Vanessa Voisin

Quali sono gli obiettivi della guerra di Putin contro l’Ucraina?

Vanessa Voisin

After the Russian Federation decided, in late February 2022, to transform the fight on Ukrainian territory from an eastern ‘low-intensity conflict’ to a full-fledged invasion, several scholars pointed out the ideological nature of the war Putin’s Russia is waging in Ukraine (Graziosi, 2022; Masoero, 2022; Fediunin, 2022; Berelowitch, 2022). Others underscored how both the significance given to the confrontation with “the West”[1] and the particular understanding of what Ukraine meant to Russia (and vice versa) related to deep-seated assumptions or beliefs about the identity of Russian itself within Russia’s ruling circle. Hence the irrelevance of separating foreign and domestic factors in the search for the causes of the invasion (Edele, 2023; Ingerflom, 2023; Lewis, 2020; Plokhy, 2017; Plokhy, 2023; Torbakov, 2023). For Igor Torbakov, “At its core, however, the [Russkij Mir] concept represents an amalgam of strong imperial and ethnic nationalist connotations and is ultimately designed to redefine the established state borders. It asserts that the present-day Russian Federation’s “political body” and Russia’s “cultural body” do not coincide. Such a perspective, coupled with Putin’s embrace of the “unity paradigm” – his contention that the Russians and the Ukrainians are one people – seriously undermines Ukraine’s political subjectivity and sovereignty. It portrays Ukraine, formally an independent state, as an inalienable part of the imagined “historical Russia,” thus keeping it within the Russian Federation’s sphere of influence”. (Torbakov, 2023, p. 12)

Indeed, for Putin himself one of the fundamental factors that “forced” Russia to act was “the so-called pro-Western civilizational choice made by the oligarchic Ukrainian authorities” (Putin, speech of February 21, 2022).

One may then contemplate the stubborn avoidance, by the Kremlin, of the term “war” itself – to the point of prosecuting in courts those Russian citizens who dared calling its violence in Ukraine anything other than a “special military operation.”[2] This euphemism was not related to a particular political wariness or to a commitment to military accuracy. The president of the Russian Federation and his various proxies, such as Sergei Lavrov, Vladimir Medinskii, Petr Akopov or Timofei Sergeitsev to name just a few,[3] never hesitated to use a heavily-loaded terminology, such as “denazification,” “genocide,” “anti-Russia,” and “russophobia.” In the notorious speech made when he officially recognized the separatist republics of Luhansk and Donetsk, the Russian president claimed: “Almost not a single day goes by without shelling of populated areas in Donbass. The formed large military group constantly uses attack drones, heavy equipment, missiles, artillery and multiple launch rocket systems. The killing of civilians, the blockade, the abuse of people, including children, women, and the elderly, does not stop. As we say, there is no end in sight to this. And the so-called civilized world, of which our Western colleagues self-proclaimed to be the only representatives, prefers not to notice this, as if all this horror, genocide,[4] to which almost 4 million people are being subjected, and only because these people did not agree with the support of the West, do not exist. But they do exist and only because these people did not agree with the West-supported coup in Ukraine in 2014 and opposed the transition towards the Neanderthal and aggressive nationalism and neo-Nazism which have been elevated in Ukraine to the rank of national policy. And they are fighting for their basic rights – to live on their land, speak their language, to preserve their culture and traditions” (Putin, February 21, 2022).

A few days later, he elaborated, “The purpose of this operation is to protect people who, for eight years now, have been facing humiliation and genocide perpetrated by the Kyiv regime. To this end, we will seek to demilitarise and denazify Ukraine, as well as bring to trial those who perpetrated numerous bloody crimes against civilians, including against citizens of the Russian Federation” (Putin, February 24, 2022).

One month later the ‘political technologue’ and editorialist T. Sergeitsev published in RIA Novosti a dreary and itself potentially genocidal program of measures to apply to Ukraine, whose population – he asserted – had massively succumbed to Nazi Western sirens and had to atone for its offences toward Russia.[5] In fact, linguistic excesses, exaggerations and fact-distortions are so numerous and blatant that one is relieved not to have also seen reappear in the statements of Moscow leaders the term of “reunification of the lands” tragically torn apart by history, the reconstitution of an organic unity deeply desired by the majoritarian ‘nationalities’ of these lands, respectively Ukrainians and Belarusians, oppressed by Polish overlords (vossoedinenie Zapadnoi Belorussii e Zapadnoi Ukrainy). The phrase “reunification of the lands” was widely used in the fall 1939 to sugar-coat the illegal Soviet annexation of the Poland’s eastern kresy (borderlands). Itseems to have deep roots in a genuine belief that the territories corresponding to present-day Ukraine and Belarus belong historically to a pan-Russian state of eastern Slavs (vserossiiskoe gosudarstvo), as Serhii Plokhy showed for the 1939 Soviet context.[6] But if the phrase is absent from today’s official discourse, the metaphor itself is suggested, as Igor Torbakov and Alberto Masoero convincingly note (Plokhy, 2011; ‘unity paradigm’ in Torbakov, 2023): “the belief that Russia and Ukraine were ‘one and the same’, that Kyiv’s independent sovereignty could only take the transitory form of a ‘failed state’ artificially created by a ‘coup junta’, had a very concrete impact on Russian military strategy, with well-known disastrous consequences (Masoero, 2022: 710).”[7]

Most western governments chose quickly to side with the legitimate Ukrainian state and its elected democratic government, against Russia’s aggression, which the Kremlin tried to present as merely a humanitarian and security intervention. But many voices within the societies expressed doubts about the events, their underlying motivations, the possible legitimacy of Russia in questioning an international order dominated by Western agenda and rules (Catalano & Pianciola, 2023), if not straightforwardly paying credence to Putin’s opus on “the historical unity of Ukrainians and Russians” (Putin, July 12, 2021 speech). Prominent historians and specialists of international law and genocide studies in Italy underscored the permeability of a significant part of the Italian public to the Kremlin propaganda (Flores, 2022; Graziosi, 2022). In France too, observers, commentators and representatives in European institutions lamented the self delusion of both the public and many political leaders about the nature of Russian foreign policy (Glucksman, 2023; Servent, 2022).

