Ukraine sees its fight against Russia as a war of liberation against a former colonial master trying to regain control. Geographer Michel Foucher defines it as a ‘colonial war’ (1), and President Emmanuel Macron called it ‘neocolonial and imperialist’ in a speech at last year’s Munich Security Conference. All claim that Moscow has revealed its expansionist tendencies, having been waiting for a chance to recover territory lost at the breakup of the Soviet Union (or the Russian empire) – or, according to some analysts, an opportunity to dominate the whole world as a civilisational force standing for ‘traditional’ values.

When commentators speak of empire, imperialism and colonialism, what exactly do they mean? One thing is certain: starting from the core territory of Muscovy in the 13th century, Russia acquired a huge domain with all the characteristics of an empire. Empires have taken many forms throughout history but as political entities they are generally defined by the fact that they differentiate between their constituent populations and territories, and impose a hierarchy (2).

Every empire requires a high degree of cultural, ethnic, geographical and/or administrative differentiation between the centre and the periphery. This is particularly clear in colonial empires. The ‘natives’ of French and British colonies in Asia and Africa, geographically distant from the metropolis, had a lower legal status and were administered by a separate bureaucracy. The exceptions of Algeria (divided into three French départements) and Ireland (which was part of the United Kingdom) proved the rule: European empires were based on settlement by colonists from the home state, who thought themselves morally superior and therefore inherently suited to exploiting the native peoples.

If awareness of this difference fades or ceases to exist, what you have is no longer an empire but a nation state which may sometimes be federal or incorporate local cultural identities. Historically, metropolitan states pursued national consolidation: France ‘assimilated’ the Bretons, Basques and (to a lesser extent) Corsicans; Spain’s consolidation was moderated by a form of federalism, which occasionally put it at risk, as shown for example by Catalan separatism. In other words, while establishing control over the periphery, the centre itself (to varying degrees) underwent a parallel process of national integration. The British government pursued both unification within the United Kingdom and territorial and commercial expansion into North America, Asia and Africa.

Russian empire’s special traits

The Russian empire, being territorially contiguous, was unique in several ways. Russia’s intellectual elite did not see their state as imperial, let alone colonial, despite its huge size (stretching from the Baltic to Eastern Siberia) and the diversity of its peoples and cultures. Territorial expansion was gradual, often achieved by coopting local elites: for instance, the Cossack Hetmanate (in what is now central Ukraine) formed an alliance with Russia in the mid-17th century before losing its autonomy. No group other than the Jews, who were confined to a ‘pale of settlement’ in the west of the empire, had a lower legal status based on racial or ethnic criteria.

However, a hierarchy was established between, to the east, the pagan (later baptised) and Muslim peoples of Siberia, the Caucasus and Central Asia, who were referred to as inorodtsy (alien peoples) and, to the west, Slavic (Polish, Ukrainian, Belarusian), Baltic and German peoples. According to historian Marc Raeff, these peoples were ‘cultural intermediaries’ for the tsarist empire. Through them, the Russian elite – from the 17th century onwards but especially from the reign of Peter the Great (1682-1725) – gained access to European civilisation: rather than imposing their own culture on them, the elite attempted to ‘civilise’ themselves through these peoples.

‘Little Russians’ were never discriminated against on the grounds of origin. They were always invited to be members of the Russian nation but their right to claim the status of a separate nation was denied

Alexei Miller

If there was any colonisation in Russia, it was of a unique kind. Officially, the term ‘colonists’ was reserved for Germans whom Catherine the Great (1762-96) had invited (because of their hardworking Protestant ethic and technical knowhow) to settle the banks of the Volga and improve the land there; and also for Serbs and Greeks encouraged to move into territories around the Black Sea, sometimes to the detriment of their existing Russian and Ukrainian populations.

Settlement of Siberia and Turkestan by Russian and Ukrainian peasants took off in the 19th century. However, the conquest of the East did not result in colonies distinct from the home state territorially and administratively. According to the historian Vasily Klyuchevsky, ‘the history of Russia is that of a country that colonised itself. Colonisation coincided with the expansion of the state itself.’ In the course of the 19th and early 20th centuries, under the influence of the Jacobins and later the French Third Republic, Russian intellectuals – from the Decembrist (3) Pavel Pestel, who wanted an egalitarian republic, to the constitutional democrat Pyotr Struve – proposed various national unification projects that sought to remove hierarchies and distinctions between peoples.

