Russian Foreign Policy is Broken

Published on 21st September 2022

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has been a moment of dawning realisation for Europe. It has shattered the illusion of a largely comfortable peace in the post-Cold War landscape, and has shattered the myth that Russia no longer posed a threat to the collective security of the continent. Many have offered their opinions on how the West should re-evaluate its foreign policy in light of Russia’s resurgence as a force of coercion, but very little has been said about Russia’s own trajectory as a global actor. To a generation that has become accustomed to relative stability, the return of Russian might threatens to usher in another period of hostility. In reality, Russia is fighting an imperialist retreat, a war in which it is destined to lose.

The problem with the current discourse around Russia’s bitter relationship with Ukraine is the rigid periodisation of history, based upon the traditional historical framework of international politics and superpower tensions. This dictates that the end of the cold war established a global order which created the conditions for the war in Ukraine, whether it comes from those who blame NATO or those who point out Russia’s determination to reestablish itself as a powerful force on the world stage. Doing so places a regional conflict within the broad context of global interests, which is too often misattributed as the sole cause of the problem. These factors provide some explanation for the motivations behind the different actors in this crisis, but it is very limited in understanding the origins of the conflict itself. In order to understand these origins, there must be a willingness to look beyond this framework and explore the continuities of history.

The beginning of Russia and Ukraine’s relationship was the opposite of what it is today. After rebelling against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth the Ukrainian Cossacks agreed to bring their lands, which make up most of modern Ukraine, under the protection of Russia at the Pereiaslav Agreement in 1654. Although this act of unity is celebrated to this day by Russians, it did not bind these two peoples together in harmonious unification. Ukrainian lands still maintained their own political and cultural autonomy; with the continued use of the Ukrainian language, the administration of some areas under the Ruthenian Uniate Church, and Cossacks resisting enserfment by Russia’s feudal system.

Although the Ukrainians managed to keep this autonomy at first, Russia’s tolerance towards the people they called ‘Little Russians’ didn’t last long. Under the rule of Catherine the Great in the late eighteenth century, all of Ukraine was swallowed into the Russian Empire. She viewed Ukrainians as ‘backwards’ people and set about civilising them “so that they should cease looking like wolves to the forest,” in her own words. Her imperialist ambitions set in motion a process of Russification in the Ukrainian lands, which began with her dismantling all political autonomy by liquidating the political administrations of the Cossacks and implementing her own political administration; which for a time was called Novorossiya, or ‘New Russia’. Russian Prince Potemkin, who Catherine made Governor-General of Ukraine’s Southern lands, wrote that the lands had been transformed from “uninhabited steppes into a garden of abundance, from a lair of beasts to a pleasing refuge for people from all countries.” Catherine’s triumphant annexation of Crimea led to the emigration of native Crimean Tatars and an influx of Russian and German settlers — a whitewashing of the peninsula’s history.

Under Russian control, new cities were established and huge amounts of land were given out to the Russian nobility, who began to enserf the Ukrainian peasantry. This paved the way for millions of Russians to migrate to Ukraine in the nineteenth century. Many settled in cities, and by the end of the century Russians outnumbered Ukrainians in the urban population. Russians took up skilled jobs and controlled many economic industries. In conjunction with this, Ukrainian culture was washed away. The Ukrainian language was banned from schools and public life and Ruthenian Churches were forcefully converted to Eastern Orthodoxy. Ukraine’s destiny was dramatically, and artificially, altered by the repressive expansion of the Russian Empire.

Just like the British Empire in India, the Spanish in the Americas, the French in North Africa, the Russian Empire saw Ukraine’s inhabitants as wild and uncivilised, and justified colonisation as an implementation of their ‘superior’ way of living. This is why so many academic narratives on this conflict are problematic. By lamenting NATO and arguing that we need to compromise with Russia, it is implied that Russia has legitimate interests that it is right to protect. In reality, however, these interests are based upon Russia’s imperialist past, and its continued interference in Ukraine’s sovereignty is a continuation of that imperialism.

The problem with arguing that the West should not interfere in Ukraine to avoid provoking Russia is that avoidance inherently interferes with Ukraine’s sovereignty in a post-imperialist world. There are some amongst the Western intellectual class who are trying to ‘big brain’ the Ukrainian conflict in an attempt to outsmart the political consensus. Their arguments, however, are predicated upon the traditional narrative that defines history as a competition between superpowers, in which smaller states caught in between are simply pawns to be bartered away. It reinforces a Cold War hierarchy between Westerners and Eastern Europeans, assuming that Eastern European states do not have control over their own future, and believing that it’s best for them to be negotiated between two spheres of influence. Supporting Ukraine is about helping it finally realise its independence after centuries of Russian hegemony and having the right, moral and spiritual, to choose its own destiny.

Ukraine was shaped by a brutal programme of repression, but despite the attempts of numerous Russian rulers, Ukraine could not be Russified. Ukrainian identity not only survived but burgeoned under Russian control, creating an existential crisis for Russia which it has failed to solve over two centuries. This existential crisis is not only limited to Ukraine, but to many of the states that Russia conquered and colonised. It is one of borders and identity in a post-imperialist world which is unique as it was binded by its geography. How do you draw the boundaries of a polyethnic empire? Where does one nation end and another begin when peoples have become entangled by settlement and emigration? These are questions which now preoccupy a once-ascendent nation, with recent cases such as Crimea with Ukraine, Transnistria with Moldovia and South Ossetia with Georgia. These disputes symbolise how far Russia has fallen, a far cry from their expansive forays which reached the borders of Germany and Sweden to the West, stretched to the Korean peninsula to the East, and travelled through the mountain ranges of Central Asia. Russia is fighting a retreat, living in denial of its fateful cripplement, and its war in Ukraine is its latest and bloodiest instalment of this.

