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In Europe in the 1990s, it looked as if the nation-state were fading away. After World War II, Franco-German and Anglo-German tensions had melted into the European Union and the NATO alliance, to the lasting benefit of western Europe. Something similar occurred in eastern Europe after the fall of communism, when the countries of the region traded national assertion for European integration. After millennia of war among empires and nations, Europe had opted for openness, peace, and prosperity.
No country appreciated the decline of the European nation-state more than the United States: European nationalisms had been giving Washington headaches for almost a century. In 1914, a fanatical Serbian nationalist assassinated Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, starting a world war that eventually drew in the United States. Two decades later, a crazed German nationalist helped push the United States into World War II. Presidents George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama all cheered the creation of a Europe where it seemed that national enmities had dimmed and national borders had softened.
But this view underestimated the salience of the nation-state and the endurance of nationalism. From the French Revolution in 1789 to Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution in 1989, nation-building movements were a driving force on the continent. After the fall of the Soviet Union, nationalist rage flared in the Balkans, and far-right political parties chipped away at European integration—in Hungary, Poland, and even in Germany, where the right-wing party Alternative for Germany was founded in 2013 with the aim of restoring German nationhood. The 2016 Brexit vote, too, dealt a blow to the European project.
And now, Europe’s first major war since 1945 has arisen between two nation-states that were carved from the Soviet Union. Russia and Ukraine have demonstrated in different ways that Europe never became a postnational paradise. The continent is once again being shaped by conflict among nations. As the historian Serhii Plokhy writes in The Russo-Ukrainian War, his masterful new book, war has “been the main instrument used to create the European system of nation-states.” The war raging in Ukraine is merely the latest chapter in a “long history of wars of national liberation, which can be traced back to the American Revolution” and runs through the hot and cold wars fought against the Russian and the Soviet empires.
Russia’s war against Ukraine will not diminish the pull of national belonging in Europe. A Ukrainian defeat would result in lasting national (and nationalist) grievances. A Ukrainian victory would not cement the country’s membership in the West on the basis of cosmopolitan liberalism or postnational pacifism. Ukraine’s self-creation within the West will be achieved through a war to preserve and defend the Ukrainian nation. As much as Europe has changed Ukraine since 1991, drawing it away from its Soviet past, Ukraine will shape Europe. The nature of its postwar nationhood will change the idea of Europe.
A war fought in the name of history can be comprehended only through the study of history. Plokhy, a distinguished and prolific historian of Russia, the Soviet Union, and Ukraine, is thus well positioned to explain the present moment. In The Russo-Ukrainian War, he expertly juxtaposes the histories of Russia and Ukraine, especially the paths they took during the Soviet era and afterward. Through their divergences, he traces Russian President Vladimir Putin’s motivations for waging his terrible war and Ukraine’s fierce resistance to Russia’s invasion.
Within the Soviet Union, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was subordinate to Moscow and subject to top-down Russification, although together with the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic and the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, it was one of the three privileged “East Slavic” republics. After World War II, the Ukrainian republic emerged as the Russian republic’s junior partner, leading in the 1970s to what Plokhy describes as “a Russo-Ukrainian condominium at the leadership level.” Had the Soviet Union not begun to fragment in the 1980s, a distinctive sense of Ukrainian nationhood might have subsided into Sovietism, Plokhy argues. But as he details in his book The Last Empire, it was the Ukrainians’ will to gain their independence that put the final nail in the Soviet coffin. In October 1991, the vast majority of Ukrainians voted to leave the Soviet Union. Two months later, the Soviet Union was no more.
The Soviet Union died suddenly, but the idea of the Russian Empire—or at least Moscow’s imperial reflexes—lived on. One reason for this was the 30 million ethnic Russians and Russian speakers who found themselves outside Russia in the 1990s. For the Kremlin, it was unclear where Russia ended. Perhaps it had no meaningful borders, some members of the elite theorized. Another incitement to empire was a widely held sense of Russia as a great power with regional entitlements, a sense rooted in centuries of historical experience.
Russia’s first post-Soviet leader, Boris Yeltsin, never fully embraced the imperial purview, but he never fully rejected it, either. Plokhy details how Yeltsin, starting with the first Chechen war (1994–96), enabled “a highly militarized Russian state.” Putin inherited this state in 2000 and further centralized it. He shared none of Yeltsin’s ambivalence about Russia’s imperial aims, concentrating on the projection of Russian power in Ukraine, Africa, Central Asia, the Middle East, and the South Caucasus.
Relations between Russia and Ukraine were relatively quiet until 2004, when Putin’s preferred Ukrainian presidential candidate, Viktor Yanukovych, won a dirty election. Ukrainians protested in what became known as the Orange Revolution, and the election result was annulled. The hero of this revolution, Viktor Yushchenko, who was backed by the West, became Ukraine’s president later that year, after winning a fairer election. The events of 2004 “put Ukraine and Russia and, subsequently, Russia and the West on a collision course that would eventually lead to war,” Plokhy writes. The Russian elite could only conceive of Ukraine through zero-sum logic: it was either “ours” or “theirs.” In the words of Gleb Pavlovsky, a Kremlin adviser, the Orange Revolution “was our 9/11.”
