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H-Nationalism

PUTIN’S WAR OF VENGEANCE AGAINST UKRAINE
Discussion published by Justin Collier on Saturday, March 19, 2022

PUTIN’S WAR OF VENGEANCE AGAINST UKRAINE
George O. Liber

Long opposed to Ukraine’s domestic political agenda and its aspirations to
join the European Union and NATO, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin launched an
unprovoked and unjustified invasion of Ukraine on Thursday morning, February 24.
He imagined that his “limited military operation . . . to demilitarize and to de-nazify”
Ukraine would topple Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government in days
and that Ukrainians would sue for peace. Living in his self-created “information
bubble,” Putin miscalculated. The Ukrainian people did not greet Russian soldiers
with bread and salt, but with bullets.

As his troops continue to run into stiff resistance in Ukraine from an
undermanned and under-weaponized military as well as from an enraged and
determined citizenry, Putin delivered a grim message to Ukrainians on Saturday,
March 5, warning their political leadership that they “risk the future of their
statehood.” On March 7, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitri Peskov asserted that Moscow
could “end the war immediately” if Ukraine agreed to sign a neutrality agreement
that would bar it from entering NATO, recognized Crimea as Russian, acknowledged
its provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk as independent states, and ceased all military
action.

These demands promise a long protracted conflict aimed at terrorizing the
civilian population into submission and at creating an unprecedented humanitarian
crisis throughout Europe.

As Putin’s units enter Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city, and surround
Kyiv, his immediate goal is to “decapitate” Ukrainian President Volodymyr
Zelensky’s government and install a pro-Russian puppet regime. With over 200,000
battle-ready Russian troops and advanced weapons systems deployed for this
purpose, Putin’s army continues to swarm across Ukraine and may crush all large-
scale military and civilian resistance. But the Russian president will be unable to
establish an effective permanent occupation regime throughout the country, a
territory encompassing 233,000 square miles, slightly smaller than Texas.

Citation: Justin Collier. PUTIN’S WAR OF VENGEANCE AGAINST UKRAINE . H-Nationalism. 03-19-2022.
https://networks.h-net.org/node/3911/discussions/9962186/putin%E2%80%99s-war-vengeance-against-ukraine
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

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At this point, very few prominent Ukrainians are willing to collaborate with
Russia’s leader. If he installs a post-Zelensky regime, it will not attract popular
support. The occupiers will confront a hostile population and introduce a brutal
occupation.

How did this happen? What comes next?

When Ukraine appeared on the world stage after the collapse of the USSR on
December 25, 1991, it became the largest state within Europe with a population
slightly larger than California’s. Born as a geo-politically pivotal and somewhat
polarized state, it remained highly dependent on its Russian neighbor, handicapped
by its Soviet legacy. But over the past thirty years, Ukraine has evolved and
established a more unified political community. In doing so, it has challenged not
only Putin’s efforts to return Ukraine to the Russian fold but also his model of
“managed democracy.”

By embracing the process of democratization, Ukraine has called into
question Putin’s highly authoritarian order and his claims over the post-Soviet
world. Since 1991 this sovereign state has had certifiably free and fair presidential,
parliamentary, and local elections, monitored by thousands of international election
observers, myself included. Its citizens have elected six different presidents
representing different political parties from different regions. Dozens of political
parties dot the landscape and actively compete for voters. The country possesses a
free media; all platforms express a divergent set of political views expressed in
Russian as well as in Ukrainian. There is freedom of religion with no state-sponsored
church. Outside of the Baltic states, the most vibrant civil society in the former
Soviet Union finds its home in Ukraine. It has become a political beacon for those
living under authoritarian post-Soviet regimes and a home for many liberal Russians
and Belarusians who have fled their oppressive homelands.

