Imperialism, supremacy, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine

Perceptions of Ukraine

Prior to February 2022, Ukraine was often described as a “divided” country (for a critique, see Kudlenko, Citation2023; Riabchuk, Citation2015) as well as a “weak” or even “failed” state. The notions of “division” and “weakness” should be analyzed separately. First, the notion of Ukraine as a “divided nation” functioned in two ways in international discourses. At times, it orientalized Ukraine as a peripheral conflict-affected country where “ancient ethnic hatreds” seemed to predestine it for disorder (for such portrayals of other countries, see Labonte, Citation2013). Ukraine was seen as “a big Yugoslavia in Eastern Europe” (Koval et al., Citation2022, p. 173). At other times, this notion normalized Ukraine as a non-post-colonial country that should have followed the Swiss model of a neutral multilingual federation—a view that ignored the fact that Germany, France, and Italy did not use language, history, and identity to undermine Swiss sovereignty as Russia did with Ukraine. Any measure that Ukraine took to limit Russia’s influence after the war's start in 2014, such as the 35% quota for Ukrainian-language songs on radio, was seen with suspicion as something that risked upsetting “Russian-speaking Ukrainians,” assumed to be homogenous a group with a tenuous attachment to the Ukrainian state and nation. The problem of Russian infiltration was recast as an issue of cultural diversity, and the burden of addressing it was placed on Ukraine.

For Russia, both the orientalizing and the normalizing ways of portraying Ukraine as a “divided nation” played into its hands. The orientalizing frame reproduced Russia’s “rhetoric about Ukraine not being a ‘real state’” (Flockhart & Korosteleva, Citation2022, p. 470), thus helping to drum up domestic support for the aggression. The normalizing frame, in turn, was used by Russia to delegitimize Ukraine’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations and the international assistance to Ukraine: Neutrality and the weakening of the Ukrainian language’s status would have helped Russia to control Ukraine’s affairs through military intimidation and cultural domination.

Second, the notion of Ukrainian state’s presumed “low capacity” led to the misperception that the 40-million country was “so weak and vulnerable that nobody c[ould] help it against Russia, and the provision of lethal arms would only further worsen the situation” (Koval et al., Citation2022, p. 172). Only a few challenged the idea of Ukraine’s “smallness” both as an empirical inaccuracy and a Russian imperial construction (Finnin, Citation2022). The notion of Ukraine’s “weakness” led to the surprise at the Ukrainian government’s choice of resistance over exile. In parallel, however, past portrayals of Ukraine exclusively through the lens of corruption continued fueling doubts as to whether it would be able to use military aid effectively and as intended. For domestic audiences in Russia, alleged “chaos” in Ukraine was contrasted with Russia’s conservative authoritarianism serving as a bulwark against disorder. It also created an expectation among the invading troops that any resistance they would encountered could be easily crushed.

At the intersection of the notions of Ukraine as a “divided” and “weak” state, the Russian propaganda created a narrative that had the shakiest basis in reality but significant reach: that the Ukrainian state allegedly struggled to contain the influence of the far right. The full-scale invasion laid bare the cynicism of Russia’s “denazification” rhetoric, especially as Ukrainian units that had (or used to have) a number of far right members fought valiantly and loyally to protect Ukraine’s democracy, the Jewish president, and predominantly Russian-speaking Mariupol. The disproportionate attention to Ukraine’s far right in the academic literature might have resulted from Ukraine’s openness for fieldwork on this topic as compared to Russia, where this problem has been and remains more serious (Gomza Citation2022). Additionally, since many societies grappled with the rise of the far right, exaggerations about the influence of such forces in Ukraine attracted attention: After all, other Ukraine’s problems, such as covert and overt aggression by a neighbor, were less relatable. This was exacerbated by the tendency to view the CEE though the lenses of illiberalism and conservatism where far-right tendencies were to be “expected” (O’Sullivan & Krulišová, Citation2023)—a case of stereotypical thinking that ignored Ukrainians’ rejection of far right parties at the polls (Shevtsova, Citation2022).

Perceptions of Russia and its relations with Ukraine

In turn, the mainstream IR literature expected Russia to behave like a modern power, that is, to seek an informal “sphere of influence” in its neighborhood and attract supporters by projecting a model of society that others would want to emulate (e.g., Malyarenko & Wolff, Citation2018). As for the reasons why Russia desired a “sphere of influence,” one strand of the literature argued that it was due to Russia's fear of an external attack, which made a buffer zone of compliant neighbors desirable (e.g., Götz, Citation2017). Another strand argued that Russia was frustrated at not being perceived as an “equal” to Western great powers (e.g., Neumann, Citation2016). At the same time, neither school of thought expected that such influence-seeking would cross the threshold into a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which was certain to become costly due to sanctions and casualties (Driedger & Polianskii, Citation2023).

