But by the nineteenth century, the territory of Ukraine was largely divided between the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires. Various Ukrainian polities followed, including the principality of Galicia-Volhynia and the kingdom of Ruthenia in the medieval period and a Cossack state in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Ukraine, as both a nation and a state, had its roots in the Kievan Rus’-a conglomerate of peoples ruled by a warrior elite that traced its ancestry to Scandinavia-that emerged on the banks of the Dnieper River in the late ninth century. Hrushevsky sketched the story of Ukraine in the following way. A coherent and distinct Ukrainian national history, he argued, stretched back over a millennium. Weightily titled “The Traditional Scheme of ‘Russian’ History and the Problem of a Rational Organization of the History of the East Slavs,” the essay insisted that Ukrainian history was not a province of an overarching Russian story. In 1903, Mykhailo Hrushevsky, an academic based in Lviv, published an article that remains powerful today. But for Ukrainians, the stakes are more existential: Putin’s reading of history would deny them the very right to exist.
Like all grand narratives, both have their share of mythology. Putin’s desire to restore an imperial Russia (of which Ukraine is but a constituent part) has crashed into a Ukrainian nationalism that imagines a sovereign Ukrainian state and a distinct Ukrainian people persisting in various forms for over a thousand years. In many ways, this war is the collision of two incompatible historical narratives. Ukrainians, too, harbor a particular understanding of the past that motivates them to fight. But history also propels the fierce Ukrainian resistance. Russian forces have been smashing their way through Ukraine for over two months now, spurred in large part by historical fiction. He published an essay in July 2021 making this case at length, a bloated historical exegesis that few expected would lead to an actual war. Russian President Vladimir Putin has ventured on wild forays into the depths of history to insist that Russians and Ukrainians are a single people, that Ukraine never truly existed as a sovereign entity until the Bolsheviks mistakenly brought it into existence, and that the territories of Ukraine are fundamentally Russian lands.
Europe’s first twenty-first-century war is very much about the past.