This chapter aims at shedding some light on the patterns of this official Russian discourse, analyzing its preconceptions and articulations, some of its key omissions too. It deconstructs the image of a defensive “operation”, studying successively the motif of tyranny of US hegemony and its unipolar world order, and the allegation that Western (always) enemies had been working for centuries at thwarting Russian unity. Finally it turns to the claim that the Russian government was defending the authentic and correct values of humanity, embodied by the Russian social and moral order in contrast with a decadent West. In that narrative, Putin’s circle may have been expressing some genuine fear about Russia’s very existence as a culture, power, or even civilization.

1. Against “modern absolutism” (Putin) and the “Western geostrategic offensive” (Karaganov)

“They did not leave us any other option for defending Russia and our people, other than the one we are forced to use today” asserted Putin in his speech of February 24, 2022. In his understanding, the Kremlin was obliged to launch a “special military operation” because the West refused to listen to repeated warnings made by Russia since at least 2007 (at the Munich conference on security); the West instead continued to pursue its own interests even in violation of international law (Putin, 2020 [2007]). The West had neglected Russia’s efforts to de-escalate tensions in Europe: not only had NATO continued to expand eastwards, but its military equipment and exercises had been spotted in Ukraine, a non-NATO member. “In my address on February 21, 2022 I spoke about our biggest concerns and worries, and about the fundamental threats which irresponsible Western politicians created for Russia consistently, rudely and unceremoniously from year to year. I am referring to the eastward expansion of NATO, which is moving its military infrastructure ever closer to the Russian border” (February 24, 2022). The last two speeches pronounced by Vladimir Putin before the invasion, on February 21 and 24, 2022 ,interspersed free-wheeling ‘historical’ reflections, foreign policy claims, economic considerations, and generic ideas on foreign relations and their rules (written or unspoken). On the last topic, his position was particularly confusing. The president recognized the authority of international law, treaties, and supranational bodies: for instance, he regretted the US’s ignorance of the post-war (1945) rules, and evoked the UN Charter, the 1999 OSCE Charter and several others  to support his decisions. But simultaneously he argued in Westphalian terms of states’ interests and spheres of influence. According to his analysis, the states born from ex-Soviet republics were, with the exception of Russia itself, devoid of traditions of statecraft. Several, like Ukraine, had tried to imitate Western democracy, but without success. All were ridden with corruption and economic hardships, resulting from the shift to the market economy. Coupled with weak traditions of statehood, governance in these new states degenerated into corruption, rapacious elites and impoverishment of the population. Even worse, though, the new states situated on the western and south-western borders of Russia – in Europe (the Baltic states, Ukraine, Moldavia) and in the Caucasus (Georgia) – were lured by Western powers who “just do not need a big and independent country like Russia around. This is the answer to all questions. This is the source of America’s traditional policy towards Russia. Hence the attitude to all our security proposals” (Putin, February 21, 2022). It is not the Russian Federation that could not let go of its former imperial peripheries. It is the West that could not recognize an essential fact: these peripheries were not viable on their own; Russia had always displayed respect (of their sovereignty)  and supportive concern, helping them financially, economically, or to fight sedition. In other words, the “Near Abroad”, these former Soviet republics now independent states, belonged to Russia’s “natural” sphere of interests. Intervening there, offering partnerships that compromise their dependency to Moscow, was hostile behavior towards Russia, according to Putin’s formulation. It was a policy directed towards Russia, not toward the countries it concerned (ibidem). As Jeffrey Mankoff emphasized, Putin’s circle thinks in anachronistic terms in a post-imperial world (Mankoff, 2022, p. 142).

At the same time, this rhetoric based on the premise of an anti-Russian US policy and of the invasion justified by Western hostility towards Russia allowed Putin to gloss over the ‘domestic’ causes of the war (Masoero, 2022, p. 703–5). In his bold study of the patrimonial conception of the state in Russia, from the early modern era to the present war, Sergio Claudio Ingerflom observed: “to think that the policy of NATO and the United States is the only one responsible for this war is to think that Russia is a country which has no awareness of its imperial past […] It is to reduce Russia to a modest country without ambitions” (Ingerflom, 2023, p. 19). However one of the undeniable invariables of Russian history is “the contrast between the grand aims and the limited means available with respect to the conditions of each historical age,” “the tension between universal ambitions and limited resources” (Masoero, 2015, p. 194).

Pro-Kremlin international analysts like Sergei Karaganov or Petr Akopov also called for the end of US hegemony in the Trans-Atlantic and Eurasian theatres, and concurred with Vladimir Putin on the necessity, ever more pressing, of revising the “global architecture of security” in order to adjust the supranational institutions to the new balance of power (a decline of the West, according to Karaganov, 2022b). With an international system genuinely under the UN control, instead of NATO’s impunity  – what Putin calls “a sort of modern absolutism” – important states like Russia would not have to invade their neighboring “brothers” to free them from Western instrumentalization. Indeed, “Nor were the interests of the Ukrainian people thought of in February 2014. The legitimate public discontent, caused by acute socio-economic problems, mistakes, and inconsistent actions of the authorities of the time, was simply cynically exploited. Western countries directly interfered in Ukraine’s internal affairs and supported the coup [the events on Maidan square in Kyiv]. Radical nationalist groups served as its battering ram. Their slogans, ideology, and blatant aggressive Russophobia have to a large extent become defining elements of state policy in Ukraine. […] Russia is open to dialogue with Ukraine and ready to discuss the most complex issues. But it is important for us to understand that our partner is defending its national interests but not serving someone else’s, and is not a tool in someone else’s hands to fight against us” (Putin, July 12, 2021).

