Like Stalin, Putin thinks nations can be defined objectively, and he has declared there is no Ukrainian nation separate from the Russian one. History matters for national identity, but sometimes serves as a tool for aggressive nationalism. 

Opinion: Contemporary Ukraine was born in 1991. During that year there were negotiations over a union treaty to replace the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics with a new Union of Sovereign States.

In August, hardliners attempted a coup to preserve the existing state. After they were defeated, the Ukrainian parliament declared independence and this act was overwhelmingly supported across Ukraine in a referendum on December 1, 1991.

Soon the Soviet Union no longer existed, and Ukraine was recognised by the Russian Federation as an independent state within its existing borders.

What had changed matters was the coup. The people of Ukraine did not want to remain in a state that could return to authoritarian, imperial rule. This is exactly what Ukrainians are resisting now.

Ukraine may be a relatively young state, but it has still had plenty of time to develop national narratives, symbols and experiences. As President Zelensky told the Russian people, these include ones that mean nothing to Russians.

This is not to say there aren’t shared narratives and historical resonances as well as close cultural connections between Russians and Ukrainians. Nor is to say there wasn’t a Ukrainian national identity before 1991. But a distinct Ukrainian identity has consolidated over the past 30 years of independence; and since the Maidan revolution of 2014, a civic identity based on the idea of a European-oriented, democratic Ukraine has taken hold even among Russian speakers in Ukraine.

In building this identity, there have been some repressions of the Russian language, but nothing to justify Putin’s wild claims of genocide (and, of course, the current aggression against Ukraine will only strengthen that identity).

In one of the earliest academic writings on nations, Ernest Renan described nationhood as a subjective feeling, a ‘daily plebiscite’, and that plebiscite clearly remains for a separate Ukraine.

However, like Stalin, Putin thinks nations can be defined objectively, and he has declared there is no Ukrainian nation separate from the Russian one.

Putin’s argument is that Ukraine is an ‘artificial’ state, created by the Bolsheviks. Now, it is true that Ukraine has not existed as an independent state in its 1991 borders before in history. But all states are ‘artificial’, their borders the results of accidents of history. Feelings of national identity do not map on to geography in a simple way (another point that Renan made a long time ago).

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For example, the borders of some post-colonial states are straight lines, the legacy of the colonial carve-up – look at a map of northern Africa or the western border of Papua New Guinea. But it still depicts independent states with a developing sense of nationhood. New Zealand, too, is in some ways an accident of history, yet a distinct identity has grown over time.

Regardless of the question of identity, Russia’s war on Ukraine is a violation of fundamental principles of the United Nations, in particular, as the preamble of the UNGA resolution condemning Russia’s aggression began, “the obligation of all States under Article 2 of the [UN] Charter to refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State, or in any other manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations, and to settle their international disputes by peaceful means”.

With decolonisation, these principles were entrenched in UN General Assembly resolutions also referred to in the preamble, in order to prevent a proliferation of conflicts over the borders of the newly independent states.

Putin does seem to believe the ‘historical’ analysis he wrote last July and has reproduced in his recent diatribes: that Ukrainians are not a separate nation but are part of the wider Russian nation or state-civilisation. He therefore thinks he is recreating the ‘real’ Russia made up of the Russian Federation, Belarus and Ukraine, and maybe other Russian-speaking areas of the former Soviet Union/Russian Empire: Trans-Dniester, northern Kazakhstan, etc – in effect, an East Slav state.

Here we see echoes of the conflicts after the break-up of a South Slav state, Yugoslavia, in the 1990s. Back then, the Russian social scientist Nadia Arbatova called the Yugoslav conflicts a ‘horror mirror’ in which “Russia saw its own probable future and shivered with horror”.

She argued the effect was generally positive, encouraging policymakers to avoid the “bloodshed, destruction and … atmosphere of hatred and mistrust” they saw in the Balkans. Now the horror mirror is reversed, although there are fears the Bosnian Serbs may seize the moment to destabilise Bosnia again.

As in the Yugoslav wars, the aggressor refers to lessons of World War II. Serb nationalists claimed there would be a new genocide against the Serbian people, and pointed to revived Croatian national symbols entwined with those of the fascist Ustaše regime. Putin similarly claims (without evidence) that neo-Nazis are in power in Kiev, and he also points to some attempts at rehabilitation of former nationalist leaders in Ukraine.

What does this tell us about the role of history in contemporary nationalisms? History matters for identity, but sometimes it serves as a tool for aggressive nationalism.

The mythologising of the Great Patriotic War in Putin’s Russia has laid the basis for a glorification of war. Children can even re-enact the storming of the Reichstag in 1945. And with its outlawing of opposition, illiberalism, glorification of war, Z symbols, and its strong-man leader, Russia is the fascist state now.