Notes

Magliabechi’s: Putin’s War on Ukraine. On August 6, when Ukraine launched its incursion into the Kursk region, it was the first time Russia had been invaded since the Second World War—and a dramatic twist in the current war. Russia’s President Vladimir Putin had been hoping to conquer Ukrainian territory, not lose Russian territory. How did he get here?

As Anatol Lieven noted in 2022, three months after Russia invaded Ukraine, Putin believed that the Russian and Ukrainian peoples were bound together historically in a common, great civilization. The Ukrainian state may not have wanted to see their country under Russian rule; but the Ukrainian state, in Putin’s view, was after all run by a fascist clique that had little to do with everyday Ukrainians. So why wouldn’t everyday Ukrainians greet the Russian army with flowers?

Samuel Ramani’s new book, Putin’s War on Ukraine: Russia’s Campaign for Global Counter-Revolution, takes a complementary view: Putin’s fundamental motivation, Ramani says, was to counter the “color revolutions” in neighboring countries. If Putin could extend Russian hegemony over Ukraine, he could not only reverse its “Euromaidan” uprising of 2014 but ultimately undo its “Orange Revolution” of 2004, Georgia’s “Rose Revolution” of 2003, and the entire pattern of nationalist-democratic revolutions in the region.

Putin’s counter-revolutionary stance is popular in Russia, Ramani says, because it has “historical legitimacy”—a broad resonance with Russians’s common sense of their country’s historical identity.

In the nineteenth century, Tsar Alexander I earned the moniker “Policeman of Europe” for combating revolutionary forces and mores. In the twentieth, the Soviet Union—far from exporting revolution—was a force of reaction through the Warsaw Pact: The Soviets crushed popular uprisings in East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, and Czechoslovakia in 1968. That counter-revolutionary tradition survived the fall of the U.S.S.R., too: During the constitutional crisis of 1993, Russia’s acting prime minister, Yegor Gaidar, warned that ongoing unrest in the streets would turn Russia into a “huge concentration camp.”

Of course, the counter-revolutionary tradition would be nothing without another of Russia’s traditions: the revolutionary tradition. That may be less visible in Russia at the moment, but Putin evidently doesn’t like seeing it among his neighbors.

—Gustav Jönsson