The war for "the right to be and remain Russia"

Abstract

From the beginning of the unprovoked attack by the Russian Federation on independent Ukraine, the Russian power elites justified the reasons and goals of the invasion in various ways, including “the right to be and remain Russia”. Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly referred to history to convince the West of the rightness of his actions. According to Putin, the Ukrainian state is an artificial entity, because Ukrainians and Russians are one people. The existence of Ukraine as a separate state, in the opinion of the Kremlin, is a historical mistake and a threat to Russia, and war – the only way to correct this mistake in order to “finally settle the Ukrainian question”. Ukraine has been the main problem for Russia for centuries, which made Kievan Rus the beginning of its statehood. Going West, Ukraine deprives Russia of the legitimacy of Russian statehood based on historical myths, forces it to revise the founding myth and redefine its identity, which is why the annihilation of Ukraine has become Russia's national idea.

Until recently, the West viewed Ukraine through a Russian lens in which Ukrainian history either did not exist, or was part of Russian history, so the West underestimated the threat of Putin's one-nation claim. This perspective has not been thoroughly reviewed and prevents some political decision-makers from thinking about the subjectivity of Ukraine, defeating Russia and victory. For Russia, the “right to be and remain itself” means to continue to maintain in the West the belief in its thousand-year history, in which Ukraine has no place. Regaining its own history gives the Ukrainian nation the right to defend its statehood and equal membership in the world community of nations.