This week, we’re sharing a 2022 essay by the Russia experts Fiona Hill and Angela Stent on how a distortion of history led to war in the present. Vladimir Putin’s “obsession with Russia’s imperial past,” they wrote, has shaped his modern-day effort to “build his version of a Russian empire”—starting with Ukraine.
In Putin’s misreading of history, “Ukraine has never been sovereign, except for a few historical interludes when it tried—and failed—to become an independent state.” He “believes that it is Russia’s divine right to rule Ukraine, to wipe out the country’s national identity, and to integrate its people into a Greater Russia,” Hill and Stent wrote. Putin has targeted Kyiv “to ‘correct’ what he says is a historical injustice: the separation of Ukraine from Russia during the 1922 formation of the Soviet Union.”
Putin’s ultimate goal is a “world where Russia presides over a new Slavic union.” He likens himself to the great Russian tsars “who conquered what are today Ukrainian territories,” but he takes the wrong lessons from his heroes. Peter the Great, for example, transformed Russia because he “opened a window to the West” by “inviting Europeans to come to Russia and help develop its economy”—the opposite of what Putin has done. “Peter took Russia into the future,” Hill and Stent concluded. “Putin is pushing it back to the past.”
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