A perspective on Ukraine

More than a border dispute: a look at the forgotten history and the enduring spirit of Russian imperialism.

Political hot takes tend to be tedious, so I stay away from them in most of my writing. That said, as a person born in Poland under Soviet rule, the war in Ukraine hits close to home. With the conflict now in its second year, let me volunteer a perspective that offers a counterpoint to viewing the conflict as an isolated border dispute between two neighboring states.

My thesis is simple: Russia’s unhampered imperial ambitions are among the most consequential geopolitical arcs of the twentieth century — perhaps more so than the rise and fall of communism itself. The death toll of the international communist movement is staggering; that said, with the demise of its founding fathers, most communist states rapidly devolved into run-of-the-mill authoritarian kleptocracies. The ideology’s enduring vestiges in places such as China, or Cuba, or Vietnam have little in common with the utopian economic visions that animated Marx, Lenin, or Mao.

Russia’s expansionist policy, on the other hand, continues to cast a long shadow across Europe. The country has a long history of conquest, but for centuries, its vast dominion resembled a loose federation of fiefdoms, not a single state; it wasn’t until the emergence of the USSR that a cohesive national identity — along with a renewed focus on global expansion — started to take hold. Through various machinations, the USSR soon ended up annexing Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania; and seizing military and political control of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, and other neighboring states. For decades, the residents of these lands suffered repression and economic hardships — and were barred from leaving the Soviet-controlled world.

Having to reckon with a new military alliance in Europe — NATO — the USSR soon turned its attention to the developing world, successfully bootstrapping a range of pro-Soviet regimes in some of the newly-liberated British and French colonies in Asia and Africa. Many of the United States’ ham-fisted and at times shameful interventions in these regions were simply meant to curtail Soviet advances — sometimes by propping up vile tyrants who happened to like American dollars more than Soviet tanks.

The eventual collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was hailed as the end of that era — Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” — but Russia never let go of its imperial dreams. In contrast to Nazi Germany, the days of the Soviet Union are not a source of national shame; former communist dignitaries are not banished from public life, streets and entire towns still bearing their names. Nostalgia coupled with bitterness continues to define Russian politics. In 2005, Mr. Putin lamented the fall of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century”; in 2009, on the subject of Ukraine, he rambled about the debt the country owes to the USSR, all while denying Ukraine legitimacy as a sovereign state. These are not unpopular views.

Since then, the foreign policy of the Russian Federation made it clear that the country still considers the former republics its own. In 2004, a leading pro-Western presidential candidate in Ukraine, Viktor Yushchenko, was poisoned by Russian operatives; later, displeased with the resulting political changes, Russia annexed Crimea — and is now coming back more. In the meantime, in 2008, Russian forces invaded Georgia, securing continued Russian military presence in the country. A similar scenario played out in Moldova, giving Russia control of a strategic strip of land bordering Ukraine. Of the former republics, only a handful of aligned dictatorships — such as Belarus or Turkmenistan — avoided military excursions, assassinations, or other surprises along the way.

One of Mr. Putin’s favorite excuses is that he’s acting in self-defense: that NATO is making aggressive advances in the region, forcing his hand. This explanation is bunk: if neighboring countries are eager to join a Western military alliance, it’s precisely because they see what Russia is doing to their neighbors — and know their days are numbered too. In the case of Poland, the country actually blackmailed the US, threatening to pursue its own nuclear program if not allowed to join the alliance.

This is not a mere border skirmish; Russia is one of the few undeterred imperial powers of our era. They are not an economic powerhouse, but they hold considerable sway over Europe — and if allied with China, they stand to shape global geopolitics for decades to come. Countless rounds of appeasement have failed, and there is a dark future ahead if the world meekly submits to Russia’s dark impulses. War is horrific, but there is a hope that the Russian populace will eventually grow weary of the cost of conflict and oust Mr. Putin and his ilk. This, sadly, might take long years.