Putin’s War on Ukraine Is About Ethnicity and Empire

BRUSSELS — President Biden took workplace with the concept this century’s wrestle can be between the world’s democracies and autocracies.

However in waging struggle on Ukraine, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has been pushed by a unique idea, ethno-nationalism. It’s an concept of nationhood and identification primarily based on language, tradition and blood — a collectivist ideology with deep roots in Russian historical past and thought.

Mr. Putin has repeatedly asserted that Ukraine shouldn’t be an actual state and that the Ukrainians usually are not an actual individuals, however truly Russian, a part of a Slavic heartland that additionally consists of Belarus.

“Putin needs to consolidate the civilizational border of Russia, as he calls it, and he’s doing that by invading a sovereign European nation,” mentioned Ivan Vejvoda, a senior fellow on the Institute of Human Sciences in Vienna.

On this sense, argues Ivan Krastev, the struggle is one among recolonization, capturing lands dominated by the Russian empire and the Soviet Union. “Even when Ukraine had been autocratic, it could not be tolerated by Putin,” he mentioned. “He’s reconsolidating imperial nationalism.’’

If Mr. Putin started as a “Soviet man, a crimson colonel,” mentioned Mr. Krastev, a Bulgarian who’s chairman of the Middle for Liberal Methods in Sofia, “He now assaults the Soviet Union as a repressor of the Russian individuals. For him, that is an identification struggle.”

For Mr. Putin’s opponents in Ukraine and the West, nations are constructed on civic accountability, the rule of legislation and the rights of people and minorities, together with free expression and a free vote.

“What Russia is doing is not only making struggle towards an harmless nation right here,” mentioned Timothy Snyder, a professor at Yale who has written extensively about Russia and Ukraine, however attacking assumptions a couple of peaceable Europe that respects borders, nationwide sovereignty and multilateral establishments.

“The Russian management is intentionally undoing the linguistic and the ethical construction that we drew from the Second World Battle,” he mentioned.

Underlying the struggle is a conflict of political techniques, “a struggle towards liberal democracy” and Ukraine’s proper to self-determination, mentioned Nathalie Tocci, the director of Italy’s Worldwide Affairs Institute. However that’s simply half of a bigger battle, she mentioned, as Mr. Putin tries to vary the which means of what it’s to be sovereign.

“He’s going again to a harmful, irredentist and ethnic nationalist view of sovereignty and self-determination,” Ms. Tocci mentioned.

Mr. Vejvoda, who’s a Serb, notes that the idea of ethno-nationalism is one which the previous Serbian chief Slobodan Milosevic manipulated as nicely, asserting that the outdated Yugoslavia repressed Serbian identification and ambitions. Whereas Mr. Milosevic used such arguments in a cynical vogue, Mr. Putin appears to have imbibed them wholeheartedly.

The concept of Russia as a separate civilization from the West with which it competes goes again centuries, to the roots of Orthodox Christianity and the notion of Moscow as a “third Rome,” following Rome itself and Constantinople. Mr. Snyder has examined the sources of what he has known as a type of Russian Christian fascism, together with Ivan Ilyin, a author born in 1883, who noticed salvation in a totalitarian state led by a righteous particular person.

Ilyin’s concepts have been revived and celebrated by Mr. Putin and his shut circle of safety males and allies like Yuri Kovalchuk, who was described not too long ago by Mikhail Zygar, the previous editor of the unbiased information channel TV Rain, as “an ideologue, subscribing to a worldview that mixes Orthodox Christian mysticism, anti-American conspiracy theories and hedonism.”

Mr. Putin has been equally taken by the concepts of Lev Gumilyov, a Soviet-era historian and ethnologist who promoted “Eurasianism” as an antidote to European affect, and Aleksandr Dugin, who has superior that notion to advertise an ultranationalist view of Russia’s future as a conservative empire in perpetual battle with the liberal Western world. Their histories have been described notably by Charles Clover in his e book, “Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia’s New Nationalism.”

