only 41,000—and of that, only about 6,000 were really combat-ready.13 Few of those soldiers had much experience with their weapons, and most of those weapons were at least 20 years old.14 Institutional corruption also crippled military efforts. By mid-2016 Ukraine did manage to mobilize some 200,000 active-service military personnel.15 But Ukrainian soldiers paid dearly for the army’s poor organization, equipment and training: by 2017, the Ukrainian army had lost “… a combined total of 10,710, including 2,333 killed and 8,377 injured”16 in the fighting in the country’s east against both Donbas separatists and the Russian Army. Despite some improvements over the next couple years, Ukrainian soldiers continued to complain loudly about uneven training, supplies, and unclear strategy.

• Change time: But something did change—dramatically. Almost immediately the government that replaced Yanukovych when he fled began a series of big military reforms, profoundly transforming its command and control, training, education, organization,

12 Valeriy Akimenko. (2018 February 22). “Ukraine’s Toughest Fight: The Challenge of Military Reform.” The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Retrieved from: https://carnegieendowment.org/2018/02/22/ukraine-s-toughest-fight-challenge-ofmilitary-reform-pub-75609

13 Louis-Alexandre Berg and Andrew Radin. (2022 March 29). “The Ukrainian Military Has Defied Expectations. Here Is How U.S. Security Aid Contributed” (Blog post). The Rand Corporation. Retrieved from: https://www.rand.org/blog/2022/03/the-ukrainianmilitary-has-defied-expectations-here.html

14 Akimenko, 2018

15 Ibid

16 Ibid

procurement services, logistics systems, and infrastructure.17 A key goal was not just NATO-standard compliance by 2020, but to achieve full NATO-level “interoperability,” meaning the ability to work directly with NATO forces. The Ukrainian Army has also had to deal with constant change—weapons from all over the world (each requiring their own detailed training), and advice, intelligence, and training from militaries all over the world—forcing the Ukrainian military to become very adaptive.

• Help? NATO (especially Turkey) did play a role in helping Ukraine reform its military capabilities through funding, training, and strategic advising. However, what was significant about the NATO aid was that it didn’t focus on the biggest, newest, shiny weapon systems but instead helped Ukraine with a very bottom-up operational redesign that helped the country create a flexible, decentralized structure (spanning formal army and civilian defense forces), which gave local military authorities flexibility in how they achieved their goals. NATO aid focused on functionality, rather than new toys. Readers of the 1970s and 80s books by Viktor Suvorov will recognize that the Soviet Army struggled with this middle-tier of military management (what the U.S. Army calls non-commissioned officers, or NCOs). The armies of the former Soviet states after 1991, children of the Soviet Union, all inherited this weakness. The Ukrainian Army was able, by 2022, to overcome that deficiency and though outnumbered in both men and weapons, was able to run operational circles around the rigid, baffled Russian Army.

• Reform at the top: When elected president in 2019, Volodymyr Zelensky launched major military reforms making enough headway by 2021 that the West felt comfortable to start selling Ukraine more modern weapons.18

• Bottom-up: Another part of the story is more organic, however. When the Ukrainian Army was first struggling in 2014, an estimated 15,00040,000 civilian volunteers rushed to the aid of Ukrainian forces in makeshift paramilitary groups (like the infamous Azov Battalion).19 Over the next few years the Ukrainian Army was able to gain control over many of these groups and formalize their equipment, training, and command, essentially absorbing them into the army. But in 2014, they provided instant (if inexperienced) manpower the army

17 Arda Mevlutoglu. (2022 April 7). “Ukraine’s Military Transformation between 2014 and 2022.” Politics Today. Retrieved from: https://politicstoday.org/ukraine-militarytransformation/

18 Berg and Radin, 2022

19 Akimenko, 2018

desperately needed. The impact of these volunteers convinced Kyiv to create in January 2022—just in the nick of time—the Territorial Defense Force, a civilian-extension of the military with 10,000 career positions in peacetime but designed to train and equip 120,000 reservists.20 Though barely two months old when Russia invaded in February 2022, this defense force proved crucial in the opening battles not just in mobilizing average civilians but also by having command, intelligence, and distribution networks already functioning in place, on the ground, enabling local citizens all over Ukraine to immediately contribute to the war effort. (CNN reporter Matthew Chance, who was in Kyiv the night the invasion began, reported encountering armed civilians on a street that first night with crates of Molotov Cocktails —homemade gasoline bombs—and when he asked where they’d acquired them, they replied that old women in nearby apartment blocks were busily making them.)21 The famous scenes we all saw of Ukrainian farmers towing Russian tanks behind their tractors were not an accident, but an organized effort.

• Democracy in action: Another key aspect that caught everyone by surprise was the degree to which Ukraine united behind the war effort. Ukraine held together not just militarily but administratively. Democratic institutions both at the center in Kyiv and throughout the country at the county, city, and village levels all continued to function and cooperate. This spanned the ethnic and language divide, so that (to the astonishment of many) even Russian-majority regions such as Odesa,22 Kherson, and Kharkiv saw huge local civilian participation in defense efforts. Simply, Ukraine kept working as a country. Over the late summer and autumn of 2022, after the Russian army retreated in the face of successful Ukrainian counter-offensives, in frustration Putin launched multiple salvoes of rocket and missiles at Ukraine’s utilities and infrastructure—but such is the level of coordination and cooperation that utilities have mostly continued functioning. Even during the worst months of the invasion, under CEO Oleksandr Kamyshin, Ukraine’s state railway system kept ferrying people and

20 Liam Collins. (2022 March 8). “In 2014, the ’decrepit’ Ukrainian army hit the refresh button. Eight years later, it’s paying off” (Blog post). The Conversation. Retrieved from: https://theconversation.com/in-2014-the-decrepit-ukrainian-army-hit-the-refreshbutton-eight-years-later-its-paying-off-177881

21 CNN. (2022 December 28). “CNN reporter reveals surprising moment he came face-toface with Russians on battlefield.” YouTube. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=F2vIC7Usuik

22 In Russian, Одесса (Odessa), in Ukrainian, Одеса (Odesa)—and we’ll use the Ukrainian version since it is legally a Ukrainian city today.

supplies all over the country, and kept Ukraine connected to key allies Poland and Romania. Probably more than any other element of Ukraine’s resistance, this organizational resiliency has truly stumped Russia.23

{ This element shouldn’t be too romanticized; a minority of (ethnic Russian) Ukrainian citizens are pro-Russian, and Ukrainian forces have had to be wary of civilians in areas of their control sometimes providing intelligence to Russian forces. It’s a reality. There has also been an ugly, unwritten covert war raging in both Russian-occupied and liberated areas by special forces units targeting collaborators on both sides. Still, the overwhelming loyalty and support Russian-majority regions have demonstrated for Ukraine has stunned everyone.

• Invasion: Another key element is that Ukraine was invaded, and nobody likes to be invaded. The Russians behaved like conquerors the moment they crossed into Ukraine, inspiring resistance even in majority ethnic Russian regions. Putin then compounded this error of arrogance as the war progressed by behaving like Hitler during the Blitz against Britain in 1940, where Hitler tried to break British fighting resolve by targeting British cities. Similarly, in frustration Putin used his dwindling long-range attack capabilities over 2022–23 to attack civilian targets across Ukraine, pointlessly killing civilians and inflicting suffering on them—and hardening Ukrainian resolve.

• Lights, Camera, Message: Zelensky is an actor and a veteran of a few Ukrainian TV shows—meaning, he understands the power of TV and image. He and his team have done a phenomenal job of portraying Ukraine’s victories and its suffering to the world, completely derailing the Kremlin’s narrative. Despite Putin’s best efforts to portray Russia as the victim in this war, a daily flood of videos, pictures, blogs, and interviews from average Ukrainian soldiers and civilians has just overwhelmed and drowned out the Russian self-pity story. To a degree that astonishes veteran Kremlinwatchers, Putin’s once invincible Russian propaganda machine seems almost…impotent. In March 2023 Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov began a speech in front of an international crowd in India by describing the invasion as a war “…launched against us,” and the crowd immediately burst into loud laughter. Lavrov’s stunned expression spoke volumes.

23 And again, compare and contrast this with the paralysis of security forces in Russia during the Wagner Uprising in July 2023.

Q: How can Putin still think Russia can win after all its humiliating defeats in this war so far?

A: Putin is likely looking at a couple examples from recent Russian history for hope. In the Winter War of 1939–40, Stalin attacked tiny little Finland, but Soviet forces were trounced by the Finns through superior training, better use of the local topography, better organization, and in some cases (given the extreme winter conditions), better equipment. But the Red Army was huge, and was able to absorb the massive losses the Finns inflicted on it until it finally just overwhelmed them in the spring of 1940.

Something similar happened in World War II (outlined in Chapter 7 of this book), where the unprepared Soviet forces suffered massive losses in men and equipment in 1941 that quickly translated into Nazi forces advancing more than 700 miles (1260 km) by November to just outside Moscow. But Moscow miraculously held, and the German strategy the following year in 1942 that shifted southward led to the Nazi disaster at Stalingrad.

In both cases Russia sustained huge losses initially and seemed on the brink of total defeat, only to eventually rebound and overwhelm the enemy with its sheer numerical advantage. Putin may see these two examples as reflective of a Russian way of war, and that somehow, Russia will bounce back and vanquish its enemies. This flummoxed Ukrainian general Valery Zaluzhny, according to the Economist:

It has also undercut General Zaluzhny’s assumption that he could stop Russia by bleeding its troops. “That was my mistake[,” said Zaluzhny.] “Russia has lost at least 150,000 dead. In any other country such casualties would have stopped the war.” But not in Russia, where life is cheap and where Mr. Putin’s reference points are the first and second world wars, in which Russia lost tens of millions.24

Or…? Or he may want instead to study the examples of Russia at war in 1856, or in World War I where the losses just kept piling up, and there was no rebound, no final recovery that snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. In both the Crimean War and World War I, poor performance, poor treatment of average Russian soldiers, and deteriorating living standards for average Russians all contributed to eventual Russian defeat—and in 1917, even worse than defeat.

24 “War of attrition; Ukraine’s commander-in-chief on the breakthrough he needs to beat Russia.” (2023 November 1). Economist, pp. 43–44. Retrieved from: https://www.economist .com/europe/2023/11/01/ukraines-commander-in-chief-on-the-breakthrough-he-needsto-beat-russia

Q: Who is winning?

A: As of this writing, things are going slowly—but as Yale historian Timothy Snyder, a specialist in the history of Central and Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and the Holocaust, reminds us, wars take time and they are grueling, grinding events filled with lots of doubt and pain. When you look back on historical wars, you already know the outcome so the gruesome details seem a little less brutal, but for the people living through those events…

Part of the problem is defining “winning.” So who is winning?

• Ukraine: Simply by still existing despite all-out assaults by its much larger neighbor, Ukraine is a winner. While smaller in size, Ukraine’s armed forces have proven far nimbler and more adaptable to modern combat than Russia’s army. Russia’s few victories in this war have mostly been through being able to overwhelm Ukrainians through sheer number advantages, like Russia’s mass rolling artillery at Mariupol and Bakhmut. But even more importantly, this war has inspired Ukraine to overcome its many internal differences (western versus eastern Ukrainians, ethnic Ukrainians versus ethnic Russians, industrial areas versus farmlands, inland Steppe versus coastal fishing and trade, etc.) to unite as never before in Ukrainian history. As I mention in Chapter 6, when Ukraine had a shot at independence in 1918, it slid instead into civil war. Again, it astonished everyone that even majority Russian-speaking regions like Odesa, Kharkiv, and Kherson overwhelmingly united against the invaders in 2022. There are legions of Ukrainian memes thanking Putin for uniting Ukraine. Ukraine has also gained new potential business and economic relationships around the world through its new allies, and as many analysts have noted, the technological sophistication of the many modern weapon systems Ukraine has been adopting and using in this war has trained a whole generation of young Ukrainians in the new technologies—boding well for a postwar economy.

• NATO: NATO’s fortunes were flagging before this war began. Its Cold War purpose seemingly gone, members were slashing budgets and limiting coordination with allies. Many resented being drawn into America’s post–9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And then Putin invaded Ukraine, clumsily tripping into a long-drawn-out colonial war on Europe’s fringe, reminding Europeans and others of the importance of a security organization like NATO. NATO has also gained two new strategic members, Finland and Sweden. Both have small militaries, but they are technologically adept and geared toward addressing a Russian threat. NATO has also regained some prestige that was diminishing in the years after the Cold War, as the

Ukraine War has suggested the superiority of both Western tactics and equipment over Russia’s remains real and palpable.

• Eastern Europe: It turns out the Poles and Baltic peoples were right all along, that Putin did pose a serious strategic threat to Europe. Squabbling over issues like Ukrainian grain in the region may scupper gains, but Western Europe has learned that it needs to take Eastern Europe more seriously. Eastern European voices are gaining importance across all European institutions. In some ways, this war has closed the postcommunist loop for the region by bringing back into focus the reality that local economic and democratic development must be linked to security, and any solutions must be pan-European.

• Putin: This may seem counterintuitive, but while Russia is losing this war badly, it has provided Putin with the excuse to further tighten his control over Russia and dispense with any annoying democratic window-dressing. To be sure, some of the shine has come off his dictatorship at home and his incompetence has become apparent, but his grip on power is stronger than ever. This is a problem for Ukraine, because Putin doesn’t dare stop this war; his death-grip on Russia depends on a non-stop crisis—i.e., this war.

• China: Western sanctions have isolated Russia’s economy, making Putin increasingly dependent on Chinese willingness to prop up Russia’s economy and bankroll Putin’s war. Russia’s battlefield defeats have translated into great gains for China across Russia’s economy (especially in all the oil, gas, and mineral-extraction industries) in ways that will be very difficult for future Russian leaders to extricate Russia from. Other countries have stepped into the void left by the West in Russia’s economy as well, particularly India, but none to the degree China has. Chinese banks have suddenly become a major force in Russia’s economy, with a huge and growing portion of Russian debt being denominated in Chinese renminbi.25 Russia is becoming a Chinese protectorate. Per Business Insider:

But the think tank argues that much of the partnership has been more to Beijing’s benefit than it has been to Moscow. Though China is one of Russia’s only reliable

25 Joseph Wilkins. (2023 September 4). “Russia is becoming increasingly dependent on Chinese banks as its yuan borrowings more than quadruple.” Yahoo Finance. Retrieved from: https:// finance.yahoo.com/news/russia-becoming-increasingly-dependent-chinese-175558080 .html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_ referrer_sig=AQAAAEExAr912IYb4EKXcmzY7lHP85NwtA9zCYKLGgnYo_N79jU4ym gTJj9ZWvNKCyL8mQwO4z45pb4djBp8RZWfqeFBlAbnXqAB8Aapzl5eDNafYcd9jCDt 2Wg2wWzUmrI9NPRYT-8SelHQjRlnE-FWbUzzk5OXsx9ktIKtD1CZJ5rL#:~:text=Russia’s%20deepening%20isolation%20from%20the,move%20away%20from%20the%20dollar.

trading partners at the moment, the nation has neglected to make major investments in Russia, Graham noted.

Beijing also appears to be prioritizing its own economic interests, such as by using its relationship with Russia to trim other trade ties on terms “inordinately” favorable to itself, Graham said. He says the nation has also worked to expand its connections elsewhere in Asia, which are actually coming at Russia’s expense.26

• India: While not nearly to the degree China has, India is benefitting tremendously from Russian trade agreements that are suddenly very favorable to India. In some respects the war has put Delhi in a difficult spot as it dances a delicate line between Russia and the West, never wanting to completely side with or abandon either side, but India has gained prestige as an important intermediary and international power-broker.

• The Global South: The Russian invasion of Ukraine has been seen in a couple different lights outside of Europe and the West. Some see a very traditional colonial situation where a stronger power is trying to impose itself on a smaller neighbor through sheer blunt force— and that sure looks very familiar to many people across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. But others instead see the West going nuclear over a war of aggression on its own periphery, while ignoring wars that have been raging for years in places like Yemen, Congo, Sudan, Ethiopia, or Myanmar with barely a peep. Though there is sympathy for the suffering of Ukrainians, some see a double-standard in the West’s reaction to Russia’s aggression. (Worse, some also invoke the Iraq War as an example of alleged Western hypocrisy.) And of course, Putin’s anti-Westernism finds some sympathetic ears in parts of the world. Without wading into these arguments, one thing that is important is that the West’s attempts to isolate Russia economically have strengthened the voices of the Global South’s economies in global affairs. The Global South (generally identified as the lessdeveloped but rising economies of southern Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America) has suddenly found itself being courted by Western, Russian, Chinese, and Ukrainian diplomats. Issues such as Russia’s attacks on Ukraine’s grain trade have also highlighted the symbiotic nature of the world’s economic relationships, reminding many of our global inter-dependence.

26 Jennifer Sor. (2023 October 13). “China’s economic partnership with Russia is so lopsided that Putin needs the help of the US —but he’d never admit that, think tank says.” Business Insider. Retrieved from: https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-economy-news-chinaputin-trade-west-sanctions-ukraine-war-2023-10

• Iran, North Korea: International pariah states Iran and North Korea have also made hay with this war by supplying Russia with basic ammunition, drones, and supplies, in exchange for some international credibility in the form of official visits with Putin.

Q: Will Putin try to invade Moldova, or maybe the Baltics, next?

A: Neither is likely. Pro-Kremlin media personalities and a few Russian officials (including some defense ministry officials) have made threats to the effect that Russia should invade these countries, or even Eastern Europe as a whole—but Ukraine has ground down Russia’s armed forces to an astonishing degree. Numbers are not known precisely, but while Russia still has considerable military resources in sheer numbers, its losses in equipment and trained, experienced soldiers in Ukraine have severely weakened Russia’s offensive military operation capabilities. Now, when a crazy guy has the steering wheel, well, never say never, but any rational assessment of Russia’s military capabilities in 2024 is going to conclude that any further empire dreams are going to have to wait a few years. And as I note through some quotes in Chapter 10 of this Second Edition of this book, NATO membership is probably what has ensured the continued independence of the Baltic states over the past thirty years.

Q: What has been the human toll in this war so far?

A: This is a tough question. Neither side is forthcoming with accurate casualty figures. Obviously, they each highlight and possibly exaggerate the number of killed on their enemy’s side, while minimizing their own losses. Many groups, from news organizations and the UN to government intelligence agencies, have been estimating losses. And of course, they mount daily. More and more people’s lives are shattered or destroyed every single day this war continues.

• Ukraine: In August 2023 the U.S. estimated that some 70,000 Ukrainian troops had been killed and 100,000 to 120,000 wounded since February 2022.27 (That date is important because most Ukrainians consider this war as having started in March 2014, with Putin’s invasion of February 2022 only an escalation of an alreadyexisting war.) The United Nations estimated civilian losses in Ukraine

27 Helene Cooper, Thomas Gibbons-Neff, Eric Schmitt, and Julian E. Barnes. (2023 August 18). “Troop Deaths and Injuries in Ukraine War Near 500,000, U.S. Officials Say.” New York Times. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/18/us/politics/ukrainerussia-war-casualties.html

(as of early September 2023) as being 27,149 total: 9,614 killed and 17,535 injured.28

“Ten thousand civilian deaths is a grim milestone for Ukraine,” said Danielle Bell, head of the monitoring mission. “The Russian Federation’s war against Ukraine, now entering into its twenty-first month, risks evolving into a protracted conflict, with the severe human cost being painful to fathom.”

“Nearly half of civilian casualties in the last three months have occurred far away from the frontlines,” she added. “As a result, no place in Ukraine is completely safe.”29

• Russia: In late 2023, as Russia released its proposed budget for 2024, that budget included a line item allocating compensation funds for the families of 102,700 military personnel killed in Ukraine.30 According to US estimates from August 2023, Russia’s military casualties were then nearing 300,000, including as many as 120,000 deaths and 170,000 to 180,000 injured troops.31

Keep in mind that the brutal Second Chechen War (1999–2009) cost an estimated 4,379 Russian soldiers killed,32 and in the Soviet-Afghan War (1979–89) some 15,000 Soviet troops were casualties (meaning, wounded and killed).33 And both conflicts traumatized Russian society.

28 “Ukraine: civilian casualty update 11 September 2023” (Media Center). (2023 September 11). United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. Retrieved from: https://www.ohchr.org/en/news/2023/09/ukraine-civilian-casualty-update-11september-2023

29 Aila Slisco. (2023 November 21). “How Russia’s Military Losses Compare to Ukraine’s This Month.” Newsweek. Retrieved from: https://www.newsweek.com/how-russiasmilitary-losses-compare-ukraines-this-month-1845800

30 Isabel van Brugen. (2023 October 13). “Russia’s Likely Death Toll in Ukraine Revealed in Government Filing.” Newsweek. Retrieved from: https://www.newsweek.com/russiadeath-toll-ukraine-war-1834486

31 Helene Cooper, Thomas Gibbons-Neff, Eric Schmitt, and Julian E. Barnes. (2023 August 18). “Troop Deaths and Injuries in Ukraine War Near 500,000, U.S. Officials Say.” New York Times. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/18/us/politics/ukrainerussia-war-casualties.html

32 “Background.” (1997 January 1). Human Rights Watch, “Human Rights Watch World Report 1997—The Russian Federation.” Human Rights Watch. Retrieved from: https:// www.hrw.org/reports/1997/russia2/Russia-01.htm#P110_8966

33 Alyssa Knapp (Curator). (2023). “Soviet-Afghan War (1979–1989)” (“Burning with a Deadly Heat”: NewsHour Coverage of the Hot Wars of the Cold War). American Archive of Public Broadcasting. Retrieved from: https://americanarchive.org/exhibits/newshourcold-war

Journalist Eric Schmitt writes, “According to U.S. assessments [in October 2024], Russian casualties in the war so far number as many as 615,000—115,000 Russians killed and 500,000 wounded. Ukrainian officials have zealously guarded their casualty figures, even from the Americans, but a U.S. official estimated that Ukraine had suffered a bit more than half of Russia’s casualties, or more than 57,500 killed and 250,000 wounded. . . . The official did not specify the number of Russian casualties last month [September 2024] beyond calling it the costliest month for Moscow’s forces. U.S. and British military analysts put Russian casualties at an average of more than 1,200 a day, slightly surpassing the previous highest daily rate of the war that was set in May.”34

All that can be said for certain about fatalities and wounded in this war is that a massive number of people are dying or being wounded at alarming rates unseen in Europe since World War II.

Q: Are we in a new Cold War, or will there be one?

A: Possibly, but likely not. Russia simply doesn’t have the financial or economic resources to sustain a long-term “cold war” in the way the Soviet Union did. Putin’s Russia is far more dependent on China and others for critical resources. There is the very real danger that U.S.-China relations could spin out of control into a Cold War–style confrontation, and Russia would be dragged into that on China’s side, but Russia alone simply doesn’t have the industrial capacity, technology development capabilities, or financial foundations to repeat the 1946–91 experience. China does, but Russia no longer does. Putin certainly can make Russia into a troublesome regional headache for the West and others, and his trump card is always Russia’s Soviet-era nuclear arsenal, but the Soviet collapse and Putin’s kleptocracy have combined to hobble Russia in ways that have severely reduced its impact and voice in the world.

Putin’s own misrule has ensured Russia is no longer capable of the heights of Soviet power and achievement. There is no reason that Russia shouldn’t be a leading economy and power in 2024; the fact that it isn’t more important than it is can be attributed almost exclusively to Putin. If he had followed the Chinese example of an authoritarian state that allowed a relatively free-market economy, Russia would be stronger today and more capable of challenging the West, but he did not. Putin is why Russia cannot compete economically, politically, and technologically on the global stage in any meaningful way, other than rattle its old Soviet nuclear saber.

34 Eric Schmitt. (2024 October 10). “September Was Deadly Month for Russian Troops in Ukraine, U.S. Says.” New York Times. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2024 /10/10/us/politics/russia-casualties-ukraine-war.html

Q: How and when will this war end?

A: Of course, the answer is (as of late 2024), I have no idea. Here are a few of the most likely scenarios, in no particular order:

• Total Ukrainian victory: Ukraine is eventually able to liberate all of its territory from Russian control. This seems less likely as of this writing—but not completely out of the realm of possibility.

• Total Russian victory: Maybe the West tires of supporting Ukraine and Russian forces are able to outlast Ukrainian reserves, and ultimately triumphantly march into Kyiv. I think this is an unlikely scenario, though Putin seems to believe it is a possibility. Even if the West does stop supporting Ukraine in tangible ways, the Ukrainians have inflicted so much damage on Russian military forces that, although Putin keeps trying, Russia doesn’t seem to be capable of effective large-scale offensive operations now. Russia’s offensives in the east and north over 2024 were the largest since 2022, and yet achieved only limited territorial gains against a Ukrainian military starved of resources.