Putin’s reaction to the possible emergence of a democratic and Western-oriented Ukraine had three phases. First, he tried to co-opt the country, a project that began to show promise in 2010, when Yanukovych, the Moscow-backed candidate who had lost in 2004, became president. But Yanukovych got tripped up in 2014, when he abruptly rejected, at Putin’s urging, an association agreement with the EU, which would have strengthened economic ties between Ukraine and the bloc. When Ukrainian citizens protested his turn away from the EU, Yanukovych deployed the special police to brutalize and arrest the demonstrators. His actions inadvertently sparked the Maidan revolution, ensuring his political demise and leaving Ukraine more Western-oriented than ever before.
Unable to co-opt Kyiv, Putin waged a limited war against Ukraine in 2014 and 2015. In this second phase, he occupied and annexed Crimea, invaded eastern Ukraine, and preserved his options through an open-ended diplomatic process between 2014 and 2022. By not going all in, Putin could forestall a radical break with the West, and by not formally ending the war, he could keep the pressure on Ukraine. Moscow hoped that Ukraine might return to the Russian fold or that more amenable leadership might materialize in Kyiv. None of that came to pass.
The third phase in Putin’s efforts began on February 24, 2022, when roughly 190,000 Russian troops began crossing into Ukrainian territory. Over the course of this massive invasion, Russia’s military has underperformed on the battlefield and committed atrocious war crimes. At the core of Russia’s failure, however, has been “the Russian president’s distorted view of history and complete lack of understanding of Ukrainian society and its democratic foundations,” Plokhy writes.
Plokhy illuminates Ukraine’s long-standing efforts to break free from foreign occupiers and forge its own identity. Before 1991, the Ukrainian nation had struggled to find a modern form. Outside control had been a constant: by the Russian Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire until World War I; by Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and the Soviet Union in the interwar years; by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union during World War II; and by the Soviet Union between 1945 and 1991. An unfortunate legacy of control by outside forces was widespread corruption within the independent Ukrainian state. An upside, however, was what Plokhy terms Ukraine’s “strong regionalism,” which inhibited authoritarian tendencies in Kyiv.
The European landscape also presented Ukraine with significant challenges in the post-Soviet period. Europe was “expanding” in the 1990s, as NATO and the EU started to spread east. Speaking at a NATO meeting in 2005, Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko said that the Orange Revolution protesters “wanted to see Ukraine in Europe, not as a neighbor of Europe, because we are a country located in the center of Europe.” Yushchenko was right: Ukraine is in the center of Europe. (If this point is valid, however, then Belarus is also a country located in the center of Europe—a notion that Russia finds unacceptable.) Yet European institutions shifted east without ever offering the possibility of membership to Kyiv.
Meanwhile, Russia was not willing to grant Ukraine any real autonomy. “Russia’s recognition of the territorial integrity and sovereignty of the post-Soviet states would be conditional on alliance with Moscow,” Plokhy writes. In Putin’s eyes, the Orange Revolution had threatened this alliance—and he was prepared to use force to highlight the costs of defying Moscow. Europe and the United States would wish Ukraine well in confronting this threat. But on the ground, Ukraine was on its own.
Twenty-first-century Ukraine could not solve its fundamental security problem. It could not deter Russia from invading in 2014; it could not subsequently expel Russia from Ukrainian territory; and it could not change Russia’s perception that Ukraine belonged to its imperial dominion. After returning to the presidency in 2012, after four years as prime minister, Putin became increasingly aggressive on the international stage. At the same time, Ukraine was still struggling with rule of law and separation of powers, despite the demands from the Maidan revolution. Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, who governed from 2014 to 2019, “exemplified the failure of the system to free itself from oligarchic influence,” Plokhy notes.
Under Poroshenko, Ukraine did not join NATO or thwart corruption. Yet it was gaining economic strength and drawing closer to the EU. Post-Maidan Ukraine was suffused with civic spirit. According to Plokhy, the 2014 war produced a much more homogeneous country, since objections to Russian heavy-handedness were shared across Ukraine, becoming one element of a common national story. Ukraine was no longer in a geopolitical no man’s land: Washington had emerged as the main partner for the reform and modernization of Ukraine’s security sector. When Volodymr Zelensky was elected president, in 2019, some denigrated the elevation of a former comedian to high office as a decadent turn. It was in fact a generational change in leadership and a sign of the country’s democratic bona fides.
Zelensky’s emphasis on civic identity consolidated Ukraine’s turn toward Europe. Poroshenko had emphasized the military and religious faith as essential aspects of what it means to be Ukrainian. One of his 2019 campaign slogans was “Army! Language! Faith!” Zelensky, who is Jewish by background, promoted a Ukraine that was bound by a civic patriotism and relaxed about questions of linguistic, ethnic, and religious diversity. The television comedy that made him famous, Servant of the People, was a meditation on civic activism. Zelensky’s inclusive vision was important before the war of 2022. Once the war began, this civic patriotism bound Ukrainians organically to the state and the military, beginning a new chapter in Ukrainian history.
