Below is Lara Marlowe’s column in the weekend edition of The Irish Times.
It’s an excellent piece, a great read and tells the lie of Putin’s doctoring of Russian Ukrainian history.
Like most of his compatriots, Professor Yaroslav Hrytsak has been on an emotional rollercoaster since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
“At times you feel everything is lost. You are heading into the abyss, and then suddenly victory seems very close. We go up and down with the news, especially since [Donald] Trump came to power, because Trump sows chaos.”
Hrytsak teaches history at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv and is one of the most prominent historians still working in Ukraine. Stoicism and cynical optimism are the best attitudes to help one carry on, he says. “Just imagine. Next month this war will have lasted as long as the first World War.”
Paradoxically, Hrytsak says, the empathy and solidarity of the early days of the war made it a high point. “This feeling has died out, because the war has gone on so long.”
Hrytsak learned last December that his godson Arsan (33) had been killed in Pokrovsk on the eastern front. “He saved three cats from the war zone. He managed to send them to Lviv and on to Germany. The cats survived; he did not. The last time I saw him, he joked that he was married to a lady with a scythe, to death.”
Hrytsak calls Vladimir Putin “the embodiment of the Russkiy Mir” (Russian World), a woolly concept of transnational Russian identity which defends traditional values against a degenerate West.
“With this war, Ukraine is in the process of leaving a dangerous world, the famous Russkiy Mir that Putin talks about in his speeches,” Hrytsak says. Cradle-to-grave violence is the hallmark of this Russian sphere.
Absurd
The Russian president’s idol, Peter the Great, began the colonisation of Ukraine in the 18th century. Peter renamed Muscovy as Russia, after the medieval Kyivan Rus’ dynasty which was extinguished by the Mongol horde in 1240. Hrytsak says the historical dispute over the legacy of the Kyivan Rus’ is as absurd as modern-day France and Germany arguing over which country is the legitimate heir of Charlemagne.
“If Putin committed no other crimes, he deserves to be punished for his crude, over-simplified exploitation of history,” Hrytsak says. “He uses history to legitimise his aggression. Putin’s claim that Russia has a 1,000-year history is a nonsense. The main story of this region is the lack of continuity.”
Hrytsak contrasts the trauma of Ukrainian historical memory with Putin’s belief that the Kyivan Rus’, the Russian and Soviet empires were a golden era. “Fortunately, Ukraine has no golden age, so Ukraine has nowhere to return to. Ukraine’s golden age is in the future. Ukrainians not only want to leave the Russkiy Mir, they want to leave the past behind.”
Putin will go down in history “in the same box with Stalin, Lenin, Hitler and other dictators who failed dramatically and provoked huge losses among their own populations and their neighbours”, Hrytsak says. “You can destroy a lot with violence, but you cannot build anything lasting on it.” Russia, he says, “has no good scenario for the future” whereas Ukraine has several.
“The worst-case scenario is a Ukraine destroyed by the war, lacking in reforms and in stagnation. Most people would try to leave because they would see no future. The country would move from the Second World to the Third World. The best-case scenario is that Ukraine succeeds in preserving most of its territory, carries out reforms, enters the EU and eventually becomes a very dynamic economy, a central European tiger.” The real outcome will probably be somewhere between, Hrytsak says.
The jury is still out on Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy. “I believe he will be one of the few people from eastern Europe who will be remembered for a very long time,” Hrytsak says. “He consciously emulated Churchill, but when asked recently he said – with the sense of humour I like – ‘I’m more like Charlie Chaplin’. It depends not just on the results of the war, but on whether he is able to bring Ukraine into the European space, whether he will be remembered as a person who fought against corruption or as a person who enabled corruption. This is not clear yet.”
Putin developed a plan to invade Ukraine in 2008, right after the Russian invasion of Georgia, Hrytsak says. That plan was an open secret, and Putin seized on the Maidan Revolution of Dignity in 2014 to enact it.
Putin “wants to ‘make Russia great again’”, Hrytsak says. “He wants Russia to be a superpower. Without Ukraine, he cannot do it. With Ukraine, Russia is like the US. Without Ukraine, it’s like Canada.”
Hrytsak believes that Putin wants to annex only the Russian-speaking east and south of Ukraine, which he sees as part of the Russkiy Mir, leaving a Ukrainian rump state that would be ruled from Kyiv by a pro-Russian puppet, similar to the president of neighbouring Belarus.
“The tragedy of our territory is that we are borderlands both for Russia and for the West,” Hrytsak says. “Unfortunately, we are at the centre of a titanic struggle. We want to have a different kind of life. We want to have a boring life.”
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