• Negotiations: Maybe both sides would come together (perhaps secretly) and hammer out a cease-fire, or a Korean War–style armistice, freezing the front line wherever it is now. There are many around the world who want this solution. The problem is that it would reward Russia at least partially for its aggression. But even worse, Putin would only view any cease-fire as a temporary halt to combat operations; he would use the respite to rebuild, resupply, and retrain, and then wait for an ideal moment to relaunch the war. The world would be back to square one.

• Stalemate: This is about where things are now, a World War I–style stalemate like the autumn and early winter of 1914, where the Allied (French, British, Belgian) armies had halted the German advance into France, but were too weak to push the Germans out, leading to three more years of stalemate all along the Western Front. Both sides built massive defense fortifications all along the front line, so that when each side launched an attempt to break through the enemy’s defenses the end result was massive, pitched battles (e.g., Ypres, Verdun, the Somme, etc.) that only moved the front line a few hundred yards, with tens of thousands of men dying in each battle—essentially, for nothing. Ukrainians have successfully halted the initial Russian advances and even taken back a lot of territory, but now face entrenched Russian forces that, while under-trained, under-equipped, and poorly led, still often outnumber Ukrainian forces trying to liberate more land. Over the summer of 2023 reports kept streaming in of excruciatingly slow

progress on the Ukrainian forces’ part, definitely moving forward but at a glacial pace as Russian defenses have proven difficult. (Mounting an effective defense in war usually requires fewer resources than attacking.)

{ The Ukrainians made gains. In autumn 2023, the Ukrainians honed the ability to launch missiles to harass Russian ships in the Black Sea, to the extent that Russia has withdrawn its famed Black Sea Fleet to Russian ports for safety. The Ukrainians have also been successfully bringing the war to Russian-occupied Crimea, destroying the Black Sea Fleet headquarters in September 2023.

{ Then again, Russian counteroffensives around Avdiivka and near Pokrovsk in the Donetsk region in 2023 and 2024 have produced some limited gains, though at great cost.

{ Some analysts believe Putin is hoping for the stalemate option, hoping that, short of a decisive victory (which he obviously can’t achieve at this stage), he can instead “freeze” the Ukrainian conflict. This would mean essentially ceasing large-scale military operations, only continuing small, local efforts to keep the war going on slow boil. This is what happened to the war in the Donbas region after an initial flare-up in 2014. By freezing the war, Putin can keep it going for years, possibly decades, using it to destabilize Ukraine while also ensuring Ukraine can never join NATO, since NATO would never allow a member to join that has a current border war raging.

„ With the outbreak of the latest round of Hamas-Israeli violence, Putin has an opportunity to freeze the Ukraine conflict as it falls out of global news headlines. As noted in Chapter 8 in this book, something similar happened with Hungary in 1956 when the Suez Crisis grabbed the world’s attention, giving Moscow more freedom of action to crush the rebel Nagy government as the West was distracted by the Middle East.

• Russian state collapse or coup: Many observers feel that this war will only end when real political change happens in Moscow. So long as Putin or anyone like him is in power in the Kremlin, Russia will continue to try to conquer Ukraine. Unfortunately, this option seems fairly remote and unlikely.

• Third party: Another less likely scenario would have a third (or fourth) party join the war—probably the most obvious candidate would be NATO, but others such as Turkey (by itself), Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, or China are also possibilities. At this stage it seems very unlikely, but it would seriously upset the status quo and possibly tip the balance one way or the other.

Where are the goal posts? But there’s a problem with all this speculation. The assumption is that this war stops when the shooting stops, but even if Ukraine manages to liberate every square inch (or cm) of its territory, the core problems that created this war—Putin and Russian nationalism—still exist. Ukraine’s problem is that its bigger neighbor has convinced itself that it must control Ukraine, and more than that, that any independent Ukrainian identity (e.g., culture, language, history, etc.) is a mortal threat. One solution would be for Ukrainian forces to liberate Russia, to march all the way to Moscow and overthrow Putin—but obviously, this is not realistic.

So long as Putin and those who agree with him rule Russia, Russia will always be a threat to Ukraine. Russia is going to be a geopolitical problem for Ukraine, for Europe, for the West, and for the world for a long time, and any solution to this war will have to take that into account.

II. Russia

Q: Is Russia really an empire?

A: This gets messy. Legally speaking, no. Russia’s official name is the Russian Federation (Российская Федерация), and at least on paper it is a republic with elected officials, and power distributed across the country’s huge geography (e.g., its oblasts or provinces). On paper, at least, Russia looks like a normal European country.

However, in reality, power is very heavily concentrated in Moscow, to a degree that is difficult for other European countries to fathom. Briefly in the 1990s, under Yeltsin, there was a weakening of the center in Russia and a genuine devolution of some powers to the regions and provinces from Moscow, but this devolution was very limited and easy to reverse (as Putin did in his first years in power after 2000). A federation is a voluntary union of different regions or states, but the Russian Federation was always a Moscow-centered state, created in Moscow for Moscow’s benefit. It tells you a lot about Russian state inefficiency when you realize that political decisions down to the most minute level on the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia’s Pacific Far East must still be made in Moscow, eight time zones away. The only real autonomy local regions across Russia have from Moscow is mostly achieved through remoteness and inaccessibility: poor roads and communications can be a blessing.

So again: Is Russia an empire? Dictionary time: The Cambridge Dictionary defines an empire as, “a group of countries ruled by a single person, government, or country.” But there is, I think, more to the definition: how empires become empires. The “ruled by” bit is usually involuntary; India didn’t ask to be ruled by Queen Victoria, nor did Constantinople beg Sultan Mehmed II to please rule over it. Empires don’t ask, they take. They conquer foreign peoples and countries. So, again—is today’s Russia an empire? It is a massive state (the largest country in the world, by territory) where a Russian-majority region (European Russia) dominates vast expanses of mostly non-Russian peoples, with a few imperial cities (usually with ethnic Russian majorities but surrounded by non-Russians, like Vladivostok) scattered among them.35 As put by Polish ethno-linguist Tomasz Kamusella:

The “golden standard” of Russian literature encased in imperial-like and elitist Russian of the tsarist and Soviet

35 “Vladivostok” in the Far East means “Conqueror of the East,” while “Vladikavkaz,” north of Georgia, means “Conqueror of the Caucasus.”

periods continues to this day, despite a fifth of the Russian Federation’s inhabitants being ethnically non-Russian. What is more, they inhabit the Asian and Caucasian fourfifths of the country’s territory. So, in spatial terms today’s Russia is overwhelmingly non-Russian. These nonRussian four-fifths denote present-day Russia’s colonies, while the metropolis is limited to the European one-fifth, less the Caucasus. Obviously, some imperial cities with ethnically Russian (or rather creole) pluralities or even majorities dot and effectively control these colonies.36

Perhaps more importantly, Putin and many Russians think of Russia as an empire, both in how it is organized and how it behaves. Empires meddle in other countries’ affairs. Just months after declaring its own independence from the Soviet Union, Russia began inserting its army into conflicts around the former Soviet Union, and each time it did so Russian forces stayed, permanently: Moldova (Transnistria), Armenia and Azerbaijan (the Nagorno-Karabakh war), Belarus, Central Asia (Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, etc.), Georgia in 2008, and the seizure of Crimea and eastern Ukraine in 2014.

In the Yeltsin days, an expression came into use in Russian politics, ближнее зарубежье (“the near-abroad”). As explored in Chapters 9 and 10 in this book, this term refers to now-independent countries once ruled directly or indirectly by the Soviet Union. A further underlying meaning is that once ruled by Moscow, always ruled by Moscow; Putin and Russian nationalists believe modern Russia still deserves to rule these countries —or at least have special and exclusive political rights in them. Former Cold War intelligence officer Douglas Boyd describes:

Flushed with their ill-gotten personal prosperity after seventy years of scant private wealth in Russia, its leaders believe that the near-abroad, in which 25 million ethnic Russians still live, is theirs by right and deeply resent Western intrusion into it by granting membership of the European Union and NATO to these countries. There is even a body of opinion in Western corridors of power that these countries should be written off, in order not to incite the bear to show its teeth.37

36 Tomasz Kamusella. (2023 July). “Going Native: Russian Studies in the West.” Academia. Retrieved from: https://www.academia.edu/104592365/Going_Native_Russian_Studies_ in_the_West?email_work_card=title

37 Boyd, Douglas. The Kremlin Conspiracy: 1,000 Years of Russian Expansionism. Stroud, UK: History Press, 2014; p. 337.

Ukrainian human rights lawyer Oleksandra Matviichuk is pretty clear about all this:

Russia is a modern-day empire. The imprisoned peoples of Belarus, Chechnya, Dagestan, Tatarstan, Yakutiia, and others endure forced russification, the expropriation of natural resources, and prohibitions on their own language and culture. They are forced to give up their identity. Empire has a center, but it has no borders. Empire always seeks to expand. If Russia is not stopped in Ukraine, it will go further.38

Putin’s chief ideologist, Vladislav Surkov, agrees. In an op-ed in official state media that he wrote just before the war, he introduced the term “social entropy” (Социальная энтропия), which (according to Surkov) happens naturally in countries: their societies inevitably disintegrate and decay, and chaos ensues. Successful empires (like Russia) use this to their advantage:

Exporting chaos is not new. “Divide and conquer” is an ancient recipe. Division is synonymous with chaos. Rally your own + divide strangers = you will rule both. Relieving internal tension […] through external expansion. The Romans did this. All empires do this. For centuries, the Russian state, with its harsh and inactive political interior, was preserved solely thanks to the tireless striving beyond its own borders. It has long forgotten how, and most likely never knew how to survive in other ways. For Russia, constant expansion is not just one of the ideas, but the true existential of our historical existence. […] Complaints from Brussels and Washington about Moscow’s interference [in Crimea] and the impossibility of resolving significant conflicts around the globe without Russian participation show that our state has not lost its imperial instincts. […] In the meantime, the world is enjoying its multipolarity, the parade of post-Soviet nationalisms and sovereignties. But in the next historical cycle, globalization and internationalization, forgotten today, will return and cover this twilight Multipolarity.

38 Oleksandra Matviichuk. (2023 May 9). “A Speech to Europe 2023.” IWM. Retrieved from: https://www.iwm.at/news/a-speech-to-europe-2023-read-the-full-text-or-watch-therecording

And Russia will receive its share in the new global gathering of lands (or rather, spaces), confirming its status as one of the few globalizers, as happened in the era of the Third Rome39 or the Third International. Russia will expand not because it is good, and not because it is bad, but because it is physics.40

In Putin’s mind, only a handful of countries in the world deserve real sovereignty and security. Russia is one of them. Other countries— e.g., Poland, Ukraine, Sweden, Kazakhstan, and the Philippines—are only playthings for the Great Powers as far as Putin is concerned, and their rights or interests are subordinate to the world’s dominant empires. As Surkov’s final sentence above illustrates, to Putin, a global Russian imperial victory is both predestined and inevitable.41

Zeitgeist: But “empire” is actually the problem. What Putin doesn’t understand is that most of Europe underwent a profound change after the horrors of two world wars. Despite the triumphalism of the Allies, there was a sense among both winners and losers in 1945 that the World Wars had really been a form of suicide—that the wealthiest and most advanced civilization on the planet had used all its advantages to destroy itself, rather than further humankind. Europeans fell out of love with empires, and instead began to focus on their quality of life. To be sure, this process was slow and fraught with missteps such as India in 1947, Algeria in 1956, or Angola in 1961. But today most Europeans look with shame, or at least reflectiveness, on their imperial pasts. Europe has changed, with much of Eastern Europe also starting down this same path after 1988. Young Poles and French people today do not fear German militarism, for instance. Historian James J. Sheehan describes this post–World War II transformation:

This system provided the incubator within which the states of western Europe were gradually transformed. They became civilian states, states that retained the capacity to make war with one another but lost all interest in doing so. The result was an eclipse of violence in both

39 “The Third Rome” = Tsarist times, the “Third International” = Soviet times.

40 Владислав Сурков (Vladislav Surkov). (2021 November 20). << Куда делся хаос? Распаковка стабильности>> (“Where did the Chaos Go? Unpacking Stabilization”). Актуальные комментарии (Current Commentary). Retrieved from: https://actualcomment.ru/kudadelsya-khaos-raspakovka-stabilnosti-2111201336.html

41 Surkov’s argument echoes Lenin’s arguments that Marxist-Leninism and its “inevitable victory” were also grounded in science (“physics”).

meanings of the word: violence declined in importance, and it was concealed from view by something else—that is, by the state’s need to encourage economic growth, provide social welfare, and guarantee personal security for its citizens. The eclipse of violence happened gradually. It was a slow, silent revolution, hidden in plain sight, but it was nonetheless a revolution as dramatic as any other in European history.42

Russia has completely missed Europe’s social and political transformation. Why? Professor Alexander Motyl points to theories that compare Putin’s Russia to Weimar Germany:

Other scholars argue that modern Russia’s expansionist drive comes from the way the former Soviet empire suddenly and comprehensively collapsed in 1991. Unlike the British and French empires, where the progressive loss of territory gave the imperial center time to adjust to being nonimperial, empires that collapsed in one fell swoop often retained the imperial ideology as well as many of the former empire’s important institutional and structural ties. The sudden collapse of the German Empire in 1918 is very instructive here: An unbroken imperial ideology mixed with resentment over lost status and territories was the toxic political and cultural cocktail that fueled the Nazis’ hyperimperialist war.43

USELESS TRIVIA: NEVER MEET YOUR IDOLS

Vladimir Putin on Peter the Great:

Peter the Great waged the Great Northern War for twentyone years. On the face of it, he was at war with Sweden, taking something away from it…. He was not taking away anything, he was returning. This is how it was. The areas around Lake Ladoga, where St. Petersburg was founded.

42 Sheehan, 2008: p. xx

43 Alexander J. Motyl. (2023 August 25). “Why We Should Not Bet on a Peaceful Russia.” Foreign Policy. Retrieved from: https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/08/25/russia-ukraineputin-prigozhin-negotiation-settlement-deal-peace-war-counteroffensive/

When he founded the new capital, none of the European countries recognised this territory as part of Russia; everyone recognised it as part of Sweden. However, from time immemorial, the Slavs lived there along with the Finno-Ugric peoples, and this territory was under Russia’s control. The same is true of the western direction, Narva and his first campaigns. Why would he go there? He was returning and reinforcing, that is what he was doing.

Clearly, it fell to our lot to return and reinforce as well. And if we operate on the premise that these basic values constitute the basis of our existence, we will certainly succeed in achieving our goals.44

—Vladimir Putin, to a group of students at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in the summer of 2022

It is perhaps natural that Putin would look up to Peter the Great since, as he said in this speech, Peter founded Putin’s hometown. Peter is also a Russian hero who crushed two rival powers (Sweden and Poland-Lithuania)—and expanded Russia’s borders in the process! Peter made Russia great, and put it on Europe’s map as a power Europe could not ignore.

But if we unpack this little gem from Putin above, what becomes clear is he is really channeling the first independent Muscovite ruler, Ivan (John) III (15th century). Peter the Great (18th century) had founded St. Petersburg in part to get away from Moscow and break himself free from the entrenched boyar (aristocratic) power intrigues there. Instead, Peter had traveled throughout Europe and admired the West’s technologies and organizational capabilities. St. Petersburg was his way of Europeanizing Russia, of drawing the country closer to Europe and forcing Russia’s traditional power elites to adopt (Western) European manners of dress, behavior, and even thinking. Putin, in contrast, wants to sever Russia from Europe.

44 Vladimir Putin. (2022 June 9). “Meeting with young entrepreneurs, engineers and scientists” (English-language translation). Official webpage of the President of Russia. Retrieved from: http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/68606

Ivan III was a guy more on Putin’s wavelength. Having successfully broken Muscovy free from the Tartars in 1480, he essentially declared Muscovy to now be the sole legitimate heir to Kyivan Rus—by which Ivan meant that Muscovy now had the exclusive right to rule all former Rus lands. This essentially was his “Gathering of the Russias” policy. Never mind that the city of Moscow hadn’t even existed for most of Kyivan Rus’s history. To Putin, Ivan’s idea that Moscow can just grant itself the right to rule over others makes total sense.

Both Ivan and Peter had imperial dreams, but Peter sought to achieve them by emulating Europe and its successes. His vision for Russia was a European vision. Ivan and Putin, in contrast, embrace Moscow’s provincial, aristocratic, xenophobic ways that Peter rejected.

Finland’s foreign minister, Elina Valtonen, views Russian imperialism as more than a Putin problem:

I think what many haven’t perhaps realized is that this is not just Putin’s war. It seems that the Russian machinery, so to speak, has been preparing for this for a very long time. They have been actively waging war since [the 2008 invasion of] Georgia and 2014 against Ukraine, with the illegal annexation of Crimea. Of course, Putin has been in power during this time, but for more than two decades, he has built an infrastructure around this. And there could have been two decades for somebody [in Russia] to tell him that it’s not okay.45

There was a remarkable observation by Gau Yusheng, a former Chinese ambassador to Ukraine, who gave a speech at a forum hosted by the International Studies Department of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing shortly after the war started. (His speech was later

45 Ishaan Tharoor. (2023 September 25). “’This is not just Putin’s war’: How Finland’s top diplomat sees Ukraine.” Washington Post. Retrieved from: https://www. washingtonpost.com/world/2023/09/25/finland-war-nato-putin-defense-supportukraine-europe/?utm_campaign=wp_todays_worldview&utm_medium=email&utm_ source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_todayworld

removed from Chinese websites.) He commented about Russia and its former empire:

The core and primary orientation of the Putin regime’s foreign policy is to view the former Soviet Union as its exclusive sphere of influence, and to restore the empire through integration mechanisms in various fields dominated by Russia. For this reason, Russia is duplicitous and reneges on its promises; it has never truly recognized the independence, sovereignty, and territorial integrity of other former Soviet countries, and frequently violates their territories and sovereignty. This is the greatest threat to peace, security, and stability in Eurasia.46

Finally, there is the question of whether Russia will ever be able to modernize and make the transition from empire to nation-state, like most of the rest of Europe has. Tomasz Kamusella is skeptical:

The Russian metropolis has been addicted to this imperial and exploitative economic model since the 18th century. Democracy necessitates decolonisation, which is a mortal danger to the empire. That is why, despite their progressive propaganda, in early 1918 the Bolsheviks ended the short-lived democratic experiment and dispersed the Constitutional Assembly. Similarly, in post–Soviet Russia a tank assault on the Russian Duma (parliament) in late 1993 spelt the end of any meaningful democracy in this country. In both cases empire won. Instead of genuine representation of the people’s will, the tsar was back, first as general secretary (of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union), and now as president (of the Russian Federation). Recently some members of the Russian elite even seriously proposed crowning the current Russian president as tsar.47

46 “Gao Yusheng, Former Chinese Ambassador to Ukraine: The Trend of the RussianUkrainian War and Its Impact on the International Order” (based on a machine-dependent translation into English). (2022 May 10). China Law Translate. Retrieved from: https:// www.chinalawtranslate.com/en/gao-yusheng-russia-war-comments/

47 Tomasz Kamusella. (2023 June 9). “Obstacles to Russian decolonization.” New Eastern Europe. Retrieved from: https://neweasterneurope.eu/2023/06/09/obstacles-to-russiandecolonisation/

Q: Is Russia a dictatorship?

A: As always, definitions are important. In his 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama argued that from a political evolutionary perspective, democracy was about as good a system as humans could produce. In other words, with democracy, we’ve hit the end of the line. There’s no further to go. Now, some took this to mean that Fukuyama was claiming there would be no more conflict, that all of humanity would eventually see the democracy light and the primary human activity would be hugging other humans (and trees, and maybe spotted owls) and singing “Kumbaya.” But Fukuyama was right in the sense that nobody has (so far) come up with a better idea than democracy that delivers stability, higher living standards, social mobility, technological development, and maximum individual freedom. There are people arguing for older forms of society and government like theocracies, fascist dictatorships, kingdoms, etc., but those were all heavily discredited. Cuba may still claim communist supremacy, but how many people around the world today are trying to copy Cuba?

Why is this important? In their 2022 book, Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century, Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman argue something similar to Fukuyama, in essence that democracy has pretty much won the argument, so that people who espouse antidemocratic political beliefs must mask their authoritarian regimes in democratic clothing. Elections must be staged, political parties must exist (but be controlled), and all the outward trappings of a democratic society must be presented to cover up the reality of who has power and how it is wielded. For Stalin and Hitler, their dictatorships were naked and unapologetic. But in 2024, dictators—like Adam and Eve after eating that apple—feel the need for some strategically deployed fig leaves.

And Putin is Guriev’s and Treisman’s poster boy for a dictator wearing democratic clothing. As Chapter 10 in this book explores, Russia under Yeltsin was, at least briefly, a very real democracy, but one without any institutional history for support. Some believe Russian democracy died the day Yeltsin ordered the army to shell the parliament building in 1993, just two years into Russia’s democratic experiment. Others believe it limped on despite Yeltsin into the early years of Putin’s rule, maybe dying somewhere between the Second Chechen War (1999–2009) and oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s arrest in 2003. Others point to Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012 after his odd interregnum as prime minister. (Again, see Chapter 10 for details.) Any lingering elements of democracy that survived have steadily been eroded over Putin’s reign— and that erosion has rapidly accelerated since Putin ordered the invasion

of Ukraine. The Russian Army’s failures in Ukraine have clearly spooked Putin, prompting him to dispense with even the window-dressing of democracy and ensure that it is utterly, bluntly clear to anyone that he alone wields power in Russia.

So is Russia in 2024 a dictatorship? Again, it depends where you put the emphasis. There were presidential elections in 2024 (as scheduled), and of course Putin was a candidate in them. There were also elections for Russia’s parliament (the Duma) and for local positions around the country. But given the new political environment, even the charade of any opposition was almost completely squelched, and of course—spoiler alert—Putin and his approved candidates won overwhelmingly. The truth is, in 2024 decisions in Russia are not made via any political process or institutions, but by one man.

Addendum: The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) agrees. In October 2023 PACE declared Russia a dictatorship and called on the international community to reject Vladimir Putin’s presidency as illegitimate when his current term ends in 2024.48

Q: Is Russia better under Putin?

A: One of the key traits of Russian history is the weak development of state institutions in favor of strongmen with near absolute power. The Kremlin has a very long tradition of harboring lonely, isolated men with unchecked imperial dreams. Some Russians buy into this imperialism, but as Russian journalist Ilya Matveyev (via Paul Goble) observes, Russia suffers:

Vladimir Putin “inherited a weak state” but had “the chance to build a strong one,” Ilya Matveyev says; but instead of using his power to create one, he focused on building “a system of personal power.” As a result, “he turned out to be an effective dictator but did not turn out to be an effective state builder.”49

48 Dinara Khalilova. (2023 October 13). “PACE declares Russia dictatorship, Putin’s rule illegitimate after 2024.” Kyiv Independent. Retrieved from: https://kyivindependent.com/ pace-calls-for-recognizing-putin-as-illegitimate-beyond-2024/

49 Paul Goble. (2023 July 10). “Putin Turned Out to Be an Effective Dictator but Not an Effective State Builder, Matveyev Says” (Blog post). Window on Eurasia—New Series. Retrieved from: https://windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2023/07/putin-turned-out-tobe-effective.html?fbclid=IwAR3xnpcosMGMZBaY_V0Ncl6-ZIys4D85dSqJEk3ylYhPyjNz yU5QQ6GYiYw

The reality is that despite the illusions of what strong men can achieve, everyone loses. Under Putin, Russia remains economically and technologically underdeveloped, and its much-vaunted military might has turned out to be a paper tiger. Two decades of very expensive reforms led by Putin and his acolytes in the Russian military have bought Russia embarrassing defeat in Ukraine. During the Prigozhin/Wagner Uprising of July 2023, most of Putin’s security forces on the ground—the army, militia forces, the FSB, local police—melted away rather than confronting the rebels, allowing the Wagner troops to get within 75 miles (120 km) of Moscow. So much for imperial invincibility. As the Matveyev quote reveals, Putin’s every move has been to consolidate his own power, at the expense of Russia’s. When Putin wins, Russia loses.