Plokhy devotes five superb chapters of The Russo-Ukrainian War to the ongoing war. They describe events that have been etched into global consciousness: the early morning attack on Ukrainian cities to mark the beginning of the invasion; the defense of Kyiv and Zelensky’s transformation into a wartime leader; the mass atrocities at Bucha and Irpin; and the stunning Ukrainian counteroffensive in September 2022. Most important, the war narrated in these chapters is explained by the history that precedes it. In the war, Plokhy sees the culmination of Ukrainian nationhood. But he also anticipates that “Ukraine’s successful resistance to Russian aggression is destined to promote Russia’s own nation-building project.” Ukraine is building a national identity that is harmonious with the West, a process that is likely to stoke an equal and opposite reaction in Russia, which may have broken permanently with the West.
The final two chapters of Plokhy’s book place the war in a global frame, documenting the high degree of transatlantic unity behind Ukraine, the levying of sanctions against Russia, the movement of Ukraine toward membership in the EU, and Finland’s and Sweden’s applications for membership in NATO. Plokhy gently critiques the West’s tepid approach to Ukraine before 2022, arguing persuasively that it did too little to help build Ukraine’s military capabilities. He also suggests that China will emerge as “a key beneficiary” of the conflict, poised to leverage the enmity between Russia and the West to its advantage.
Unlike the rest of the book, these chapters feel perfunctory. They also downplay the contrast between the unity the war has forged in the West and the distinct lack of solidarity with Ukraine—and even support for Russia—it has inspired elsewhere in the world. Plokhy is too quick to conclude that the “war buried Russia’s hopes of becoming a new global center in the multipolar world envisioned by Russian politicians and diplomats since the 1990s.” Russia has diminished its stature by mismanaging the war, but before the war, it correctly assessed the reality of a multipolar world, in which it has proven surprisingly easy for Russia to evade Western sanctions, pin blame for the war on the West, gain access to arms and ammunition, and find buyers of Russian energy perfectly willing to help fund Moscow’s war machine.
Historians will strain to balance the war’s intensely national colorations with its many global implications. This war did not begin as a proxy war between Russia and the United States. Putin may have gone to war because of his vision of Russia’s place in the world. But his more visceral motivations follow from Russian history and from his warped view of Ukrainian history. Ukrainians may be defending their country for the sake of abstractions such as democracy or Europe. But their more visceral motivations follow from Ukrainian history and, in a sense, from Russian history. The Russo-Ukrainian War is the best possible guide to this regional history. Other books will flesh out the war as an event in global history.
The Russo-Ukrainian War will not be an easy book for U.S. policymakers to digest, although it offers them some affirmation. Nobody will have a problem with Plokhy’s reading of the war as one of national liberation for Ukraine. This reading strikes some of the deepest chords in American foreign policy. From the Greek Revolution of 1821 to the struggles for freedom in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland, the United States has thrilled to European efforts at national liberation, which Washington tends to equate with Europe’s democratization (and not with the outbreak of war). The central train station in Prague is named after President Woodrow Wilson to honor the American aspiration for a Europe of liberated and democratic countries.
The problem for Washington is that, as Plokhy points out, the war will spur nation building in a Russia that will always remain just at the edge of Europe. It remains unclear what kind of Russia the war will create. It might be a country bent on expanding in perpetuity, driven by an appetite for conquest or by a fear of collapse. A powerful Ukraine grounded in Western security structures would be impossible for Putin to accept; it might be impossible for any Russian leader to accept. And although Russia’s defeat could yield a country freed from its imperial-authoritarian impulse and eager to make peace with Europe, the more likely outcome is that it would produce a Russia animated by grievance and resentment of the West.
The United States will do what it can to give Ukraine victory. It has a good chance of succeeding in this noble endeavor. If it does succeed, however, it will still have lost the postnational Europe that had previously been the desired end state of Washington’s strategy—one that undergirded the concept of a liberal international order. This situation will force the United States and its allies back toward something akin to containing Moscow, as they did during the Cold War—an approach that will play out mostly in eastern Europe, where the determination and protection of borders have led to countless wars, of which the Russian-Ukrainian war is only the most recent. Plokhy’s extraordinary book reminds readers of this history. Although containing Russia will be necessary in the twenty-first century, it will not be easy.
The Russo-Ukrainian War offers insights for Ukrainian policymakers as well. As they shepherd their country into European institutions, which is clearly their goal, they will have to balance two competing realities. The war will situate a Ukrainian nation in the West, with borders that will be set on the battlefield. This nation will derive strength from the wartime heroism of Ukrainians. The echoes of the American Revolution will make Ukraine’s story intuitively comprehensible to Americans, deepening Ukraine’s most important strategic partnership. It will take diplomatic finesse, however, to reconcile Ukraine’s national strength with the postnational spirit of the EU. Created to tame European nationalism, the EU now finds itself on the fault line of an epic conflict between two nation-states, as does the United States. As they make their way into Europe, Ukrainians should avoid the temptations of an ethnonationalism forged in war and should instead hold fast to the civic patriotism Zelensky has championed.
How the War in Ukraine Is Transforming Europe
The Thousand-Year Struggle Over Ukraine
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