The overwhelming majority of Ukraine’s citizens have lived in an independent
Ukraine, not the USSR. Nearly 25 percent of them was born and raised entirely after
1991; this younger generation has no memory of the Soviet past. Even for those who
lived in the Soviet era, three decades of independence have framed the contours of
their current reality. For these people, to overturn this status quo is inconceivable.
As Machiavelli pointed out centuries ago, the longer people live in freedom, the
stronger they will resist a return to a subordinate status.

Over the past thirty years, Russia’s covert and overt interventions, the 2004

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Orange Revolution and the 2014 Euro-Maidan Revolution, and their aftermaths
altered Ukraine’s political environment and strengthened its uniqueness. Each
revolution sought to create a more democratic and more inclusive course for
Ukraine, brought new leaderships to power, and strengthened civil society’s
capacity to resist its own ruling elite’s efforts to establish to consolidate a post-
Soviet hybrid regime (neither fully democratic nor fully authoritarian) or impose an
authoritarian order. Each accelerated the development of a political and civic
identity in Ukraine increasingly dissimilar to those established in the other post-
Soviet states. Ukraine’s diplomatic and economic relationships with the United
States, Poland, and the EU helped strengthen its pro-Western and pro-democratic
orientation. These connections helped popularize the ideas of an open society, a
democratic order, and a free market, the critical components – according to most
Ukrainian voters -- necessary to establish a “normal” country.

But Putin refused to accept these political developments. In response to the
February 2014 Euro-Maidan Revolution, which removed Putin’s preferred pro-
Russian president of Ukraine, his “little green men” overran Ukraine’s Crimea,
occupied it, and annexed it three weeks later. Russia then actively supported pro-
Russian annexationist uprisings in Eastern Ukraine and played a critical role in the
downing of Malaysia Airlines MH-17 in July 2014, which killed 298 passengers. Over
the past eight years, he has financially and militarily fueled the conflict in the
Donbas, which has killed 14,000, wounded tens of thousands more, and generated
1.5 million internally displaced refugees.

Putin’s actions have radically altered Ukraine’s internal political dynamics.
For the past eight years, Ukraine has been in a low-intensity war with Russia. Until
the recent invasion, Russian proxies occupied seven percent of the internationally-
recognized territory of Ukraine, lands which most Ukrainians believe belongs to
them. In sharp contrast to the ambivalent attitudes towards Russians most
Ukrainians held in the 1990s, Putin’s actions lost their hearts and minds. The
2014-2020 war united the people of Ukraine as never before, persuading them to
view Russia as an existential threat to Ukraine’s independence. In January 2022,
pollsters found that 72 percent of all citizens of Ukraine considered Russia as a
hostile power.

In response to these long-standing hostilities and violation of Ukraine’s
territorial integrity, the citizens of Ukraine were now far more enthusiastic about
joining the European Union and NATO than they had been at the beginning of the

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twenty-first century. In November 2021, an opinion poll recorded that 62 percent of
all Ukrainians expressed a desire to join the European Union and 58 percent -- in
NATO.

Long before Putin initiated the formal plans for the February 2022 invasion,
these survey results – and others before them -- record a political reality that set off
the Russian president’s fire alarms. For him and his national security team, Russia’s
“need” to maintain its sphere of influence on its Western flank superseded Ukraine’s
sovereign right to choose its own domestic and foreign policy. In an essay published
last July, Putin recycled the tradition Russian imperial narrative concerning the
intimate millennium-long relationship among the Russians, Ukrainians, and
Belarusans. He claimed that Russians and Ukrainians were “one people,” that
independent Ukraine served as the West’s puppet state, and that the “true
sovereignty of Ukraine is possible only in partnership with Russia.” To justify these
imperialist claims, the Russian state-controlled media constantly delegitimized
Ukraine, claiming that this country was a “failed state” led by a neo-Nazi regime
which must be removed.

