Russia's attack on Ukraine took the world by surprise in February, even as President Putin's policies became increasingly aggressive. Based on Ukrainian and Russian history, the war for Putin is logical, says Harvard historian Plokhii, choosing a drastic comparison.
Ukrainian historian Serhii Plokhii feels that Russian President Vladimir Putin reminds him of a jealous husband "who murdered a family member, allegedly out of great love." Putin not only says that Russians and Ukrainians are one and the same people, "but to a certain extent he apparently believes in his own propaganda," Plokhii told Der Spiegel.
The irony is that Russia is supposedly defending Ukraine's Russian-speaking citizens, said Plokhii, who heads the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University in Boston and grew up in Zaporizhia in southeastern Ukraine. "But those who are suffering the most now are people in the mostly Russian-speaking regions of southern and eastern Ukraine."
After Putin took power, it quickly became clear that "he had imperialist ideas." Putin's ideas stemmed from the imperialist thinking and ideology of 19th and early 20th century Russia. According to the report, the Russian president shares the idea of a tripartite Greater Russian nation that "should consist of the Greater Russians (today's Russians), the Little Russians (the Ukrainians), and Belarusians (the Belarusians)." Putin believes that the Bolsheviks created Ukraine and Belarus as nation states and divided Greater Russia.
"Based on his conservative utopia of Greater Russia, Putin apparently expected his soldiers to be welcomed as liberators," said the historian, who published his book "The Gate of Europe - The History of Ukraine" in early September. Instead, Russian-speaking Ukrainians marched against the tanks with Ukrainian flags. "The 20th century is the age of the collapse of great empires and the rise of nation states - Ukraine is part of this history. Those who, like Putin, do not recognize this, misunderstand the situation dramatically."
After 2014, Ukraine increasingly developed into a political nation. Even if there is still little sociological data on this, Plokhii suspects that the war is further driving "cultural and linguistic Ukrainization".
