Finding insights in history for war in Ukraine

When Russia invaded Ukraine three years ago, President Vladimir Putin frequently invoked history, falsely claiming his goal was to “denazify” Ukraine and harkening to the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany in World War II to rally the nation behind him.

History and its misuse have been central components of the war in Ukraine since its inception, Ukraine and Russia scholars observed during an online discussion Monday. But, they argued, looking at the actual record of the past can offer valuable insights into the current conflict and where it might be headed.

Serhii Plokhii, Mykhailo S. Hrushevs’kyi Professor of Ukrainian History, noted the war began on Feb. 24, 2022, not long after the Kremlin published an essay in which Putin falsely claimed Ukraine had occupied Russian territory and that Ukrainians had no culture or history independent of Russia.

Though Putin appears to be gaining the upper hand at the moment, the conflict could ultimately backfire on Russia in the long run.

War often has a “profound” effect on a country’s sense of national identity and on its state- and nation-building process, said Christopher Miller, ’09, a professor of international relations at the Fletcher School at Tufts University.

The most significant and lasting impact of the Russia-Ukraine war will be felt in Ukraine and what it has done to “further catalyze” and consolidate a nation-building process that Ukraine began before 2022.

“Ukrainians are more convinced than ever of the need to have two fully separate polities.”

Christopher Miller, Tufts University

“That speaks to the dilemmas that I think Russia finds itself in,” said Miller. “Having started a war on the thesis that Russia and Ukraine were, if not the same country, at least part of the same history, as Putin set it out in his [essay] in the summer of 2021, ending up in a situation in which Ukrainians are more convinced than ever of the need to have two fully separate polities.”

Miller said a war-weakened economy is unlikely to bring Russia to heel soon. The Russian government was well prepared for the conflict, making sure it had little debt and lots of savings and military stockpiles to draw from. Ordinary Russians haven’t experienced a decline in their standard of living — and some even feel better-off than before the war, because the Russian government has maintained aggressive social spending, and strong hiring by defense factories has boosted wages.

Through “creative accounting” Russia has been able to “hide a lot of the cost of the war” by borrowing heavily from Russian banks and government sources, which has insulated its economy from the war’s full impact — for now. But Russia’s financial troubles still loom on the horizon as “the likelihood that those loans get repaid is low,” he added.

A controversial proposal between Ukraine and the U.S. to divide Ukraine’s mineral reserves embodies a growing trend in recent years among the major world economies that have gone from seeing trade as “a positive-sum dynamic” to seeing trade as having “very clear zero-sum dynamics” that have forced “a new politicization of the international economy in ways we have not seen for some time,” said Miller.

For some, the negotiations to end the Russia-Ukraine war, which President Trump seeks to broker, have drawn comparisons to the Yalta Conference, the historic “Great Powers” meeting of 1945 held in then-Soviet Crimea, noted Plokhii, who is also director of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University.

It was there that President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet leader Josef Stalin unilaterally mapped out the post-World War II global order, partitioning Germany and handing the Soviets a “sphere of influence” in Eastern Europe.

Unlike the current peace talks, the West at Yalta focused on ensuring some security for Poland and other territories under Soviet control, Plokhii said.

“What we are seeing today is that the interests of Ukraine … have been sacrificed” by decisions being made by outside forces, he said. “The lessons of Yalta still stand today: No lasting peace without those who are involved and affected the most.”