Since this invasion of Ukraine began, Russia has been decoupled from the West’s technologies and economies, while estimates claim that (in two waves), nearly a million50—mostly younger, educated, wealthier, and tech-savvy—Russians have fled the country since this war began. This is important because overall, Russia’s population was already shrinking before this war and its sanctions, and Putin is scaring off the country’s most productive people. The impact is expected to be severe; the Atlantic Council projects that by 2026, Indonesia’s economy will be larger than Russia’s51 with the decisive factor being Indonesia’s big growth in younger, educated people, while Putin has declared war against precisely those same types of people in Russia. The Russian Central Bank reported in July of 2023 that between February 2022 and June 2023 some $253 billion—a record amount—of foreign capital fled Russia.52 Putin’s grip on power has condemned not just today’s Russians but future generations of Russian citizens to some of the lowest living standards in all of Eurasia, with little hope for improvement. As Fareed Zakaria wrote in June 2023 in his Washington Post column, Russia’s problems run deeper: “For a fifteen-year-old boy, life expectancy in Russia is the same as in Haiti.”

50 Maria Kiseleva and Victoria Safronova. (2023 June 4). “Why are people leaving Russia, who are they, and where are they going?” BBC. Retrieved from: https://www.bbc.com/ news/world-europe-65790759. Putin has claimed in 2023 that many have returned, but most analysts and political observers dispute this claim.

51 Josh Lipsky and Niels Graham. (2023 August 31). “Indonesia’s economy will surpass Russia’s sooner than expected. Here’s what that says about the global economy.” The Atlantic Council. Retrieved from: https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/econographics/ indonesias-economy-will-surpass-russias-sooner-than-expected-heres-what-that-saysabout-the-global-economy/

52 “Russia Loses Record $253Bln in Wartime Capital Flight.” (2023 July 24). Moscow Times Retrieved from: https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2023/07/24/russia-warns-of-toughretaliatory-measures-to-drone-attacks-a81949

He observes that political economist Nicholas Eberstadt “points out that shockingly, Russia is a country with ‘First World’ education levels and ‘Fourth World’ mortality rates for its working age population.” Russia “performs miserably in the knowledge economy” and “lags in patents,” Zakaria writes; its government is notoriously corrupt and antimodern. “What does this all add up to?” Zakaria asks. “I am not sure. But it’s fair to say that Russia’s biggest problem is not that it is losing the Ukraine War but rather that it is losing the 21st century.”53

Q: Putin has been so successful for years; what has changed with this war?

A: It seemed like Putin did score a long run of victories over the years: his invasion of Georgia, his browbeating of Belarus into a union, his seizure of Crimea, then his proxy war in eastern Ukraine, his support for proRussian dictators in Central Asia. Russian military aircraft began once again challenging NATO aircraft in international skies, and the Russian Navy similarly shadowed Western ships on the high seas. Russia was back!

Or not. In reality, Putin’s moves were all carefully confined to places and spaces where no other significant power—especially the West— claimed vital interests. In Europe, this mostly meant the former Soviet states. The Near Abroad54 became Putin’s imperial sandbox where there was a political vacuum after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and in that vacuum he could play out his imperial fantasies, deploying the Russian Army in dramatic shows of force. His wars against Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014 were designed precisely to remind local elites that they were beyond the West’s pale, and very much within his grasp.

This was all designed to portray Russia to the world as a reviving power, but in truth Putin has only presided over a disintegrating, decaying Russia that is still in the throes of the Soviet collapse. Over Putin’s twenty(-plus)-year-rule, Russia has failed to undergo any serious financial, economic, infrastructural, or political change. It started down

53 Fareed Zakaria. (2023 June 30). “Opinion: Russia’s biggest problem isn’t the war. It’s losing the 21st century.” Washington Post. Retrieved from: https://www.washingtonpost .com/opinions/2023/06/30/putin-russia-war-modernization/

54 Noted elsewhere both in the book and this special insert, “Near Abroad” is a modern Russian term referring to the independent countries once part of the Soviet Union. Putin and Russian nationalists insist Moscow has special rights in these countries, including a right to veto local authority and laws. This belief plays a direct role in Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

the path of transformation in these areas in the 1990s, and was actually making very real progress by the first decade of the 2000s, but Putin aggressively reversed most of these gains by 2010, reverting to Sovietera models. Superficially, it looked over the 2000s as if Russia had really changed economically as a certain prosperity appeared in Russian cities, but this was really mostly a product of government subsidies fueled by skyrocketing global oil and gas prices. Despite all this, a generation of Russians was born into this post–Soviet Russian world and saw themselves as belonging to a larger world, embracing technology, world cultures, and traveling.

Unfortunately, it was overwhelmingly Russians of this generation who fled Russia when Putin attacked Ukraine.

In light of all this, many Russia specialists today agree that Russia has not fully reckoned with the full implications of the Soviet collapse, and there is unfinished business. What happened in 1991 was only a beginning, and the full collapse has been delayed by Putin.

So when his army, only partially reformed and still riddled with Soviet-era problems and further impaired by the Putin regime’s corruption and incompetent planning, invaded Ukraine in February 2022—it met unexpectedly strong resistance and fell apart in the process. Putin’s failure in Ukraine is not a short-term thing, but the result of twenty(-plus) years of misrule.

Q: Does that mean Putin (and Russia) are still communist?

A: Again, the answer is nuanced and not so simple. So, the straightforward answer is no; Putin is not a communist, he has condemned communism repeatedly as a foreign ideology that weakened Russia, he has heaped particular scorn on Lenin as the person who brought foreign ideas to Russia, and ultimately, the Communist Party in Putin’s Russia is a tiny, insignificant and hollowed-out political force mostly filled with nostalgic elderly pensioners. Putin also helped push along a decades-long effort within the Russian Orthodox Church to canonize Tsar Nicholas II (which happened in 2000), who along with his family was murdered by the Bolsheviks in 1918—on Lenin’s direct orders. So, no.

But …

While Putin is not a communist, he is enamored with the symbols of the Soviet Union and its (perceived) power. He loves the red star still emblazoned on all Russian military equipment, he has readopted the music of the old Soviet national anthem (with new words) for Russia’s current national anthem, and over the years he has reinstated

many Soviet cultural and ritual practices that Yeltsin had banned. Even more importantly, in Putin’s mind the Soviet Union was not so much a communist powerhouse as a post–Tsarist Russian empire worthy of emulation. This was how the Soviet Union gained whatever popularity it had with its Russian population, not as a communist wonderland but as a de facto Russian empire—even if it didn’t call itself that. Though anecdotal, several stories have emerged during the early months of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 of Russian forces re-erecting Sovietera statues of Lenin locals had torn down—as a symbol of the reassertion of Russian power in Ukraine. Lenin, the man, was a traitor in Putin’s eyes, but Lenin as the symbol of Soviet power is golden to Putin.

Many Russians were sympathetic to the Soviet Union’s claim that it was the most advanced society on the Earth, and for once (so Moscow claimed), it was the West that was backward and playing catch-up. Going back to the 1880s, as more and more Europeans visited Russia and were astonished by how underdeveloped and backward Russia was, the Tsars angrily denounced the scores of articles and travelogues across Europe describing travelers’ observations. The Soviet Union tried to thwart that same message by carefully controlling what Western tourists in the USSR saw, failing to understand that it was the day-today workings of Soviet life Westerners witnessed while being carted between carefully selected tourist sites that shocked them. For Russians, the Soviet Union’s boasts of superiority offered a salve for Russian insecurities about their place in Europe and the world. Putin seems to have sipped this Kool-Aid himself and is very attracted to Soviet symbols as a model for the future.

But in some more practical ways, Putin is also recreating the failings of the Soviet Union: near-total state ownership (or control) of the Russian economy, heavy centralization of all politics in Moscow, appointments to key political and economic positions throughout the country based on loyalty to Putin rather than competence or experience, state-worship and subordination of all activities to the needs of the Russian state, heavy reliance on the state security services (like the FSB, the current incarnation of the KGB), and deep corruption that penetrates all spheres of Russian life. Under Putin, the Russian state and political institutions (like the Duma) are empty organizations devoid of any real authority or influence, and continue their daily work pointlessly as nothing more than a charade.

So again, is Putin’s Russia communist? Technically and in some important ways, no, but in some functional ways, it sure works and behaves a lot like its communist predecessor—including in the ways that brought the Soviet Union crashing down in 1991.

Q: What is Русский мир/Russkiy Mir?

A: Русский мир (pronounced “Roosskee meer”) translates as “the Russian World,” and in a nutshell it is the ethnic Russian cultural and political zone. But more than that, it also implies social and moral superiority, equating Russian culture and ways of living as the right way for people to live, combining the trifecta of antidemocracy (like the Tsar), the Russian Orthodox Christian Church (the only real Christianity, for Русский мир believers), and Russian language and culture. Russians who embrace the Русский мир concept believe the Русский мир realm reflects the only truly moral and appropriate living space for humanity, so that people around the world only have two basic choices: Русский мир (freedom and salvation), and everything else—particularly the evil West (which will clearly earn you hellfire).

The concept of Русский мир goes back to the 19th century in Tsarist Russia, as Tsarist authorities became more aware of the West and felt defensive about Russia and its relative backwardness, and began arguing that Russia may not be the most technologically or economically developed country but that Russians nonetheless lived the good, clean, moral life (unlike the morally depraved West) in the way the Christian God no doubt intended. The notion of Русский мир didn’t completely disappear under the Soviets, being replaced by a similar notion, Homo sovieticus (“Soviet Man”), the idea that the Soviet Union under its communist system was so advanced that Soviet citizens had somehow actually evolved to be physiologically superior beings. Homo sovieticus was posed as an aspiration in Lenin’s time but was described by some Soviet leaders in the 1950s and 60s as an accomplished reality. (Moscow became fixated on the Olympics as an arena in which to prove the superiority of Soviet citizens.) Putin completely buys into the Русский мир concept, and made it (particularly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022) a constant staple in all official Russian state media nowadays.

To be fair, the Russians aren’t the only ones to have an idea like Русский мир. Nineteenth-century German nationalists, fretting about Germans living in communities across Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and the Baltics, came up with the idea of Deutschtum: Germandom, meaning the collective community of German speakers and German culture across Europe. And an underlying belief attached to the original Deutschtum concept was the assertion that somebody somewhere really ought to gather up all these lands where Germans live and put them in one, big (German) Reich. Similarly, Hungarians looking at their state census in the late-19th-century Habsburg empire were very concerned about being surrounded by large groups of Romanians, Serbs, Slovaks, and Ukrainians—within Hungary.

They came up with their own term, Magyarság (“Hungariandom”), which meant the same thing as Deutschtum. All three of these peoples—Russians, Germans, and Hungarians—had official state-run forced assimilation programs (Russification, Germanization, Magyarization) in the 19th and early-20th centuries aimed at local minorities. Those kinds of ideas are dead in Germany and Hungary nowadays, but Русский мир lives on in Russia.

Q: Is Russia fascist?

A: This is the focus of a huge debate in the international community, particularly among historians. I’ll start with a quote by noted Eastern Europe historian Timothy Snyder, who has argued that Russia is the closest thing to a fascist state Europe has seen since 1945: A time traveler from the 1930s would have no difficulty identifying the Putin regime as fascist. The symbol Z, the rallies, the propaganda, the war as a cleansing act of violence and the death pits around Ukrainian towns make it all very plain. The war against Ukraine is not only a return to the traditional fascist battleground, but also a return to traditional fascist language and practice. Other people are there to be colonized. Russia is innocent because of its ancient past. The existence of Ukraine is an international conspiracy. War is the answer.55

My take is that this argument is not very helpful. To begin with, everybody in this conflict has been flinging terms like “fascist” and “Nazis” at each other since Day One,56 beginning with Putin’s claims that all Ukrainians are Nazis. There is some validity in wondering aloud just how much Putinism reflects some sort of modern revival of European fascism. After all, Putin actually brought home the remains of 1940s Russian pro-Hitler fascist Ivan Ilyin from Switzerland and reburied him in an elaborate Kremlin ceremony in 2005.

But in real terms, does using a historic label like “fascism” help us understand Putin or his appeal for Russians? Whether the Putin regime is fascist or not is an academic argument. What isn’t in doubt is the reality that Russia in 2024 is in the grips of some sort of extremism that

55 Timothy Snyder. (2022 May 19). “We Should Say It. Russia Is Fascist.” New York Times. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/19/opinion/russia-fascismukraine-putin.html

56 Ukrainians in 2023 commonly refer to Russians as Rashists (“Russian” + “racist” + “fascist”) and Orcs (from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, where orcs were the deformed, ignorant foot soldiers who mindlessly serve the dark lord Sauron).

is doing tremendous damage to both Russia and Ukraine. Where I agree with Professor Snyder is that the experiences of Russia’s radicalization over the 2010s and 20s throw new historical light on Germany’s radicalization over the 1920s and 30s. In this sense, this term “fascism” is less an accusation and more a diagnosis. Will future Russians be willing to peer into the abyss and ask what Grandma or Grandpa did in this war?

Russian scholar Andrey Makarychev argues that Westerners are mistaken in trying to understand Russia through the filter of a nation-state lens or any modern ideologies. First, he argues, “the leadership of Russia has never acted according to the logic of a nation state in the customary sense. Cultural nationalism, needed for the construction of such a state, in Russia is automatically transformed into imperialism.” Second, he continues, “the Russian state is not an instrument for administration but a living Leviathan with all of its monstrous aspects and attributes. Its function is to acquire but not administer.”57

Ukrainian general Valery Zaluzhny agrees that Russia under Putin is something more primitive: “Let’s be honest, it’s a feudal state where the cheapest resource is human life.”58

Q: OK, but is it fair to compare Putin to Hitler?

A: One way that Putin and Hitler can be compared is in their shared experience of being foot soldiers—for Hitler, literally, while for Putin, figuratively—in the forces of crumbling empires. Both were on the front lines for their empires, and both saw the formidable power their empires projected ebb, and crumble. For both, this humiliating experience was formative and created a drive for revenge. Both sought to reverse the defeats they lived through: for Hitler, Germany’s defeat in 1918, and for Putin, the Soviet Union’s in 1991. Both also were in love with power and the idea of empire, and interestingly, both seem to interpret power as being feared by others.

Another interesting commonality shared by both is that while both believed their respective defeats were illegitimate, neither necessarily wanted to recreate the empires that had been defeated. Hitler fumed

57 Paul Goble. (2023 October 10). “Western Experts Misled by Their Own Models when Thinking about Russia, Makarychev Says” (Blog post). Window on Eurasia—New Series. Retrieved from: https://windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2023/10/western-expertsmisled-by-their-own.html

58 “War of attrition.” (2023 November 1). Economist, pp. 43–44. Retrieved from: https:// www.economist.com/europe/2023/11/01/ukraines-commander-in-chief-on-thebreakthrough-he-needs-to-beat-russia

about the wrongs (in his eyes) inflicted on Germany in 1918 and 1919 at Versailles, but when he came to power in Weimar Germany in 1933, his goal was to establish a nationalist dictatorship—not re-enthrone the Hohenzollerns59 and restart Bismarck’s “Second Reich.” Hitler loved and recycled many of the symbols of Wilhelmine Germany, but ultimately, he named his empire the “Third Reich” precisely to distinguish it from the two German empires he saw as his predecessors.60 It was something new. Similarly, Putin has denounced communism and Lenin, but as we’ve observed in the “Does that mean Putin (and Russia) are still communist?” question, he craves the Soviet Union’s symbols and is trying to reachieve the heights of Soviet power in the world. His empire is a nationalist empire very much aligned with the old Tsarist empires in many respects, but Putin has all too happily embraced the USSR (in terms of its power) as a model as well.

Another interesting way that Putin and Hitler can be compared is in their own respective careers in service to their empires. Hitler was an Austro-Hungarian citizen who had to get special permission to join Germany’s Reichswehr (army) when war broke out in 1914, but despite that enthusiasm, and despite several positive comments from commanding officers, he received few promotions to a higher rank. He finished the war in 1918 as the equivalent of a corporal, just above private, despite having served for the entire war and having taken on the very dangerous job of running messages in the trenches between commanders. Similarly, Putin landed a plum assignment in the KGB outside of the USSR, but in a dusty, backwater East German city (Dresden), far away from any real Cold War action (e.g., in East Berlin), and he also only achieved a middling-level rank. He mostly liaised with his East German Stasi colleagues, in a town where not much was happening. In other

59 This was a serious problem because the surviving Hohenzollerns of the 1930s and 40s mistakenly believed, at least initially, that Hitler’s ascension to power meant their restoration and resumption of royal power. With this in mind, Crown Prince Wilhelm— Kaiser Wilhelm II’s son—collaborated openly with the Nazis for some years in the 1930s. And it wasn’t just the Hohenzollerns; Hitler achieved power in 1933 when the old aristocratic class, led by President (and World War I general) Paul von Hindenburg, appointed Hitler chancellor, believing he was controllable and could be used unwittingly for an eventual royal restoration. Karina Urbach. (2020 August 18). “Useful idiots: the Hohenzollerns and Hitler.” Historical Research, Volume 93, Issue 261; pp. 526–550. Retrieved from: https://doi .org/10.1093/hisres/htaa018

60 “First Reich” = the medieval Holy Roman Empire which, despite its name (as the old joke goes), was neither Roman, Holy, nor an empire. It was more of a medieval confederation centered on, but not exclusively, German. The “Second Reich” = Bismarck’s creation in 1871, which lasted until its destruction in World War I in 1918.

words, neither Hitler not Putin were particularly successful or highly regarded by their commanders or peers. Both were very eager recruits, but neither impressed many people.

There is one important difference between Hitler and Putin, however. This stems from how they interpret their defeats. From the moment he achieved power in 1933, Hitler had one purpose: to prepare Germany to refight World War I. He was bent on revenge, and in his mind the only resolution would come through the military reversal of the outcome of 1918. If he had anything to do with it, there was going to be a second world war. (And there was.) But for Putin, the defeat of 1991 derives from political intrigues, not open war. Western armies did not come crashing into Moscow. He has had to invent elaborate conspiracy theories to try to pin the Soviet collapse on the West, somehow explaining why despite the fact nobody saw Western tanks crashing into Red Square, there surely must have been Western spies and CIA spooks hiding behind the scenes and causing the events that led to Yeltsin standing on a (Soviet) tank and the coup leaders losing faith. Putin’s goal is similar to Hitler’s in that he wants to recreate a Russian empire, but he seems to understand that a war is not necessary to do so—and may not deliver the desired outcome, anyway. For all his bluster and miscalculations, Putin does seem to understand something of Russia’s limits, at least as far as NATO and the West are concerned, and he has been remarkably restrained in a lot of ways in Ukraine and elsewhere. He thrives on being provocative to the West, but not too much. He does not seem to want World War III.

Q: Do Russians actually support Putin?

A: It is difficult to generalize, and a lot of governments, organizations, and pollsters have been trying to figure this out since the war began. Official state polls in Russia indicate overwhelming support—but they’re official state polls, which would say something like that. And more to the point, as many Russians outside of Russia have pointed out, it would be dangerous and foolish for any Russian answering an official state poll either on the street or on the phone to give responses that the government may not be pleased with. Veteran journalist Owen Matthews, who has long and deep ties to Russian society, was stunned how quickly things reverted to Soviet-era norms when the invasion began: “What surprised—and chilled—me most was how quickly Russian society shut down. Before Putin’s 2022 invasion there was a space in Russia’s political ecosystem for political opposition and for free speech. The space was narrow, but

it was defined by a series of unspoken rules that were observed by the authorities more often than they were broken.”61

So it is difficult to say.

It is also important to recall that all Russians are not created equal. There is a stark and quite frankly shocking level of difference in the living standards available in places like Moscow or St. Petersburg on the one hand, where the average material life on offer is not too dissimilar from that available elsewhere in Europe, and somewhere like Siberia or the Far East. Simply said, for those people who live away from the major urban centers in Russia, there are extremely few choices available for information—and all of them are controlled by the state. The internet has just not penetrated most of these places, making access to non-government-controlled information pretty scarce. People in cities can circumvent state controls on the internet and read global news sites, but people in rural areas (the vast majority of Russia) only see official state TV and newspapers.

Russian sociologist Aleksey Levinson of the Levada Center in Moscow estimates that the number of Russians who completely buy into Putin’s arguments is a minority—but that traditional anti-Western sentiments have put a growing number of Russians in Putin’s corner, including some who had doubts about the war early on: “What this means,” Levinson says, “is that about two-thirds of the Russian population is firmly in Putin’s corner and can be counted on to support whatever he does, while a minority, about a fifth of the population in total, consists of people who approve his policies in Ukraine and his opposition to the West.”62

There is a further phenomenon at play, however, that is more specific to Russia. Several Russian expats or exiles (such as British-Russian academic Vlad Vexler63) have pointed out a Soviet-era phenomenon whereby average Russians essentially put political blinders on and focus on their own lives, ignoring the news. They believe modern Russians are doing something similar. The daily news is bad, so they just detach themselves from it and try to live as normally as they can without taking sides or getting involved at all. There is an obvious survival mechanism at play here, but it also involves a certain level of collusion with evil—like

61 Matthews, 2022: p. 4

62 Paul Goble. (2023 October 14). “Three Quarters of Russians Who Back Putin on Ukraine Back Him on Everything But He Gets a Boost from Those who Don’t Back Him on Everything but Like His Anti-West Stance, Levinson Says” (Blog post). Window on Eurasia —New Series. Retrieved from: https://windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2023/10/threequarters-of-russians-who-back.html

63 Vlad Vexler. (2022 June 12). “Why All Russians Are Responsible for Putin’s War.” YouTube. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1pOahq4TCk

for instance when Putin bombs Ukrainian civilian targets. Looking the other way is not a solution.

So the answer about what Russians actually support or believe is complicated, and unknown.

Q: Is Russia going to collapse?

A: The short answer is, as of late 2024, I dunno. Many knowledgeable people both inside and outside of Russia64 are claiming in 2024 that a Russian collapse is at least very possible. At the moment Putin does not seem to be going anywhere, though the war has certainly upset the traditional applecart in Russian politics and Moscow is tense. The growing severity of security crackdowns indicates Putin is at least concerned about the possibility.

In a popular music video released in 2016, the Russian shockrock group Pussy Riot trolled a corrupt Russian prosecutor, but in the refrain, they snidely repeat a Putin regime admonition for average Russian citizens: “Be humble, learn to obey, don’t worry about the material stuff; be loyal to those in power, ’cause power is a gift from God.”65 This was the basic deal Putin struck with the Russian population: stay out of politics, be loyal, and Putin would deliver a basic middle-class lifestyle just like Russians saw in Western media— and maybe an empire to boot.66 As of late 2024, both sides of that bargain are breaking down: the economy is tanking, most global companies have withdrawn from Russia (certainly the consumer-focused ones), inflation is skyrocketing while the Ruble plummets, the military soaks up most of the government budget, and any empire seems as far from reality as ever.

64 Most notably so far, Jamestown Foundation senior fellow Janusz Bugajski; Janusz Bugajski. (2023 January 12). “The benefits of Russia’s coming disintegration.” Politico. Retrieved from: https://www.politico.eu/article/opinion-russia-benefits-disintegration/ 65 “Pussy Riot—CHAIKA” (YouTube). (2016 February 3). Pussy Riot. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VakUHHUSdf8

66 Soviet dissident Pavel Litvinov reported that when he was arrested in 1968 protesting in Red Square, one of the cops beating him shouted: “You fool—if you’d stayed at home, you’d have lived a peaceful life.” So Putin’s deal with Russians has its roots in Brezhnevera Soviet society. Andrei Kolesnikov. (2023 September 25). “Regime Change in Russia Won’t Lead to Chaos or Collapse.” The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Retrieved from: https://carnegieendowment.org/politika/90622?utm_source=rssemail& utm_medium=email&mkt_tok=ODEzLVhZVS00MjIAAAGOazN_ UohO5QRKan3wLy3RfGHrCy16e68WI-OM7NnVZBFDiS5XSlFJJcuuPmYELyKdoSHABk 70J2R02egRY14GpPbJB737DjCfl50HQuPMbw

Some have observed that Russia seems to be stuck in a historical cycle of overly centralized power centers (i.e., authoritarian rulers with near-absolute power), followed by periods of total regime collapse— usually, revolution. These revolutions—1825, 1863, 1905, 1917, the postStalinist “coup” by Khrushchev and others in 1954–55 (and the restoration of the Stalinist clique under Brezhnev in 1964), and then 1991—seem to reflect an inability of the Russian state to modernize itself, to develop real institutions that can provide political continuity (and stability) and resist power-grabbers like Putin. With each period of revolution or collapse, Russia sheds more of its old imperial lands (usually ones inhabited mostly by non-Russians) which generates resentment among Russian nationalists, leading to the next cycle of strong men promising an imperial restoration. As I noted in this book, many observers a decade ago began noticing that Putin’s Russia seemed to be lapsing back into old Soviet patterns, to the extent that some claimed that Putin had actually delayed the full Soviet collapse. Is Putin’s Russia doomed to repeat 1917, or 1991, or at least 1955? Is there no way off the merry-goround for Russia?