Consistent in the responses of Russian leaders to the nationalities problem is repression. Policies to Russify ethnic minorities continued throughout the Tsarist period, and under Soviet rule blanket bans on political freedoms and writings struck down upon defiant national activists. This repression took on a malignant form in Ukraine through forced deportations and population transfers. In the early twentieth century Russia transferred 1.6 million Ukrainian peasants to Kazakhstan and Siberia to settle on uninhabited territories. Under Stalin, dekulakisation saw hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians forcefully deported. Stalin went on to deport hundreds of thousands of Crimean Tatars to Central Asia, all but wiping out the indigenious population from their homeland.

A fundamental shift in Russian policy towards ethnic minorities came from the Bolshevik revolution. Lenin championed a new nationalities policy which pledged to give ethnic minorities the right to self-determination. In reality this policy came with the customary conditions. Lenin’s belief was that all peoples would inevitably unify, not under the banner of Russian identity but under Communist ideology, and that there would be no appetite amongst the proletariat for national self-determination. Lenin’s nationalities policy therefore became confused as he sought to dispel ‘bourgeois’ nationalist movements whilst also having to accept the political realities the new Soviet state faced. As a result he simultaneously seized and relinquished control in different parts of the Russian Empire, creating a complex patchwork of different states with unresolved ethnic boundaries. Putin lamented Lenin’s nationalities policy in his pre-invasion speech. To him, Lenin fostered the creation of this existential crisis by allowing these national identities to form. Really, he’s angry at Lenin for muddling what seeming order there was on Russia’s peripheries, but Putin’s problems started well before Lenin was even born. They were started by the self-indulgent interests of invulnerable rulers, too preoccupied with their own legacy to consider the ramifications of their greed.

They are ramifications that Russia is still trying to untangle today. When the Soviet Union collapsed, 90% voted for Ukraine’s independence, including millions of Russian-speakers who would become a minority in the new nation. Yet these people share cultural and historical roots with Russia, so how would Russia deal with part of their population living on the other side of their own border? When the Maidan Revolution occurred in 2014, and the Russian sympathetic government in Ukraine was ousted from power, Putin responded with vengeance. He seized control of Crimea and took the opportunity to stir up hostility into conflict in the Donbass region, destroying good relations between the nations. Putin was determined to put Russia’s imperialist legacy back on the map, and his current invasion of Ukraine shows how far he is willing to go. Driven by the bitterness of Russia’s lost might, he has failed to learn from the regressive policies of his predecessors that have only weakened Russia’s standing. He is continuing a war which is rigged against Russia, for their participation in it only inflicts more damage upon themselves.

Fear of Russian aggression has driven Poland, the Baltic States and Romania into the shelter of NATO’s borders, and now Finland has reached the same conclusion. Relations with Georgia and Azerbaijan have been severed by conflict. Russia has in one way or another established a cooperative post-imperial relationship with the Central Asian states as well as Armenia and Belarus, but this is punitive compared to the vast sphere of influence it once commanded. Even this is under threat, however, with disputed election results in Belarus and economic protests in Kazakhstan bringing into question their future as Russian-aligned allies. And now Ukraine, what was once the crown jewel of Russia’s imperial treasures, has become their mortal enemy. Ukrainians, the majority of whom had a favourable view towards Russia even up until 2014, have now resolutely turned their backs on them, and it’s not as though Russian speakers in the Donbas have managed to find any resonance of Russian glory in 8 years of shell craters and unexploded rockets. It would have always been difficult for Russia to build a positive relationship with these new states in a post-imperialist environment, as many of their peoples remembered the brutality and repression of their history as colonies, but committing to a foreign policy of redeveloping relations in a mutual and constructive manner would have given Russia the opportunity to carve out a secure and influential place in the new world order. A path of diplomacy and compromise with its neighbours could have offered a more hopeful alternative to the shrivelled and embittered power that it is today.

Russian foreign policy is broken. Maybe even Russia is broken, for it was built upon expansion and a chauvinistic belief in its own triumphalism. Now that glory is gone, and in a grey post-industrial landscape it can only be found in flags, parades and daydreams of the past. When it comes to the periodisation of history, Russia has come full circle. In the words of Peter Zeihan, “Russia can expand, or Russia can die” was the philosophy of Catherine the Great, and Putin has taken this philosophy to heart. Indeed, Putin has such sentiment for Russia’s old philosophy that he has even imitated Catherine’s divide and conquer tactics. When Catherine executed her conquest of Poland, she employed the same hybrid warfare that Putin has used today, backing rebel militias and funding foreign politicians to destabilise any forces that stood in the way of their objectives. When Catherine moved her troops in, she justified it as a defence of Orthodox Christians, in the same way Putin did with ethnic Russians.

This perpetual desire to expand has become Russia’s tragic fallacy, however, as it has set the timer for its own destruction by creating an artificial empire sewn together through coercion, lies and genocide. Sustainability has never been at the forefront of the minds of Russia’s leaders, which is why in this war Russia clings onto its past by erecting Soviet flags and wearing the ribbon of St. George, whilst Ukraine has made the sunflower the symbol of its resistance, because Ukraine and its neighbouring allies see themselves heading to a future beyond where Russia has headed.

Cover Photo Credit: Artūras Kokorevas