In such a worldview, Ukraine does not possess a true sovereignty, nor even agency: its institutions are weak facades for corrupt elites serving a foreign “patron.” Until the Russian troops encountered a fierce resistance in its offensive towards Kyiv, Putin had hoped that a significant part of the Ukrainian population, particularly in the south and the east, still considered Russia as a brother country, and was not opposed to a closer association, if not annexation. He failed to see the divergent path (from Russia) that Ukraine as a nation decided to probe after it gained its independence in 1991 (Graziosi, 2022, 3–50). He also missed the deep and swift changes that happened after Russia chose to annex Crimea and ignite the conflict in the Donbas, in matters of institutional strength, defensive capacity, nation-building, and strategic shifts (Kudelia, 2022).

The Kremlin’s conception of international relations, global security system, and of its “Near Abroad” appeals to a part of international opinion, both in the West and in the global South. It is possible to acquire nowadays a book in Italian collecting several speeches or essays written by the Russian president preceded by an third party’s introduction praising his “very broad culture and precise training” (vastissima cultura e accurate preparazione) and the fact that “Russia ceased in that year 2000 to be a colony at the service of the West”. The translations themselves serve the purpose of “transmitting to the careful and serious reader, without the mediation of the approach  of Western media – constantly dismissive and misleading, the literacy and the human texture of a stateman of our time” (Rossi, 2023, p. 11, 19). In a wide-ranging and insightful lecture delivered at the Lennart Meri conference this year Fiona Hill noted that “in its pursuit of the war, Russia has cleverly exploited deep-seated international resistance, and in some cases open challenges, to continued American leadership of global institutions. […] Other countries that have traditionally been considered “middle powers” or “swing states” – the so-called “Rest” of the world – seek to cut the U.S. down to a different size in their neighborhoods and exert more influence in global affairs. They want to decide, not be told what’s in their interest” (Hill, 2023).

According to the scholar, although most countries recognized that international law is on Ukraine’s side in this war, nevertheless “how most states and commentators feel about the United States is their prism for assessing Russia’s actions” (ibidem). In other words, “Ukraine is essentially being punished by guilt through association for having direct U.S. support in its effort to defend itself and liberate its territory.” The systematic litany, by the Russian president or his proxies, of the US’s misguided actions – or inactions – in the last twenty-five years resonates in many societies which may readily paraphrase Sergei’s Karaganov: “It’s not really about Ukraine”, or “We are shaking off the Western yoke” (Karaganov, 2022a and 2023.)  The success of Russian claims and outlandish propaganda resulted not only from the significant means invested in Russian soft power, but also from “a resounding no to U.S. domination and […] a marked appetite for a world without a hegemon” (Hill, 2023.)

The next building block of Putin’s discourse on his defensive “operation” was not intended for an wide international audience, but was expected to be attuned to Russian nationalist feelings. It summoned the myth of an organic millennium-long unity torn apart by malevolent “forces.”

2. “Parts of a single people [pitted] against one another”

“During the recent Direct Line, when I was asked about Russian-Ukrainian relations, I said that Russians and Ukrainians were one people – a single whole” (Putin essay, July 12, 2021).

Vladimir Putin believes, or wants his compatriots to think so, that eastern Slavs – Belarusians, Ukrainians, and Russians – are the three components of a single nation, bound together since Vladimir I’s conversion to orthodoxy (988) and the subsequent elaboration of a liturgical language, the Old Church Slavonic: “Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians are all descendants of Ancient Rus, which was the largest state in Europe” (ibidem). From this moment, he contends, “Russia” was born. This idea is incessantly recited in his statements on Russia and its western immediate neighbors. The “millenary” history of Russia dates back to the speech that then president-by-interim Putin gave in late-1999 (Millennium  speech), and was regularly reasserted, including in the 2007 Munich speech, the purpose of which was apparently not connected in any way to this question: “Russia is a country with a history that spans more than a thousand years and has practically always used the privilege to carry out an independent foreign policy. We are not going to change this tradition today. At the same time, we are well aware of how the world has changed and we have a realistic sense of our own opportunities and potential” (Putin, 2020, p. 379).

The February 21 speech even presented fabulist accents (“from time immemorial”). Beyond the needs of state propaganda, the president of the Russian Federation was truly preoccupied with history, he thought of himself as a good student in the discipline, and less and less tolerated competition, as the dissolution of the Russian Memorial organization in 2021-22 blatantly illustrated (Pearce, 2020; Roccucci, 2020; Weiss-Wendt, 2021; Werth, 2022; Borelli, 2023).

Historians have long shown that modern Russia is not the direct heir of medieval Rus’. And if some remote origin needed to be established, then the Muscovite principality (the actual direct ancestor of modern Russia) would have to share the bench with the principality of Halych-Volyn’ and the republic of Novgorod the Great (in short: Edele, 2023; in more details: Ostrowski, 1998; Pelenski, 1998; Plokhy, 2005; Snyder, 2003). The myth on the Rus’ origin of the Russian empire took its roots in the 18th and especially 19th centuries through often tendentious extrapolation of the earliest chronicles. Historians during the era of imperial identity building used the myth either to identify ancient roots of the Russian (imperial) state (Ingerflom, 2023, pp. 71–82) or to celebrate the unique virtues of the (unitary) Russian “people”. The latter publicists are usually referred to as the Slavophiles. These national constructions, typical of the period, would have remained intellectual fantasies if the Tsars or their savvy ministers had not decided to use them to confront the challenge raised by the French revolution and the subsequent national upheavals. Nicholas I’s minister of Enlightenment, count Uvarov, thus elaborated the famous triad “Autocracy, Orthodoxy, National Principle (narodnost’)” with the assiduous help of the historian Nicholas Ustrialov (Miller, 2008, pp. 159–79). Russia’s last three Tsars then actively developed the “national” versions of the dynastical myth, in contrast with the earlier Romanovs who had put the emphasis on its “European” pretensions and ambitions (Wortman, 1995). The ‘Millennium Monument’ was erected in Novgorod in 1862, in memory of the legendary call to the Varangians of 862: the iconographic program of this monumental piece is an ode to the “great men” of Russian history, mainly in their feats resulting in defending Russia against the world – from Riurik to Peter I, not forgetting Vladimir the Great, Dmitrii Donskoi, Ivan III, and Michael Romanov (Wortman, 2014).  