Mind you, while it may seem emotionally satisfying to imagine another Russian collapse, it won’t be fun for anybody. Putin regularly gives speeches that portray Holy Russia as constantly under attack by a morally depraved West that covets superior Russian technology, territory, resources, and civilization. In reality, the West of 2024 views Russia more like the West of 1918 viewed the Austro-Hungarian empire: as an outdated, feudal relic on the West’s eastern border that has the potential for instability, but which also plays an important “nanny-state” role in keeping all the messy minorities and stateless peoples under wraps, out of the West’s hair.

This is instructive. The Habsburg state was a placeholder for the West and when, to their horror, it began unraveling over 1918–19, the West did its best to save it—unsuccessfully. The West’s policies toward Eastern Europe from 1919 to 1925 were a reactive and frustrated attempt to fix all the many strategic and ethnic problems the Habsburg state had addressed through its mere existence. If Russia collapses, it will unleash similar political and economic chaos on the world—with the important difference that Austria-Hungary didn’t have nuclear weapons. This means that regardless of whether it is imminent, Western and global policy makers should be making “what if?” plans for a Russian implosion. The 1920s and 30s are instructive for what an imperial collapse on Russia’s scale can look like. To that point, as reported by Paul Goble, Tallinn-based Region.Expert editor Vadim Shtepa chillingly reminds us that a Russian collapse is not out

of the question, but it does not automatically translate into progress or change. Writes Goble:

There is no question, [Shtepa] argues, that “the liquidation of the Kremlin empire would represent a chief victory of world democracy in the 21st century.” But in seeking its destruction, everyone must remember that it has been destroyed twice and then revived with the arrival of yet another totalitarian leader.67

Q: Be honest: Are you anti-Russian—a Russophobe?

A: No, I am not a Russophobe. In the best tradition of the old “Some of my best friends are Russians” defense, there was a cluster of friends by the bar in the hall where my wedding reception was held where the night’s language was Russian. As a young student in late 1980s/early 1990s Hungary who made some extra money helping Russian language teachers learn English, I befriended many of my “students” (and exchanged Russian language lessons for English with one), and they regaled me with their genuine love for Russian philology and culture. They were patriotic Hungarians and deeply resented Soviet rule, but had built close friendships with Russians and loved traditional Russian life and values. On the contrary, I know that just as I argued in this book that real security and prosperity in London, Paris, or Berlin can only come with support for the same in Warsaw, Budapest, and Sofia—so, too, is Eastern Europe’s security and prosperity bound up with Russia. Put another way, there will never be complete security and prosperity in Lithuania or Romania if average Russians feel constantly threatened by external geopolitical forces, or if they do not have access to European-level living standards and material life. So long as gaps exist between the security and prosperity of Eastern Europe (well, Europe as a whole, really) and Russia, Russia will be a destabilizing factor in European politics and economics, and it will continue to play Brzezinski’s “spoiler state” role. So being anti-Russian is pointless. The challenge for Europeans and Westerners is not just in how to help Russia achieve this security and prosperity, but dealing with average Russians’ traditional paranoia and distrust of the outside world. Russia’s immense size allows unscrupulous rulers like Putin to exploit the information gaps average Russians face, especially those more

67 Paul Goble. (2023 October 14). “De-Imperialization of Russia Cannot Occur If It is Based on Hostility to Russians as an Ethnic Group, Shtepa Says” (Blog post). Window on Eurasia —New Series. Retrieved from: https://windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2023/10/ de-imperialization-of-russia-cannot.html

remote from urban areas and media. Late-stage Putinism is more than just paranoid; it justifies Russian aggression as a necessary response to imaginary Western attacks. I argue in this book that NATO’s expansion along Russia’s western frontier has actually strengthened Russia’s security; we’ll delve more into that argument in this section later, but in truth, for Putin NATO is a double-asset because it actually poses little threat to Russian security—while at the same time serving as a convenient foil. Putin needs windmills to tilt against; his vast wealth and death-grip on Russian politics are justified by the imaginary (Western) barbarians he claims are at the gate. Putin needs NATO.

And this is where I would boldly accuse Putin himself of being anti-Russian. In any world that I would create, Russians would live with Austrian-level living standards (GDP, wealth, education, health care, access to media, etc.), but Putin has created a Russia that serves his personal interests well—at the expense (in very real terms) of average Russians. Putin has diminished the life quality of average Russians in a thousand ways, even before he launched his pointless war. He has mauled the Russian economy, ensuring Russians’ lower living standards for generations to come; weakened Russia’s defense capabilities through the incompetence and corruption of his acolytes (luckily no foreign powers actually do threaten Russia, despite’s Putin’s hysterical rhetoric68); and laid waste to Russian education—which was seen in Soviet times as a valid and competitive alternative to Western education. Then, add how much Putin has damaged Russia’s reputation and defense capabilities by not only invading a neighboring European country in Europe’s largest war since 1945—but also by botching the invasion badly, and pressing on mindlessly because he doesn’t dare admit defeat? Tens of thousands— possibly hundreds of thousands—of Russians are being killed in this war, with barely a shrug of acknowledgement from Putin. Millions more are having their lives upended by husbands, sons, and brothers sent to fight

68 Maybe I spoke too soon. In August 2023 an official Chinese newspaper published a map showing an island in the middle of the Amur River (the border between Russia and China) as being Chinese. Mao’s China and the Soviet Union actually fought a series of battles over the island in 1969 before cooler heads prevailed. Now, the island is uninhabited and fairly small, and not really of much strategic value-—but it’s the principle of the whole thing. Officially, legally, by international law, the island belongs to Russia. China and Russia have signed several agreements recognizing this. But now China (Putin’s strongest ally) has published a map (with official Chinese Communist Party sanction) portraying the island as Chinese. What could possibly go wrong? Paul Goble. (2023 August 31). “India has Protested But Russia Hasn’t Beijing’s New Official Maps Showing Portions of Their Territories are Chinese” (Blog post). Window on Eurasia—New Series. Retrieved from: https://windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2023/08/india-has-protested-but-russiahasnt.html

in a vague war. I would argue I care about the welfare of the Russian people more than Putin does. Who is the real Russophobe? Journalist and historian Anne Applebaum agrees:

But I don’t think there’s any question that Putin will be remembered as the man who really set out to destroy his own country. And apart from what he did to Ukraine, apart from what he did to Georgia, apart from what he did to Chechnya, apart from what he did to Syria, you know, this is somebody who has worsened the living standards, and freedom, and culture of Russia itself. He doesn’t seem to care about the well-being or prosperity of ordinary Russians. They’re just cannon fodder to him.

He’s not interested in, you know, Russian achievements in infrastructure or art or in literature and in anything else. He has impoverished Russians. And he’s also brought back a form of dictatorship that I think most Russians had thought they’d left behind. Remember the Putin regime for the first decade that Putin was president had elements of freedom in it. It wasn’t a totalitarian state. There was no thought police, no thought control of the kind people had known from the Soviet era. He is now slowly bringing that back. So, this is a crushing not just of dissent but a crushing of all politics, all imagination, all culture, all activity, anything independent. What he’s really doing is really destroying modern Russia. And I think that’s what he’ll be remembered for overall.69

Putin reminds me of the 19th-century Paraguayan dictator Francisco Solano López, who launched a suicidal war against his neighbors Uruguay, Brazil, and Argentina over land disputes in what became known as the Paraguayan War (1864–70). The validity of any land claims aside, he whipped his nation into a frenzy and his soldiers became known for their fanaticism in battle, not unlike Japanese soldiers in the closing years of World War II. Estimates vary wildly and historians and demographers argue intensely over this, but some estimates claim that López managed to get as much as 70% of Paraguay’s population killed in his pointless war. Every male citizen was expected to serve until death. And, of course, López lost.

69 Vazha Tavberidze. (2023 August 17). “Anne Applebaum: Putin ’Is Really Destroying Modern Russia.’” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Retrieved from: https://www.rferl .org/a/applebaum-interview-russia-putin-history-tavberidze/32552736.html

III. Ukraine

Q: Aren’t Ukrainians just Russians, or didn’t they come from Russians?

A: The short answer is no. Ukrainians and Russians are related and have common origins in the same way modern French, Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese, and Romanians are all related but are still separate peoples. Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarussians all derive from a parent civilization that arose in the mid-9th century, just as modern Italians, French, Spanish, Portuguese, etc., have all inherited a Roman cultural heritage. Kyivan (or Kieven) Rus was a Norse (Viking) creation centered on the city of Kyiv—today, Ukraine’s capital—whose mostly Eastern Slavic population eventually came to dominate it. This civilization adopted Orthodox (instead of Western, Roman) Christianity as well as the Cyrillic alphabet, bequeathing these to modern Belarussians, Russians, and Ukrainians. (This is all outlined in Chapter 2 of this book, by the way.) Kyivan Rus was destroyed in the 13th century and its lands were divided in half by foreign conquerors, with the western half eventually becoming modern Belarus and Ukraine, and the eastern half eventually becoming Russia. (That’s an oversimplification, but you get the idea.)

The problem is that Putin (and quite frankly Russians for many generations) have claimed that Russia = Kyivan Rus, and that Russia is the only (legitimate) descendant of Kyivan Rus. Put another way, according to Putin and Russian nationalists, Kyivan Rus was really just early Russia. (Russian textbooks, and lazily, some older Western textbooks actually say this.) By this definition, neither Belarussians nor Ukrainians exist; they are lies and fabrications invented by the West or Lenin to weaken Russia. According to Putin, Belarussians and Ukrainians must be forced to renounce their obviously heretical cultures and misguided ideas of independence, and reassimilate to become the Russians they actually are (or at least, should be).

It’s like some crazy French dictator claiming that France is the only legitimate heir to the Roman Empire and civilization, and he then invades Italy to suppress what he calls the heretical Italian culture and language. Never mind the fact that the Roman Empire was ruled from modern Italy’s capital city, and the historic Latin spoken by Marcus Aurelius was closer to modern Italian than French. Similarly, Kyivan Rus was ruled from, well, Kyiv, and most linguists agree that modern Ukrainian is closer to the Old Eastern Slavic language than Russian.

USELESS TRIVIA: GRAMMAR AS A WEAPON

There is a linguistic oddity that has become a battleground over Ukraine: the use of the expression the Ukraine in English, with the added definite article (“the”).

One claim is that this use of “the” was a Soviet-era relic, a Stalinist artifact designed to suppress an independent Ukrainian identity. The Slavic languages (like Russian or Ukrainian) do not have definite articles, but there is a nuance in how Russians refer to Ukraine: на Украине (“on Ukraine”) versus в Украине (“in Ukraine”). The difference is that на (pronounced “NA,” meaning “on”), implies that Ukraine is a more generalized place, whereas в (pronounced “v,” meaning “in”) implies a specific place—a country. In Chapter 4 of this book we explored how the name Ukraine likely derives from the Slavic term kraj (pronounced like “cry” and meaning “land” or “country”), and “U-kraj-na” is believed to have originally meant “the borderlands,” or “the outer lands.” The origins of the Russian use of на were probably innocent enough, and in fact variations of this “borderlands” term were used by medieval Slavic peoples for border territories all over Eastern Europe. (The Serbian Krajina [pronounced “CRY-yee-nah”] enclave in modern Croatia also loosely translates as “frontier region.”) So it is not surprising that an older usage should survive in modern Russian.

But not so fast. Whatever the origins of Ukraine’s name, since at least the second half of the 19th century there has been a people who call themselves Ukrainians, and their country Ukraine. In other words, “Ukraine” today is an ethnonym. In 1991, Russia (and the rest of the world) legally recognized Ukrainian independence, and both Yeltsin and Putin have reaffirmed that recognition in multiple treaties with Ukraine since. But today Putin and his media stubbornly continue to use the older на Украине (“on Ukraine,” meaning “in the borderlands,” rather than “in Ukraine”). Worse, Putin even sometimes uses the Tsarist term Малороссия (“Little Russia”) for Ukraine, or Новороссия (“New Russia”) for the Donbas region.

But why do we say “the Ukraine” in English? This story is a little more complicated. While some point a finger at the Soviets, it was in use in English decades before Lenin or the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917. And Ukraine wasn’t the only country to get this treatment;

19th-century Brits routinely referred to the Congo, the Gambia, the Lebanon, the Argentine, and the Sudan—as well as the Ukraine. Maybe the answer is that these countries were named after geographic features: Congo and Gambia are named after rivers, and Lebanon takes its name from a mountain—so that until the mid20th century, for example, “the Congo” referred to the river and, vaguely, the lands around that river. Linguist Michael Moser thinks that English borrowed the “the” from German (which does have definite articles: die Ukraina) while the Germans had taken the old “borderlands” meaning from nearby Slavic peoples.70

Incidentally, as a counter to this, Ukrainian president Zelensky in March 2023 suggested that going forward Ukrainians should refer to Russia as “Moskovia” (Московія) to emphasize Russia’s Muscovite (as opposed to Kyivan Rus) origins. Putin reacted with fury, of course.

Q: OK, so how is it possible that modern Russians, Belarussians, and Ukrainians are separate peoples if they share common cultural ancestors?

A: The answer is that each has had very different historical experiences and influences in the centuries after the collapse of Kyivan Rus in the 13th century, and in many respects the three peoples were isolated from one another. This is all outlined in this book, but here’s a very brief recap. The Mongols destroyed the Rus lands, but in subsequent decades Lithuania conquered the western third of the old Kyivan Rus lands, ruling at one point an empire that stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Lithuania was minimally intrusive in its rule of these peoples, and even used their Eastern Slavic language to communicate with them—allowing them to develop culturally unmolested for centuries, cut off from their eastern Rus brethren.

Eventually these western Rus peoples were divided into two basic groups, mostly defined by geography: those who lived in the thick forests north of the Great Steppe (mostly small village farmers) eventually came

70 Tomasz Kamusella. (2012). “The Change of the Name of the Russian Language in Russian from Rossiiskii to Russkii: Did Politics Have Anything to Do with It?” Acta Slavica Iaponica, Tomus 32, pp. 73–96

to be Belarussians, and lived under benevolent Lithuanian rule until 1795, when the Russian Empire seized Belarus.

The Rus peoples living south of the Belarussian forests on the western Great Steppe also initially came under Lithuanian rule but after a few centuries fell under Polish rule. This was a problem. The transfer of control in 1569 was purely administrative (i.e., not a military event), but the Poles were not like the Lithuanians, and they began aggressively trying to reorganize Ukraine politically and economically. The combined peasant, Cossack, and local Orthodox Christian resistance to Polish interference in daily Ukrainian life in the 17th century laid the foundations for a Ukrainian identity. That resistance continued when Russia acquired eastern Ukraine (including Kyiv) in 1667, and fitfully attacked Ukrainian institutions. Western Ukraine remained under Polish rule until 1795; then part of the Galicia region was under Habsburg (Austrian) rule until 1918.

In this time under Lithuanian, Polish, and Habsburg Austrian rule, average Belarussians and (especially western) Ukrainians were exposed to European cultures, languages, and ideas. Beginning with some rulers like Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, Russia, too, began to experience European beliefs and practices, but this was a top-down process initiated by Russia’s rulers. Most average Russians would first encounter common European cultures and ideas only in the 20th century. This is an important point that separates Belarussians and Ukrainians on the one hand, and Russians on the other—despite their common early origins.

And Russia only made things worse in the 19th century by sporadically trying to suppress the Belarussian and Ukrainian languages. St. Petersburg only managed to provoke a crop of local nationalists and artists like Belarus’s Kastus Kalinousky and Ukraine’s Mykhailo Hrushevsky, determined to defend local identity and autonomy. (Russia got similar returns from Russification campaigns in occupied Poland, Finland, and the three Russian-ruled Baltic countries.)

Russians, in turn, derive from a city-state (Muscovy, centered on Moscow) that was founded just a few decades before Kyivan Rus’s demise, but which grew wealthy on redirected trade routes within the Mongol Empire (and its local part, the Golden Horde). Muscovy became so prominent that the Mongols began using it as their northern proxy administrators by the 14th century. Eventually, Muscovy was able to organize the eastern Rus states in resistance to Mongol rule, claiming independence in the late-14th century. Under its ruler Ivan (John) III a century later, Muscovy in effect declared itself the revived Kyivan Rus,

and declared its mission to liberate all other former Rus peoples. Or, put another way, Muscovy granted itself the right to rule all former Kyivan Rus lands, and set out trying to do just that, while also conquering other non-Rus Mongol territories (like Astrakhan, Kazan, etc.) in the process. It was Ivan III who changed Muscovy’s name to Russia, and two centuries later one of his successors, Peter the Great, would declare Russia an empire (and himself, “Tsar”).

USELESS TRIVIA: THAT’S NOT WHAT MY MOTHER CALLS ME

In late 2016, Putin unveiled a 52-foot (16-m) high statue of (Saint) Vladimir the Great just outside of the Kremlin walls in Moscow. Who was Vladimir the Great? According to RT Russiapedia, “Vladimir I, Grand Prince of Kiev and of all Russia, was an outstanding political figure in ancient Russia. During his rule, Christianity was adopted in Russia. He is also known as St. Vladimir.”71

So it’s natural that Putin would celebrate an outstanding Russian hero like St. Vladimir, and in such a prominent place. Makes total sense. Why wouldn’t he?

Well, except that Vladimir the Great wasn’t Russian, and he never set foot in the Kremlin or Moscow. In fact, “Vladimir” is the Russianized version of his name. As chronicles of the time make clear, he called himself Volodymyr (Володимир), which is what modern Ukrainians call him. (To be fair, Ukrainians try to claim him as a Ukrainian, which is also inaccurate.) Some believe that “Volodymyr” may have derived from the Scandinavian name “Valdemar.” Why? Because his native country, Kyivan Rus,72 had originally been founded by Norse Vikings. Though he was a Viking descendant, Volodymyr was born in Kyiv73 in the 10th century speaking a Slavic language, a product of a century’s intermingling between Norse and Slavs:

71 Leonid Laparenok. (2021). “Prominent Russians: Vladimir I.” RT Russiapedia. Retrieved from: https://russiapedia.rt.com/prominent-russians/history-and-mythology/vladimir -i/index.html. RT is the official state TV news service in Putin’s Russia, akin to the Sovietera TASS.

72 The name “Rus” is believed to derive from a Finnic term for rowers, ruotsi; remember that Viking ships were rowed.

73 Known to Russians as “Kiev” and to Ukrainians as “Kyiv,” today it is the capital of Ukraine. Most Westerners know Kyiv as “Kiev” because Ukraine was ruled by Tsarist and, later, Soviet Russia over the 19th and 20th centuries.

While the Varangians [Vikings] initially held positions of authority, their assimilation into Slavic society gradually transformed their role. Over time, they intermarried with Slavic noble families, forging alliances and cementing their position within the Rus aristocracy. The Varangian elite became integrated into the fabric of Rus society, and their distinct identity gradually merged with that of the Slavic population.74

Remember that the city of Moscow was founded more than 130 years after Volodymyr died.

Long story short, Volodymyr (as ruler of Kyivan Rus) invaded Byzantine Crimea and threatened to go further unless the Byzantines accepted his demands. The Byzantines said they would—but only if Volodymyr in turn adopted Orthodox Christianity. He did, and so today’s Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarussians are Orthodox Christians because of Volodymyr.

The problem with Putin’s statue in Moscow—and Putin’s use of the Russian version of Volodymyr’s name is a tip-off—is that he is trying to claim all of Rus history for Russia. In Putin’s mind, Russia is Kyivan Rus, and Kyivan Rus is early Russia. There is no such thing as Belarus or Ukraine to Putin, only Russia, and so these two peoples and their countries must be forcibly re-Russified. He was also using his statue to try to legitimize his illegal seizure of Crimea in 2014 through Volodymyr’s Crimean escapades in the 10th century. Putin claiming Volodymyr was an early Russian is like (continuing the French-Italian analogy from an earlier answer) a French dictator trying to claim that Julius Caesar was really an ancient Frenchman.

Q: So, Ukrainian isn’t just a dialect of Russian?

A: Again, no. There is no absolute line in linguistics describing when two dialects become languages, but in general, despite some common words and phrases, Russians and Ukrainians need translators to understand one another, just like modern English and Dutch or Spaniards and Italians need translators. Reports have surfaced of Russian soldiers in Ukraine

74 XY, Dandin. 2023: p. 16

expressing frustration with being unable to understand Ukrainianspeaking locals. The two obviously derive from a common parent Slavic language called (today) Old East Slavic, Rusyn, or in Russian and some older Western texts, “Old Russian.”75

Q: Isn’t Crimea Russian? Hasn’t it always been Russian?

A: Today’s Crimea does have a strong Russian cultural flavor, but that dominance has been artificially achieved. At the dawn of the 20th century, Russians were a minority in Crimea. At the dawn of the 19th century, there were almost no Russians in Crimea. And sadly, the Putin regime continues a long Russian tradition of harassing and suppressing native local Tartar culture, as well as purging Crimea of Ukrainian influence. Russians today think of Crimea sort of like a semi-tropical version of Las Vegas, with vacation resorts and gangsters. But Crimea’s human history stretches back thousands of years, long before Russians—or even Slavs—existed:

• Stage 1—The Steppe: Some of the oldest human remains in Europe have been found in Crimea. The Great Steppe constantly deposited eastern peoples at Crimea’s doorstep, so that for instance the various Steppe Iranian peoples like the Cimmerians, Alans, Scythians, and Sarmatians made Crimea their home almost 5,000 years ago. The peninsula was known for millennia as Taurica, Taurida, or Tauris after the Tauri people who inhabited Crimea before the Iranian peoples, and who eventually merged with the Scythians. As late as the 19th century, Russia called Crimea the “Taurida Governate” (Таврическая губернія).

• Stage 2—Greeks and Romans: Most of Crimea’s cities today were founded by the ancient Greeks in the Bronze Age, and these cities had by the time of Jesus large Jewish populations—completely distinct from today’s Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews.

• Stage 3—Byzantines: The Romans ruled Crimea for some time (as did their later-phase siblings, the Byzantines) during which times more eastern peoples (the Turkic Huns, Bulgars, and Khazars, as well as the Germanic Goths and Vandals) also settled briefly in or passed through Crimea. During Byzantine rule the Kyivan Rus civilization did briefly rule at least northern Crimea. Other Turkic Steppe peoples flowed through Crimea, like the Pechenegs and Cumanians, before the Mongols conquered Crimea in the 13th century.

75 It was called “Old Russian” simply out of laziness, because in the 19th and 20th centuries Russia was the most powerful Eastern Slavic state. Modern linguists note that in reality, modern Ukrainian retains more features and traits of the original Rus-era Old East Slavic than Russian does.

• Stage 4—The Mongol Empire and Tartars: Under Mongol rule Crimea was flooded with various Turkic peoples from whom would emerge a century later the Tartar people, who would eventually break from Mongol control and found their own state: the Crimean Khanate. The Mongols also gave us Crimea’s modern name, from their capital city on the peninsula, Qirim (today, Старий Крим/Old Krim). But during the Mongol period and into the Tartar era, Italians—first Venetians and Milanese, then eventually Genoese—would establish colonies along Crimea’s southern coast as trading posts.

{ It was one of these Genoese trading posts in Crimea at Caffa— today’s Feodosiya (Феодосія)—where the Black Plague first entered Europe from Asia. Genoese merchant ships unknowingly brought the disease back to Italy on their ships, and from there, it spread to the rest of Europe in the 14th century.

• Stage 5—The Ottoman Empire and the Tartars: The Ottoman (Turkish) Empire didn’t so much dramatically conquer Crimea as absorb it in the 15th century, and the Tartar Crimean Khanate became an Ottoman client state—with Ottoman protection. The Tartars infamously raided very far afield, harassing the young, new Russian state as well as Poles, Hungarians, Wallachians (Romanians), and others in the neighborhood.

• Stage 6—Russia: Those raids are why Catherine the Great targeted Crimea in the late-18th century, finally conquering it in 1783. When Catherine seized Crimea, the population was overwhelmingly Tartar (along with a mixture of other Turkic language–speaking peoples). A century later in the first Russian state census in 1897, Tartars were still the biggest ethnic group in Crimea with 36% of the population, but Russia solved this problem by combining both Russians (33%) and Ukrainians (12%) as “Slavs.”76 Catherine also built up a nearby town on the Black Sea coastline that was once an ancient Greek city, Odesa, to secure Crimea. (This is all in Chapter 4 of my book.)

