The Long War #35
Understanding how Russia sees Ukrainian identity, ecological damage & bird watching in Ukraine, the tensions behind mobilization and more
KYIV—Vladimir Putin’s rambling interview with Tucker Carlson on February 8 rekindled a question I have been asking myself several times over the past years: how can Vladimir Putin (and the Russian state as a whole) deny Ukraine’s existence as a sovereign nation, while also talking about Ukrainians and Russians as two brotherly but, by definition, separate people? How can he talk about Ukrainians and Russians as being different people and say at the same time they’re just one people?
It is to me a question with very immediate implications—understanding how Vladimir Putin and the people who make up the Russian state see Ukrainian identity can help us understand how Russia is fighting this war, and how it is acting in the Ukrainian territories it occupies. It is crucial to the discussion of whether Russia’s actions in Ukraine fall under the umbrella of crimes against humanity or even genocide. It is, finally, important to understand Russian policies that may look puzzling at first—should local authorities in Russian-occupied regions allowing Ukrainian-language classes be seen as a purely pragmatic move, or is there more to it?
The easy answer to the question of how Putin can deny Ukraine’s existence while still referring to Ukrainians is that it is a distinction without a difference: Putin does not conceive of Ukrainians as a different people, and mentions “Ukrainians” only to better that it is a separate identity. A slightly better explanation is that Russia does recognize a Ukrainian identity, but simply sees it as something artificially created by Russia’s enemies to weaken Moscow.
This latter explanation is largely true, but I do want to add one layer of nuance that matters when we’re talking about Russia’s actions in occupied Ukrainian regions: I think Russia is fine with Ukrainian identity as a folklore identity, and nothing more. It is fine with the quirky language, with the Cossack tales, the traditions, the varenyky. It doesn’t have any issues with the backward, Ukrainian-speaking peasant from the Kherson region. It is fine with that, as long as it doesn’t take any overtly political form, as long as that folkloric identity isn’t perceived by the Ukrainians themselves as something conscious and coherent—a form of Ukrainian identity that is seen as inherently targeted at Russia. That’s why the issue of language is so tricky. In a way, occupation authorities probably don’t mind if someone is speaking Ukrainian—but will react forcefully if that person is fully conscious (or, worse, proud) of speaking Ukrainian.
Something to read
Foreign Policy just published a story I wrote about Ukraine’s dilemma when it comes to its military: Ukraine needs more men, but mobilization is unpopular while exhausted soldiers are asking for a way out. It’s one of those issues with no easy solution, but it is also an issue that will only become more prominent in the coming months—Zelensky sent today to the parliament a bill that would allow for the demobilization of conscripts during martial law.
Conflict and Environment Observatory (in English & Ukrainian) | Ukraine conflict environmental briefing | January
An extensive and somber briefing on the ecological damage caused by the past two years (and the eight years before that) of war. There’s the obvious—the minefields, the devastation caused by the Khakovka dam explosion—and the more sneaky: conservation programs stopped by the war, experts displaced or mobilized into the military. There is also a more specific case study of the militarization by Russia of Dzharylhach, an island and natural park 60 kilometers south of Kherson, and the consequences for the local environment. How the war has affected nature and the people protecting it is still an underreported topic I think—the Kyiv Independent also published a really cool story about Ukrainian bird watchers during the war, which touches on similar themes.
Babel (in Ukrainian) | In Kosmach, the village that does not want to send its people to the front | February 12
A detailed report about a story that made the headlines all over Ukraine: a woman driving through a quaint village in the Carpathians mountains was stopped and beaten by a group of locals, who feared (wrongly) she had been sent by the military commissariat to conscript more men into the military. It’s a story that, on the one hand, is unusual—I am not aware of other such cases of group violence in the context of mobilization, hence why the event drew so much attention in Ukraine.
But it absolutely does reflect widespread tensions and fears, something I’ve witnessed firsthand these past few weeks by working on stories that took me through several villages in the Poltava and Cherkasy regions. The anxiety that locals experience seeing the villages emptied of their men is almost systematically combined with the perception that villages and small towns are being disproportionally targeted by the mobilized effort.
London Review of Books | Two Armies in One—James Meek on the Russians in Ukraine | February 22
An excellent piece worth reading in full, but there’s one sentence in particular I wanted to highlight: “Putin has been using armed force to try to change Ukraine’s borders since 2014, without ever saying exactly what he wants: he has never put terms to Ukraine that it could satisfy without falling into subservience, and that includes the unworkable Minsk Accords.”
It’s a crucial point that I think is often omitted from the conversation about the Minsk Agreements, and one that reminded me of one of the best pieces published on the topic, an interview of German diplomat Wolfgang Sporrer published by Jacobin. The main reason the Minsk Agreements failed, Sporrer astutely points out, is that Russia always refused to admit what the conflict was really about. “What this conflict is fundamentally about is Russia wanting to exert influence over the domestic and foreign policy orientation of the government in Kyiv. In the Minsk agreement, however, this fiction of an ethnic conflict was constructed instead, although Russia actually had no particular interest in obtaining any autonomy rights for eastern Ukraine, for Russian-speaking or ethnically Russian Ukrainian citizens.”
Suspilne (in Ukrainian) | In Transcarpathia, the birth rate fell by 40% last year | February 16
This isn’t a long piece about an unexpected or underreported story, just a headline that stopped me dead in my tracks. And there isn’t much more to it than this stunning and depressing headline: “In 2023, 9,500 children were born in the region against 14,000 back in 2017”. The number of marriages also decreased by 30%.
ICYMI
Stories from legacy Western media published these past 24 hours
The Times (on Youtube) / Meet the Russians fighting for Ukraine
The Wall Street Journal / A Ukrainian Teen’s Dark Transformation Into Russian Propaganda Star
Al Jazeera / ‘Tired not demoralised’: Ukraine’s tech workers fight growing war fatigue
Politico / Why the West is losing Ukraine
Reuters / Ukraine outnumbered, outgunned, ground down by relentless Russia
The New York Times / Russian Forces Press On With Attacks in Southern Ukraine
The Guardian (Documentary) / Ukrainian Factory: two years of war for a Mykolaiv key worker
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