So historians of the symbolic representations of the Romanov monarchy and specialists of Ukrainian history discarded the direct medieval (common) origin of Russia or Ukraine. We also owe to Ukrainianists the discrediting of the myth of the three branches of a same people, Little Russians (for Ukrainians – malorosy), White Russians (for Belarusians – Belorusy) and Great Russians (Velikorosy). The “nationalization” of the Ukrainian past occurred slightly later than the apparition of the ‘three-tiered people’ myth, in the second half of the 19th century, with the figure of Mykhailo Hrushevsky (Plokhy, 2005). Faith Hillis showed how the first appearance of Russian nationalism as an ideology and a mass movement originated from Russophone elements in the empire’s southern-western provinces called Novorossiia (a designation resurrected by the Kremlin for its current project) and was based on both the assertion of the ‘three-tiered people’ myth and the affirmation of an ethnic exclusivism that culminated in the anti-Jewish pogroms of the turn of the 20th cent. (Hillis, 2013).

What Igor Torbakov named Putin’s belief in a “unity paradigm” has no factual basis, despite the president’s inexhaustible efforts to interpret historical documents and facts in that light. Belarus, Ukraine and Russia did develop different national languages, cultures and histories. To account for that reality, the Kremlin needed to tie in antagonistic “forces”: “First of all, I would like to emphasize that the wall that has emerged in recent years between Russia and Ukraine, between the parts of what is essentially the same historical and spiritual space, to my mind is our great common misfortune and tragedy. These are, first and foremost, the consequences of our own mistakes made at different periods of time. But these are also the result of deliberate efforts by those forces that have always sought to undermine our unity. The formula they apply has been known from time immemorial – divide and rule. There is nothing new here. Hence the attempts to play on the ”national question“ and sow discord among people, the overarching goal being to divide and then to pit the parts of a single people [narod] against one another […] These decisions[8] were taken against the backdrop of dramatic events in Poland and the desire of the leaders of the Polish national movement to exploit the ”Ukrainian issue“ to their own advantage. I should add that works of fiction, books of Ukrainian poetry and folk songs continued to be published. There is objective evidence that the Russian Empire [Rossiiskaia imperiia] was witnessing an active process of development of the Malorussian [Malorossiiskaia] cultural identity within the greater Russian nation [russkaia natsiia], which united the Velikorosy, the Malorosy and the Belarusians” [Velikorosy, Malorosy i Belorusy] (Putin essay, July 12, 2021).

Reading closely this text, it appears that president Putin believes hostile forces from the west – in the first place Poles, but also French, Austrians, Germans – have been persistently deploying efforts to contain Russia. From that perspective, the concept of Ukraine transformed into an “anti-Russia” by the contemporary avatar of this western foe is nothing incongruous (ibidem).

A particular variation of the theme is to be found in the interpretation of post 1989 events. The narrative of the humiliation of Russia from the West, noticeable in other public utterances in the 2010s, reached an apex in the February 2022 speeches: “As for our country, after the disintegration of the USSR, given the  entire unprecedented openness of the new, modern Russia, its readiness to work honestly with the United States and other Western partners, and its practically unilateral disarmament, they immediately tried to put the final squeeze on us, finish us off, and utterly destroy us. This is how it was in the 1990s and the early 2000s, when the so-called collective West was actively supporting separatism and gangs of mercenaries in southern Russia. What victims, what losses we had to sustain and what trials we had to go through at that time before we broke the back of international terrorism in the Caucasus! We remember this and will never forget” (February 24, 2022).

In the Russian president’s words, this motif was reminiscent of the mistakes of the Versailles treaty as origin of post-1933 Germany, though there is hardly any commonality between the two configurations (Graziosi, 2022, pp. 55–9). Yet it convinced many listeners, and not only in Russia. The theme is embedded in a long tradition of anti-Western thought that would be mainly rooted in a ressentiment for Russia’s status of eternal apprentice of Europe (another construct) (Bassin, 1991; Greenfeld, 1995). As Dostoevsky reflected in 1881, “It is necessary to banish as an attitude of servants this fear that we have of being treated in Europe as Asian barbarians and of being told that we are Asians even more than Europeans. This shame of being considered Asians by Europe has been haunting us for nearly two centuries. But this shame has been especially reinforced in this nineteenth century, it has taken on panic proportions, it has reached the Moscow shopkeepers’ superstitious terror in face of “metal” and “sulfur”. This aberrant shame of ourselves, this false notion that we have of being only Europeans and not Asians (which we have never ceased to be), this shame and this false idea have already cost us dearly, very dearly for two centuries, we have paid for them, at the cost of the loss of our spiritual originality, at the cost of the failures of our European policy, and finally at the cost of our money, this money that we have so abundantly spent proving to Europe that we are only Europeans and not Asians. But the jolt Peter the Great provided to push us into Europe, necessary and salutary as it was in the beginning, was still too powerful, and for this we cannot be blamed completely. And what didn’t we do so that Europe would acknowledge us as her own, as Europeans, as Europeans and only Europeans and not Tatars! […] They will never ever believe that we can truly participate, on an equal basis with them, in the future destinies of their civilizations” (Dostoevsky, 1994 [1881]).

In turn, this European complex of Russia is linked to the belief in some particular Russian set of values and beliefs  that would have kept it – until the fateful 1990s –immune from Western decadence.