• Stage 7—The Soviet Union, and Massive Ethnic Cleansing: The Soviet Union in particular would make Russians the majority ethnic group in Crimea through intense colonization and brutal ethnic cleansing, with for instance the mass deportation of 1.1 million ethnic Chechens, Kalmyks, Tartars, Ingush, Balkars, Karachays, and others from Crimea and the Caucasus to Siberia in 1943, often locked into train cars for weeks without food or water. (See the special insert section after the World War II chapter in the book for more information.)

76 “The First General Census of the Russian Empire of 1897. Breakdown of population by mother tongue and districts* in 50 Governorates of the European Russia, № 993–994. (June 27–July 10 2023). Демоскоп Weekly. Retrieved from: http://www.demoscope.ru/weekly/ ssp/rus_lan_97_uezd_eng.php?reg=1420

Post–World War II Moscow would practically make a religion out of the huge battles fought in Crimea in the Soviet reconquest of 1944, especially the Battle of Sevastopol. This hagiography became the excuse for the continued Russification of Crimea. I suspect Russia’s defeat in Crimea in the 1853–56 Crimean War may have also played a role in Moscow’s World War II worship in Crimea.

• Stage 8—Ukraine: In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed and Ukraine, among other Soviet republics, became an independent country. At the time, the post-Soviet countries simply agreed to keep borders where the old Soviet republic borders had been, to be sorted out later. Crimea had been in Soviet Ukraine prior to 1991, so it continued to be in independent Ukraine after 1991. It took more than a decade, but finally Kyiv and Moscow reached an agreement that included Russia accepting that Crimea was in Ukraine. Notes Paul Goble, “Those bilateral talks finally led to an accord which Leonid Kuchma and Vladimir Putin signed in Kyiv on January 28, 2003. Ukraine ratified the accord almost immediately but Russia did so only in April 2004.”77

USELESS TRIVIA: PLEASE PASS THE MAPLE SYRUP

New England is believed to have gotten its name from Captain John Smith, who, after helping found the Jamestown Colony in Virginia, explored the American coastline. The name “New England” was created as a marketing ploy, intended to make the untamed continent sound just like the ’burbs back in Merry Old England to prospective new settlers: safe and bountiful. “New England” initially referred to the entire American Atlantic seaboard, but over time came to mean only the northern-most English colonies east of the Dutch colonies.

But that’s not what the first guy to use the term “New England” meant. Sigurðr (sometimes rendered “Siward” or “Sigeweard” in chronicles) was the earl of Gloucester in England, and apparently was not thrilled with the new management in England after William the Conqueror’s Norman Conquest in 1066. Sigurðr joined a couple rebellions against William and tried to entice Denmark into reinvading (Knut, a Dane, had ruled England 1017 to 1044). But, both strategies failing, Sigurðr allegedly gathered a bunch of followers on

77 Paul Goble. (2023 August 15). “Ukraine Must Seek Restoration Not of Its 1991 Borders but Those of 2003, Osavolyuk Says” (Blog post). Window on Eurasia-—New Series. Retrieved from: https://windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2023/08/ukraine-must-seekrestoration-not-of.html?fbclid=IwAR2AcAUkwB1f5gA7Y7yzDWu4idfBDAqAPVDBm y1b-eLv51ga4BI1Fx8LIog

some ships and headed for the Mediterranean. For a while Sigurðr and his mates went gallivanting around the eastern Mediterranean, raiding and looting, until they got wind of an enemy (Seljuq Turk?) siege of Constantinople. They rushed to the Byzantine emperor’s aid and helped save the day.

To reward them, the Byzantine emperor offered the Englishmen a spot on the Varangian Guard (an elite guard composed of Vikings in Constantinople serving as the emperor’s personal guard), and indeed there is evidence of some English members of the Varangian Guard. (Remember that 11th-century Englishmen were just barely removed from their Anglo-Saxon and Danish Viking roots.) But, so the story goes, some of the English instead requested land to settle down, and the Byzantine emperor pointed them east to a land six days’ and nights’ sail from Constantinople which had once been under Byzantine rule but had since been overrun by barbarians. If the English could reconquer it for Byzantium, it was theirs, said the Byzantine emperor. The legend says that Sigurðr and a contingent of English did just that.

What is about six days’ and nights’ sail eastward from modern Istanbul? Crimea. This whole story is conjecture, based on accounts from several medieval chronicles from across Europe, but some modern historians believe there is some truth to them. The story continues that Sigurðr founded Nova Anglia—New England— somewhere on the Crimean coast in the 1070s or 80s. Greek and Italian navigation maps as late as the 15th century listed two towns in Crimea, Susaco (or Porto di Susaco) and Londina, which some historians believe reflected names connected to the Nova Anglia settlement: Susaco—Sussex—and Londina—London. There are also several place names around the Kerch Strait which some believe trace their premodern etymology to the Greek term for “Varangian.” There are also 13th-century accounts mentioning a Christian people in the area called Saxi—Saxons? Again, all of this is controversial today, but some modern historians are convinced Nova Anglia really existed.78

78 Caitlin R. Green. (2015 May 19). “The medieval ’New England’: a forgotten AngloSaxon colony on the north-eastern Black Sea coast” (Blog post). Caitlin R. Green Blog. Retrieved from: https://www.caitlingreen.org/2015/05/medieval-new-england-blacksea.html?fbclid=IwAR3r-T57I_Ut6zyaGUHAwknXL_ixcU4er6fdEnPdFkcfSmA4SG2 HBHQfV-Y

Q: So how did Ukraine end up with Crimea before 1991?

A: On paper, it was a simple administrative move by the Supreme Soviet, the Soviet Union’s parliament, in 1954 when it transferred Crimea from Russian control to Ukrainian. Why? The transfer was officially attributed to two things: (1) to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the “reunification of Ukraine with Russia” (referring to the 1654 Treaty of Pereyaslav during Khmyelnitsky’s rebellion against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in which Russia agreed to help Kyiv), and (2) because Ukraine’s and Crimea’s economies had apparently become intertwined, so it made sense. Most historians reject these reasons as hogwash. One theory is that Nikita Khrushchev, one of (but not the only) Soviet leaders in 1954, had been for years the Soviet leader of Ukraine and this was his wrangling. Another theory is that Ukraine’s getting Crimea was Moscow trying to show Ukrainians some benefits of being in the Soviet Union. A large part of the Ukrainian population had resisted reincorporation into the USSR in 1943–45 and the Soviet reconquest had been brutal. Stalin had made his point through the Red Army’s savagery that resistance was futile, but a decade later the post-Stalin Soviet leadership may have felt the need to throw Ukrainians a carrot of some sort to showcase some advantage for Ukrainians being in the USSR. Since it was all in the Soviet Union anyway, giving Crimea to Ukraine was ultimately just a symbolic gesture, and the assumption was of course that the Soviet Union would never break up, and Ukraine actually become an independent country.79 Oops.

Q: Why doesn’t Ukraine just give Russia some of its territory (like Crimea or the Donbas), in exchange for peace?

A: All historical comparisons have their limitations, but the Czechoslovak experience in 1938 is helpful here. As I outline in Chapter 6 in this book, in 1938 Hitler demanded territory from neighboring Czechoslovakia, the Sudetenland region. Hitler’s claim was that the Sudetenland was predominantly German-inhabited (he was right), and that Czechoslovakia was mistreating these Germans (which was less true). To Hitler’s astonishment, Britain and France intervened, negotiating what became known as the Munich Agreement in September 1938. British prime minister Neville Chamberlain famously stood in front of his plane upon arriving home and declared “peace in our time.” A year later, he

79 Mark Kramer. (2023). “Why Did Russia Give Away Crimea Sixty Years Ago?” (Hindsight Up Front: Ukraine). The Wilson Center. Retrieved from: https://www.wilsoncenter.org/ publication/why-did-russia-give-away-crimea-sixty-years-ago#intro

found himself fighting the very war with Germany he’d claimed he had avoided. What went wrong?80

Chamberlain’s problem was that Hitler was not looking for minor border adjustments in 1938. Hitler’s demands against Czechoslovakia were really just a pretense for war and the total conquest of Czechoslovakia. (Hitler indeed broke the Munich Agreement just six months later in March 1939 and seized all of Czechoslovakia.) Worse, even that wasn’t enough. He already had plans to invade and destroy Poland, but even more importantly, Hitler, a veteran of World War I, wanted revenge for the defeat of 1918. He was very explicit in wanting to refight World War I. He wanted World War II. His every action once he achieved power in Germany in 1933 was to plan and prepare to launch the next war, and with it the conquest of Europe. So Chamberlain went to Munich in 1938 thinking he was diffusing some minor border disagreement, when in reality he (and his country) stood on the brink of the worst war in human history.

Now again, all historical comparisons have their limits, but there is something similar in Putin’s war in Ukraine. Putin has said many times that he considers the Soviet collapse of 1991 to be a tragedy, and illegitimate. He was a loyal (KGB) soldier of that regime, and was on the front lines of its collapse. He has also made no secret of the fact he believes Russia has a right to rule over all former Soviet territories, and occasionally also declares that Moscow deserves to rule its former Soviet Bloc in Eastern Europe as well—and his ambitions don’t stop there.

What this adds up to is the reality that the West will not be able to buy off Russian aggression by giving Putin parts of Ukraine. Zelensky has said that any “peace” signed with Russia now will not be worth the paper it’s written on, and that Putin will use any peace to rebuild his armed forces to relaunch the war later. Like Czechoslovakia was for Hitler in 1938, Ukraine is just the first step for Putin. His imperial ambitions are global. Per historian Alexander Motyl:

The second plausibility check involves Moscow’s behavior in similar situations—that is, does the Kremlin have a record of abiding by agreements with Ukraine?

80 A revisionist theory has arisen in the form of a historical-fiction novel, Munich, by Robert Harris, published in 2018. In this heavily researched fictional retelling of the Munich Crisis, Harris claims that far from being a fool, Chamberlain correctly understood Hitler’s intentions but had to create a situation where Hitler would betray his own deceptive plans, so that in effect Chamberlain signed the Munich Agreement precisely because he expected Hitler to break it. In this revisionist version, Chamberlain needed to prove to a war-weary British public that Hitler could not be trusted. If true, then Chamberlain destroyed his own political career (and reputation) in the process.

Russia has twice guaranteed the sanctity of Ukraine’s internationally recognized borders, including Crimea— once in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum and a second time in the 1997 Ukraine-Russia friendship treaty. It is now clear that Putin never intended to abide by the Minsk agreements that were supposed to bring peace after the first Russian-Ukrainian war in 2014. The details are as murky as any information coming out of Russia these days, but if Wagner Group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin was indeed executed this week, it would also demonstrate Putin’s approach to negotiated agreements. He struck a deal with Prigozhin when the regime was weak, waited for an opportune moment, and then reneged on the deal to exact his revenge.81

History would suggest that trusting Putin is a mistake. Or, more bluntly, Putin has broken every agreement he has signed with Ukraine so far. Would you trust him now?

So let’s do a thought experiment, putting yourself in Zelensky’s shoes. Let’s say the West abandons Ukraine, and while Russia is unable to conquer Ukraine, Ukraine is too weak to push Russian forces back to the 1991 borders. Zelensky is forced to sign a peace treaty with Putin that grants Russia its conquered Ukrainian lands in Crimea and Donbas. At this point, knowing that Putin will use any peace to prepare for another invasion in the months or years to come, what would you do, as President Zelensky? One obvious path is to develop nuclear weapons. Does the West want nuclear-armed rivals, like India and Pakistan, in Europe?

Q: But isn’t Ukraine corrupt?

A: An important factor in Ukraine’s success in this war, especially in the first three months, was the astonishing coherence and cohesiveness of Ukrainian government structures and civil society, from the national level all the way down to remote villages. Ukrainian resistance is only possible because state structures work and they cooperate across all levels, and even more importantly—average citizens have overwhelmingly stuck to and supported those institutions. There is a vibrant civil society in Ukraine that makes what we see on our TV news every night possible.

81 Alexander J. Motyl. (2023 August 25). “Why We Should Not Bet on a Peaceful Russia.” Foreign Policy. Retrieved from: https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/08/25/russia-ukraineputin-prigozhin-negotiation-settlement-deal-peace-war-counteroffensive/

Civil societies only exist in functioning democracies. Ukrainians aren’t defending a personality like Zelensky; they’re defending their Ukrainian identity and, they feel, the Ukrainian state and government that (in their eyes) represents that identity.

As I mention earlier in this book (Chapter 10), Ukraine does have a problem with corruption. But, unlike Russia, Ukraine has been trying to address its corruption problem, for years—particularly under Zelensky. Kyiv has made major strides since 2014. In Ukraine, the government and state struggle with corruption that impedes their work. In Russia, corruption is the system—it is inseparable from the state and government. Ukrainians are trying to fix their state to make it more responsive to citizens’ needs, but nothing like that will ever happen in Russia so long as Putin is in power.

Q: Is Ukraine Nazi or fascist, like Putin claims?

A: This has been one of Putin’s more consistent charges against Ukraine. Putin never explains what he means by this but keeps calling Zelensky and all Ukrainians fascists and/or Nazis. (Putin has also claimed the West is fascist.) Remembering that Putin is extremely pro-Soviet, this accusation likely derives from the World War II experience where some Ukrainian resistance groups in the earlier stages of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union regarded the Nazis as liberators from Stalinist terror and collaborated with them. By 1944 most had turned against the Nazis and fought both German and Soviet forces. However, in Soviet eyes (both in 1945 and today in Putin’s Russia), any resistance against Soviet rule was an act of fascism. One of the Ukrainian resistance leaders who followed this path was Stepan Bandera, and so Putin sometimes refers to Ukrainians resisting Russia’s invasion today as “Banderists.” In truth, the memory of Bandera in Ukraine is controversial—but resistance to Russian rule is not.

USELESS TRIVIA: NO GOOD OPTIONS

Andrei Vlasov had been an earlier communist party supporter, and gained military experience as an advisor to Chang Kai-shek in China during its civil war in the 1930s. When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Vlasov answered the call and was serving alongside Soviet general Georgi Zhukov. In the summer of 1942 General Vlasov was ordered to break the Nazi siege of Leningrad— but instead, his forces were shattered and he himself was captured.

The Nazis made Vlasov a deal: recruit a force from among Soviet POWs and we’ll help you liberate your homeland from Stalin. Vlasov took the deal and began recruiting. The vast majority of Soviet POWs refused, but it is believed he did manage to recruit “tens of thousands”82 of soldiers for what became known as Русская освободительная армия—the Russian Liberation Army. Unfortunately, Hitler didn’t fully trust Vlasov or the RLA, and they never received the full equipment and arms promised. They were deployed briefly to help hold Berlin in February 1945—obviously, unsuccessfully. They retreated southward toward Prague, where they waited. As an American force approached Prague, many of the Vlasovites joined the Czech resistance and led an uprising against the Nazis, leading to brutal Nazi reprisals against both the Vlasovites and Czech citizens. When Soviet forces entered Prague, they were furious to learn most of the hard work had already been done— by Nazi-collaborating Russians. (Czechs point this out vigorously to this day, that Prague was liberated not by Soviet forces but by local resistance and Vlasovite/RLA forces—to Putin’s fury.) Most Vlasovites fled west to surrender to American forces.

It did them no good. The Western Allies handed some 9,000 Vlasov POWs over to the Soviets after the war, all of whom met a grisly fate in the Soviet Union.83 In his Gulag Archipelago, Soviet dissident (and World War II veteran) Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn84 praised the Vlasovites, but modern Russians struggle with their legacy as either pro-Nazi, or anti-Soviet Russians.

When Putin seized Crimea and started the proxy war in eastern Ukraine (Donbas) in 2014, it inspired many Ukrainian nationalist groups to organize volunteer fighting units. The Ukrainian Army at the time was so pathetic that it had no choice but to accept help from these units. It

82 Tony Wesolowsky. (2019 December 8). “The Vlasov Army: Nazi Sympathizers Or WWII Freedom Fighters?” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Retrieved from: https://www.rferl .org/a/the-vlasov-army-nazi-sympathizers-or-ww-ii-freedom-fighters-/30313961.html

83 Paul Goble. (2017 June 27). “A rare Russian glimpse of fate of Vlasovites forcibly returned to the USSR.” EuroMaidan Press. Retrieved from: https://euromaidanpress .com/2017/06/27/a-rare-russian-glimpse-of-fate-of-vlasovites-forcibly-returned-to-theussr-euromaidan-press/

84 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956 (Vol. 1). New York: Harper & Row, 1973; pp. 251–262.

has grown and become far more sophisticated since, and over the years following 2014 slowly absorbed these groups into the army, standardizing their equipment and training. The most famous of these groups was the Azov Battalion, which was led by far-rightwing extremists who had neoNazi political views. However, as Azov was taken over by the Ukrainian Army in 2014 it has since lost its political underpinnings, and played a central role in the heroic Ukrainian resistance in the siege of Mariupol in the late spring of 2022.

So is Ukraine fascist or pro-Nazi? Not in 2024. The fascist states of the 1930s and 40s in Europe were mostly aggressive, demanding territory from their neighbors, but Ukraine’s army was tiny in 2014 and threatened none of its neighbors. It was larger and better trained in 2022 when Putin launched his invasion, but it was deployed almost exclusively along the Donbas front in the east, nowhere near Russian territory. Ukraine’s fighting since 2014 has all been on its own territory, as it has tried to defend itself from Russian aggression. Ukrainians have flocked to the armed forces to defend their country, but there is no militarism or state worship in the country. There is no glorification of war in Ukraine. While popular, Zelensky is often criticized in the Ukrainian press. He is not a dictator. As average citizens experience the horrors of war, there is a determination to defend their homes but no glorification of violence. Interviews with soldiers and volunteers reveal not bloodlust but a craving for a return to prewar peacetime and normalcy. Ukraine has no territorial demands against any of its neighbors. Are there skinhead groups and Neo-Nazis in Ukraine? Yes, but not more so than in any other country. And though flawed in many respects, Ukraine is a functioning democracy. Its current president, Volodymyr Zelensky, was elected in free elections. (And it bears mentioning that Zelensky is a Jew, and an openly practicing one—i.e., something Ukrainian voters were aware of when they elected him president in 2019. When Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov was confronted with Zelensky’s Jewishness at a press conference in May 2022, he infamously countered falsely that even Hitler was part Jewish—which earned him Israel’s immediate condemnation.85) In late 2023, Reporters Without Borders scored Ukraine very favorably in terms of freedom of the press in its World Press Freedom Index, in which Ukraine had improved from being the 126th ranked country in the world in 2013 (when the Maidan protests began in Kyiv) to 79th a decade later.86

85 Crispian Balmer. (2022 May 2). “Israel demands apology after Russia says Hitler had Jewish roots.” Reuters. Retrieved from: https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/ israel-denounces-lavrovs-hitler-comments-summons-russian-ambassador-2022-05-02/

86 “World Press Freedom Index.” (2023). Reporters Without Borders. Retrieved from: https://rsf.org/en/index

Finally, ultimately, there are no Nazi symbols on display in Ukraine, and most average Ukrainians regard the Nazis as horrible criminals. The defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945 is celebrated in Ukraine, and wellattended mass memorial services have been held commemorating the horrors of the Holocaust. Per historian Jade McGlynn:

Russian propagandists harness the powerfully emotive cultural memory to disguise the real arguments they are making. When Russians claim Ukraine is destroying its true memory, they mean Kyiv is denying that Ukraine is nothing more than a province of Russia. When they say Ukraine’s dislike of Russia is rooted in fascism, they mean that Kyiv’s insistence on its independence is illegitimate. When they slander the Ukrainian government and army as the modern-day heirs to the Nazis, they are asserting their right, even duty, to kill them.87

Put simply, as I described in Chapter 8 in this book, former Soviet foreign minister Maxim Litvinov once characterized Stalin as erroneously equating direct territorial control with security, meaning that the Soviet Union was only secure if it directly controlled any territories that might threaten it. Putin seems to have inherited this misconception, so in his mind if Russia doesn’t rule Ukraine, then a hostile power will. In other words, for Putin an independent Ukraine is itself—no matter how friendly or neutral—a threat to Russian security. This is a game Ukrainians can’t win.

Q: Are you biased in favor of Ukraine in this war?

A: No. I do support Ukraine, but on the basis that Ukraine—an internationally recognized country that had done nothing to provoke Russia—has been attacked and invaded, and its citizens murdered. Ukraine, within its 1991 borders, was accepted into the United Nations and universally recognized as a sovereign, independent country— including by Russia, both at the time and repeatedly in bilateral treaties with Ukraine since. The generation that fought World War II tried to create an international order based on the respect for borders and the rule of law, designed precisely to prevent the kind of behavior Putin is engaged in now. To be sure, there are examples of valid criticism of the West’s

87 Jade McGlynn. (2023 October 6). “Russia Doesn’t Care About the Fight Against Fascism.” Moscow Times. Retrieved from: https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2023/10/06/russiadoesnt-care-about-the-fight-fgainst-fascism-a82684

own adherence to these rules, but in 2022, Russia invaded a neighboring country that posed no threat to it and, worse, Putin has implied multiple times in public speeches that his aim is not just to curtail the sovereignty of Ukraine (i.e., bring it under Russian control) but to eradicate its culture, to forcibly Russify its population. Ukrainians as a people and a distinct culture do not exist, according to Putin. Indeed, while Putin has complained about feeling threatened by NATO expansion (this will be explored later), he has never accused Ukraine itself of posing any threat to Russia. This is a clear case of unprovoked Russian aggression.

Furthermore, while troubled in some respects, Ukraine is a real, functioning democracy whose government and its policies reflect popular Ukrainian desires, in stark contrast to Russia where the only citizen’s opinion that matters is Putin’s. Ukraine far more closely reflects Western and European values than Russia does. Russia’s values are more closely aligned with 19th-century European colonial powers. As explored elsewhere in this section, Ukraine’s democracy and civil society have played a crucial role in the resistance to the Russian invasion.

And finally, the behavior of Russia’s military forces in Ukraine reflect an utter contempt for humanity through alleged war crimes in places like Bucha (publicly celebrated by Putin), and widespread looting of Ukrainian civilian homes.

So I support Ukraine not because it is Ukraine, but because it is a modern, democratic state under attack, in a way that the World War II generation of leaders wanted to prevent. Putin’s war is not just an attack on Ukraine, but on the entire postwar order that was intended to restrain imperial behaviors.

IV. NATO

Q: Did NATO expansion cause this war?

A: Putin certainly has claimed so:

I will begin with what I said in my address on February 21, 2022. I spoke about our biggest concerns and worries, and about the fundamental threats which irresponsible Western politicians created for Russia consistently, rudely and unceremoniously from year to year. I am referring to the eastward expansion of NATO, which is moving its military infrastructure ever closer to the Russian border.

It is a fact that over the past 30 years we have been patiently trying to come to an agreement with the leading NATO countries regarding the principles of equal and indivisible security in Europe. In response to our proposals, we invariably faced either cynical deception and lies or attempts at pressure and blackmail, while the North Atlantic alliance continued to expand despite our protests and concerns. Its military machine is moving and, as I said, is approaching our very border.88

Political scientist John Mearsheimer agreed, writing an article in the Economist in March 2022 essentially saying that the Ukraine War was the West’s fault. His argument in a nutshell is that aggressive NATO expansion into Eastern Europe boxed Russia defensively into a corner:

There is no question that Vladimir Putin started the war and is responsible for how it is being waged. But why he did so is another matter. The mainstream view in the West is that he is an irrational, out-of-touch aggressor bent on creating a greater Russia in the mould of the former Soviet Union. Thus, he alone bears full responsibility for the Ukraine crisis.