‘Little Russians’ denied statehood

Ukrainians and Belarusians (mostly peasants) were to play a special role in the formation of a ‘national heartland’, though this was never completely realised because of the empire’s size. After the three partitions of Poland in the late 18th century, Russia sought to mobilise the peasants against the Polish nobility, whose growing nationalism was demonstrated by rebellions in 1830 and 1863. Fearing that ‘Polonism’ would spread, the tsarist government sought to bring together the Eastern Orthodox Slavs – the Great Russians (or Russians from the Soviet period onwards), Little Russians (Ukrainians) and White Russians (Belarusians) – in a ‘trinitarian’ Russian nation (4).

As historian Alexei Miller notes, ‘Little Russians were never discriminated against on the grounds of origin. [They] were always invited to be members of the Russian nation but their right to claim the status of a separate nation was denied’ (5). This observation makes it clear that the history of Russia-Ukraine relations cannot be interpreted in terms of colonialism – at least if that is taken to mean the typical form of European overseas empires.

When movements that championed the idea of a Ukrainian nation (ukrainstvo) emerged in the second half of the 19th century, the imperial centre responded with a policy of Russification on the French assimilation model, which eradicated regional languages with the goal of building a unified national community. In 1863 and 1876, decrees restricted the use of ‘Little Russian’, which the imperial authorities saw as a working-class and rural variant of standard Russian. But the political elite’s indecisiveness, the relative weakness of state infrastructure and, above all, the absence of universal primary education (only introduced in 1930) limited Russification to cities; the peasant majority remained largely Ukrainian-speaking.

In 1917 the Russian empire collapsed under the strain of the first world war, which favoured the rise of separatism. In Ukraine, short-lived political entities such as the Ukrainian People’s Republic and Pavlo Skoropadsky’s Cossack Hetmanate declared independence. The Russian civil war also revealed the divisions within Ukrainian political nationalism. Emboldened by the Red Army’s victory, Lenin imposed an original answer to the ‘national question’: in contrast to the tsarist empire, seen as a ‘prison of nations’, the Soviet Union was established as a federation of (formally) independent republics, each of which had a national heartland but guaranteed the cultural rights of minorities. This was the principle of recognition of ‘nationality’ (ethnicity), from that time recorded in censuses and Soviet citizens’ passports.

In the 1920s the young Soviet Union encouraged the emergence of national cultures and local languages and elites, all under the heading of ‘indigenisation’ (korenizatsiia), a kind of affirmative action before its time (6). A Soviet identity was supposed gradually to supersede national affiliation, seen as a relic of the past that would eventually be overcome by socialism. The project was relatively successful, especially among the Russians, whose language became the lingua franca of the Soviet Union and of international socialism.

Founding USSR member

Ukraine was a founding member of the Soviet Union, along with Russia, Belarus and the short-lived Transcaucasia (1922-36). Its economic weight, strategic access to the Black Sea and plentiful supply of educated administrators prolonged the privileged status it had enjoyed under the tsars. But any expression of independence was repressed: in the 1930s full-fledged Ukrainian nationalism was emerging in Galicia, then part of Poland, one of a wave of movements with fascist leanings across Europe. Moscow saw this as a dangerous temptation for Ukraine, which had been severely traumatised by the collectivisation and famine of 1932-33. The fight against ‘bourgeois nationalism’ and the annexation of Ukrainian-speaking parts of Poland in 1939 and 1944 offered only a temporary solution to the Ukrainian question. Nevertheless, during the Soviet era the Ukrainians were recognised as a nation in their own right, within the limits imposed by the requirements of ‘fraternity’ with the Russians.

It was only in retrospect that the Soviet Union came to be seen as an empire. During the cold war, few historians used the term ‘Soviet empire’; these included Richard Pipes, professor of Russian history at Harvard and former advisor to Ronald Reagan, who was close to the anticommunist diasporas of Eastern Europe. After 1991 this view began to prevail with the success of books by historian Timothy Snyder (Bloodlands, 2010) and neoconservative journalist Anne Applebaum. Academic researchers re-examined the Soviet experience through the prism of empire (a development known as the ‘imperial turn’).

In parallel, political discourse spread a vision of Russia as programmed to resume its attacks on its neighbours. This view, notably championed by politicians in Eastern and Central Europe, called for Russia to be further contained by the eastward expansion of NATO, this despite the fact that Russia was clearly weaker than it had been.

