These four overlapping communities are united in the vague notion of Russkii mir (Russian world), which became part of the Kremlin’s political imagination (and ideological toolkit) in the mid-2000s. Imprecisely defined and broadly interpreted, the Russkii mir concept helped Russia’s governing elites pursue policies of their choice while perpetuating the ambiguity of their approaches to nation-building and extracting maximum benefit from this ambiguity. At its core, however, this concept represents an amalgam of strong imperial and ethnic nationalist connotations and is ultimately designed to redefine the established state borders. It asserts that the present-day Russian Federation’s “political body” and Russia’s “cultural body” do not coincide.
Such a perspective, coupled with Putin’s embrace of the “unity paradigm”— his contention that the Russians and the Ukrainians are one people — seriously undermines Ukraine’s political subjectivity and sovereignty. It portrays Ukraine, formally an independent state, as an inalienable part of the imagined “historical Russia,” thus keeping it within the Russian Federation’s sphere of influence. So long as Moscow managed to keep Kyiv within its orbit — and the West at bay — by manipulating identity as a soft-power tool, it largely remained a status quo power and a quasi- imperial polity preferring indirect control. When the Kremlin leadership sensed that Ukraine was about to “defect” to the West in 2014, however, Russia turned revisionist and irredentist. It embarked on what might be called the “Russian Reconquista,” seizing Crimea and attacking Ukraine’s eastern provinces.
The “pan-Russian” idea was deployed with a vengeance. But this was the beginning of the end of Russia’s “imperial” ambition in the post-Soviet space. Moscow’s full-scale war on Ukraine has driven the last nail into the coffin of the Russian-led Eurasian “civilization bloc.” Putin’s “special military operation” appears to have been a last-ditch effort to restore Moscow’s full control over Ukraine by toppling the Zelensky government and installing a new, loyal leadership in Kyiv. As this plan failed, the Kremlin was forced to reformulate its war aims, focusing instead on reconquering “historic Russian lands” allegedly “gifted” to Ukraine by Lenin. These lands, some leading Russian commentators suggest, might include not only the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, but also a much broader swath of Ukraine’s south-east stretching from Odesa to Kharkiv.
Yet having shifted its objective from regime change in Kyiv to reclaiming lost parts of “national patrimony” and returning “kith and kin” to Mother Russia’s fold, the Kremlin seems to no longer be interested in quasi-imperial “integrationist projects.” Rather, Moscow’s goal is now to reformat the post-Soviet space and to build a strong and viable Russian national state. Such an endeavor has long been supported by several influential Russian thinkers, from Struve to Ivan Il’in to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The last two are particularly popular with the Kremlin leadership these days.
In his voluminous political commentary from the early 1950s, Il’in prophesied that, after the inevitable fall of Communism, Russia’s future could only be as a “national Russia.” Solzhenitsyn painted a very similar picture in his 1990 pamphlet “Rebuilding Russia,” resolutely denouncing Russia’s “imperial syndrome,” calling on Mikhail Gorbachev to immediately shed the “culturally alien” borderlands in the South Caucasus and Central Asia, and suggesting focus be placed on building what he termed the “Russian Union.” According to Solzhenitsyn, however, this Union would have to comprise all Eastern Slavic countries (including Ukraine and Belarus), as well as huge chunks of “Russian” Southern Siberia and the Southern Urals (now part of Kazakhstan). In his understanding, the southern territories of Ukraine, Crimea, and Donbas are quintessentially “Russian.” One cannot fail to see striking similarities between Solzhenitsyn’s ideas and Putin’s new strategic blueprint.
The collapse of the Soviet Empire has turned out to be a protracted process. Indeed, it has continued in the form of war on Ukraine. However, no specter of a new Russian Empire is in sight: what we are now witnessing is the emergence, amid abominable atrocities and bloodshed, of an aggressive and nationalistic Russian state that will likely prove no less of a threat to global security than its imperial predecessor.
“Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?”
Steeped in Russian imperial historiography, the Kremlin leader conceives of “nation” as something primordial, timeless, and immutable—a community based on the idea of Blut und Boden (blood and soil) and welded together by the “unity of fate.” In all of his recent articles and speeches asserting the sameness of Russians and Ukrainians, Putin has invoked the two Slavic peoples’ ethnic, linguistic, religious, and cultural affinity. Long-standing historical ties are always front and center. His mammoth “unity” article’s concluding paragraph reads:
[Ukrainians and Russians’] spiritual, human and civilizational ties formed for centuries and have their origins in the same sources, they have been hardened by common trials, achievements and victories. Our kinship has been transmitted from generation to generation. It is in the hearts and the memory of people living in modern Russia and Ukraine, in the blood ties that unite millions of our families. Together we have always been and will be many times stronger and more successful. For we are one people.
Contrary to this outdated vision, a nation is a fluid and malleable phenomenon. It is only the people themselves who have the right to decide who they are and to which nation they belong. Notably, a powerful counterargument questioning the validity of viewing the Russo-Ukrainian problem as a historical problem par excellence first emerged within the Russian intellectual tradition almost a hundred years ago. In 1930, the brilliant Russian émigré historian Petr Bitsilli, at that time a professor at Sofia University in Bulgaria, published in Prague (one of the main centers of Russian interwar emigration) a strikingly innovative essay entitled “The Problem of Russian-Ukrainian Relations in the Light of History.”
It is quite common, Bitsilli noted, for both Russians and Ukrainians to discuss their relations exclusively in historical terms. Such debates, he said, could be beneficial for historiography but provide no valid arguments illuminating contemporary political problems. Anyone who thinks otherwise simply misunderstands the essence of the historical process. The present moment is also “history,” argued Bitsilli; it is part of the historical process. Precisely because history is in a constant state of renewal, of moving forward, because it is irreversible, so-called historical arguments — that is, those referring to facts and events of the historical past as such— do not (and cannot) have any merit or significance when applied to the historical present or the historical future. Do Russians and Ukrainians constitute “one people” (as Putin would have it) because of the proximity of their languages and cultures? To Bitsilli, these are secondary factors. Ethnic, cultural, and linguistic similarities, as well as close historical ties, he argued, create conditions for “unity” but are not proof of it. A sense of closeness between nations is a psychological fact and a matter of perception: you either experience it or it does not exist.
Bitsilli was a liberal thinker steeped in imperial Russian high culture. He was not supportive of Ukrainian political independence or even of Ukrainians’ ambitions to develop their own national high culture. He thought that the policy of Ukrainization pursued in Soviet Ukraine in the 1920s was redundant because Russian world-class culture was easily accessible to all Ukrainians and could satisfy all their intellectual needs. In this respect, he was a man of his time. However, he was far ahead of his time as a theorist of nations and nationalism. Historical arguments to the effect that Ukraine as a state entity or Ukrainians as a nation did not exist in the past are beside the point, he contended. If there are the political will and social resources to create a distinct Ukrainian nation, separate from the Russians, this can be done. This conclusion makes Bitsilli a true precursor of the likes of Ernest Gellner, Benedict Anderson, and other social constructivists. Yet these ideas are completely alien to Putin. He appears to genuinely believe that the people who lived in the Dnieper valley in the tenth century and called themselves Rus’ are in fact “Russians” and that all subsequent splits and divisions within this ancient ethno-political community are “unnatural,” as they have largely been caused by external forces inimical to “Russian” national interests.
It is here that we find the major divide between Moscow’s and Kyiv’s understandings of what nation is. The Kremlin’s “national project” is hopelessly stuck in the past; a conservative dictatorship does not have much to say about the future. Thus is