Since the outbreak of the current war, Ukrainian attitudes against Putin’s
Russia have only hardened. Fighting on home ground, Ukrainians used their smaller
army and inferior weapons to slow, if not stop, the Russians. They have defied
Putin’s interpretation of history. He never expected them to refuse to accept geo-
political realities and the new Russian order. Ukrainian resistance has infuriated
Putin, who after two decades of unchallenged rule has absorbed a siege mentality,
as expressed in his public pronouncements concerning the West’s disrespect of
Russia, the threat of NATO encirclement, and the West’s contamination of Russia’s
eternal “values.”

But the Russian president has really misread the depth of popular support for
an independent Ukraine. In response to the fierce Ukrainian resistance the Russian
Army has encountered, Putin has doubled-down and transformed his “special
military operation” into a total war implemented across the entire urban landscape
of Ukraine, where his cruise missiles, cluster bombs, and indiscriminate shelling
have hit civilian areas, killed uncounted thousands, and even threatened the nuclear
power sites at Chernobyl and near Zaprorizhzhia. Russia’s introduction of Multiple
Launch Rocket System (MLRS), thermobaric bombs, and other weapons of mass
destruction follow the grim playbook established in Grozny and Aleppo. The Russian
military will continue to target the civilian infrastructure, especially hospitals, water

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and power stations, and cut off food supplies to urban populations, even as Western
journalists and cameras record the carnage.

In addition to the countless thousands of civilians killed in this war, over 2
million Ukrainians have fled into neighboring Poland, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia,
and Moldova; the UN estimates another 5 million may follow. Millions have been
internally displaced. Whatever the final outcome of the war, Ukraine in its pre-
invasion configuration may not necessarily be restored and Ukrainian citizens who
experienced this war will pass on their trauma to future generations.

Putin’s obsession with Russia’s historical past and current place in the world
drives the destruction and brutality we see daily on our television screens and
smartphones. In his vision of the world, Ukraine needs to remain a part of Russia’s
sphere of influence, if not direct control. Much like independent Czechoslovakia and
Poland for Hitler in the 1920s and 1930s, Putin conceives an independent Ukraine
as a psychological and political affront, as an existential danger to Russia and to his
control of his country. Possessing the will and the means to remove this political
cancer, he declared war on Ukraine two weeks ago. The overwhelming majority of
Ukrainians now view Putin’s Russia as a direct threat to Ukraine’s existence as an
independent state and to all of its citizens. Their seething anger against Putin and
those Russians who blindly follow him have reached fever pitch, inspiring the
creation of a mass people’s army and local citizen militias to confront the Russian
military.

Seen in this light, there is no diplomatic compromise on the horizon. This war
has become a total war, with the complete capitulation of one side or the other. With
the Russian siege of Ukrainian cities and the prospect of brutal urban warfare, this
conflict will only become bloodier. The worst is yet to come.

________________

George O. Liber is Professor of History at the University of Alabama at Birmingham
(Ph.D., Columbia University, 1986; MA, Harvard University, BA, Indiana University).
He is the author of: Soviet Nationality Policy, Urban Growth, and Identity Change in
the Ukrainian SSR, 1923-1934 (Cambridge, England and New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1992); Alexander Dovzhenko: A Life in Soviet Film (London: British
Film Institute, 2002); and Total Wars and the Making of Modern Ukraine, 1914-1954
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016). With Anna Mostovych, he compiled and
edited: Nonconformity and Dissent in the Ukrainian SSR, 1955-1975: An Annotated

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Bibliography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 1978). He
also served as a Short-Term Observer to the Organization for Security and
Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) for the 2010 and 2019 Presidential Elections in
Ukraine, the 2011 Presidential Elections in Kazakhstan, the 2016 Presidential
Elections in Moldova, and the 2012 parliamentary elections in Ukraine.

Citation: Justin Collier. PUTIN’S WAR OF VENGEANCE AGAINST UKRAINE . H-Nationalism. 03-19-2022.
https://networks.h-net.org/node/3911/discussions/9962186/putin%E2%80%99s-war-vengeance-against-ukraine
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

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