The Russian Delusion About Ukraine
Behind Putin’s war—and any discussions about peace—is a two-century-old fiction about the two countries’ unity.
Intent to Destroy
Russia’s Two-Hundred-Year Quest to Dominate Ukraine
by Eugene Finkel
Basic, 336 pp., $30
AFTER YEARS OF WAR, and after months of trying to negotiate some kind of settlement, a Ukrainian official finally had the sitdown meeting with a high-ranking American counterpart he’d long sought. With Russian forces still ransacking Ukraine, the Ukrainian official laid out his case, listing out all the reasons Kyiv needed American support. Ukraine, the official declared, deserved to be free. And it needed American aid and American backing to make it so.
The American official listened to the Ukrainian, and came back with a simple response: No. America would do nothing for Ukraine, or for Ukraine’s efforts to beat back marauding Russian forces. Not now, and not in the future. As the Ukrainian official later remembered, any “attempts to explain why Ukrainians desired recognition and support as an independent country were rebuffed,” met as they were with a mixture of “ignorance” and a “Russo-centric perspective.” As the American official said, Russia was an American “ally”—and as such, Ukraine must submit to Russian authority. Kyiv must give in to a “Ukrainian federation with Russia,” which, for America, was “the best—and, for [Washington], easiest—solution.” There was no alternative. There was nothing Ukraine could do to convince Washington otherwise.
This, of course, could pass for a sketch of how the United States has treated Kyiv under the second Trump administration: viewing Ukraine a liminal nation, hardly deserving of independence, destined for a return to Russian embrace. Drenched in pro-Kremlin propaganda, the Trump administration has largely dismissed Ukraine’s desires for aid, trying to force Kyiv back under Russian dominion—all while Washington flirts with an outright alliance with Moscow.
Yet the meeting quoted above between the Ukrainian and American officials didn’t take place last week, or even last month. It took place, instead, just over a century ago, when Ukrainian diplomat Arnold Margolin approached U.S. Secretary of State Robert Lansing at the Paris Peace Conference following World War I, part of a broader effort to obtain much-needed American aid to stave off both Red and White forces running roughshod over Ukraine in the midst of the Russian Civil War. With the tsar’s empire imploding, Ukraine had finally tasted independence, declaring a free, sovereign Ukraine for the first time in history. Given that President Woodrow Wilson had already included calls for recognizing sovereignty as part of his “Fourteen Points” proclamations, Ukrainian representatives naturally thought they could count on American backing for their efforts at freedom.
They, like so many other stillborn nations elsewhere, thought wrong. Wilson evinced no interest in backing Ukrainian efforts at independence. With a rank mixture of disdain, condescension, and ignorance of regional history, Wilson and his administration instead preferred to throw Ukraine back into the Russian maw. In so doing, they set an example that future American administrations would mimic—and created, perhaps more than anything else, a blueprint for Donald Trump’s policy on Ukraine more than a century later.
WITH THE POSSIBLE EXCEPTION OF DEFENSE, the one industry that has benefited from Russia’s war against Ukraine is the long-overdue production of Ukrainian history in English. One recent addition to this category, Johns Hopkins international affairs professor Eugene Finkel’s book Intent to Destroy, is a necessary corrective for Americans who view Ukraine as a plaything for Russian imperialists—and who have missed the fact that Ukrainians have been staving off Russian revanchism for multiple centuries. The book is a riveting read. Finkel not only unearths chapters of Ukraine’s history that have long been subsumed by Russian propaganda and Western apathy, but also places Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine in a far wider context, as part of a generations-long Russian project to destroy Ukrainian statehood and even Ukrainian identity.
Finkel’s book could not be timelier—and not just for the historical resonances between Wilson’s and Trump’s treatments of Ukraine. Had it been written decades ago, it could have steered Western policymakers down a far safer path than the one they chose, which consistently succored Russia and constantly sidelined Ukraine. At the center of Finkel’s story is a propaganda narrative—a lie, grounded in historical mistruths—that Russia and Ukraine are, in fact, a single nation, separated only by the quirks of history. This is a lie that Putin has swallowed fully; anyone who read Putin’s 2021 screed on the “historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians” recognizes why the Russian dictator believes an “independent Ukraine” is an oxymoron. But it’s also a lie that Russians have been telling themselves for centuries, long before Putin ever ascended to the Russian presidency. It is, likewise, a lie that gullible Westerners have also absorbed, taking at face value Russian claims to Ukraine, and watching with a mixture of confusion and concern when Ukrainians have fought back.
Instead of retracing every step of Ukrainian independence, Finkel details how the lie that there is some inherent, unified identity tethering Russians and Ukrainians—as well as Belarusians—first emerged. As he writes, the fiction is surprisingly recent, having been invented long after Kyiv’s founding in 482, or even Moscow’s founding in 1147. Finkel traces the lie to the middle of the nineteenth century, when an expansionist Russian empire needed a story to tell itself and others to explain its imperialist thrusts south, east, and west in its efforts to demolish lands and nations neighboring the tsar’s domains. As Finkel writes:
Up until the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, Russian intellectuals rarely considered Ukraine part of their history and identity; the region was increasingly referred to as Little Russia, but the “historical unity” narrative later promoted by Putin simply did not exist. The change came when, because of the Napoleonic Wars, young Russian aristocrats could no longer go on previously mandatory “grand tours” of classical Europe and instead switched to visiting the much closer but still unknown Ukraine. As a result, Russian elites finally “discovered” Ukraine . . . which the Russian Empire had gained only in the late eighteenth century after the partitions of Poland.