Vladimir Putin is said to be planning to rebuild the ‘Soviet empire’. Analysts frequently refer to a paper he published in December 1999, on becoming interim president, ‘Russia at the Turn of the Millennium’, in which he linked the ‘political split in society’ to Russia’s decline. Above all he was against ‘revolution’ or radical change as advocated by ideology-driven minorities. He called for stability and national unity, as well as gradual reforms that would reverse the brutal liberalisation, imposed ‘from outside’, that had brought the country to the brink of collapse. As regards patriotism, he wrote, ‘When these sentiments are free from the tints of nationalist conceit and imperialist ambitions, there is nothing reprehensible or bigoted about them. Patriotism is the source of our people’s courage, staunchness and strength.’

Putin did not mention the second Chechen war, which had begun a few months earlier, but his vision of a ‘strong state’ implied the defence of sovereignty and, consequently, vigorous resistance to any kind of separatism. That said, to construe his remarks as the basis of a plan to re-establish the old Soviet borders would be wrong.

In fact, the prevailing idea in Moscow in the 1990s was that Russia and Ukraine should form a new kind of union, like the ‘union state’ formed by Russia and Belarus in 1997. The breakup of the Soviet Union came about when the leaders of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine signed a dissolution treaty. For Belarus and Ukraine, independence was less a way to end the Soviet ‘occupation’ of their territory (as it was for the Baltic states) than a means of placing relations with Russia on a more equal footing. On 8 December 1991, at the Viskuli hunting lodge in the Białowieża forest (straddling Belarus and Poland), Ukraine’s prime minister Leonid Kravchuk (acting on the strength of a vote for independence of over 90% in a referendum held a week earlier) and Russia and Belarus’s heads of state, Boris Yeltsin and Stanislav Shushkevich, founded a new Commonwealth of Independent States (which Ukraine left in 2018).

However, Russia’s leaders still saw Ukraine as part of its natural sphere of influence, just as the Monroe doctrine treats the Americas as the US’s backyard. The proper term for this is ‘imperialist policy’, provided this is understood as simply a power (in this case a regional one) claiming the right to exert influence over a particular geographic area through economic or security-based partnerships, such as the Eurasian Economic Community (later Union) and Collective Security Treaty Organisation.

Russia found itself on the defensive: the US and EU were enlarging their own military (NATO) and economic (association agreements) groupings eastwards and trying to exert influence in the post-Soviet space. Armed intervention was one of the tools (though not the central one) used by the new Russian state, notably in pro-Russian separatist regions of Moldova (Transnistria) and Georgia (Abkhazia, South Ossetia), which avoided formal annexation. The goal was to gain political leverage in these countries, where it faced new competitors.

Ukraine crossed red line

For the historic reasons mentioned earlier, Ukraine’s swing to the West crossed a red line for Moscow, even more than those of the Baltic states and Georgia. Ukraine’s political polarisation between pro-Russian and pro-Western camps made it a target for competing foreign interference, heralding wider conflict. NATO’s 2008 Bucharest summit was a turning point: its final declaration stated that Ukraine would join NATO, though France and Germany opposed granting it official candidate status. This further angered Russia, without enhancing Ukraine’s security.

Strategic considerations were a key factor in the nationalist reactions at the highest levels of the Russian state (7). This is clear from the way that, in recent speeches, Putin has repeatedly referred to NATO expansion and Russian-Ukrainian unity: Ukrainian independence is seen as breaking historic, and even national, links, and as an attack on Russia’s ‘legitimate’ right to intervene in its own backyard.

With its influence in decline since 1991, Russia has been watching its rival the US (often seen as omnipotent), with a view to imitating it where possible and finding ways to counter it, and defending Russia’s zone of influence against Western incursions. The breakup of the Soviet Union was a shock to much of the Russian military elite: Gorbachev’s perestroika, which they perceived as encouraged by the US, strengthened their belief that in this new world it was possible to make considerable strategic gains without firing a single missile.

In the 2000s the belief grew that future wars would be fought largely using non-military means. ‘Indirect’ strategies – information wars, coopting national leaders, installing friendly regimes – would be far more effective than brute force. The ‘colour revolutions’ in the post-Soviet space (Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine) and later the Arab Spring in North Africa and the Middle East were seen in the same light. Russian strategists believed them to be the result of a US policy of exporting ‘controlled chaos’, sometimes as a prelude to military intervention, as in Iraq (2003) or Libya (2011). Russian doctrine called for avoiding armed conflict. The use of force – rapid and decisive action – was only a last resort, if the indirect approach failed.

Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 – with the help of troops in unmarked uniforms and political supporters on the inside – was seen as a successful application of this doctrine. However, this tactical victory put Russia further away from its strategic objective of ensuring that Ukraine was pro-Russian, or at least neutral. Having gained control of the naval base at Sebastopol, Russia found itself facing a country that was reduced in size, but even more wary and better armed, thanks to Western aid.

