The Russo-Ukrainian War: From the bestselling author of Chernobyl

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In the melee, the outnumbered separatist were trapped in a building where a fire broke out and 48 separatists died. This was clearly a tragedy but not an indication that the separatists were innocents or that Naziism was involved. Perhaps Putin made the link to Naziism because the event was one week before Russia's annual Victory Day, a celebration of the German defeat in 1945. (see here)

It is a cruel game to ask a historian to look into the future. But here we are and, as Plokhy himself says, rephrasing Churchill, historians are probably “the worst commentators on contemporary events except for all the others”. So what about the Ukrainians’ spring counteroffensive, I ask – which, when we speak in the last days of April, is expected any day. In 2014, using a trove of newly declassified documents, Plokhy published a book called The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union. In it, he countered the usual triumphalist American interpretation of the Soviet collapse. What doomed the superpower wasn’t U.S. foreign policy, Plokhy argued, but its own political structures and ethnic fractures, its imperial weaknesses. It “died the death of an empire,” he wrote, “splitting along lines roughly defined by ethnic and linguistic territories.” As Ukraine and then the other republics broke away, Soviet (and American) leaders were reacting to events, not steering them. While journalists present at the time depict a complex interaction between the Russian state, nationalist freelancers and local actors (in particular in Donbas), Plokhy tells the story as completely determined by the puppetmasters in Moscow: “the Russian intelligence services organized a push for independence from below.” Future historians will have to sort out the evidence here, once more sources become available. Based on decades of research and his unique insight into the region, he argues that Ukraine's defiance of Russia, and the West's demonstration of unity and strength, has presented a profound challenge to Putin's Great Power ambition, and further polarized the world along a new axis. A riveting, enlightening account, this is present-minded history at its best.The Russo-Ukrainian war, Plokhy argues, marks the end of the unipolar world that had come into being after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Putin had hoped for multipolarity, with several great powers asserting their spheres of influence. However, what the historian sees emerging instead is a new confrontation between East and West. I may say this book is a grand one for finding problems of definition – what is an annexation? What is a valid referendum? What is an independent republic? What is democracy?

Anders dan in Rusland wist het parlement in Oekraïne met vallen en opstaan wél een sterke positie te verwerven tegenover de uitvoerende macht. De vreedzame machtswisseling na de presidentsverkiezingen van 1994, van Leonid Kravtsjoek naar Leonid Kuchma, was een belangrijke eerste mijlpaal in de democratische ontwikkeling van de voormalige sovjetrepubliek. Voor de goede orde: Kuchma bleek als president allesbehalve een voorbeeldige democraat. Net als Jeltsin in Moskou, probeerde hij de grondwet naar zijn hand te zetten. Anders dan Jeltsin, slaagde hij daarin echter niet. Tien jaar later, in 2004, lukte het Kuchma evenmin om Viktor Janoekovitsj, de corrupte pro-Russische gouverneur van Donetsk, tot zijn opvolger te benoemen. Hoe corrupt en verdeeld Oekraïne ook was, de meeste Oekraïners eisten democratie en velen bleken bereid hiervoor hun nek uit te steken tijdens de eerste Maidan-protesten na de gemanipuleerde verkiezingen van 2004. Rusland raakte langzaam maar zeker de greep op Oekraïne steeds meer kwijt. I wonder whether he can foresee the disintegration of the Russian Federation as it is currently constituted – especially in a context where Russia is seemingly recruiting its military disproportionately from its Muslim peoples and peripheral autonomous republics. “The process of disintegration has already started,” he replies. “Already Russia doesn’t control its constitutional territory” – by which he means that some parts of Ukraine that were formally adopted as part of the Russian Federation last autumn in the wake of the full-scale invasion, such as Kherson, have already been liberated and restored to Ukrainian hands. But yes, he says, republics on the edges of the federation – such as Tuva, Buryatia and Sakha, not to mention Chechnya, are vulnerable. “The longer the war goes on, the stronger the narrative that Russia is using them as cannon fodder.” Over a year into Russia’s grotesque full-scale invasion of Ukraine, disinformation and misconceptions of the conflict — fuelled both by the Kremlin and by political actors abroad — continue to permeate public debate. "The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History" by Serhii Plokhy takes aim at many of these myths, demonstrating how Russia’s centuries-long imperial obsession with Ukraine created the conditions for Europe’s largest land war since 1945.