Mr. Dugin, who has lengthy pressed for the reabsorption of Ukraine, is usually known as “Putin’s thinker.” In 2014, Mr. Dugin mentioned: “Solely after restoring the Higher Russia that’s the Eurasian Union, we are able to change into a reputable international participant.” The Ukrainian revolt towards Russian affect that yr he known as “a coup d’état by america,” a Western try and cease “the advance of Russian integration.”

But when Mr. Putin as soon as appeared to make use of such views cynically to fill the ideological gap left by the collapse of communism, he now appears to have absorbed them — and acted upon them.

There’s ready soil for such concepts in Russia, which has been torn for hundreds of years between “Westernizers” and people who see the West as a most cancers — alien, decadent, insidious and threatening.

Western Europeans coped in a different way with their very own failed empires, combining their weakened nation-states into the European Union, partly to constrain aggressive nationalism. “The European Union was the transformation of empires that failed, determined to search out one thing new,” mentioned Pierre Vimont, a former French ambassador to america now at Carnegie Europe — one thing safer and fewer liable to struggle.

Mr. Putin’s idea of a nation is an ethnic and autocratic one, in distinction to the Western concept of a multicultural state constructed on civic accountability, the rule of legislation and particular person rights. To be an American, many have urged, it’s essential merely to swear allegiance to the flag, obey the legislation and pay your taxes.

Efforts to extra narrowly outline what it’s to be a “true American” have fed right into a far-right populism, and in former President Trump’s reward of Mr. Putin there are components of identification with a robust chief defending “conventional” — and restrictive — definitions of nationwide belonging.

However as with the far proper in European international locations like Germany, France and Italy, affiliation with Mr. Putin now, throughout his struggle of aggression in Ukraine, is an embarrassing reminder of the place such views can lead.

China, the opposite nice autocracy within the Biden formulation, is constructed on comparable concepts of ethnic nationalism — that each one Chinese language are a part of the identical nation, that minorities just like the Uyghurs are inferior or harmful, and that Taiwan’s separation is illusory, a criminal offense of historical past that should be repaired.

Even India, a terrific democracy, has been pushed into ethnic nationalism by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, together with his Hindu ascendancy. In Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has recreated historic tales of the Ottoman Empire whereas performing in solidarity with Turkic-speaking peoples in Azerbaijan, Nagorno-Karabakh and in Central Asia.

In Europe, too, Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister, has promoted Hungarian identification and nationalism regardless of censure from Brussels. He has handed out Hungarian passports to ethnic Hungarians in Romania and different international locations, who’re allowed to vote in Hungary, giving him, to this point, an electoral edge. However Mr. Orban faces parliamentary elections subsequent month, and his lengthy, shut relations with Mr. Putin have damage him politically, at the same time as he has moved shortly to assist European Union sanctions on Russia and welcome Ukrainian refugees.

Mr. Putin’s ethno-nationalist struggle has not gone significantly nicely, apparently to his shock, unfolding as a bloody slog quite than a swift triumph. Casting it as a civilizational struggle creates every kind of difficulties for Russian invaders — in spite of everything, if Russians and Ukrainians are one individuals, as Mr. Putin insists, they’re firing on their brothers and sisters.

“It’s not simple for these children to kill Ukrainians, who share the language and seem like them,” Mr. Krastev mentioned. “It was simpler with the Chechens,’’ the non-Slavic individuals of the Caucasus whom Russia has been preventing since Catherine the Nice.

Mr. Putin’s nice disappointment, mentioned Mr. Krastev, was to find that Russian audio system in Ukraine fought his forces. Even his favourite Ukrainian oligarchs, like Rinat Akhmetov and Dmytro Firtash, “have all of a sudden found Ukrainian-ness.”

Mr. Putin has additionally labored to construct a extra militaristic society, primarily based on Russia’s delight in its defeat of Nazi Germany in what known as “The Nice Patriotic Battle.” However now Ukraine, which additionally fought and suffered below the Nazis, is utilizing the identical tropes towards the invading Russians. For Ukraine, Mr. Krastev mentioned, “that is their Nice Patriotic Battle.”

Mr. Putin has executed extra to construct Ukrainian nationhood than anybody within the West may have executed, Mr. Krastev mentioned. “Putin needed to be the daddy of a brand new Russian nation, however he’s the daddy of a brand new Ukrainian nation as an alternative.”