But that story is wrong. The West, and especially America, is principally responsible for the crisis which began in February 2014. It has now turned into a war that not only threatens to destroy Ukraine, but also has the

88 Vladimir Putin. (2022 February 24). “Address by the President of the Russian Federation” (English-language translation). Official webpage of the President of Russia. Retrieved from: http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/67843

potential to escalate into a nuclear war between Russia and NATO.89

Economist Jeffrey Sachs echoes this sentiment:

The key to this, which is now well discussed, but still not well understood, is the post-1991 vision of strategic leaders in the United States: that we are now in a unipolar world, and that the United States can do pretty much whatever it wants, and that includes basing the military where it wants and when it wants, entering and exiting treaties when it wants and where it wants, without serious consequence. In the mid-nineties, there was a quite ferocious debate over even the first phase of NATO enlargement, where many wise people, including Bill Perry, our Defense Secretary at the time under Clinton, thought that this was a dreadful mistake; many others did, too. And George Kennan, whom I regard as the essence of wisdom, thought that it would lead to a new Cold War.90

Are they right? Should NATO have expanded eastward? Here are some things to consider:

• Who made who? NATO expansion into Eastern Europe wasn’t initiated in the West, but by the Soviet Bloc states themselves, who eagerly ditched the Warsaw Pact (dissolved officially in 1991) and sought guarantees against revived Russian imperialism. Already in the early 1990s, Poland and Hungary began floating ideas in diplomatic circles of American troops being stationed permanently on their territory. { Conversely, despite claims of Western triumphalism, the notion of eastward NATO expansion was very controversial in the West, with opponents citing fears over the costs of updating outdated Soviet-equipped and training Eastern European militaries, and of the reliability of local civilian control over the region’s military

89 John Mearsheimer. (2022 March 19). “John Mearsheimer on why the West is principally responsible for the Ukrainian crisis.” Economist. Retrieved from: https:// www.economist.com/by-invitation/2022/03/11/john-mearsheimer-on-whythe-west-is-principally-responsible-for-the-ukrainian-crisis?utm_medium=cpc .adword.pd&utm_source=google&ppccampaignID=18151738051&ppcadID=&utm_ campaign=a.22brand_pmax&utm_content=conversion.direct-response.anonymous& gclid=Cj0KCQjwwtWgBhDhARIsAEMcxeAWvH4jo0Kjfyh3zkgeCPkdvK3FjUDYYO tWkRslo9f23hxrcnIYbSwaAjSTEALw_wcB&gclsrc=aw.ds

90 Isaac Chotiner. (2023 February 27). “Jeffrey Sachs’s Great-Power Politics.” New Yorker. Retrieved from: https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/jeffrey-sachss-great-power-politics

forces. Many in the West seriously asked whether Poland or Romania would strengthen or weaken NATO’s security. Per security research firm GZero:

Second, as a voluntary association, NATO has no unilateral ability to “expand”—and it has always been reluctant to do so. But Central and Eastern European states have agency, and they demanded to join NATO to protect themselves from Russian aggression despite initial objections from NATO members. It was the Ukrainian people—not officials in Washington and Brussels—that voted in 2019 to enshrine NATO and European Union membership as national goals, largely as a response to Russia’s threats (on which Putin has acted). Far from being pushed or imposed by the US and its allies, NATO enlargement was actively sought by Eastern European countries, which had to actively convince members to accept them.91

• Was NATO actually threatening Russia? NATO’s stance toward the Soviet Union was always defensive. It never amassed troops on the Soviet border, and never accumulated enough troops to pose an offensive threat to the Soviet Union. Here is how NATO saw itself as stacking up against the Warsaw Pact in 1984, at the height of the Cold War:

Source: NATO

91 Ian Bremmer. (2023 May 31). “No, the US didn’t ‘provoke’ the war in Ukraine.” GZero. Retrieved from: https://www.gzeromedia.com/no-the-us-didnt-provoke-the-war-in-ukraine 92 “NATO and the Warsaw Pact: Force Comparisons.” (1984). NATO Information Services. Brussels; pp. 4–6. Retrieved from: https://archives.nato.int/nato-and-warsaw-pact-forcecomparisons

Figure 1.4. Warsaw Pact vs. NATO in 1984 92

Figure 1.5. NATO Global (i.e., not just Europe) Troop Levels, 1991 versus 202193

Source: Statista

• Losing interest: After the Cold War, NATO significantly reduced its troop strengths and equipment levels. Across Europe, NATO military budgets were slashed, active-duty forces shrank significantly, and intermilitary cooperation slowed. After 9/11, the U.S. withdrew most of its military forces from Europe.94 Simply said, nobody in NATO, in the governments, militaries, or civilian press expressed any desire for a confrontation with Russia. There were no troop concentrations in the east.

93 Martin Armstrong. (2022 May 31). “NATO Countries Have Heavily Cut Troop Levels.” Statista. Retrieved from: https://www.statista.com/chart/27534/nato-troop-levels-1990to-present/

94 In 1957, the U.S. had 430,643 troops stationed in Europe. In 1984, that number was 321,286. On 9/11 (2001), that number had been reduced to 111,170, and in 2021, the year Putin began the military build-up in preparation for his invasion of Ukraine, there were 63,853 American soldiers in Europe. Source: Michael A. Allen, Carla Martinez Machain, and Michael E. Flynn. (2022 January 25). “The US military presence in Europe has been declining for 30 years—the current crisis in Ukraine may reverse that trend” (Blog post). The Conversation. Retrieved from: https://theconversation.com/the-us-militarypresence-in-europe-has-been-declining-for-30-years-the-current-crisis-in-ukraine-mayreverse-that-trend-175595

• Identity crisis: If anything, post–Cold War NATO had an identity crisis, unsure if there was a reason for its continued existence. The attacks of 9/11 and the resulting Afghanistan and Iraq wars seemed to further dilute its mission—as well as absorb most of NATO’s dwindling military resources.

{ The expansion eastward of NATO into Eastern Europe was accompanied by stern admonishments about ensuring each newly joining country had no territorial disputes with any neighbors.

{ Even several Eastern European states (reluctantly) contributed to the American war efforts in the Middle East.

{ A central theme in NATO thinking post-1991 was that Russia was no longer a threat, and that resources should be realigned accordingly—despite the protests of several new NATO members in Eastern Europe post-1999 that Russia remained a security concern.

„ Immediately prior to the Ukraine War, NATO had stationed only about 4,000 troops in Poland and the Baltics, another 4,000 in Romania, and 3,500 in the western Balkans in Kosovo and Bosnia-Herzegovina.95

„ Keep in mind that in June 1941 Hitler invaded the Soviet Union with 3.5 million German and nearly 700,000 Germanallied troops (Romanians, Finns, Hungarians, Italians, Slovaks, others)—and still lost.96

Finally, in an assessment written in October 2023, Nataliya Bugayova, Kateryna Stepanenko, and Frederick W. Kagan of the Institute for the Study of War concluded:

Russian President Vladimir Putin didn’t invade Ukraine in 2022 because he feared NATO. He invaded because he believed that NATO was weak, that his efforts to regain control of Ukraine by other means had failed, and that installing a pro-Russian government in Kyiv would be safe and easy. His aim was not to defend Russia against

95 Robin Emmott (editing by Timothy Heritage). (2022 January 24). “Where NATO forces are deployed.” Reuters. Retrieved from: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ where-nato-forces-are-deployed-2022-01-24/

96 Robert Citino, PhD. (2021 June 18). “Operation Barbarossa: The Biggest of All Time.” The National World War II Museum (New Orleans). Retrieved from: https://www. nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/operation-barbarossa#:~:text=Be%20careful%20 about%20superlatives%2C%20that,nearly%20700%2C000%20German%2Dallied%20 troops%20(

some nonexistent threat but rather to expand Russia’s power, eradicate Ukraine’s statehood, and destroy NATO, goals he still pursues.97

Q: OK, so even if objectively NATO didn’t pose a threat to Russia, aren’t Russian perceptions still important?

A: NATO signed the NATO-Russia Founding Act in 1997 to create some coordination around mutual security issues, including any potential NATO expansion. This was further strengthened in 2002 by the signing of the NATO-Russia Council. Russian Foreign Minister Primakov complained in the 1990s that Russia was too weak to do anything about NATO expansion so its participation in these cooperation efforts with NATO was just a formality.98 But still, there was a level of communication and information exchange happening between NATO and Moscow as Eastern European states joined NATO, and Putin was informed of decisions.99 Through all the most active years of NATO enlargement, Putin was consulted often and complained little. Foreign Policy columnist Elisabeth Braw reports NATO secretary general George Robertson as telling her:

The turn of events baffles Robertson, arguably the Western leader who best knows Putin’s views on the alliance. “In all the meetings and conversations I had with him, he never complained about NATO enlargement, not once,” Robertson said. “We had the 2002 enlargement, seven countries joining NATO, all from the Warsaw Pact, including three from the Soviet Union. But not a single time did he complain. We had a difference of opinion regarding the CFE Treaty, but that was it.”100

97 Nataliya Bugayova, Kateryna Stepanenko, and Frederick W. Kagan. (2023 October 1). “Weakness is lethal: Why Putin Invaded Ukraine and how the War Must End.” ISW Press. Retrieved from: https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/weakness-lethal-whyputin-invaded-ukraine-and-how-war-must-end

98 Michael Rühle. (2014 July 1). “NATO enlargement and Russia: myths and realities.” NATO Review. Retrieved from: https://www.nato.int/docu/review/articles/2014/07/01/natoenlargement-and-russia-myths-and-realities/index.html

99 Timothy Garton Ash. (2023 May–June). “Postimperial Empire; How the War in Ukraine is Transforming Europe.” Foreign Affairs. p. 70

100 Elisabeth Braw. (2022 January 19). “When Putin Loved NATO.” Foreign Policy. Retrieved from: https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/01/19/putin-russia-ukraine-nato-george-robertson/

• Many Russia specialists point to several events that irritated Putin and Russia:

{ The first took place in the 1990s, with NATO’s interventions in the Yugoslav implosion wars, which infuriated Yeltsin as Western meddling in Russia’s traditional sphere of influence—indicating that Moscow still thought of Eastern Europe as being under its sway, if only informally. When Putin entered office in 1999, he made clear his disapproval of the NATO interventions in the Balkans. And by the way, local polling indicated average citizens in Belarus and Ukraine were also upset about the NATO actions in Bosnia and Serbia at the time. Back then, there was greater consensus across the three former Soviet republics.

{ Though they arose from local political circumstances, Putin blamed NATO for the 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia and the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine, which each drove proMoscow politicians from power, believing the CIA had somehow orchestrated them. This is very much in line with Putin’s belief that people do not have any agency, that average citizens only do what governments or strong men (like him) tell them to. If they revolt, it is not because of bad governance but because some power like the CIA convinced or tricked them. For Putin, people are mindless bots.

{ In 2007, Putin shocked attendees when he gave a speech at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that was essentially an anti-Western rant, accusing the U.S. and NATO of wanting to rule the world.

{ The next big event was the April 2008 Bucharest Conference at which Ukraine and Georgia were offered a chance to join NATO. However, as security research firm GZero notes, from NATO’s perspective the invitation was more about relationship-building than a real offer:

Fourth, despite Ukrainian aspirations, NATO membership was never a realistic prospect for Ukraine. While it’s true that at the Bucharest NATO Summit in 2008, NATO promised Ukraine and Georgia accession at some indeterminate time in the future, it didn’t offer a roadmap for it. Indeed, when Ukraine applied for a NATO Membership Action Plan, NATO members rejected the application. The prospect of Ukrainian accession died a second death after the Russian invasion in 2014, as the alliance had little appetite to go to war with Russia. On the eve of the 2022 invasion, Ukraine was no closer to actually

joining NATO than it was during the 2008 Bucharest summit 14 years prior.101

„ At NATO’s Vilnius summit in July 2023 the alliance still didn’t offer Ukraine any concrete path to membership, despite Kyiv’s war successes.

{ NATO’s interventions in the Libyan and Syrian civil wars (both in 2011) appeared to Putin to be further proof of NATO’s global ambitions.

Today Putin accuses NATO of being aggressive and of challenging Russian security, but this was not his story back when NATO actually did most of its expanding. Further, as we’ve explored in the previous question, NATO is just not positioned or geared to be a threat to Russia. Many analysts argue that for whatever reason, Putin began to change his mind in 2007, and he tried to signal that to the West (at Munich), but the West either misunderstood or just didn’t take him seriously. These analysts and regional specialists see the West’s refusal to take Putin at his word as he escalated with the Georgian War in 2008 and the Crimea crisis of 2014 as a big cause behind his belief that the West was too weak to challenge him—in effect, encouraging him to do something worse in 2022. They see Western hesitance to confront Putin as the problem.

Figure 1.6. NATO Enlargement

Source: Tomek Jankowski’s Eastern Europe!

101 Ian Bremmer. (2023 May 31). “No, the US didn’t ‘provoke’ the war in Ukraine.” GZero. Retrieved from: https://www.gzeromedia.com/no-the-us-didnt-provoke-the-war-inukraine

When Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022, the West’s media were filled with regional experts trying to explain Putin and his mindset. Putin seems to have undergone a mental shift over the mid-2000s, but the constant throughout all of his thinking has been empire: that Russia is a great empire deserving of both a sphere of influence and respect. The change seems to be that before 2007, he thought restoring Russia to its imperial pedestal could be done in cooperation with the West, while around 2007 he seems to have concluded that was not possible—and the West was the enemy. His fury at the West today is often couched in the language of betrayal: we were going to be friends, but then it turned out you didn’t respect Russia’s imperial dreams!

Again, some Western regional specialists and geopolitical strategists believe the West should have been more sensitive to Putin, regardless of his imperial mania. Some go as far as to claim that the West should have allowed him his empire, essentially abandoning Eastern Europe to a Russian imperial fate to placate Moscow and Putin. The problem is that, as we’ll explore in the question “Why did NATO expand into Eastern Europe?” the West already tried those options and they failed miserably, creating serious challenges for the West’s own security. History has shown that giving dictators what they want doesn’t convince them to go away.

Q: Did NATO promise Gorbachev not to expand into Eastern Europe?

A: Putin and Russian nationalists contend the West promised back in 1990 that NATO would never expand eastward. Historian Mary Elise Sarotte counters that the story is a little more complicated. In private conversations back in 1990, U.S. secretary of state James Baker did say to Gorbachev that NATO eastward expansion should be off the table102—but the two were speaking specifically about German reunification, and the fate of the late East Germany. In other words, Baker meant that NATO should never station troops in the old East Germany territory. (And that has never happened.) As former Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze later put it, nobody in 1990 was thinking about Eastern Europe.103 The Soviet Union still existed, and while its direct grip over the Soviet Bloc had receded, international trends at the time suggested greater cooperation between the Western and Soviet realms. The Warsaw Pact still existed.

102 Sarotte, 2009: p. 110

103 Michael Rühle. (2014 July 1). “NATO enlargement and Russia: myths and realities.” NATO Review. Retrieved from: https://www.nato.int/docu/review/articles/2014/07/01/natoenlargement-and-russia-myths-and-realities/index.html

The final treaty for German reunification (the “2+4” Agreement) signed in September 1990 said nothing about Eastern Europe or NATO expansion. And that context is key: all of these discussions were taking place at a time when East Germany was coming unglued. The U.S., Britain, France, and the Soviet Union were negotiating in 1990 because ever since the breach of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, East Germany was disintegrating rapidly—administratively, economically, and socially. In the midst of these negotiations, the East German government announced it was on the verge of defaulting on its debts and was facing imminent financial collapse. A steady exodus of East Germans took the opportunity of the end of border barriers to flee to West Germany. There was very real fear of violence or anarchy as the straitjacket suddenly came off a society brutally oppressed for decades. The four World War II–era occupying powers were frantically looking for a workable solution to stave off chaos in the middle of Europe, smack-dab front line on the Iron Curtain. Gorbachev and Baker were negotiating about East Germany’s future in 1990, not Europe’s.

For some indication about where Washington was focused during these negotiations, keep in mind that a month before this treaty was signed Iraq had invaded Kuwait, which would lead to the First Gulf War in 1990–91. Gorbachev revealed during the negotiations the depth of the Soviet economic crisis; Moscow couldn’t even afford to bring its own soldiers home, requiring a promise from West Germany to finance both the transportation of Soviet troops and the building of barracks for them in Russia. This raised red flags (no pun intended) all over the West, as the joy at the collapse of the Soviet empire turned to dread that the Soviet Union itself—a nuclear-armed power—might collapse, spreading ethnic and political chaos into Europe.

So as Sarotte notes, nobody in the West (or Moscow) in 1990 was looking far enough ahead to worry about the future of NATO. Instead, they were simply trying to peacefully disentangle some of the Cold War’s thorniest issues before they exploded into World War III:

[T]he legacy of 1989–1990 shows the power of chance and contingency. At many points, all state leaders, superpower and otherwise, were simply reacting to change. They had to propose models of order for the future precisely because they were overwhelmed by disorder. Often they were not so much designing events as simply surviving them. The challenge was to make the best use of events, no matter how unexpected they might be.104

104 Sarotte, 2009: p. 210

Q: Why did NATO expand into Eastern Europe?

A: Some analysts and geopolitical specialists blame hubris, claiming a West drunk on victory in the Cold War wanted to press their victory home to Moscow by taking over the former Soviet realm. I was living in the region during this period of transition between the communist regimes and the postcommunist world, and I, personally, did not get that sense from Western behavior toward the region. Mind you, I wasn’t sitting in meetings with embassy officials or presidents. There were no invitations to official state dinners in my mailbox. I never had access to the kinds of people Jeffrey Sachs was speaking with back then, but I did get the chance to interact with some Western government bureaucrats, businesspeople, and academics as they started trying to make sense of the region. The overwhelming feeling I got from them was one of caution In their minds, Eastern Europe was a dangerous place where bad things started—think the two world wars, Sarajevo in 1914 and Poland in 1939—and so the biggest impression I got from them was a fear that with the collapse of Soviet control over the region, a can of worms had been opened.

The Yugoslav wars over the 1990s only confirmed the West’s worst fears about what Eastern Europe could be like: widespread pointless ethnic bloodshed, massive demographic dislocation, stifled economic development, extreme nationalism, unending cycles of revenge violence, and all this with the propensity to drag bigger powers in. While Russia saw the West stepping on its turf in NATO’s intervention in the Yugoslav wars, the West saw its interventions (which were indeed controversial at home) as attempts to put out a fire spreading along its eastern boundaries. These wars were decisive in turning the tide in the West’s capitals toward those who argued that the West would have no security so long as Eastern Europe didn’t.

Those who’ve read Chapters 6–9 in this book know that the West’s strategy for Eastern Europe evolved over the 19th and 20th centuries on a trial-and-error basis:

• 19th century: As the Ottoman Empire slowly crumbled the West coined a new term, “Balkanization,” to describe the irrational desire (from the West’s perspective) of Ottoman-ruled Balkan peoples to create their own nation-states. To the West, empires like the Ottoman Empire kept Eastern Europe’s messy ethnic and religious problems under wraps. The West’s defense of the Ottoman Empire in the 1853–56 Crimean War was about preserving the balance of power in the region, as the West feared Russia’s moves against the Turks threatened overall Ottoman rule in the Balkans.

• Post–World War I: But the four big empires (Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman) ruling Eastern Europe came crashing down anyway in 1918, so the West instead tried to build its own alliances and security structures in the region. These efforts drove the West’s decisions about borders at the Paris Peace Conference, as the West sought to create large states in the region capable of standing up to both German and Bolshevik Russian aggression. Unfortunately, the West’s vision for Eastern Europe required lots of investment (money, expertise, technology, etc.) that the postwar West just didn’t have in 1919.105 This, and Western frustration with the region’s petty, uncooperative politics, led to 1925.

• The Locarno Treaties: The West basically threw in the towel in 1925 with the Treaty of Locarno with Germany, which promised Germany better relations with the West so long as Germany respected its western borders. The treaty said nothing about Germany’s eastern borders. The West was abandoning Eastern Europe; the new strategy was to just let the Eastern Europeans do whatever they wanted to each other. The West wouldn’t care, so long as none of the craziness spilled over the West’s borders. What actually happened was the weaker, smaller states of the region each found themselves forced to align with a great power for their own security, providing an entryway for Nazi Germany and Italy, and to a smaller extent, the Soviet Union, into the region. By 1939, many Eastern European states had been reduced to client states of a great power, paving the way for great power conflict and World War II.

• World War II: World War II was precisely what the West had been trying to avoid, a worst-case scenario proving the Locarno Treaty strategy had failed. As the war unfolded, as I describe in Chapters 7 and 8, policy thinkers across Britain and the U.S. came to believe the solution lay in a reversion to the 19th-century model: having some big empire control the region. The only realistic candidate in the 1940s was Russia. The Soviet Union’s great suffering in the war was used as an excuse to build the case for Moscow being able to create “governments friendly to the Soviet Union” (whatever that meant) across the region, with the hope some sort of Western-Soviet cooperation would continue after the war. Essentially, the West was happy to let the Soviets solve the West’s eastern strategic problems.

105 “The West” in the 1920s and 30s primarily meant Britain and France, sometimes with supporting neighboring countries. The U.S. was new to international politics after World War I, and withdrew to isolationism after the Paris Peace Conference of 1919.

• The Cold War: But that’s not what happened. Instead, Stalin quickly transformed Eastern Europe into a militarized frontier zone that cut Europe in half and threatened the West. The West ended up having to dedicate huge amounts of resources to its defense over 1946–89, facing down a Soviet military machine that was much larger and had several geostrategic advantages. NATO was born of the Cold War.

• Post–Cold War: With both sides bristling with massive conventional forces as well as nuclear weapons, the first 15 years of the Cold War were highly dangerous and unpredictable. However, after the Cuban Missile Crisis, both sides began dialing back their provocations, and while always dangerous, the Cold War settled into a precarious stability over the 1960s and 70s. The West preached about Eastern Europe’s subjugation by Moscow, but when Soviet control over the region crumbled over 1988–91, the West’s reaction was jubilation— and horror. As many Eastern Europeans observed at the time, for all its bluster about Soviet imperialism, the West had never envisioned the Soviet empire disappearing. It had no plan for a post–Soviet Europe. In this way, 1989 was for the West like 1918, as the West confronted a disorganized gaggle of Eastern European countries free from external control. There were no more empires in the region. Chapters 9 and 10 in this book chronicle how many in the West in the 1990s were willing to take another stab at a Locarno Treaty–type solution, but a rising tide of voices asserted that the West had to take some responsibility for Eastern Europe’s prosperity and security—in the interest of the West’s own prosperity and security. As mentioned, the Yugoslav wars served as a showcase for what an abandoned Eastern Europe might look like.

This is how the West came to the conclusion that it needed to play a role in the region’s development and security. Many in Eastern Europe hoped this meant a Marshall Plan–type of approach, but to the chagrin of many in the region, that never materialized. Still, Western states did work with friendly governments across the region to prepare them for both European Union and NATO membership, aided by growing private investment. As Richard Cashman, adjunct fellow at the Centre for Defence Strategies, notes, NATO’s enlargement into Eastern Europe was driven locally, and owes much to Russia’s own failures to confront its imperial past:

Far from being a story of Euro-Atlantic sea power moving to dominate the Heartland, NATO enlargement since 1997 has overwhelmingly been a response to

dynamic lobbying by former Warsaw Pact members. Some, such as Poland, immediately sought sanctuary without waiting to see what sort of country the new Russian Federation might become. Others made applications once Putin and the clan which captured the Russian state at the turn of the millennium revealed their intention to reverse rather than manage Russia’s imperial decline.

In most cases, applications were met with initial skepticism by existing NATO members. Yet Patrushev ignores this and wholly removes agency from what he terms as the small states of Eastern Europe when he implies that NATO membership was imposed on them.

Overtures toward Moscow at the end of the Cold War that might have been read as condoning a sphere of influence were made in the expectation that the Russian Federation would develop into a democratic and rule of law–based society. Indeed, many of the applications to join NATO by former Warsaw Pact nations would not have been made if Russia had evolved meaningfully in that direction. Instead, Russia’s unreconstructed imperial mindset has been instrumental in persuading countries in Central and Eastern Europe that NATO membership is the only way to guarantee their national security.106

Q: Has NATO expansion strengthened or weakened security in Europe?

A: This is a very contentious question, and the answer ultimately will be this: It depends whom you ask. It is highly likely Putin would argue not— but I would counter with: How realistic is his view of Russian security? Let’s take this apart:

106 Richard Cashman. (2023 May 25). “Russian narratives ignore real reasons for Western support of Ukraine” (Blog post). The Atlantic Council. Retrieved from: https://www. atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/russian-narratives-ignore-real-reasons-forwestern-support-of-ukraine/?fbclid=IwAR15U3NSEtPuzKdsGxNIk60dLYlq5YbrRJMQv OltIa69glXLmGAgOo-HxM8

Figure 1.7. Pros and Cons for Russian Security of NATO Expansion Eastward

NATO is a critical ingredient in European security. Granted, there are other factors as well, such as the broader transformation post–World War II Europe has undergone, but NATO plays an important role formalizing Europe’s commitment to continent-wide peace through a realistic framework. For the first time in centuries, Europeans are not killing Europeans in Western or Central Europe—and that part of Eastern Europe that belongs to NATO. There is a war in Europe in 2024, but it is being waged by a non-NATO member against another non-NATO member. As stated earlier, national rivalries in NATO Europe play out on soccer pitches, not battlefields.

