Samuel McIlhagga writes:

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has become an exemplary instance of the use of historical ideas to justify invasion. Whereas U.S. President George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq was couched in abstract rhetoric about “the power and appeal of human liberty,” Putin has resorted to esoteric historical arguments to explain his choice to invade.

Putin, in his information and propaganda war, has repeatedly used certain imperial tropes that make historical claims about how Russia should be understood. Tropes, and increasingly memes, such as “the triune Russian people” — an idea that perceives the East Slavic people as part of Russia — and similarly the “all-Russian nation” and the “Russkiy Mir” (Russian World) have been used throughout his tenure as president and prime minister since 2000. In essence, all these concepts are employed to deny Belarusians and Ukrainians a sense of themselves that is separate from the Russian imperial project. These tropes also suggest that Putin’s understanding of his foreign policy, and increasingly Russia’s destiny, is imperial rather than nationalistic.

At the beginning of his rule, Putin made veiled references to the triune people. But the 2014 Euromaidan protests that ousted pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and moved the country closer to the EU changed this. From 2014 onward, Putin’s references became more incessant and explicit.

In 2000, at the start of his rule, Russia celebrated the 55th anniversary of Russia’s defeat of the Nazis, proudly referenced as the “Great Patriotic War” (instead of as World War II, as most countries call it). To celebrate, Putin gathered then-Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma and the longtime Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko to open the “Bell of Unity of Three Fraternal Peoples” in Prokhorovka in Russia. During the ceremony, Putin spoke in customary diplomatic terms about Slavic friendship, and the event unfolded without much fanfare.

But in 2009, Putin’s rhetoric became markedly more insistent on the imperial Russian worldview. To drive his point home, he spoke at the grave of the White Russian officer Anton Denikin, an icon of antisemitic and anti-leftist Russian politics who served in 1918 as deputy “supreme ruler” of the anti-Bolshevik Provisional All-Russian Government made up of liberals, conservatives and ultranationalists. Putin announced to a selection of gathered members of the press that “[Denikin] has a discussion [in his diaries] about Big Russia and Little Russia [Malorossiya] — Ukraine … he says that no one should be allowed to interfere in relations between us; they have always been the business of Russia itself.” [Continue reading…]