Vladimir V. Putin likes to appeal to history as the highest authority to “understand the present and look to the future.” What Putin is actually doing is invoking a fabricated and distorted history, a series of generated myths about the past.
He has made it very clear in different writings, speeches and statements: Ukraine has no historical right to be independent: “Modern Ukraine was created entirely by Russia or, to be more precise, by Bolshevik and communist Russia.”
in your article On the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians, published on July 12, 2021, recalled the “crucial moments” of that path shared by Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians as descendants of “ancient Rus”, the “greatest” European state in the 10th century, united by a language, economic ties, the rule of the princes of the Rurik dynasty and the Orthodox faith. “Our kinship”, he concludes at the end of that writing, “has been transmitted from generation to generation. It is in the hearts and memories of people living in modern Russia and Ukraine, in the blood ties that bind millions of our families. Together we have always been and will be many times stronger and more successful. Because we are one people”.
Putin plays with the concept of “historical unity” to show that the meaning of history has always moved in that direction, from the mythical origins in the Middle Ages to the present day. In the face of all the unfortunate and tragic attempts to “separate the parts of what is essentially the same historical and spiritual space,” Putin wants to become the czar of a rebuilt Russian empire. By denying the existence of an independent state, Putin spreads an imperialist sentiment, combined with militarism and ethnonationalism, which serves as a justifying argument for his revenge obsessions.
There is nothing extraordinary in remembering and celebrating the common origins of an invented nation, the heroic struggles or the military triumphs. Dictators and many leaders of democratic states have done it and are doing it. But by putting those ideas into practice with lethal weapons, the invasion and the war have just unleashed an orgy of violence that is going to have devastating effects.
It is a war on European territory that challenges the European Union, the United States and NATO. The main victims are already the Ukrainian citizens who are going to live stories of death, assassination, persecution, massacres, expulsions and forced and massive displacement of the population. After the two world wars of the 20th century, the Spanish civil war and the war in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, millions of refugees and political exiles fleeing harassment and repression had to leave their homes. Women and children suffered atrocities not often found in history books, focused on combatants and male accounts.
A nuclear-armed tyrant, who occupied three Ukrainian provinces years ago, suppresses opposition movements in Russia, censors the media and denies individual rights, is going to liquidate the independence of a nation of 44 million of inhabitants after several weeks of lies and propaganda and gathering tens of thousands of soldiers on the Ukrainian border.
The Ukrainian resistance will be crushed. Putin has been able to rebuild a powerful army thanks to the wealth of Russia’s natural resources and the vast fortunes amassed from black money abroad by the vast group of corrupt oligarchs who surround him and help him wield his power. Some of the most powerful European countries depend on Russian gas imports.
Putin has caused a crisis in the international system, in the established order and in the economy. It has set in motion what was the norm for dictators in Europe between 1922 and 1945: considering war as an acceptable option in foreign policy, achieving its objectives with unilateral military actions, placing politicians educated in dialogue and education and highlight the inability of democracies to counter the instruments of terror.
The invasion and the war have already begun. If it continues for a long time, gas and oil prices skyrocket and product shortages become news, Putin will end up dividing the European Union, where there are already fractures when it comes to deciding the type of sanctions: Italy wants to exempt to the luxury sector so that the Russian oligarchs can continue buying Gucci bags, Belgium to the diamond sector, Austria to the banking sector and Germany to the energy sector.
Now it is necessary to know how far the catalog of human destruction derived from that brutal decision reaches.
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