Q: If NATO isn’t a threat to Russia, why does Putin see it that way?

A: The answer here can easily get lost in the weeds of Russian politics, so let’s steer clear of that morass other than to say that there is definitely a political dimension to why any Russian ruler scores points on the home front by being anti-Western. But why in particular does Putin see NATO as a threat—not just a problem or irritant, but as an actual threat?

As we’ve shown, NATO since the Soviet collapse did not enthusiastically expand into Eastern Europe but only reluctantly, when the West became convinced doing so was the only way to safeguard its own security. Furthermore, post-1991 NATO was more concerned about the relevance of its mission, and it became distracted by the U.S.’s anti–Islamist terrorism crusade. Russia fell off NATO’s radar. While countries like Poland and Estonia continued to see Russia as a threat, the West actually began viewing Russia as a partner in business, in global antiIslamist efforts, and in scientific pursuits like the International Space Station. (The U.S. confidently ended its Space Shuttle program in 2011 as too expensive, expecting over the following decades to develop the next generation of affordable rockets, while relying in the interim on the Russian space program to shepherd astronauts and supplies to the ISS.)

From the Western perspective, Russia was no longer a (major) threat, and so NATO’s budget cuts and resource reallocations away from European security issues were seen in the West as a clear signal to Russia of the West’s peaceful intentions. Instead, what Putin saw after 2007 (or so) was a West that no longer feared Russia and felt it could relax its military posture because Russia had been subdued in 1991. Putin saw an overconfident West that believed it had achieved global hegemony. Putin was infuriated by Western relaxations in NATO spending and cooperation, because to him they were proof that the West believed the Russian empire had been vanquished, and the West had nothing to fear from Moscow. Putin’s efforts beginning in 2007 have been precisely designed to reinject an unpredictable element into global relations, and to begin reasserting Russian imperial influence through subversion of international standards. In his mind, Western relaxations of its military posture (and redeployment to the Middle East) were actually a threat; if the West does not fear Russia, then it can take Russia for granted—or worse.

The West only slowly woke up to this situation, and its half-hearted efforts to corral Putin beginning in 2008 were interpreted in the Kremlin as proof of Western decay and weakness. The West is now confronted by a man with a tight grip on power in Moscow who has some pretty

bizarre and extreme political views. Putin is guilty of provincialism and parochialism: he’s a guy who hasn’t traveled much over his lifetime, and that insular outlook has allowed him to develop some dangerously distorted misconceptions about how the world works. He has made this worse by surrounding himself with yes-men, people whose careers depend on the boss hearing only information that he already agrees with and believes true.

• In the early-16th century, Italian (Florentine) diplomat and political scientist Niccolo Machiavelli understood this problem when he said a ruler needs a consigliere—an advisor who is free to give the boss bad news, who can speak truth to power without fear of reprisal. This gives the ruler, according to Machiavelli, a clearer, less-filtered view of important information and events. Putin has missed this key lesson.

So to circle back and answer the original question, in some respects Putin sees NATO as a threat because it’s a foil—a convenient bogeyman for him to rally Russians against. But he also sees NATO as a threat because its very existence puts limits on his ability to impose Russian imperialism outside of Russia. As long as NATO exists and is able to resist someone like Putin, it denies him options. Several of Putin’s entourage have declared the necessity of continuous Russian territorial expansion. NATO limits Putin’s freedom of action—and worse, that highlights his own weaknesses and vulnerabilities simply because NATO proves he is not as all-powerful as he tells Russians. For all Putin’s bluster, all his meddling since 2008 has been in non-NATO countries. NATO means there are places in Europe Putin can’t go.

There is a tantalizing suggestion that Putin himself realizes that NATO isn’t really a threat to Russia. I have heard this same information from multiple quarters, but will rely here on a quote from the Finnish foreign minister Elina Valtonen, who in August 2023 confirmed that the border area was “pretty empty” of Russian troops: “If we were a threat, they would certainly not have moved their troops away, even in a situation where they are engaged somewhere else.”107

Others have also noted that Russia has moved large numbers of troops away from Eastern Europe to support its war in Ukraine, and

107 Peter Dickinson. (2023 September 19). “Putin ‘knows very well’ NATO poses no security threat to Russia” (Blog post). The Atlantic Council. Retrieved from: https:// www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/putin-knows-very-well-nato-poses-nosecurity-threat-to-russia/?mkt_tok=NjU5LVdaWC0wNzUAAAGOTlLvFMW3OArEaFtR 9cB7z0bd8fjF-v0rnhCz9WKqTVrvPLScsmJNkhHQ-mA6UilSHSpxtqOVfTODMbd9iSwf_ Zkk72H6Vu1IcpdiD2Z5zOoBAw

particularly, not just large numbers of troops but most of Russia’s topquality troops have been moved away from NATO borders.

Q: What does Putin mean by a unipolar or multipolar world?

A: In a few of his speeches over 2022–23, Putin has talked about the era of a unipolar world coming to an end, and (with his invasion of Ukraine) the rebirth of a multipolar world. What does he mean by this?

In Putin’s worldview, the West somehow tricked the Soviet Union into collapse in 1991, leaving the West (or the United States, or NATO) to pretty much rule the world unchallenged. And that has been the state of affairs until Putin (the hero) reinjected Russia into global politics in 2022 with his invasion of Ukraine, challenging Western (or American) hegemony on behalf of all the world’s peoples and (non-Western) nations—who apparently would welcome, instead, being led (ruled?) by Russia. This is what Putin means by “multipolarism,” the notion that Western global power is being rolled back by Russia—oh, and its ally, China, of course.

Is this true? There is no doubt that post–World War II and post–Cold War, a global system of economic and political governance evolved, adopted in some places but definitely imposed in others. There is today a global macramé of overlapping legal, financial, regulatory, diplomatic, and commercial systems that keeps the modern world humming, and much of that system either has deep roots in or is heavily reliant upon Western systems (like the U.S. dollar, the IMF, the WTO, the World Court, etc). The West is a potent force in global affairs today.

West or bust? But, it is not the only force in global affairs, and in fact, non-Western influence in global systems has been growing steadily since the end of the Cold War—by leaps and bounds. In 1990,108 of the top ten largest economies in the world (by GDP), only one—Japan— was non-Western, but by 2021109 (before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine), Japan was joined in the top-ten list by China, India, and Russia.110 And the next group of ten (i.e., the economies ranking 11–20) includes Brazil, Australia, South Korea, Mexico, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. Forbes Magazine’s list of the world’s leading companies—the Global 2000

108 “Comparison: Annual GDP 1990.” (2023). countryeconomy.com. Retrieved from: https://countryeconomy.com/gdp?year=1990

109 Caleb Silver (Editor-in-Chief), Erika Rasure (Reviewer), Vikki Velasquez (Fact checker). (2023 September 20). “The Top 25 Economies in the World.” Investopedia. Retrieved from: https://www.investopedia.com/insights/worlds-top-economies/

110 The strength in Russia’s (prewar) economy was in its relatively large population, and its massive oil and gas sector—which is in reality mostly a state-run sector whose revenues mostly bankrolled the war in 2023.

companies—(in 2023) has, in the top twenty-nine American companies, six Chinese companies, two British companies, one Saudi company, one Japanese company, and one South Korean company.111 That’s the West represented by 55% of the top twenty companies, which means almost half are non-Western in just the top ten.112

Also, since 1990 there has been a massive upswelling in economic growth and development around the world to the extent that more than 1 billion people have been lifted out of extreme poverty since 1990, into middle class lifestyles.113 The world has never seen this kind of growth in prosperity—and almost all of it was in developing countries, especially southern Asia. Other regions, such as the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and yes, Eastern Europe, have also benefitted from this growth, but the point is that almost all of it has happened outside the West. This means that global economic decisions, whether made by governments, companies, or consumers, were overwhelmingly made in the West in 1990, but today, the non-Western voice in those decisions is far stronger and growing. We live in a world where global consumers can choose competitive products (like refrigerators or cars) made by Indian, Chinese, Indonesian, South Korean, or Brazilian companies as much as those made by Western companies.

And finally, Global Firepower ranks the world’s militaries, and in its 2023 rankings, only four Western countries placed in the top ten.114

That is not a unipolar world.

The truth is that since 2000, Asia (India and China in particular) has grown to have a rising voice in world affairs, and not just in terms of making decisions but in the very systems the world runs on. Japan’s yen, South Korea’s won, and China’s renmibi/yuan are rapidly becoming global currencies that a growing number of transactions and investments are denominated in. Asia is playing an outsized roll in global investment flows, even in places like Africa or Latin America. The ASEAN countries115

111 Andrea Murphy and Hank Tucker. (2023 June 8). “The Global 2000, 2023.” Forbes Retrieved from: https://www.forbes.com/lists/global2000/?sh=7e8c9a2e5ac0

112 Not a single Russian company made Forbes’ list in 2023, though other Eastern European companies did.

113 “Millennium Goals—Poverty.” (2023). The United Nations. Retrieved from: https:// www.un.org/millenniumgoals/poverty.shtml#:~:text=More%20than%201%20billion%20 people,less%20than%20%241.25%20a%20day

114 Sinéad Baker and Thibault Spirlet. (2023 August 24). “The world’s most powerful militaries in 2023, ranked.” Business Insider. Retrieved from: https://www.businessinsider .com/ranked-world-most-powerful-militaries-2023-firepower-us-china-russia-2023-5

115 Association of Southeast Asian Nations: Brunei Darussalam, Burma, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam

are growing at such a clip that they are stealing manufacturing business from China and becoming competitive with Western firms. Asian businesses are redefining and in some cases, reinventing, the business world. Putin may not understand all this, but it is a multipolar world already. It has been a multipolar world for at least twenty years.

Russia Nyet: It’s just that Russia isn’t a factor in most of this. True, Global Firepower still rank’s Russia’s military as the second most powerful in the world, but as the ranking noted, China just barely missed surpassing Russia for the number 2 spot this year. The rankings are based on numbers, and Russia still has a huge amount of military aircraft (4,100 in January 2023)116 and ships, as well as nuclear weapons. But the ranking also noted that despite its huge numerical advantages, as illustrated in the Ukraine War, Russia’s ability to effectively deploy and make use of its military resources has fallen flat.

In reality, outside of the huge stockpiles of aging military equipment, Russia just isn’t competitive or impactful around the world. Russia’s economy isn’t competitive outside of Russia in a single economic sector or industry, except for oil and gas, and minerals—i.e., digging stuff out of the ground that was already naturally there. Russian investments are inconsequential globally in the business world, tending to go to client governments like Syria or their shell companies rather than real economic opportunities. In almost any way that matters, Russia just isn’t an important country in the world outside of the former Soviet sphere.117 Inside that sphere, aging authoritarian leaders need Putin to cling to power, allowing him to play Tsar, but as both Ukraine and Georgia show, even in the Near Abroad, countries can defy Moscow. And as Putin further shackles Russia to China in his desperation to overcome Western sanctions, he has also opened the door to Chinese influence in traditionally Russian regions of influence like Central Asia.

So Putin is right that it is a multipolar world—but the counterweight to a Western-dominated world comes mostly from Asia, not Russia. Giants like China and India increasingly have a greater say in the world and how it works, though others like Turkey and Brazil are also gaining ground. Russia in 2024 is weak, and while some of that weakness comes from the

116 Sinéad Baker and Thibault Spirlet. (2023 August 24). “The world’s most powerful militaries in 2023, ranked.” Business Insider. Retrieved from: https://www.businessinsider .com/ranked-world-most-powerful-militaries-2023-firepower-us-china-russia-2023-5

117 Anecdotally, an Azerbaijani acquaintance living in the West related how, on the morning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he went raging through his apartment looking for Russian things to smash—only to realize there were none. No appliances, no foods, no clothing, nothing. Russia is a very limited entity in global trade—again, outside of gas and oil. This is the result of Putin’s very limited vision.

Soviet collapse of 1991, most of it is a consequence of its leaders—i.e., mostly Putin—failing to allow real change to happen in Russia over the thirty years since the Soviet collapse. As historians Liana Fix and Michael Kimmage observe, Putin is a man in a decrepit castle who does not understand how the world has left him and his feudal kingdom behind: “Despite its acts of aggression and its substantial nuclear arsenal, Russia is in no way a peer competitor of China or the United States. Putin’s overreach in Ukraine suggests that he has not grasped this important point.”118

Q: Could Russia have done something to stop NATO enlargement?

A: The short answer is, no—except … Despite the communist rhetoric, the Soviet Union in 1991 was a crumbling, almost feudal empire with a ruling class that was very politically and socially conservative. Communism’s anti-bourgeois rhetoric conveniently masked Soviet Moscow’s traditional anti-Westernism, which it inherited from Tsarist Russia.119 As we’ve explored in this FAQ, Russia desperately needed to go through some sort of post-Soviet de-Sovietization process after 1991, akin to what Germany and Japan had to go through after World War II, or South Africa after 1990. Instead, as we know, modern Russians have clung to the old Soviet myths and laid blame for the failures of the Soviet system on outsiders— mostly the West.

What if? So let’s do a little thought experiment. It is 1996, and you have been elected president of Russia.120 Congratulations! Or not. Russia’s economy is in a freefall, the Russian military is in a state of nearcollapse because of budget, crime is rampant, and oligarchs are seizing control over national economic assets. Luckily, the average person on the street in Russia blames your predecessor for this mess, so you have some wiggling room. But let’s put aside Russia’s domestic problems (in 1996) for a moment, and address another one: you know from your intelligence services, as well as frank discussions with Western diplomats, that most of your former empire in Eastern Europe is clamoring to join NATO. For today, that is not a problem because NATO is not eager to add countries

118 Liana Fix and Michael Kimmage. (2023 January/February). “Putin’s Last Stand; The Promise and Peril of Russian Defeat.” Foreign Affairs, p. 20

119 In the same way that, for instance, Stalin’s “anti-cosmopolitanism” campaigns in the early 1950s masked official Soviet state anti-Semitism.

120 I say 1996 because that was the year Yeltsin won reelection, and after the 1993 fiasco with the Russian Duma (parliament), the president in Russia had much more power.

whose economies are in a state of collapse just like yours—but what about in five or ten years? That would bring NATO right up to your borders in some places. What should you do?

Idea! Luckily, you’re a smart and resourceful person. You recognize that Russians are not terribly popular in the former Soviet Bloc states nowadays, but that doesn’t mean there is no opportunity. You design a diplomatic charm offensive that tries to find common ground with each former Bloc member, emphasizing that Russia, too, was a victim of the communists.121 You visit each country and hold some wreath-laying ceremonies to commemorate the victims of the Soviet-imposed regimes. You:

• encourage both business and academic cooperation between each country, turning your embassies into chambers of commerce.

• set up joint entrepreneur-support programs.

• also encourage regular meetings between the Russian military and local military authorities to discuss mutual security issues, and plans for addressing them.

• go further and launch mutual tourism campaigns to encourage backand-forth tourism, as well as culture exchanges (official and private).

• emphasize on the diplomatic side a fresh start in mutual relations and make clear you want to be partners. There are numerous commercial, cultural, and security synergies on which you can build solid relationships.

• go so far as to create an Eastern Europe chic program (along the lines of the Visegrád Group), one that emphasizes the region’s common experiences over the 20th century and which seeks to find regional alignment and consensus on topical political, economic, and cultural issues.

• create a group that helps the smaller countries of the region adopt and make use of newer advanced technologies, taking a page from the Google or Microsoft playbook, and use this opportunity to create your own system standards to spread throughout the region.

In short, what you’re trying to do is to convince your former Soviet Bloc neighbors that you are no longer a threat, but rather an important partner and ally advocating for their interests through common, shared interests. To be sure, this is a long game. It will take time to wear down their distrust and animosity. But the synergies Eastern Europe as a whole shares with Russia are very real, and today—largely unrealized. If you

121 Indeed, Soviet historians Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr M. Nekrich argue this point in their 1986 history of the Soviet Union (listed in the Second Edition’s bibliography), that Russia is the first and primary victim of Lenin’s experiment.

do all of this, and consistently try to behave like a partner to the region, future leaders in each of these countries may come to question the value of something like NATO membership. Maybe. It is a long shot, but it can be done. Again, look at Germany’s relations with France, Denmark, Czechia, and Poland today. It’s not impossible.

Ain’t happenin’ Unfortunately, the policies I just outlined presuppose that Russia actually wants to cooperate and collaborate with its former domains, treating them as equals along the lines of the British Commonwealth model. It would require oceans of humility, something countries with strong imperial histories find particularly difficult to muster. Instead, Russia has behaved in exactly the opposite way toward Eastern Europe, bullying them and ranting about how it deserves to rule them again. Here is Yevgeny Balitsky, in effect the governor of Russianoccupied Zaporizhia in Ukraine, outlining his vision for Russia’s relations with its former imperial domains in 2023:

The Russian Empire, when it was shaken after the Bolshevik coup and took a different path of development, lost a lot of its citizens. I’m not talking about lost lands now, that goes without saying, I understand that these are both Warsaw and Helsinki, and Revel (Tallinn) and Liepaja [in Latvia]. And of course the entire Baltic region is our lands and our people live there. The fact that they have been made into a ’dumb herd’ and ’trembling creatures’ must be corrected. And we will correct this situation with the power of Russian weapons. I don’t believe in any diplomacy in this case. Well, perhaps diplomacy should always be involved, but I believe we will return all of this to Russia only with the force of Russian arms. Bring back your people, your subjects who previously belonged to the Russian Empire and today will belong to the Russian Federation. This must be done so that the whole world does not turn into Sodom and Gomorrah, like what is happening in Europe!122

The crux: And this is Putin’s primary failure, as well as Russia’s failure. Neither he nor a significant portion of the Russian population can grasp how negatively most non-Russians viewed life in the various

122 “The head of the Russian occupation administration of Zaporizhia, Yevgeny Balitsky, says is [sic] Russia will re-conquer Poland, Finland and the Baltic states because ‘they are historical lands of Russia’” (Facebook post). (2023 October 4). Visegrad24. Retrieved from: https://fb.watch/nxkoELeORN/

Russian empires (Tsarist, Soviet). Anecdotally, I have had conversations with Russian adults who still believe that the three Baltic countries (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) actually willingly gave up their independence in 1940 and welcomed being reabsorbed back into the state they had fought so hard to break free from in 1918–21.123 Putin has continuously aggravated relations with former Soviet client states by celebrating the Russian or Soviet imperial parts of their histories—and then being surprised when they reacted negatively, such as in 2005 when he awarded former Polish general and president Wojciech Jaruzelski a medal for his World War II service, provoking angry responses from both the Polish and Czech presidents.124 In fact, Putin regularly behaves like a mafia thug toward Russia’s former Soviet Bloc neighbors, in the process providing them with ample evidence for why a security alliance like NATO is absolutely necessary. As Russian blogger Mikhail Makarov noted recently, most Russian citizens today who are old enough to remember the Soviet Union still refuse to recognize that it was an empire that treated the peoples it ruled over like colonial subjects.125 Even worse, many Russians apparently feel those former subjects should be grateful for having been ruled by Moscow:

After the death of Stalin, these two notions were strengthened by two others, an insistence on the sacred nature of the state after the victory in World War II and the idea that the center was financing the borderlands at the expense of the Russian core—and that therefore the former should be grateful to the latter.126

Reality: Any Russian attempt to build bridges with its neighbors will have to begin with a realistic understanding of how those neighbors view Russia and its history. Russia under Yeltsin and Putin has consistently failed to do this. In Chapter 7 of this book, I outlined how Stalin was receiving over 1939–41 massive amounts of intelligence indicating an

123 See Chapters 6 and 7 in the book for details.

124 Jaruzelski was deeply unpopular in Poland for his role in the violent suppression of the 1970s protests as well as his military coup in 1981 that halted the Solidarity experiment and imposed martial law on Poland. In the Czech Republic he is angrily remembered as a Warsaw Pact leader who eagerly participated in the 1968 Soviet-led Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia to suppress the Dubček government.

125 Paul Goble. (2023 August 19). “Older Russians Reject Suggestion that USSR was an Empire and that a Post-Colonial Discourse is Needed, Makarov Says” (Blog post). Window on Eurasia—New Series. Retrieved from: https://windowoneurasia2.blogspot .com/2023/08/older-russians-reject-suggestion-that.html

126 Ibid

imminent Nazi attack on the Soviet Union, but that he utterly refused to believe it, leading to a complete lack of defensive preparations— almost resulting in catastrophic Soviet defeat in 1941. As I describe in this chapter, despite the reams of intelligence, Stalin’s Achilles’ heel was his own paranoid personality and the very skewed lens all that intelligence was interpreted through. In short, Moscow defeated itself by relying on a deeply inaccurate understanding of the outside world, and that failure was disastrous.

Every country is prone to some myopia, and it is naturally difficult for humans to “walk a mile in someone else’s shoes,” as the saying goes. Still, how hard is it to understand that Poles, Estonians, and—as it turns out—Ukrainians do not want to be ruled by Russia? Until Russians understand that, NATO will be a vigilant and persistent feature along Russia’s frontier.127

127 I am not alone in imagining more intelligent Russian leadership. The director of the Carnegie Russia-Eurasia Center in Berlin, Alexander Gabuev, published an article in Foreign Affairs on March 13, 2023, entitled “The Russia That Might Have Been; How Moscow Squandered Its Power and Influence,” which outlines similar thoughts. Retrieved from: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/russia-might-have-been

V. Eastern Europe

Q: How has the war impacted the rest of Eastern Europe?

A: It has had a mixed impact, as you might imagine. On the not-sogood side of the ledger, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has once again put pictures of war, suffering, destruction, and ethnic genocide on the world’s TV (and internet) stations every night, once again making Eastern Europe look like an instable region stuck in the past and prone to violence. This effect has dampened some investor interest in the region, raising corporate risk profiles—which means added cost for more risk management. Eastern Europe was benefitting from postpandemic adjustments to global supply chains, and while this is still the case, Russia’s behavior has injected some caution into company commitments to the region, even in countries far from Ukraine and relatively safe from any spillover effects.

People: Russia’s invasion has also created a human disaster across the region in the form of some 14 million displaced Ukrainians, about 7.7 million displaced within Ukraine from their native regions but still in the country, while about 5.5 million fled the country to neighboring countries—4.9 million to Eastern Europe, and 600,000 to Russia.128 While allegations remain anecdotal at this stage, reports are that Russia has treated these Ukrainians on its soil poorly, including attempting to Russify children.129 The Ukrainian refugees in Eastern Europe have also generated some social tensions but have actually been able to functionally assimilate and find jobs fairly well, contributing to the local economies. As the security situations in Kyiv and other parts of Ukraine have stabilized since early 2022, some of these refugees have returned home, but a sizeable number remain abroad and dependent on the good will of their host countries.

A further factor that is an unknown variable is the impact on Russia’s own population in terms of the border regions that have experienced

128 Olivia White, Kevin Buehler, Sven Smit, Ezra Greenberg, Ritesh Jain, Guillaume Dagorret, and Christiana Hollis. (2023 July 28). “War in Ukraine: Twelve disruptions changing the world—update.” McKinsey & Company. Retrieved from: https://www. mckinsey.com/capabilities/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/war-in-ukrainetwelve-disruptions-changing-the-world-update

129 Vladyslav Havrylov. (2023 July 27). “Russia’s mass abduction of Ukrainian children may qualify as genocide” (Blog post). The Atlantic Council. Retrieved from: https://www. atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/russias-mass-abduction-of-ukrainian-childrenmay-qualify-as-genocide/

some of Ukraine’s military reprisals, as well as the demographic impact on poorer regions where Moscow has done most of its recruiting for its army. As noted elsewhere, while many have observed how Putin has scared off the most educated and technologically savvy class of Russians, conversely, what remains to be seen is this 1 million+ strong Russian émigré community’s impact on countries like Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkey, and Serbia. Russia’s diaspora is currently the third largest in the world behind India and Mexico (and followed by China), according to UN statistics.130

War: There have been fears that the war will spill over from Ukraine, either intentionally or accidentally. There have been claims of Russian interference in Moldova’s politics, though Putin’s constant threats against Moldova have had the effect of turning even long-time pro-Russian Moldovans against Moscow—or at least, Putin.131 In November 2022 a Ukrainian air defense missile accidentally landed in a farmer’s field in Poland, killing the farmer. Meanwhile, in September 2023 Russian missiles rained down on Ukrainian port facilities exporting grain on the Danube River—just a couple hundred yards from Romanian port facilities, as the Danube is the border between Ukraine and Romania in this area. And Romania is a NATO member state. Russian military aircraft have continued to fly provocatively near or into NATO airspace in Poland, the Baltic countries, and Scandinavia since the war began—as well as Alaska.