It was arguably Ukraine’s cultural distinctiveness from Russia—especially its Polish influence—that first led Russian officials and mouthpieces to claim Ukraine as some part of Russia proper. With multiple Polish uprisings spanning much of the era, tsarist officials realized that they needed some excuse to lay claim to the broader swaths of Slavic lands from the Nieman to the Dniester. Polish rebellions “prompted the [Russian] empire’s government and intellectuals, many of them based in Ukraine, to work intensely to uncover the region’s supposed original Russianness through cultural preservation, archaeological research, ethnography, and historical writing,” Finkel writes. Suddenly, rather than a cultural backwater, Ukraine became, as writer Aleksei Khomiakov claimed in 1839, “an organic and inseparable part of a single . . . Russian nation.” Nor were these simply pro-regime mouthpieces; as Finkel finds, “even as staunch a liberal as the writer and critic Vissarion Belinskii viewed Ukrainians as just a tribe, their history simply one episode of broader Russian history and the Ukrainian language only a regional dialect of Russian. Russian intellectuals of the mid-nineteenth century were a fractious lot, but on the question of the Russian origins of Ukraine’s Orthodox population, there was soon little disagreement.”
From there, the lie at the heart of Russia’s domination in Ukraine only expanded, seeping across the Russian body politic. By the 1860s, Russian officials were claiming that the Ukrainian language “never existed, does not exist and cannot exist.” With the tsar’s signoff, Ukrainian writing and education were banned. All of it “marked a watershed moment in relations between the empire and its Ukrainian subjects,” Finkel notes. “The [ban] was the first instance of Russian authorities attempting to destroy Ukraine: as an idea, an identity project, and a literary language.”
All of it set a pattern that would continue well into the twenty-first century. By the 1910s, Russian officials were claiming that “Ukrainian national ideology was a heresy originating from Polish intrigues.” By the breakout of the Russian Civil War—which was in reality, as scholars have noted, multiple civil wars, fracturing much of Eastern Europe and Northern Asia—it seemed that the only thing uniting divergent Russian nationalists, monarchists, and liberals was the notion that Ukraine rightfully belonged to Russia.
As the wars wound on, the White monarchists’ refusals to grant any rights to non-Russian nationalities, including Ukrainians, allowed Communist forces to sweep to power, pledging as they did to respect local identities, cultures, and languages. (As the Whites surely realized, it’s tough to gain Ukrainian support when your rallying cry is “Russia, one and indivisible.”) But even those Red allowances extended only so far. “The Bolsheviks supported national self-determination, but only if they were to rule the new entities that would emerge,” Finkel notes. When Ukrainians had the gall to fight back, nascent Soviet authorities quickly turned against them, and it wasn’t long until “the Ukrainian language itself was considered ‘counterrevolutionary.’”
Such was the situation when Wilson and the United States entered the picture. At the Paris Peace Conference, with Europe in ashes—and with Ukraine, having just declared sovereignty, grasping at formal independence for the first time—Ukrainian representatives stated their case. They laid out their historic claims, and the rotten lie at the heart of both tsarist and Soviet revanchism in Ukraine. They launched multiple lobbying offensives targeting American diplomats in Paris, all the way into Wilson’s inner circle.
But at every point American officials spurned them. Wilson remained convinced that the new Soviet regime was set to crumble, with the flailing Russian liberals—or perhaps even the fascistic monarchists—once more returning to power. Aside from places like Poland or Finland, Wilson had no interest in supporting separatists trying to break free from Kremlin control. He turned his back, and Washington shunted the Ukrainians to the side—and cost the United States the best chance it had to strangle the Soviet Union in the crib and prevent many of the massacres, genocides, and wars that would drench the twentieth century in more bloodshed than the world had ever seen prior.
FINKEL’S BOOK HAS FAR MORE on the topic of Russian domination in Ukraine: discussion of Stalin’s genocidal famines, of post-WWII Ukrainian resistance fighters trying to beat back Soviet domination, of underground Ukrainian scholars and patriots keeping the flames of Ukrainian identity alive as the Soviet behemoth trudged toward collapse. He also has far more on how, with the Soviet fracture, the idea of the “historic unity” of Russia and Ukraine found new life, from the supposed liberals in Boris Yeltsin’s administration to the fascists now in the Kremlin. Several of these subjects have been well-mined elsewhere. And readers of Finkel’s book will find little to surprise them in the gullible responses of Westerners, who seemed at times to barely understand that Ukraine was an independent nation, with a history and identity separate from its former imperial overlords.
But taken together, the conclusion, as Finkel deftly demonstrates, is inescapable: Russia has spent centuries peddling a lie, both to itself and to ignorant Westerners, that Ukraine belongs to Russia alone. It’s a lie at the core of Russia’s ongoing war of annihilation against Ukraine. It’s a lie that continues to infect the White House, and many Western policymakers beyond. It’s a lie that now threatens Europe with a much larger war. And it’s a lie that will threaten the rest of us for far longer, until it is finally dismantled, in Russia and far beyond.
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