3. A fortress against moral decay

In his spring sermon of March 6, 2022, Patriarch Kirill brought his share to Putin’s crusade against  “anti-Russia”, declaring that “in Donbass there is a rejection, a fundamental rejection of the so-called values that are today offered by those who claim world power. Today there is such a test of loyalty to this government, a kind of pass to that ‘happy’ world, the world of excess consumption, the world of visible ‘freedom’” (Patriarch Kirill, 2022). The decadence of the West and its drifting away from genuine spiritual values are symbolized by Gay Pride. Indeed, “the denunciation of homosexuality has been Kirill’s battle horse […] homosexuality became the symbol of the antagonism with a depraved West” (Rousselet, 2022 p. 162). According to the French researcher, in the last twenty years several themes were woven into a “tradition against the West”: juvenile justice, domestic violence, contemporary art, vaccinations, homosexuality. She shows which parts of society contributed to elaborating this “tradition”, notably the most conservative clergymen, the Orthodox believers who were marginalized by the economic reforms in the 1990s, and the siloviki, those servants of the enforcement organs – ordinary police, state security, special forces, army. She concludes that this “tradition” helped forge a new political consensus around the president, who was promoted as defender of traditional values and morality.

A new consensus appeared necessary after the prosperity of the first two presidential mandates (the oil prices peaked in 2010) collided with new economic difficulties, the rise of tensions with the West, the war with Georgia, and the wave of street protests in the winter 2011–2012. Then a clear stiffening of the regime occurred, new legislation on foreign agents, a stricter surveillance of internet (through the agency Roskomnadzor). “The denunciation of Western attempts to overthrow the Russian regime went hand in hand with a political reinvestment in moral issues. Associated with a patriotic position, the defense of a healthy lifestyle gained momentum” (Favarel-Garrigues, 2023, p. 165). The Duma adopted measures to restrain sales and advertisement of alcohol (2012), and toughened laws proscribing swearing in the media and cultural productions, as well as offenses to religious feelings (2014). The most shocking law was, however, the June 2013 law on the protection of children from “information promoting the rejection of traditional family values”. Moreover, beyond the measures adopted by the legislature and the executive, the conservative turn was noticeably supported and implemented by a galaxy of vigilantes and self-organized groups, studied for the past twenty years by the historian and sociologist Gilles Favarel-Garrigues. They hunt and publicly denounce or chastise shop holders who offer expired products, young people caught drinking alcohol in public or smoking in forbidden places, drivers parking in unauthorized spots, and, first and foremost suspected “pedophiles”. If some of the most extreme activists ended up behind bars for acts of physical violence against their targets, many pursued their moral crusade without being disturbed by law enforcement agencies. Some even received public subsidies, for their civic actions (Favarel-Garrigues, 2015, 2021 & 2023).

Whatever the president’s personal beliefs and religious practice are, the conservative turn in the realm of values did not equate with a submission to the Orthodox Church and the Moscow Patriarchate. On the contrary, those institutions do not possess any influence on the political power; the state “cooperates” with the Patriarchate because their interests converge. The collaboration also offers the means to control and instrumentalize a network of cultural and spiritual authorities, even if the Orthodox revival of the immediate post-Soviet years has since then slowed down and observant Orthodox remain relatively few in number (Rousselet, 2022, p. 12–55).

It is worth at this point of the reflection on the declarations of Vladimir Putin and his proxies to interrogate the kind of conservatism that this regime, in its actual shape, embodies. Philosophers, historians and investigation journalists have speculated, but also aptly investigated the philosophical and  political works likely to have influenced the worldview of the master of the Kremlin (Eltchaninoff 2015; Snyder, 2018; Laruelle, 2019; Lewis, 2020). Others added to the analysis of his utterances and decisions in-depth research into his past, experience, training and entourage (Hill & Gaddy, 2013; Clover, 2016; Belton, 2020). Before the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, a debate arose on the nature of the regime around Marlene Laruelle’s latest monograph Is Russia Fascist? Unraveling Propaganda East and West (2021).[9] Recently, S. C. Ingerflom proposed to revisit the representations of power in Russia in the long-term run, resorting to Reinhart Koselleck’s concept of Zeitschichten, “time layers” or, as he prefers to translate, “time sediments”. He showed how the successive autocratic leaders of Russia developed a cult of the “state” while the term in Russian denoted a strong patrimonial understanding of the ruled territory and people (gosudarstvo is a suffixed extension of gosudar’, master). The modern and contemporary leaders of “Russia” (or the Russian empire, or even the Soviet Union) identified their state as their personal possession and retained from the centuries-old history of Muscovy-Russia only those aspects they wanted to build on: centralized authority, popular consensus (imposed whenever necessary), military power and international mission. Thus doing, they created their own interpretation of the past and rejected any dialogue with this tradition (Ingerflom, 2023). Autocracy, clientelism and empire appeared as the main traditions Russia inherited from its past. Domestic democratic contestation or chosen independence and sovereignty (in Ukraine’s case) are perceived by the long series of leaders as genuinely alien to Russian tradition and history – except Gorbachev.

Longue durée schemes of interpretation are always debatable, but it remains undeniable that in his public statements Vladimir Putin identifies Russia’s tradition, ‘millenary’ history and statehood precisely in the terms identified by S. C. Ingerflom. The president’s retrospective search for a Russian state back to a time it did not exist is obsessive. The celebration of the imagined antiquity of the Russian state is systematically opposed to the imagined weakness of the Ukrainian one, in a deep confusion between empire, state and nation. In his striving for a centuries-old Russian national state, the president ascribes agency to 17th century subjects of two competing realms, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Muscovite Tsardom. However, the creation of Ukrainian states at the twilight of the First World war, foremost Hrushevsky’s Central Council, is not credited to popular national feelings, but to the doing of various obscure forces hostile to Russia. Putin underscores that nobody asked the inhabitants’ opinion when designing the boundaries between the RSFSR and the Soviet republic of Ukraine. But he ignores the votes of December 1991, unambiguously in favor of an independent path towards political change, and away from an imperial subjugation. Comparing the president’s presentation of Russian and Ukrainian institutions is as vertiginous. His state is strong, based on a wide popular acquiescence; the increasing recourse to crude repression is glossed over as a necessary and legitimate fight against inner enemies, manipulated by outside foes (the myth of the fifth column, so crucial in the launching of Stalin’s Great Terror). In contrast, according to the Kremlin Ukraine is led by corrupt elites who despise their constituents and sold the country’s wealth to external purchasers or “patrons” (a word much prized by Vladimir Putin). In Ukraine, elections are rigged since at least 2014, if not earlier. They serve the purpose of concealing the loss of national sovereignty to foreign patrons.

