Putin’s War of Lost Glory

The war in Ukraine might have officially started last Thursday morning, but in another sense, it had begun a long time ago. Already back in 2014, when Putin annexed Crimea, there were people who believed the Russian advance would not stop there. Alongside taking the peninsula, the Russian government also supported militant groups in Ukraine’s easternmost breakaway regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, and while things went quite smoothly in Crimea, the takeover was not as smooth in the east. Putin thus continued to prop up the pro-Russian side, even to the point where the administration of the local governments was effectively in Russian or Russian-oriented hands; but full and official annexation of Donetsk and Luhansk—Crimea-style—never came.

Now, the angle of the present war has caught many, including me, by surprise. I thought Putin would finally sweep into the Donbas and proclaim the two breakaway regions parts of Russia. I did not think he would resort to waging war against the rest of Ukraine, too.

This makes me think that the war did not actually begin in 2014, but in 1989. Today’s Russia never recovered from the misplaced nostalgia of the supposed glam and glory of the USSR. When the empire fell, it did so in a very different way than, say, Nazi Germany. In the case of the latter, the regime was thoroughly weeded out and the ground salted. There was no chance of any Nazi sympathies returning to Germany anytime soon. This was not so in Russia. Putin has repeatedly said that the worst thing to have happened in the world in his lifetime was the dissolution of the USSR. And a lot, a lot of people agree with him; more so now than immediately after the union fell. Many of them would like to return to a past when Russia seemed to be contending for the position of the preeminent world power.

1989 was a huge blow to Russian self-confidence. Suddenly, the ‘mother’ country became just a mid-level power in world affairs, plagued by poverty, decay, and rampart base gangsterism that replaced the hitherto mythical and grandiose gangsterism of the politburo. Since then, Russia seemed to be stuck in the past, growing ever poorer, ever rustier, ever sadder, while elsewhere the world carried on and the power and influence of Russia’s geopolitical rivals kept increasing. The expansion of NATO into the former Eastern Bloc has only been a cherry on top of the whole tale of relapse and decline.

This is the backstory that I see behind the scramble for Russia’s reclamation of lost territories in Georgia, Azerbaijan/Armenia, Moldova, and Ukraine. It appears to be a blatant attempt to claw back some of the imperial losses suffered at the end of the Cold War. The doctrine of self-determination has been a useful tool in this effort, which Putin has employed in front of international onlookers to claim that what he was doing ‘was not actually that bad when you think it through’. Now, he has decided to go one step further, and instead of nibbling away at parts of other countries he has for the first time directly attacked the centre of one.

This war is unique in modern times. Even according to the invader himself, neither is it being fought on behalf of the safety and security of Russian citizens nor as a retaliatory action in response to perceived aggression by others. During his long tenure, Putin has frequently recalled NATO expansion eastward and its numerous past promises that were not kept. He did not, however, place this story anywhere near the centre of his justification for the invasion. Instead, he talked about partly real, partly fictional historical developments that have led to the current status quo of an independent Ukraine. He denounced such an evolution, protesting that Ukraine has always been true Russia in spirit, and that, by getting rid of an insurgent government in Kyiv, he is restoring order to the Slavic world. 

If that is so, no wonder the rest of the Slavic world is up in arms. No wonder its citizens are in the streets protesting this war en masse and trying to help Ukrainian combatants, civilians, and refugees in every way they can. They know that Russian rulers have always considered themselves the ‘protectors’ of the Slavic world and amused themselves with delusions of pan-Slavic unity with themselves at its helm. What this idea of unity looks like in practice is unambiguous in the Czech collective memory since the summer of 1968, when Soviet tanks filled the streets of Prague in order to ‘liberate’ it from a version of socialism that no longer sought to be a puppet state of Moscow. Amid the invasion of Ukraine, the whole of the Eastern Bloc is now reliving such memories, and is under no illusions that Putin would just want to take over Kyiv and go home. First they came for the Ukrainians…

At the same time, the Russian state seems weak. An unambiguous invasion in which there isn’t even a pretence of acting in self-defence is a scene from centuries past. It is something that we inhabitants of the modern world are simply not used to. It is a strange, bizarre sight that most people have no mental framework to deal with, and therefore they resort to labelling Putin a lunatic who must have completely lost it. To those who don’t think he is crazy, such a straightforward act of aggression is simply a sign of weakness—of a dying empire lashing out at others in a last-ditch but hopeless attempt at saving itself from being devoured by the wheel of time.

Russia might be a shell of the former USSR, but as it stands, the country maintains the largest land area in the world, a sizable population, and an equally sizable number of nuclear warheads. It is a multicultural, multinational country that has historically been held together mostly by force. The original inhabitants might have been mixed in with Russian colonists and they might be united by the ever-present Soviet prefab residential block, but the country is disjointed and many of its territories do not feel much allegiance to the whole project. When looking at world maps from 1988 and 2021, it is easy to forget that while one empire might have disintegrated, today’s Russia is still an empire in and of itself. It has 85 federal subjects (second-level administrative divisions), of which 27 are either called ‘republics’ outright or exist under a kind of semi-autonomous status. These parts of the federation have their own cultures, languages, ethnicities, histories, you name it. It does not make sense to call the political structure that binds them together anything other than imperial.

In this context, 1989 did not go all the way. The former Russian Soviet Federalist Socialist Republic had lost all its neighbours/hostages at that time, but itself remained intact. A few years later, Chechen separatists attempted to keep the spirit of 1989 alive and continue the de-imperialisation north of the Caucasus as well. In this event, Putin rose to Russian fame precisely by mercilessly making sure they were never successful. The new Russian Empire showed its cracks, and since then the regime has been highly paranoid about similar developments—and with good reason. Faced with a prospect of decline and disintegration, one might figure that the best defence is a good offence. One might try to conquer new lands in the hopes of everyone forgetting that the old lands are being gradually lost too.

Putin is not too old yet, but he is getting there. Perhaps part of the reason for starting this war is his personal desire to make a mark on history before he goes; to feel like he has been part of something grandiose and glorious too, like his predecessors from times past. If history tells us anything, it is that wars are often not fought for reasonable causes but the personal vanities of rulers. I would not be surprised if something like that was a partial reason for the undertaking of the present war, too.

Finally, I don’t know Putin. I don’t know his motivations or intellect, his dreams or his aims. It seems to me, however, that whatever has made him make the decisions that he has, this venture will not end well for him. Gorbachev is a hero for letting the USSR go without deploying the tanks. Putin will be remembered as the villain who could not let the Russian Federation go, causing untold despair, suffering, and destruction in the process. This will end badly for Ukraine; it will also end badly for Russia, and the future misery of his own country will be Putin’s fault. The question now is whether it will end badly for a lot more countries and a lot more people, and how to avoid such a scenario. As to that, unfortunately, I have no answers to give you.