Putin won’t be stopped in Ukraine until we understand his 1,000-year-old obsession

 Last month Vladimir Putin had a rare conversation with the leaders of Nato members Finland and Norway, countries whose borders with Russia run for nearly 1,000 miles.

The Russian leader is reported to have spent most of the call lecturing Alexander Stubb, the Finnish president, and Jonas Gahr Store, the Norwegian prime minister, about “medieval Slavic history” and, according to a source, “the initial reasons” for his attack on Ukraine. It is not the first time that Putin has deployed medieval history to justify his war

On July 12, 2021, he published a nearly 7,000-word diatribe titled “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians”. At its heart was the unconscionable resistance of Ukrainians (in Putin’s mind) to subjection by Moscow. Eight months later, this mindset found expression in the devastating Russian invasion.

Putin wrote in that diatribe: “Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians are all descendants of Ancient Rus, which was the largest state in Europe. Slavic and other tribes… were bound together by one language… economic ties, the rule of the princes of the Rurik dynasty, and – after the baptism of Rus – the Orthodox faith.

“The throne of Kiev held a dominant position in Ancient Rus… The Tale of Bygone Years captured for posterity the words of Oleg the Prophet about Kiev: ‘Let it be the mother of all Russian cities.’”

The essay is revealing not simply because it telegraphed Russian imperialism, but because its argument rests not on modern geopolitics, control of resources or the legacy of Soviet-era political experiments, but on the remote early medieval world of the ninth and tenth centuries.

Putin seeks to establish the essential “national” unity of the eastern Slavic world and the implacable hostility of “the West” to it. The Russian Federation is, he believes, the only natural and legitimate vehicle for said unity.

At first glance, Putin’s account contains a kernel of uncontroversial historical explanation. Rus was, indeed, the territorial precursor to Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Vladimir the Great’s conversion to Christianity in 988 did shape eastern Europe’s cultural trajectory

Kyiv, then as now, loomed large as the symbolic heart of that lost world. But to take Putin’s account at face value is to miss its deft sophistry: the escalation of historical connection into inevitability, and the relegation of difference to subordinate status.

If Russia was vast, unified, Slavic, Russian-speaking and Orthodox at its birth, Putin’s logic runs, it should still be so now. Any deviation is an aberration. And if Kyiv is the heart of Rus, Kyiv should be at Russia’s heart. There can be no appeal to a higher authority. The birth certificate has been produced, there in black and white.

A dagger to the narrative

None of these claims withstand scrutiny. The Rus polity initially developed as commercial infrastructure for traders overwhelmingly of Scandinavian origin. They opened up eastern Europe’s river systems, connecting the Baltic to the Black and Caspian seas.

Furs, wax, timber, honey, amber and, above all, enslaved people from western Europe and the Baltic rim were exchanged in the markets of Byzantium and the Muslim world. Vast quantities of silver flowed north in exchange.

This commerce energised a diverse territory of Finnic, Baltic and Slavic peoples, alongside nomadic peoples of the southern and eastern steppes. It encompassed pagans, Muslims, Jews and Christians speaking a babel of tongues. “Old Russian” – or more neutrally, Old East Slavic – developed late and was initially geographically limited.

The Vikings who came to dominate arrived speaking Old Norse; they retained both their distinctive militarised culture and their historic ties to Scandinavia into the mid-eleventh century.

Vladimir the Great’s conversion was epoch-defining, even if the account in The Tale of Bygone Years (the 12th-century chronicle of Kyivan Rus) is post hoc propaganda. By adopting the religion of the great power to the south – the Greek-speaking Byzantine Empire – Vladimir set the conditions for growing cultural alienation from western Europe.

In the decades that followed, the Scandinavian world also adopted Christianity. But for them, the milieu in which they mostly operated meant that their Christianity would be Latin, not Greek, and would look to Rome, not Constantinople, for cultural and religious direction.

By the 13th century, these identities had hardened. The sack of Constantinople in 1204 by a western crusading army was a watershed. Meanwhile, in the far north, economic competition between Sweden and Novgorod acquired a religious character as rival missions sought to bring the pagans of Tavastia and Karelia under their patrons’ dominion.

In 1240, a Swedish army was defeated on the Neva by Prince Alexander Yaroslavich, later celebrated as Alexander “Nevsky” in honour of his victory and canonised by the Orthodox Church.

The West had become an alien antagonist sundered by confessional difference, economic competition and a deepening history of mutual hostility. A frontier eventually formed through eastern Finland and along the River Narva in Estonia, pre-figuring today’s north-eastern boundary between Russia and Nato.

Its medieval origins remain politically potent. In 2021, Putin and Patriarch Kirill – the head of the Rusian Orthodox Church – attended the unveiling of an elaborate memorial to Nevsky near Pskov in western Russia, close to the border with Estonia. The subtext needed little explanation.

Yet something else happened in 1240 that was even more consequential. This was the year that the Mongol army of Batu Khan swept through southern Rūs and sacked Kyiv, shattering the old Kyivan political order.

For 240 years, northern cities paid obeisance to Mongol khans, while much of the old Rus lands in the west and south were incorporated into Catholic Poland-Lithuania. Kyiv had never been subject to Moscow.

But in 1480, Ivan III, prince of Muscovy, faced down the Horde at the Ugra river and refused to pay tribute. With renewed confidence, he would go on to promote Moscow as the heir to Kyiv and the natural defender of Orthodox Christianity.

Ivan’s narrative has shaped the attitudes of Putin and other Russian nationalists ever since, and every move Kyiv makes towards the West is a dagger to it. An overture to the EU, democratic reform, Nato membership, Ukrainian Orthodox autonomy from the Moscow patriarchate, or rejection of Russian as an official language can all be felt as betrayals of Russia’s very essence – a denial of its identity, its terms of existence.