4. Concluding remarks

In their articles, speeches and editorials, the Kremlin’s mouthpieces build the notion of the war against Ukraine as a fundamentally defensive, protective and preventive endeavor. Moreover, they toy with historical precedents and international legal frameworks to claim the righteousness of the invasion. This narrative is organized along three main threads: the resistance to US hegemony, the necessity to restore Russian historico-spatial unity, and Russia’s duty to save its existence from the corrosion of alien values.

It seems highly plausible that the president of the Russian Federation partly believes this mental construction, a little like Stalin had when he commented that even if only 5% of the suspicions and denunciations were authentic, they were worth the Great Terror, because they sufficed to threaten the existence of the system (Nérard, 2004). As Alberto Masoero observed, “there is a utopian-religious dimension in Putin’s self-representations that escapes understanding in terms of conservative realism […] We therefore have to ask ourselves whether the war does not signal the need to bring attention to politics also in its dimension of faith at the center of historiographical research, a belief not necessarily supported by objective data” (Masoero, 2022, pp. 712, 713).

Once again in Russian and Soviet history, the authorities have tried to find a “usable past” and usable identity markers (Brandenberger, 2002 and 2015). But this time the Russian Federation as a geopolitical power does not possess the strongest assets – militarily, culturally, in terms of prestige, or even demographically. In search of this hook on which to hang its national pride and the regime’s legitimacy, the Kremlin muses again with imperial sirens, with the idea that Russia does not have clearly bound limits to its civilizational pretenses. It may be on this specific point that the plans of the elites meet the dreams and wishes of the ordinary citizens.

Bibliography

Bassin, M. (1991). Russia between Europe and Asia: The Ideological Construction of Geographical Space. Slavic Review, 50(1), 1–17.

Beissinger, M. R. (2005). Rethinking Empire in the Wake of Soviet Collapse. In Z. Barany & R. G. Moser (Eds.), Ethnic Politics after Communism (pp. 14–45). Cornell University Press.

Berelowitch, A. (2022). Un’ideologia di Stato al servizio della guerra. In Memorial Italia & M. Flores (Eds.), Russia, anatomia di un regime (pp. 41–67). Corriere della sera inchieste.

Borelli, A. (2023). Nella Russia di Putin. La costruzione  di  un’identità post-sovietica. Carrocci.

Brandenberger, D. (2002). National bolshevism. Stalinist mass culture and the formation of modern Russian identity, 1931-1956. Harvard University Press.

Brandenberger, D. (2015). Promotion of a Usable Past: Official Efforts to Rewrite Russo-Soviet History, 2000–2014. In B. Iacob & V. Tismaneanu (Eds.), Remembrance, History, and Justice. Coming to Terms with Traumatic Pasts in Democratic Societies (pp. 191–212). Central European University Press.

Catalano, A., & Pianciola, N. (2023). Introduzione. Il mondo  dopo il 24 febbraio. In Memorial Italia (Ed.), Guerra globale. Il conflitto russo-ucraino e l’ordine internazionale (pp. 7–26). Corriere della sera inchieste.

Clover, C. (2016). Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia’s New Nationalism. Yale University Press.

Colin Lebedev, A. (2023). Jamais frères? Ukraine et Russie: Une tragédie postsoviétique. Points.

Dostoevsky, F. (1994). Geok-Tepe. What Does Asia Mean to Us? In K. Lantz (Ed. & Trans.), A Writer’s Diary. Vol.2: 1877-81 (pp. 1368–1372). Northwestern University Press.

Edele, M. (2023). Russia’s War Against Ukraine: The Whole Story. Melbourne University Press.

Eltchaninoff, M. (2015). Dans la tête de Vladimir Poutine, Solin/Actes Sud.

Favarel-Garrigues, G. (2015). A Power Horizontal. The Public–Private Enforcement of Judicial Decisions in Russia. Europe-Asia Studies, 67(4), 606–623.

Favarel-Garrigues, G. (2021). ‘Vigilante Shows’ and Law Enforcement in Russia. Europe-Asia Studies, 73(1), 221–242.

Favarel-Garrigues, G. (2023). La Verticale de la peur. Ordre et allégeance en Russie poutinienne. La Découverte.

Fediunin. (2022). Comment le Kremlin justifie la guerre contre l’Ukraine, ou la rigidification idéologique du régime poutinien. AOC. https://aoc.media/analyse/2022/03/16/ comment-le-kremlin-justifie-la-guerre-contre-lukraine/

Flores, M. (2022). La guerra di Putin e la storia. In Memorial Italia & M. Flores (Eds.), Russia, anatomia di un regime (pp. 225–239). Corriere della sera inchieste.

Frye, T. (2021). Weak Strongman: The Limits of Power in Putin’s Russia. Princeton University Press.

Galeotti, M. (2022). Putin’s Wars: From Chechnya to Ukraine. Osprey Publishing. (Italian tr. 2023)

Glucksman, R. (2023). La Grande Confrontation. Comment Putine fait la guerre à nos démocraties. Allary Éditions.

Graziosi, A. (2022). L’Ucraina e Putin tra storia e ideologia. Editori Laterza.

Greenfeld, L. (1990). The Formation of the Russian National Identity: The Role of Status Insecurity and Ressentiment. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 32(3), 549–591.

Hill, F. (2023), “Ukraine in the New World Disorder. The Rest’s Rebellion Against the United States,” Lennart Meri Lecture 2023, https://lmc.icds.ee/lennart-meri-lecture-by-fiona-hill/ last accessed November 21, 2023

Hillis, F. (2013). Children of Rus’. Right-Bank Ukraine and the Invention of a Russian Nation. Cornell University Press.