Benefit? On the positive side, the war has seemingly validated and justified Eastern Europe’s paranoia about Russia in Western eyes. And this has had some important tangible effects, such as Europe finally developing an energy policy less reliant on Russian supplies. It has also convinced Western policy makers that they need to listen more to their Eastern European colleagues, giving the region a stronger voice in European and Western institutions, as noted elsewhere in this FAQ.

The war has also sharpened the arguments for the EU and NATO in the region, forcing even traditional naysayers like Viktor Orbán in Hungary to acknowledge their importance. On the whole, the war has shown that while a part of Eastern Europe is still stuck in old ways, large swaths of the region have in fact developed significantly since 1989 and are now firmly integrated with the modern world. Putin may not have learned much since 1989, but many other Eastern Europeans have.

130 Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan. The Compatriots. Kindle Edition. New York: Public Affairs, 2019; p. 23.

131 Galiya Ibragimova. (2023 May 11). “How Russia Torpedoed Its Own Influence in Moldova.” The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Retrieved from: https:// carnegieendowment.org/politika/89731

Q: Is it possible this war may ignite other conflicts elsewhere in Eastern Europe?

A: Possibly, yes. Whether with direct encouragement from Moscow (or not), northern Kosovo (which has a large Serbian minority) has seen increasing acts of violent confrontation between local (mostly ethnically Albanian) police and local Serbs. In September 2023 some thirty Serbian gunmen engaged in a gun battle with local police, holing themselves up in a Serbian monastery.132 Serbia has been quietly amassing large numbers of troops on its border with Kosovo, while Kosovo has put its army on heightened alert. NATO peacekeeping troops have been reinforced and are trying to keep the peace. The U.S. is very actively involved diplomatically to diffuse the situation. Is Serbia or others hoping the Ukraine War might distract the West enough to allow for a reconquest of Kosovo?

Bosnia-Herzegovina: The Serbian part of Bosnia-Herzegovina, called Republika Srpska, also became more aggressive as the Ukraine War began in 2022, and some locals feared a reopening of the 1990s Bosnian War, but those storm clouds seem to have receded since.

The Caucasus: One area that has been profoundly impacted by the Ukraine War has been Nagorno-Karabakh, in the southern Caucasus. As the Soviet Union was in its final stages in 1988, ethnic Armenians living in this region of Azerbaijan began protesting against Azerbaijani rule, leading to fighting. In 1991 Nagorno-Karabakh declared its independence from Azerbaijan, leading to war between newly independent post-Soviet Armenia and Azerbaijan. Armenia mostly won that war and by 1994 Russia negotiated a ceasefire, and Russian peacekeepers moved into the region. However, despite the Russian presence, many Azerbaijanis living in Nagorno-Karabakh either fled the region or were expelled (or worse) by local Armenian authorities and official Armenian forces over the years. The conflict seemed frozen—a situation triumphant Armenia was happy to prolong—but with Russia distracted by its intervention in eastern Ukraine, Azerbaijan (supported by ally Turkey133) launched in September 2020 a new counteroffensive, recapturing much of the disputed region. Three years later, with Russia bogged down in its invasion of Ukraine (and Russian influence in the Caucasus seen as evaporating), Azerbaijan

132 Alex Binley. (2023 September 29). “US urges Serbia to withdraw troops from Kosovo border as tensions rise.” BBC. Retrieved from: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe66968021

133 Interestingly, Turkey helped Azerbaijan launch a drone-driven war against the utterly unprepared Armenians, echoing the drone war that erupted in Ukraine—with Ukraine using Turkish Bayraktar TB2 drones.

boldly completed its takeover of Nagorno-Karabakh, and has been effectively ethnically cleansing the region of Armenians, reversing the Armenian ethnic cleansing operations of the 1990s.

Many security analysts see the key ingredient in Azerbaijan’s victories as being Russia’s weakness. However, Armenian journalist Maria Titizian blames both Russia and the West, because the West just wasn’t concerned enough to do anything. She believes Russia abandoned Armenia because Armenians had the temerity to oust a Putin ally (Serzh Sargsyan) in 2018 and hold real elections that brought Nikol Pashinyan to power in Armenia:

The blatant failure of Russia, Armenia’s erstwhile treaty ally, in protecting the rights and security of the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh has become painfully clear. The primary issue appears to be Moscow’s discomfiture with Armenia’s Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, a former journalist with a prodemocracy government. As the Kremlin’s media guidelines on the September fighting state, referring to Pashinyan’s alleged belligerence, “The Armenian premier was probably pushed … by his Western ‘partners,’ who should now fully share the responsibility for their consequences.” Russian media was quick to pick up on the Kremlin’s prescribed talking points, with Lenta.ru, for instance, repeating a favorite phrase of the Kremlin’s in referring to Karabakh as “Azerbaijan’s internal business.” None of this has been lost on the Armenian public, who see how Moscow emboldened Baku and, instead of honoring its treaty commitments, stood by and watched the ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh. In protest, holders of dual citizenship even photographed themselves tearing up their Russian passports.134

Either way, whether because Putin has bogged Russia down in Ukraine or because he wanted to punish Armenia for behaving like a real democracy, he has permanently changed the political dynamics of the southern Caucasus—and not in a way favorable to Russia.

134 Maria Titizian. (2023 November 13). “The Lights Are On But There Is No One Home: An Armenian journalist explains the tragedy of Nagorno-Karabakh.” Persuasion. Retrieved from: https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-lights-are-on-but-there-is-no?utm_source =post-email-title&publication_id=61579&post_id=138834950&utm_campaign=emailpost-title&isFreemail=true&r=3xser&utm_medium=email&fbclid=IwAR29loIJaqtTTl_ rlFgme7M2Q6_XEZRVTP_xruzF5dEWQ_Duf9_xXFoExgk

Q: Is Belarus involved in this war?

A: Yes and no. Officially, no. Belarus is a neutral country in this war. However, from literally Day One of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Belarus has been party to Russia’s aggression by allowing some of the invasion to be launched from Belarus’s territory, and since that first day, countless Russian air strikes and missile strikes have been launched from Belarus’s territory against Ukraine. It has taken a while for Belarus’s dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, to admit this publicly, however.135 Belarus is a key supply depot and route and training ground for Russian forces in Ukraine. Belarus has also helped Russia by positioning some of its forces in southern Belarus along the Ukraine border to force Ukraine to maintain forces along the border—just in case. Most countries would interpret Belarus’s behavior in this war toward Ukraine as aggression. Ukraine officially does not, simply because it already has its hands full dealing with Russia.

However, as noted in Chapters 9 and 10 of this book, indications are that Lukashenko is deeply unpopular in Belarus and his participation in Russia’s war is equally as unpopular. Lukashenko relied on Russia’s aid in suppressing protests against his falsified election in 2020, and ever since he is utterly dependent on Putin, turning Belarus effectively into a Russian province. There were indications over 2022 and 2023 that some Belarussians have sabotaged military rail traffic in the country. There is also a unit of Belarussian expats fighting in Ukraine for Ukraine—and a free Belarus. Reportedly numbering 300, the Kastus Kalinouski Regiment hopes to help liberate Ukraine, then come home and do the same.136 In truth, as both Belarus and Ukraine have struggled to emerge from the shadow of Moscow, it just hasn’t occurred to either Minsk or Kyiv to look to one another for help.

Although political transformations in Ukraine and Belarus are often discussed and compared, the problems of the Ukrainian-Belarussian relations themselves and their role in Eastern Europe are rarely addressed. This is not surprising, given that for more than sixty years relations between the Soviet republics were mediated by Moscow. For more than a decade after the collapse of the USSR, Ukraine and Belarus remained corners of the “East Slavic triangle” dominated by Russia. During the

135 Elsa Court. (2023 August 18). “Lukashenko admits Russian troops invaded Ukraine through Belarus in 2022.” Kyiv Independent. Retrieved from: https://kyivindependent .com/lukashenko-admits-russian-troops-invaded-ukraine-through-belarus/

136 Aleksander Palikot. (2023 February 19). “Belarusian Fighters In Ukraine Set Sights On A Long March.” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Retrieved from: https://www.rferl .org/a/belarus-fighters-ukraine-long-march/32278387.html

1990s new bilateral relations between Kyiv and Minsk were shaped mainly within the framework of the Commonwealth of Independent States (the CIS), as the successor of the disintegrated “Soviet empire.”137

Still, popular sentiment in Ukraine is that Belarussians have not done enough to keep their country out of the fray. A Belarussian antiLukashenko government-in-exile, led by Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya in Lithuania’s capital, Vilnius, has been dismissed by some Ukrainians as toothless, and unwilling to take solid steps toward Belarus’s liberation. Time will tell.

Q: What does all this talk of “decolonizing” Eastern European or Slavic Studies mean?

A: Finally, these events have forced a rethink in Western academia, as well as further afield, about how to approach Eastern Europe and Russia. This is, I think, mostly positive. To be sure, there is some element of antiRussianism involved today, as some institutions, art galleries, concert halls, etc. across the world have suddenly dropped Russian artists and refused to include Russian classics like Tchaikovsky or Tolstoy138 in their programs and studies. This is unfortunate, because like it or not, Russian artists have contributed positively to world culture.

But this is momentary. A larger rethink is happening in Western academia in how it approaches Eastern Europe as a subject of study. Traditionally, anything even remotely Eastern European has been relegated to departments that were really focused on Russia, with tortured titles like “Russian and Slavic Studies.” (Estonians, Hungarians, Romanians, and Albanians really love that they’re slotted under the “Slavic Studies” side.) This made sense over the 20th century, as Russia was by far that part of Eastern Europe that most of the West dealt with most directly. And while Tsars and commissars complained about Western tourists’ portrayals of Russia, in truth, the West really took Russian culture seriously and fell in love with Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Kandinsky, etc. And that’s OK because Russian artistic culture truly is amazing. Russians have figured prominently in Western global survey courses in literature, music, etc. for more than a century.

137 Tatiana Zhurzhenko. (2008). “Sisters into Neighbors: Ukrainian-Belarusian Relations After 1991.” Crossroads Digest N 3/2008 (Journal for the Studies of Eastern European Borderland), ISSN 1822-5136; pp. 4–34

138 In fact, Tolstoy became a loud critic of the Tsarist system in Russia, and would likely condemn Putin.

But still, Russia is not all of Eastern Europe, and in fact constitutes just one, distinct part of the region and its history, culture, and economy. Polish, Bulgarian, or Lithuanian views of Eastern Europe are very different from how Moscow sees the region—not to say anything of past peoples and states of the region, like the Prussians, Avars, or Byzantines. There is a growing recognition that Western academia has been too Russiacentric in its approach to the region, and worse, it has also allowed Russia to define the region so that far too many Westerners today view Eastern Europe through a very Russian lens, whether they know this or not. (This is a habit; in the section of my book entitled “Special Insert: Peoples of Eastern Europe—The Germans” between Chapters 3 and 4, I note how much of the English language’s take on Eastern European place names derives—lazily—from medieval German, so that for instance Polish Warszawa became “Warsaw” through the German Warschau, or Russian Москва (Moskva) became “Moscow” through the German Moskau. So we’ve been here before.) Eastern European history has been framed in Western university programs as if the rise of Russia was the only important event, with the rest of the region’s history, economic development, cultures, and languages subordinated to Russia. It’s not just that this has been unfair to other peoples. It’s also a very distorted view of the region and its real history and development. As this special insert argues, Ukrainians and Belarussians have been the foremost victims of this Russification of Eastern Europe’s history, but it is also just plain inaccurate. Russia is real and it has had an important impact on the region’s history, on Europe’s history, and the world. But so have Poland and Romania. Russia didn’t exist in any way, shape, or form when the first two Bulgarian empires reshaped the Balkans. Russia has its place in Eastern European Studies, but its place is realistically more subdued than it enjoys in most Western academic programs today. This is all to say that the West’s academic approach to Eastern Europe has been horribly skewed, and something needs to change.

VI. The European Union

Q: Has the Ukraine War had any impact on the European Union or on EU expansion?

A: Yes. In 1992 the European Union took the step of transforming itself from an economic union into a political one, but it has failed since to fully realize that side of the European project. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has reminded Europe that basic values are at stake.

Politics: To be sure, the European Union still has to figure out how to successfully formulate a single foreign policy, but there is a renewed clarity in Paris, Berlin, and elsewhere about the importance of a united European policy and voice in geopolitics.

Energy: One area where Europe has particularly realized its vulnerability is in energy. To be fair, while there were European (especially German) corporate interests who pushed for reliance on Russian oil and gas since the 1980s, there was also a desire to engage with Russia and develop strong economic ties. Especially after the Soviet Union collapsed, it was thought that helping an important Russian economic sector develop through both purchases and investments would help integrate Russia’s economy into Europe’s and the world’s, providing access to capital, technology, and corporate best practices for nascent Russian firms. The first cracks in this strategy appeared in 2009, when Putin provoked a crisis with Ukraine and its then pro-Western prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko and shut down pipeline gas supplies to Ukraine for almost two weeks—impacting Europe as well. Putin’s willingness to use Russia’s gas supplies as a political weapon spooked Europe. Unfortunately, it didn’t spook them enough to actually do something, and through the Georgian War (2008), the seizure of Crimea and the eastern Donbas regions of Ukraine (2014), Europe kept right on using Russian oil and gas. Only the invasion of Ukraine finally shocked Europe into action. Putin did not think Europe was capable of unified action. As put by Nathalie Tocci, director of the Italian think tank Istituto Affari Internazionali:

Putin expected Europe to bend and eventually break over its need for energy, which is precisely why he turned the taps off at the cost of hurting Russia too. As Robert Falkner explains, Europe was partly aided by exogenous factors such as a warm winter and sluggish Chinese growth, but the EU and its member states also

Europe: The Ukraine War

put in place a set of key measures. They diversified their gas supplies, they met their targets for the refilling of gas storages and developed a European Energy Platform to aggregate demand for the refilling of storages for the following winter.139

Q: Will Ukraine be able to join the European Union?

A: That remains to be seen, though two factors have changed. One is that the European Union is far more open to Ukraine joining. In early November 2023 European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen officially offered Ukraine (and Moldova) the chance to start membership negotiations. The other is that Ukraine itself is far more excited about (potentially) joining. Remember that the Maidan protests in 2013–14 in Kyiv were over the then–Ukrainian president’s sudden abandonment of an agreement with the European Union because of pressure from Moscow. Back then, European Union membership was already growing in popularity, but there were parts of Ukraine— especially the more Russian-speaking south and east— 140 that provided these results:

139 Nathalie Toccie. (2023 November 15). “How the war in Ukraine has transformed the EU.” Social Europe. Retrieved from: https://www.socialeurope.eu/how-the-war-inukraine-has-transformed-the-eu?fbclid=IwAR01s8Ef74CPJCXdoCEdzy9JYBDiYpRVXnrm dU4qiLElOz7X9PP7IkM-vnM.

140 A quote about the poll: “Gallup’s interviews in Ukraine this year [2014] took place in September and October, following a cease-fire between the Ukrainian government and proRussian separatists in the country’s East. Gallup’s polls in 2014 excluded the Crimea region, which is currently considered occupied territory, and some areas of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions where security was an issue. The excluded areas account for approximately 10% to 13% of Ukraine’s adult population.” Source: Elizabeth Keating and Cynthia English. (2014 December 16). “Ukrainians Prefer European Union, US to Russia.” Gallup. Retrieved from: https://news.gallup.com/poll/180182/ukrainians-prefer-european-union-russia.aspx

Figure 1.8. Results of a 2014 Gallup Poll in Ukraine on Relations with the European Union

Source: Gallup141

Today? In July 2023 Statista asked Ukrainians, “If a referendum was held on Ukraine’s accession to the European Union (EU), how would you vote?” and 85% responded “yes,” while 4% responded “no.”142 (Presumably, the remaining 11% didn’t respond.) As described elsewhere in this section, Russia’s attack on Ukraine has united the country in ways it has never been, crossing ethnic, religious, and regional lines.

Don’t call us…. But one problem Ukraine has is that the European Union itself is in disarray. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has reminded the EU of the importance of its political (and security) pillars, but ever since the failure of the European constitution in 2005 under Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the EU project has been somewhat adrift. In 1992 with the Maastricht Treaty signing, Europe was swept by pan-European enthusiasm, but that has cooled some since, and with the duel crises of the 2008 economic crisis and the COVID pandemic (2020–21), many Europeans have turned to more local, nationalist politics. In 2007 the

141 Elizabeth Keating and Cynthia English. (2014 December 16). “Ukrainians Prefer European Union, US to Russia.” Gallup. Retrieved from: https://news.gallup.com/ poll/180182/ukrainians-prefer-european-union-russia.aspx

142 “If a referendum was held on Ukraine’s accession to the European Union (EU), how would you vote?” (2023 September 21). Statista. Retrieved from: https://www.statista .com/statistics/1294443/public-opinion-on-ukraine-joining-the-european-union/

Europe: The Ukraine War

European Union member states renegotiated the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, creating a more diluted (though more formalized) political union with the Treaty of Lisbon. With that, the EU’s appetite for expansion has pretty much evaporated. Bulgaria and Romania joined in January 2007 (the Treaty of Lisbon was signed in December 2007), but the only country able to join since was Croatia, in 2013. The truth is that despite the offer made to Ukraine at Bucharest in 2008—the one that put Putin into permanent tantrum mode—Ukraine’s prospects for joining the EU, while greatly improved with its successful resistance to Russian aggression since 2022, still look vague, at best.

Figure 1.9. The Evolution and Expansion of the European Union

Source: Eastern Europe! by Tomek Jankowski, and the European Commission website143

You don’t send me flowers anymore: In 1999, the European Union created the Stabilization and Association Process (SAP), which basically created a path (using a checklist laid out in a Copenhagen conference in 1993, so referred to as the “Copenhagen Criteria”) for Balkan countries to (eventually) join the European Union. The countries who signed up for the SAP process (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, North Macedonia, Kosovo, Montenegro, Serbia) were seen as being on the road to EU membership. But then came the massive fifth expansion of EU membership in 2004 with ten countries joining the EU, and worsening relations with Russia, and so by the 2010s there was “expansion fatigue.”

143 European Neighbourhood Policy and Enlargement Negotiations (DG NEAR); “From 6 to 27 members.” (2023). The European Commission. Retrieved from: https://neighbourhoodenlargement.ec.europa.eu/enlargement-policy/6-27-members_en

Not today: The “stuff” hit the fan in 2018, when Albania and North Macedonia were set to formalize their applications only to have the process scuttled by France, Denmark, and the Netherlands. This abrupt halt was seen at the time as universal—impacting other candidates states such as Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, and Serbia— as well as being potentially indefinite. The European Union did great damage to its credibility in the region when this happened, suggesting that the argument of the 1990s that Western Europe’s security and prosperity required supporting the same in Eastern Europe had lost some ground—that the old 20th-century lessons had been forgotten. (At about the same time in 2018, the European Union also halted membership talks with Turkey, which had been ongoing since 1997.)

The current president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, continues to push for a restart to the membership process for the Balkan states, and an EU summit in Thessaloniki in 2023 also reaffirmed support for moving forward with the process, but as of this writing—with little real progress. Worse, some things have even rolled backward: in 2023, full EU member states Bulgaria and Romania were once again denied being allowed to join the Schengen area (which opens borders for citizens across EU member states), despite the fact the EU has acknowledged both countries have met the technical criteria for Schengen for years.144 The 2018 brick wall also gave rise to an old bogeyman, once pushed by France, of a multi-tiered EU with some states more equal than others, something very much outside of the spirit of the original coal-sharing agreement in 1951, and certainly not something welcome in the Balkans.

To be fair, there are some valid reasons to give the EU pause:

• Continuing corruption in some Balkan countries, such as candidate states Kosovo and Albania, and including member states like Bulgaria

• The regression in democracy and the rule of law in some countries— member-country Hungary first and foremost—echoed by increasing authoritarianism in candidate states like Serbia and Turkey

• Tensions between some countries in the region (e.g., North Macedonia and both Greece and Bulgaria, Serbia and Kosovo, a border dispute between Croatia and Slovenia, etc.)

• Shifting economic trends across the EU that are creating tensions in member countries, inspiring political caution

144 Cristian Gherasim. (2023 November 17). “In its bid for cohesion, the EU needs to fully integrate South-Eastern European member states.” Emerging Europe. Retrieved from: https://emerging-europe.com/voices/in-its-bid-for-cohesion-the-eu-needs-to-fullyintegrate-south-eastern-european-member-states/

• The Ukraine War has also generated political tensions for some candidate states, such as Serbia (and member states such as Hungary or Greece), which are resistant to Western sanctions against Russia

And Ukraine? What does this mean for Ukraine and its bid to join the EU? Ukraine already faces an uphill battle with the ongoing war and Ukraine’s own battles with corruption. But this is further complicated by the EU’s own internal turmoil. In some respects, Kyiv’s ascent (likely with neighbor Moldova) could revive the expansion process and help Brussels develop some clarity around why the EU exists and what the benefits of a European union are to its members. The EU is right to hold candidate states to a rigid standard, though that would have more credibility if existing members are also held to the same standards, with clearly stated consequences of noncompliance. (This would help the EU address Viktor Orbán’s increasingly corrupt and authoritarian Hungary more effectively.)

The European Union (as the European Economic Community) was founded to help members recover more quickly from World War II, and provide a solid economic foundation for Western Europe (to help it counter the growing Soviet threat of the 1950s), but it also was a recognition that without their colonial empires, the countries of Europe are fairly small and poorly equipped to attract capital investment and develop competitive economies. Many—even in Western Europe—also struggled with residual feudal elements in their economies and legal systems. As the World War II generation passed the political torch in the 1970s and 80s, many Europeans desired a stronger European voice in global affairs, separate from the U.S. The EU has done a stunning job over the decades of helping its members raise their living standards and modernize their economies and state administration structures. Much work remains to be done, but its achievements are very real and palpable. For a variety of reasons briefly mentioned in this section, the EU has been less successful on the political front, but even there, it is not without some important wins.

Solution? It might be tempting to restrict the EU to a few regions of Europe, but as I stated in this book, Europe is a peninsula and its political and economic challenges are unavoidably continent-wide—requiring continent-wide solutions. A state with the population of Ukraine and the resources of Ukraine, and—via its war with Russia—the proven commitment of Ukraine would be a valuable member state for Europe.

VII. A Selected Bibliography

This is intended to supplement the bibliography in the Second Edition. The reality is that with current events like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, books will be few. No doubt more will come as the years progress.

Applebaum, Anne. Putinism: The Ideology (Strategic Update 13.2). London: London School of Economics and Political Science, 2013.

Boyd, Douglas. The Kremlin Conspiracy: 1,000 Years of Russian Expansionism. Gloucestershire (UK): History Press, 2014.

Eine, Anton. (Simon Geoghegan, translator). The Thin Blue-Yellow Line Between Love and Hate: A War Diary from Ukraine (Kindle Edition). Selfpublished, 2023.

Galeotti, Mark. Putin’s Wars, from Chechnya to Ukraine. Oxford (UK): Osprey Publishing, 2022.

Guriev, Sergei and Treisman, Daniel. Spin Doctors: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022.

Marik, Adoriana (via Howard, Anne K.). Escape from Mariupol: A Survivor’s True Story (Kindle Edition). Denver: WildBlue Press, 2022.

Matthews, Owen. Overreach: The Inside Story of Putin and Russia’s War Against Ukraine (Kindle Edition). New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2022.

Ostrovsky, Arkady. The Invention of Russia: The Rise of Putin and the Age of Fake News. New York: Penguin Books, 2017.

Plokhy, Serhii The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2023.

Sarotte, Mary Elise 1989: The Struggle to Create Post–Cold War Europe Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009.

Satter, David. Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State (Kindle Edition). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003.

Soldatov, Andrei and Borogan, Irena. The Compatriots: The Russian Exiles Who Fought Against the Kremlin. New York: PublicAffairs, 2022.

Wylegała, Anna. The Burden of the Past: History, Memory, and Identity in Contemporary Ukraine (Kindle Edition). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2020.

XY, Dandin. Sword and Shield: The Varangian Vikings and the Birth of a Troubled City that is Now at the Center of the Russia-Ukraine War (Histories of the Tribe Book 2) (Kindle Edition). Independently published, 2023.

Zygar, Mikhail. All the Kremlin’s Men: Inside the Court of Vladimir Putin. New York: PublicAffairs, 2016.