Regardless of the scope of Russia’s military assault on Ukraine, the drivers of Moscow’s policies are not well understood in Washington.
It is not a question of seizing Ukraine’s territory, changing its political system, or determining its international alliances. This is a struggle for something much more profound — identity and history. Ukraine’s revival has exposed the fragile historical and ethnic foundations of the Russian state that Vladimir Putin is determined to disguise.
Every legitimate state needs a coherent history and a binding identity. Russia’s offensive against Ukraine is a blatant attempt to salvage its own brittle history and confused identity by trying to eradicate three realities. These being that Ukraine has a longer history than Russia, Ukraine has a more coherent identity than Russia, and Ukraine is a rising state while Russia is a failed empire and a failed state.
One foundational problem is that Moscow’s rulers claim non-Muscovite state structures as part of their “Russian” heritage. These include Kyivan Rus — an east Slavic confederacy between the 10th and 13th centuries to which Ukraine has the more authentic claim. Moscow was a peripheral town in Kyivan Rus and embarked on its imperial expansion in the 15th century. While swallowing its neighbors, it spread three streams of disinformation that it continues to push: that Kyiv was the cradle of the Muscovite state, that Moscow had the right to appropriate the “Rus” ethnonym, and that Moscow was the “Third Rome” (after the fall of Constantinople) for the Orthodox Church.
Muscovite history remains expansive, historically and territorially. If you claim your neighbor’s history as your own, then you can also claim your neighbor’s land, property, religion, and identity as belonging to you. Russia’s falsified history is challenged by neighboring nations. Ukrainians in particular have a more legitimate claim to regional leadership than Muscovite Russians, whether in state-building, Christianization, literature, or the adoption of the Cyrillic alphabet.
While Ukraine is rediscovering and consolidating its identity, Russia grapples with an insecure identity. The Russian Federation has failed to establish a civic identity to which most citizens would subscribe regardless of their ethnic background. Instead, the country has witnessed constant identity battles between ethnonationalists, imperialists, federalists, regionalists, and non-Russians.
While Ukraine is developing a democratic state, despite its institutional and economic problems, the Russian Federation has been unable to transform itself into a nation-state or a civic state. Russia’s numerous weaknesses are exacerbated by an overdependence on unpredictable fossil fuel revenues, its stark socioeconomic inequalities and demographic defects, widening disparities between Moscow and its federal subjects, a precarious political pyramid based on personalism and clientelism, deepening distrust of government institutions, increasing public alienation from a corrupt ruling elite, and widespread disbelief in official propaganda. The Russian Federation is approaching the end of a regime cycle, and the Kremlin is tightening repression against any sign of opposition.
Escalating internal problems have evidently convinced Putin that a bolder and riskier foreign policy strategy may bring domestic benefits by mobilizing citizens around “fortress Russia.” However, a deeper military attack on Ukraine could be Putin’s biggest miscalculation and will accelerate Russia’s failures. The war would come home to Russia with a growing toll of military and civilian deaths, economic decline propelled by Western sanctions, and spreading public opposition to Kremlin policy that kills “fellow Slavs” and “fellow Orthodox” Christians. Such a war will further unearth Russia’s decaying imperial structure.
Janusz Bugajski is a senior fellow at the Jamestown Foundation in Washington, D.C. His recent book, Eurasian Disunion: Russia’s Vulnerable Flanks, is co-authored with Margarita Assenova. His new book, Failed State: A Guide to Russia’s Rupture, will be published in the spring.