Karaganov, S. A. (2022, February 7). It’s not Really about Ukraine. Russia in Global Affairs. https://eng.globalaffairs.ru/articles/it-is-not-about-ukraine/

Karaganov, S. A. (2022). From Constructive Destruction to Gathering. Russia in Global Affairs, 20(1), 50–67. https://doi.org/10.31278/1810-6374-2022-20-1-50-67

Karaganov, S. (2023, May 28). “We are shaking off the Western yoke….” Bizness Online. https://karaganov.ru/en/we-are-shaking-off-the-western-yoke/

Kudelia, S. (2022). The Ukrainian State under Russian Aggression: Resilience and Resistance. Current History, 121(837), 251–257.

Laruelle, M. (2019). Russian Nationalism: Imaginaries, Doctrines and Political Battlefields. Routeledge.

Laruelle, M. (2021). Is Russia Fascist? Unraveling Propaganda East and West. Cornell University Press.

Laruelle, M., & Grek, I. (2022, February 25). Decoding Putin’s Speeches: The Three Ideological Lines of Russia’s Military Intervention in Ukraine. Russia Matters. https://russiamatters.org/analysis/decoding-putins-speeches-three-ideological-lines-russias-military-intervention-ukraine

Lewis, D. G. (2020). Russia’s New Authoritarianism: Putin and the Politics of Order. Edinburgh University Press.

Mankoff, J. (2022). The War in Ukraine and Eurasia’s New Imperial Moment. The Washington Quarterly, 45(2), 127–147. https://doi.oConfigurazione della LAN ethernet di casa?rg/10.1080/0163660X.2022. 2090761

Marples, D. R. (2022). The War in Ukraine’s Donbas: Origins, Contexts, and the Future. Central European University Press.

Masoero, A. (2015). Russia between Europe and Asia. In P. Rossi (Ed.), The Boundaries of Europe. From the Fall of the Ancient World to the Age of Decolonization (pp. 192–208). De Gruyter.

Masoero, A. (2022). L’invasione dell’Ucraina e il lavoro degli storici: Alcune questioni da discutere. Rivista storica italiana, 134(3), 699–713.

Memorial Italia, & Flores, M. (Eds.). (2022). Ucraina. Assedio alla democrazia. Corriere della sera inchieste.

Memorial Italia, & Flores, M. (Eds.). (2022). Russia, anatomia di un regime. Corriere della sera inchieste.

Memorial Italia, Catalano, A., Flores, M., & Pianciola, N. (Eds.). (2023). Guerra globale. Il conflitto russo-ucraino e l’ordine internazionale. Corriere della sera inchieste.

Merlo, S. (2023). La costruzione del’Ucraina contemporanea. Una storia complessa. Il Mulino.

Miller, A. (2008). The Romanov Empire and Nationalism. Essays in the methodology of historical research. CEU Press.

Miller, A. (2015). The Romanov Empire and the Russian Nation. In S. Berger & A. Miller (Eds.), Nationalizing Empires (pp. 309–368). Central European University Press.

Nérard, F.-X. (2004) Cinq pour cent de vérité. La dénonciation dans l’URSS de Staline (1928-1941). Tallandier.

Ostrowski, Donald. Muscovy and the Mongols: Cross-Cultural Influences on the Steppe Frontier, 1304-1589. Cambridge, 1998.

Patriarch Kirill, 2022. Patriarshaia propoved’ v Nedeliu syropustnuiu posle Liturgii v Khrame Khrista Spasitelia, march 6, 2022. On the official website of the Moscow Patriarchate: http://www.patriarchia.ru/db/text/5906442.html, last accessed November 23, 2023.

Pearce, J. C. (2020). The Use of History in Putin’s Russia. Vernon Press.

Pelenski, Jaroslaw. ‘The Incorporation of the Ukrainian Lands of Kievan Rus’ into Crown Poland (1569): Socio-Material Interest and Ideology (A Re- examination)’ and ‘The Ukrainian-Russian Debate over the Legacy of Kievan Rus’, 1840s- 1860s.’ In idem, The Contest for the Legacy of Kievan Rus’ (pp. 151–88 & 213–26). Boulder, CO, 1998.

Plokhy, S. (2005). Unmaking Imperial Russia: Mykhailo Hrushevsky and the Writing of Ukrainian History. University of Toronto Press.

Plokhy, S. (2011). The call of blood: Government propaganda and public response to the Soviet entry into World War II. Cahiers Du Monde Russe, 52(2–3), 293–319.

Plokhy, S. (2017). Lost Kingdom. The Quest for Empire and the Making of the Russian Nation. From 1470 to the Present. Basic Books.

Plokhy, S. (2023). The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History. W. W. Norton & Company. (Italian tr. Mondadori, 2023)

Putin, V. (2020) Speech and Q&A of the President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin at the Security Policy Conference in Munich, February 10, 2007. In Kupiecki, R., & Menkiszak, M. (Eds.) Documents Talk: NATO-Russia Relations After the Cold War (pp. 369–79). Polski Instytut Spraw Miedzynarodowych.

Putin, V. (2021) “Ob istoricheskom edinstve russkikh i ukraintsev”, July 12, 2021, Moscow, Kremlin: http://kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66181. The official English version (with several puzzling inaccuracies in the transliteration) is at http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66181, last accessed November 22, 2023.

Putin, V. (2022 a) “Obrashchenie Prezidenta Rossijskoj Federatsii”, Feb. 21, 2022, Moscow, Kremlin: http://kremlin.ru/events/president/news/67828. The official English version (with some inaccuracies in the transliteration) is at http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/67828, last accessed November 22, 2023.

Putin, V. (2022 b) “Obrashchenie Prezidenta Rossijskoj Federatsii”, Feb. 24, 2022, Moscow, Kremlin: http://kremlin.ru/events/president/news/67843. The official English version (with some inaccuracies in the transliteration) is at http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/67843, last accessed November 22, 2023.

Roccucci, A. (2020). Parole d’ordine, grande potenza e terra russa. Limes, XVII(8), 223–235.

