Lawrence Freedman writes:

Putin’s rhetoric is littered with historical references, recently, in his Peter the Great mode, to the start of the eighteenth century and Russia’s war with Sweden, to Catherine the Great’s acquisition of Novorussia, which includes much of the land that is now at the heart of the fighting, and then to the construction of the USSR and its eventual collapse, with the Great Patriotic War always the highlight. For Putin history describes a struggle for Russia to find the right shape, as its domain has expanded and contracted over the centuries, and, in his mind, must now expand again. There is a tension between his desire to include all Russian-speakers in the same state, and a paranoid instinct that no border can ever be truly secure if non-Russians are on the other side of it. There is a continuity in enemies too, for the current opponents of Russia are presented as the heirs of those who opposed it in the past, so that by definition they are all ‘Nazis’ or, to be more specific in the case of Ukraine, followers of Stepan Bandera, the Ukrainian nationalist leader, who worked with the Nazis during the war. The fact that the families of those leading Ukraine, including Zelensky, suffered under the Nazis and fought against them is irrelevant.

But it is important also to appreciate how much history informs the opposition to Russia. Ukraine has memories of maltreatment, including famine, under the Bolsheviks, and their borders being regularly chopped and changed by Europe’s great powers. Those countries bordering Russia remember not only Nazi atrocities but also the crimes of Stalinism. The Poles recall the Katyn massacre of 1940 when 22,000 Polish officers and intellectuals were murdered by Stalin’s men. The Baltic states recall how they were incorporated against their will into the Soviet Union. The Czechs and Slovaks remember the crushing of their hopes for liberalising reforms in 1968 when they were invaded. For the states of this region the narratives are as much of betrayal as of past glories – of Britain and France consigning them to their fate in 1938, or the Stalin-Hitler pact of 1939, or the 1945 Yalta conference when Churchill and Roosevelt accepted that the countries they had worked to liberate from the Nazis were still going to end up in the Soviet bloc.

From this perspective the debates elsewhere in the West about whether it was wise to allow NATO to enlarge after the end of the Cold War fail to understand why these countries insisted on the guarantees of formal alliance to enable them to feel secure. Their Russian neighbour still seemed disappointed that they had been allowed to slip out of its sphere of influence. Now this same sense of a precarious security, these same narratives of betrayals, including the fear of betrayals to come, are vital to any understanding of why these states are determined to see Russia defeated in Ukraine and their wariness of calls for continuing dialogue with Putin. [Continue reading…]