Medieval Geopolitics Help Explain Modern Russia and Ukraine

Explanations for Russia's 2022 war in Ukraine often go back to 2014, when the Revolution of Dignity replaced Kremlin ally Viktor Yanukovych with a pro-Western government and Vladimir Putin responded by annexing Crimea and sponsoring separatist enclaves in Eastern Ukraine.

- By Cathy Young

Others focus on 2005 when the Orange Revolution first brought a Western-oriented leadership to power in Kyiv. Some analysts look further back to the messy history of Ukrainian nationalism in the 1930s and '40s, including the anti-Soviet fighters who collaborated with the Nazis.

But the history of Russia and Ukraine goes all the way back to the Middle Ages. It raises fascinating questions about the role that different visions of liberty and the state played in their development.

Russian and Ukrainian medieval and early modern history is sufficiently relevant that last summer, Putin produced an essay titled On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians, which was posted on the Kremlin website in Russian, Ukrainian, and English. Putin's main thesis was that Russians and Ukrainians are part of the same family, united by language and religion but separated in the 13th century when the northeastern part of Kievan Rus was conquered by Batu Khan's Golden Horde, while most of its southwest became part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. In later centuries, Putin wrote, the northeastern Russians freed themselves from the Horde's yoke, while their southwestern Orthodox Christian brethren found themselves increasingly subjugated to Polish-Lithuanian Catholic rule, which eventually pushed them to seek the Russian czar's patronage.

After that, in Putin's narrative, everything was basically fine until the czarist empire ended with the Russian Revolution. In 1921, the Soviet Union was born, and Ukraine became one of its republics after a brief period of independence, its territory padded with lands that had previously belonged to Russia. Seventy years later, the Soviet Union broke up, and Ukraine went off on its own, taking rightfully Russian lands with it.