Rossi, D. (2022). Perché la tigre russa si libererà  del sonaglio. In D. Rossi (Ed.), V. Putin. Di fronte alla storia. Obiettivi e strategie della Russia. Pgreco.

Rousselet, K. (2022). La Sainte Russie contre l’Occident. Éditions Salvator.

Sarotte, M. E. (2021). Not one inch: America, Russia, and the making of Post-Cold War stalemate. Yale University Press (well summarized in eadem “Not One Inch”: Unpicking Putin’s Deadly Obsession with the Details of History’. Financial Times. February 17, 2023).

Servent, P. (2022). Le Monde de demain. Comprendre les conséquences planétaires de l’onde de choc ukrainienne. Robert Laffon.

Snyder, T. (2003). The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999. Yale University Press.

Snyder, T. (2018). Ivan Ilyin, Putin’s Philosopher of Russian Fascism. The New York Review. https://www.nybooks.com/online/2018/03/16/ivan-ilyin-putins-philosopher-of-russian-fascism/

Surkov, V.(2021). Kuda dels’ia khaos? Rasspokovka stabil’nosti. Aktualnye kommentarii. 20 November 2021. https://actualcomment.ru/kuda-delsya-khaos-raspakovka-stabilnosti-2111201336.html, last accessed November 21, 2023.

Torbakov, I. (2018). After Empire: Nationalist Imagination and Symbolic Politics in Russia and Eurasia in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century. Ibidem.

Torbakov, I. (2023). Deadly Illusions: The Ukraine War and Russian Historical Imagination. Russia Program Online Papers, 3, 1–16.

Weiss-Wendt, A. (2021). Putin’s Russia and the Falsification of History: Reasserting Control over the Past. Bloomsbury Academic.

Weiss-Wendt, A., & Adler, N. (Eds.). (2021). The Future of the  Soviet Past: The politics of history in Putin’s Russia. Indiana University Press.

Werth, N. (2022). Poutine, historien en chef. Gallimard.

Wortman, R. (1995). Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, Vol.2. From Alexander II. to the Abdication of Nicolas II. Princeton University Press.

Wortman, R. (2014). 8. “Glas naroda”: Visual Representations of Russian Monarchy in the Era of Emancipation. In Visual Texts, Ceremonial Texts, Texts of Exploration: Collected Articles on the Representation of Russian Monarchy (pp. 180–207). Academic Studies Press.

(pubblicato su gentile concessione dell’editore, da: F. Zannoni e D. Gladun, a cura di, “Ukrainians Feeing the War. Stories and Studies in Reception Contexts”, Bologna, Clueb, 2024, pp-15-38)

---

[1] Returning to the academic tradition of Cold War years, I use capitals (West, East, South) when the discourse I am analyzing refers to political camps or groups instead of geographical realities, which retain the small initials (west, western, east…)

[2] Human Rights organizations such as OVD-Info tried to have the Supreme Court recognize the ‘discrediting the military’ article 20.3.3 as unconstitutional, but in vain. This article from the Code for Administrative Offenses was introduced after the 2022 invasion and is used in case of “first violation against people who criticized the Russian military and other Russian state structures, as well as mercenary groups.” A fine is imposed on the violator, if found guilty by the court. On second violation, citizens risk to be sued under the criminal code (Article 280.3) and to be inflicted 5 to 7 years in prison. ‘Discrediting the military’ was from the start a vaguely defined violation, and for instance “a journalist was fined for using the word ‘frontline’ when talking about the ‘special military operation’.” In late June 2023, OVD-info knew of 89 cases prosecuted under 280.3 and 7,182 under 20.3.3. Quotes and numbers from https://en.ovdinfo.org/discreditation-articles-explainer. There exists another offense in the criminal code for disseminating “knowingly false” information about the Russian army (subparagraph “d”, Part 2, Article 207.3), as of today, 239 people are known to be prosecuted under this article: https://repression.info/en/articles/207-3-pt-1.

[3] Respectively the minister of Foreign Affairs (since 2004), the former minister of Culture and current president of the Russian Military Historical Society (RVIO), and finally two RIA Novosti sulfurous editorialists: on Akopov, see https://sanctions.nazk.gov.ua/en/sanction-person/17089/; on Medinskii, see Pavlenko O., “Kak vazhno byt’ istorikom,” Novaia Gazeta, Feb. 17, 2022.

[4] On the use of this notion in Putin’s discourse, see Laruelle & Grek, 2022.

[5] RIA Novosti is published by the governmental press agency MIA Rossiia segodnia (Russia Today). He is also a member of  the “Zinoviev Club” created in 2014 within this same press agency, as a platform to discuss the legacy of Alexandre Zinoviev’s anti-Western thought, Russia and the contemporary world.

“Chto Rosssiia dolzhna delat’ s Ukrainoi?” [What should Russia do with Ukraine?], April 3, 2022:

https://ria.ru/20220403/ukraina-1781469605.html, last accessed November 20, 2023. An English translation can be found at: https://medium.com/@kravchenko_mm/what-should-russia-do-with-ukraine-translation-of-a-propaganda-article-by-a-russian-journalist-a3e92e3cb64.

[6] In the 1939 case, the Soviet leaders themselves did not believe in this idea as much as they used it for their domestic and external propaganda (successfully in the first case, less so in the latter one).

[7] All translations of quotes are mine, except if an English version of the original has been made available (Putin and Sergeitsev).

[8] At this point in his essay the president is evoking the Valuev circular (1863) and the Ems Edict (1876) that imposed severe restrictions on the publication in the Ukrainian language.

[9] Book symposium, Nationalities Papers, 50(6), comprising Orenstein, M. A. Russia: Fascist or Conservative ? (pp. 1245–1247); Herrera, Y. M. Who’s a Fascist ? (pp. 1248–1251); Shekhovtsov, A. What Happens When Soft Power Falls ((pp. 1252–1254) and Laruelle, M. Is Russia Fascist?: A Response to Yoshiko Herrera, Mitchell Orenstein, and Anton Shekhovtsov. (pp.1255–1258).