The invasion of Ukraine, preceded by diplomatic ultimatums to the US and NATO in November and December 2021, was also supposed to achieve a quick result: overthrowing the Kyiv government, like the US attacks on the Taliban in Afghanistan (2001) and Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq (2003). Despite the US’s failures, Russia copied its errors. ‘The decision to launch the special military operation,’ says Dimitri Minic of the Institut Français des Relations Internationales thinktank, rather than being a carefully planned attempt to conquer territory, ‘was simply the unhappy conclusion of the failure of Russia’s indirect approach in Ukraine.’

Redefining Russia’s ‘heartland’

The war in Ukraine had begun as an ‘imperialist’ intervention but changed as the front became static, morphing into a conflict over the borders of emerging nation states, typical of the collapse of composite political entities. Until now, such wars had taken place only on the periphery of the former Soviet Union, notably in the Caucasus. After two decades of stability, Russia challenged the territorial status quo with a view to countering NATO’s strategic advances in its claimed zone of influence. In claiming sovereignty over the four Ukrainian oblasts it had partially occupied in September 2022, Russia indicated its preferred solution.

However, the invasion of Ukraine should not be seen as a prelude to attacks on Lithuania or Poland: Russia has neither the resources to threaten NATO, nor the desire to rebuild an empire. It sees the invasion as a way of redefining its ‘heartland’ at the expense of Ukraine, and also of Belarus, which it is well on the way to absorbing, given the Lukashenko regime’s dependence on Moscow. In this sense, the current phase of the Ukraine conflict could be termed post-imperial or even nationalist.

Ukrainisation and Russification mirror each other on either side of the front. Ukrainisation follows the classic model for building a nation state: the goal is to have one people, one language, one central government (8). The process has accelerated since 2014, and especially since February 2022, when the government set about dismantling the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, linked to the Patriarchate of Moscow, and replacing it with an independent national church founded in 2018. It went on to ban Soviet, and later Russian, place names. Statues of military leaders and artists once considered part of Russia and Ukraine’s joint heritage, were destroyed; books in Russian were removed from public libraries.

Russification has some less well-defined aspects. At present, in the areas of Ukraine controlled by Russia, it involves military occupation, denying local residents freedom of movement and access to healthcare unless they acquire Russian passports, administration from Russia, and imposing the rouble and the Russian education system (with all teaching in Russian). But this process is dressed up in ambiguous language: Russian speakers are presented as ‘natural’ citizens of the Russian Federation, and regions annexed by Russia – if it retains control of them – as remaining Ukrainian within a federal state, defined as ‘multiethnic and multicultural’.

Russia’s education ministry has announced that a Ukrainian language textbook is to be written, based on Soviet standards, for schoolchildren in the four annexed areas to learn Ukrainian, among other ‘mother tongues’ (in fact, the languages of national minorities), though all teaching is to take place in Russian. This ambiguous stance reflects the dual character of Russian nationalism, which, since its emergence in the mid-19th century, has hesitated between forming a nation state that prioritises the interests of the ethnic majority and an empire involving the domination of ethnically and culturally diverse territories and populations.

In Kyiv, and some Western circles, another vision prevails. It likens the Russian Federation to a colonial empire and emphasises the over-representation of ethnic minorities in Russia’s armed forces: tensions in the regions that provide this ‘cannon fodder’ are closely scrutinised. In October 2022 Ukraine recognised the Chechen government in exile led by Akhmed Zakayev, declared Chechnya ‘a territory temporarily occupied by Russia’, and condemned the ‘genocide’ of Chechens by the Russian authorities in the 1990s. In January 2023 the European Parliament hosted the Forum of Free Nations of Post-Russia, an organisation representing ‘non-Russian’ ethnic groups which calls for independence for the Russian Federation’s peripheral republics, notably Buryatia, Yakutia and Tatarstan.

Edward Lucas of the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) thinktank in Washington believes the US policy goal should be the ‘decolonisation [of Russia]. Rather than narrowly focussing on “regime change” or the personality of Vladimir Putin, all outside countries dealing with Russia should hold this long-term aim in mind’ (9). Some historians take this view too. Alexander Etkind of the Central European University acknowledges that Russia’s collapse ‘would present enormous problems, including those of its nuclear arsenal and … border conflicts’ but concludes: ‘Would these wars be worse than the current one? Probably not’ (10). Given the Balkan scenario – now with nukes thrown in – that’s optimistic.