To understand why we got it wrong, it is necessary to examine Russia’s relations with Ukraine. These relations were often described, at Russia’s instigation, as “brotherly.” Again, this worked both for international and Russian audiences. For international audiences, this led to an expectation that the Russian public would not support an all-out invasion of Ukraine, and that Russian forces would not commit war crimes. In other words, it led to a mistaken belief that Russia would seek to protect its standing among Ukrainians and therefore not invade so overtly and violently. For Russian audiences, it constructed Ukrainians as practically indistinguishable from Russians in order to downplay the existence of Ukraine as a separate political community (Riabchuk, Citation2013). It made many invaders believe that they would be greeted “with flowers.”

Once Russia launched the full-scale invasion, few expected it to be so brutal. Even in Russia, the initial expectation was that occupation of Ukrainian lands could be sustained through Ukrainians’ acquiescence and sold to domestic audiences as a “surgical operation.” Yet it quickly transpired that Russia did not hesitate to kill Ukrainians—often Russian-speaking ones—on the territories it occupied, and then kidnap or deport those who survived. The campaign of ethnic cleansing was followed by the influx of Russian settlers, either brought in by the Russian state or moving enthusiastically to razed cities.

Disciplinary lenses

From a mainstream IR perspective, the behavior of Russian elites, soldiers, and civilians appears irrational: by starting and escalating the war, Russia incurred losses in terms of its economic and geopolitical standing, especially in the region and Ukraine itself. Yet other disciplines, for example, the humanities, could have provided important insights into Russians’ attitudes to Ukrainians. The systematic “othering” of Ukrainians (e.g., Riabchuk, Citation2016) and their relegation to a lower tier in the hierarchy of nations was prevalent in Russian discourses for centuries. It simultaneously made imperial violence acceptable and created an expectation that there would be no capable resistance.

In the Tsarist-era literature, Ukrainians were consistently represented as a backwards nation. Prince Ivan Dolgoruky reflected in the following way on his 1817 visit to Kyiv, a few decades after a large part of Ukraine was annexed by the Russian empire and serfdom was introduced:

Theoretical lenses

Another blind spot of mainstream IR is that it rarely draws on postcolonial scholarship in seeking to understand war (cf. Barkawi, Citation2016), especially war on the European continent. For this reason, many analyses missed the fact that the hierarchies that Russia sought to correct through its full-scale invasion were not only between states but also between societies. For example, the granting of visa-free travel to the Schengen area for Ukrainians was viewed in Russia as more than Ukraine-EU rapprochement. In the eyes of Russians, the West granted Ukrainians, a nation they viewed as “inferior,” a privilege that Russians did not enjoy. This “undeserved favour” (Chaban et al., Citation2023, p. 14), a transgression of hierarchies, deepened Russians’ hostility towards Ukrainians. Russians on Internet forums imagined that Ukrainians in Europe would do nothing but “[p]rostitution and cleaning toilets,” activities befitting their “inferior” status in Russian eyes (Oksamytna, Citation2022b). Russian media alleged that people would flee “dysfunctional” Ukraine to escape poverty and become illegal migrants or smugglers in the EU, and the coverage overall evoked “envy, anger, fury, dislike and hatred” towards Ukrainians (Chaban et al., Citation2023, p. 16). Russian media further insinuated that to be accepted in Europe, Ukrainians had submitted to “liberal” values allegedly alien to their culture. This further strengthened the narrative that Ukraine had to be “rescued” in an imperial expedition.

Imperialism is not just a land grab or subversion of another country’s independence: it is an exercise of supremacy. The Russian troops' brutality in Ukraine was aimed at “correct[ing] the allegedly mistaken cultural code of Ukrainianness which does not recognize the superiority of Russianness, the Russian nation, culture, history and language” (Mälksoo, Citation2022, p. 6). The behavior of Russian forces bore all hallmarks of imperial violence, including sexual abuse, the looting of cultural artifacts, dispossession, ethnic cleansing, and forced recruitment of people on occupied territories into the imperial army. It ran counter to the expectations that Russia would behave like a responsible occupying power aiming to restore its standing internationally or even among Ukrainians, eventually. Yet Russian soldiers had been primed by the images of Ukrainians as backwards, apathetic, and self-interested and of Ukraine as underdeveloped, chaotic, and fragmented—a “failed state” where Russian-speaking population was “oppressed,” the president was “a drug addict,” and everything was in the state of “chaos.”Footnote⁵ When they invaded en masse in February 2022, they found a well-functioning and cohesive society where the population enjoyed a decent standard of living and a free exercise of their rights. They were “astonished by the high quality of basic infrastructure in Ukraine” (The Times, Citation2023) and did not expect that the Ukrainian society would be so organized and supportive of their elected authorities at the local, regional, and national levels. This did not align with the stereotypes of Ukrainians as “indolent, inert, and passive” (Shkandrij, Citation2001, p. 108).

