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On the evening of February 21, 2022, three days before Russian forces began the largest land invasion on the European continent since World War II, Russian President Vladimir Putin gave an angry televised speech. In it, he expressed familiar grievances about the eastward expansion of nato, alleged Ukrainian aggression, and the presence of Western missiles on Russia's border. But most of his tirade was devoted to something else: Ukrainian history. "Ukraine is not just a neighboring country for us," Putin said. "It is an inalienable part of our own history, culture, and spiritual space." Ukraine's borders, he asserted, have no meaning other than to mark a former administrative division of the Soviet Union: "Modern Ukraine was entirely created by Russia."
To many Western ears, Putin's historical claims sounded bizarre. But they were of more than casual importance. Far from an innovation of the current crisis, Putin's argument that Ukraine has always been one and the same with Russia, and that it has been forcibly colonized by Western forces, has long been a defining part of his worldview. Already during the Maidan popular uprising in Kyiv in 2013-14, Putin claimed that the people leading the huge protests were Western-backed fashisti (fascists) trying to tear Ukraine from its historical roots. (In fact, the protests caught the West by surprise, and although they included a far-right fringe, they were no fascist takeover.) And in July 2021, well before the buildup of Russian troops on the Ukrainian border, the Kremlin published a 7,000-word essay under Putin's byline with the title "On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians." Both Russia and Ukraine, it asserted, have not only common roots in language and faith but also a shared historic destiny. Since its publication, the essay has become part of the required curriculum for all service members in the Russian armed forces, including those fighting in the current war. According to Putin's logic, all divisions between Russia and Ukraine are the work of Western powers. From Poland in the sixteenth century to the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the nineteenth century and the Nazis in World War II, they have periodically coerced Ukraine or led it astray. In this reading, Kyiv's pro-Western outlook over the past decade is only the latest form of...