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Ukraine, meanwhile, is fighting for its survival. The invasion turbo-charged a process of decolonisation, which began in 1991, and accelerated in 2014 when Putin annexed Crimea. Statues have been toppled, Pushkin and assorted Moscow generals carried away. A plaque to the Soviet writer Mikhail Bulgakov – who opposed Ukrainian independence – has disappeared from the medical academy in Kyiv where he studied. A homeowner in the village of Kushuhum, in the Zaporizhzhia region, examines his house and yard in the aftermath of Russian shelling. Photograph by Dmytro Smolienko/Ukrinform/Future Publishing via Getty Images To soften the blow of the “concession to their former master” and hide the embarrassing victory of Russia over the US, NATO asserted that both countries did have the right to eventually join the alliance. The war buried Russia’s hopes of becoming a new global center […] It exposed weaknesses not only in Russia’s clearly overrated and overpromoted army but also in its economic potential. Plokhy, who grew up in Zaporizhzhia and began his academic career in Dnipropetrovsk (both in Ukraine), keeps his outrage about Russia’s aggression on a tight leash. There are no polemics in this book. The historian lets the facts speak.

US supplies of sophisticated weapons such as long-range artillery systems have driven Ukraine’s counter-offensive. Putin has long railed against American hegemony and called for a “multipolar” world. Plokhy believes the war has taken us into a new age of superpower rivalry. Its poles, however, are Washington and Beijing. Moscow is China’s weaker and poorer partner. West and Russia—which vehemently opposed the action—demonstrating how little Russia’s views and declared Zes jaar na de inname van de Krim woedde de Covid-crisis van 2020-2021. Een van de vele onvermoede gevolgen van deze mondiale gezondheidscrisis was dat een geïsoleerde Poetin zich vastbeet in een specifieke lezing van de geschiedenis en daarmee van zijn historische missie, een gevaarlijke vorm van zingeving. “Putin reads all the time, mostly about the history of Russia,” aldus zijn woordvoerder Peskov in die tijd. “He reads memoirs, the memoirs of Russian historical state figures.” Het resultaat was een essay van zijn hand, getiteld ‘On the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians’, dat leest als voorbode van de Russische inval van 2022. Poetin: “I said that Russians and Ukrainians were one people — a single whole. […] It is what I have said on numerous occasions and what I firmly believe.” (136) In dit licht bezien was het besluit van Boris Jeltsin in 1993 om met militaire middelen een einde te maken aan de onafhankelijke positie van het Russische parlement van grote betekenis voor de toekomstige verhoudingen tussen Rusland en Oekraïne. Hij voerde daarna een nieuwe grondwet in die de macht verplaatste naar de president. De presidentiële verkiezingen van 1996, die Jeltsin slechts met grote moeite van de Communisten wist te winnen door zich te verbinden aan de nieuwe ‘oligarchen’-klasse, zetten de ontwikkeling van Rusland naar een “‘managed’ or ‘sovereign’ democracy” kracht bij. (48) Aldus werd de weg geplaveid voor een terugkeer naar een autoritaire regeringsvorm.

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A local resident eats a free meal and talks on the phone at a shelter in Orikhiv, amid boarded-up windows and a TV displaying a more tranquil scene. Ukraine nationalists can point to a number of instances when Russia said Ukraine was independent; their opponents can also find many instances when the answer was otherwise. It's impossible for a layman to determine when an assurance is credible and when it is not. I suspect that even experts on diplomacy and international relations have no clear criteria to measure credibility. Until that time when we can determine whether an assurance is in good faith, its a "She says – He says" dilemma. Meanwhile, Ukraine received desperately needed economic aid and established itself as a good global citizen in exchange for its nuclear arsenal. At the same time, Ukraine might have been able eventually to solve the technical problems that hindered its use of the nukes and hence become a formidable regional military power. Plokhy prefers “Russo-Ukrainian war” to alternatives like “ Russia’s war against Ukraine”. While the latter expression is well suited to emphasising Russia’s culpability in this war, the former stresses that Ukraine is not just a victim of Russia, but its equal.