Russian soldiers’ belief in the righteousness of their mission civilisatrice was challenged, leading to confusion and discomfort that sometimes morphed into extreme cruelty. Indeed, “the hostility and brutality … have been shocking” (Dijkstra et al., Citation2022, p. 464), yet they are typical for imperial wars. This is especially the case when soldiers deploy to a foreign country to “rescue” its “backwards” inhabitants only to find out that the “natives” were managing fine on their own. For example, Canadian peacekeepers arriving in Somalia in 1992 to fix that “failed state” did not encounter famine and lawlessness, the purported reasons for the intervention, in their region of deployment. The local population did not welcome the peacekeepers with open arms but remained apprehensive and focused on their own survival. As frustration mounted among Canadians peacekeepers, several of them killed an unarmed Somali over petty theft and tortured another Somali teenager to death (Razack, Citation2004). Similarly, when Russian soldiers invaded in February 2022, Ukrainian “natives” were not only ungrateful—in fact, defiant—but also not backwards at all. The ensuing frustration among Russian troops contributed to the war crimes, which the mainstream IR literature would struggle to explain as they detracted from military effectiveness and ruined what was left of Russia’s image.

Empirical lenses

Since the number of scholars who studied Russia far exceeded those who studied Ukraine, it contributed to the lack of empirical knowledge, especially of the relations between Ukraine and Russia.Footnote⁶ Many people who came to Moscow or St. Petersburg from outside the region for journalistic or academic research spent time among Russian elites who seemed moderate and sensible. Moscow or St. Petersburg were exotic enough to justify extended stays but not genuinely dangerous. The jokes about Ukrainians seemed innocuous, even if in bad taste, and the mistreatment of Central Asian migrants did not appear that different from what minorities experienced in many Western democracies.

If the invasion did happen, many observers thought, Putin would struggle to hold on to power as elites and eventually the population would turn against the war. By contrast, many specialists on or from the CEE doubted that Putin’s departure would mean an end of the subjugation and denigration of Ukrainians (Hendl, Citation2022). Thinking about the invasion as “Putin’s war” offered a tantalizingly easy solution: a change of leadership in Russia would mean the end of aggressive policies (see also McGlynn, Citation2023). This narrative of potential redemption was much more alluring than the reality of a 140-million nation where a large proportion of the population held supremacists views of neighboring nations. This does not mean that those views are immutable. However, they took a long time to construct and might take a long time to dismantle through reparations, trials, changes to the curricula, and societal debates about centuries of Russian imperialism.

While some members of Russia’s political, artistic, and academic elites expressed disapproved of the full-scale invasion, in the years preceding the war, they participated in discourses that denigrated Ukrainians. For instance, several months before the annexation of Crimea, Ivan Urgant—a Russian media personality whose humor is considered “intellectual” and “sophisticated” and who declared to be “against the war” in 2022—joked at a culinary show about chopping greens “like a Red [Army] Commissar chopped residents of a Ukrainian village” (as cited in Minchenia et al., Citation2018, p. 224). While this joke could be dismissed as simply provocative, it needs to be placed in the context of the absence of renunciation of, and accountability for, Soviet crimes against Ukraine, including Holodomor.

A foreign scholar who used to teach in Moscow noticed that before February 2022, Russian academic circles remained relatively free, but opinions about Ukraine “were myopic and lacking in empathy” (Đokić, Citation2023, para. 22), suggesting that at least then, censorship was not the reason for the perpetuation of the negative stereotypes about Ukraine and Ukrainians. As McGlynn’s (Citation2023, p. 12) friend confessed to her, for most Russians, it was natural to “care more about a Pushkin statue than a dead Ukrainian child.” The privileging of imperial culture above the lives of people it framed as inferior and therefore disposable paved the way for a situation when the war crimes against Ukrainians did not dent the support for the war: instead, some Russian social media users praised them (Garner, Citation2022).

In trying to understand why the reality of Russian imperialism was ignored for so long, Ukrainian writer Zabuzhko (Citation2023, para. 5) wondered whether it was “a case of latent imperialistic solidarity” among great powers. Indeed, Russia’s behavior in Ukraine holds an uncomfortable mirror to Western Europe’s relatively recent colonial past, yet the fact that it is Western Europe’s past should not dilute the attention to Russia’s violent present.