An Etiological Investigation
Two years have passed since Russia invaded Eastern Ukraine, yet we are still debating why Russia invaded, what its ultimate goals might be, and how to end the conflict. This confusion, I submit, has much to do with our unwillingness to grasp the war’s true complexity, and can only be overcome if we recognize that it is a conflict with multiple levels.
The first level, familiar to many U.S. observers, is the strategic competition between Russia and the United States and the enduring conflict rooted in the question of to whose sphere of influence Ukraine belongs. Former U.S. Ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder confirmed that much in 2016, arguing that the heart of the problem is “nothing has happened to suggest that the Russians are any more willing to give us control of Ukraine than they were before.” (Curiously, this wording went unchallenged for six years but was changed to “give up control of Ukraine” in March 2022, after the original quote went viral).
At a second level, however, the war represents a conflict between Russian and Ukrainian elites over whether they are one people or two and whether their relations should be fundamentally friendly or antagonistic. In Russia, antagonism is bolstered by the fear that far-right nationalism in Ukraine, which has grown steadily in influence since 2014, is transforming Ukraine into “anti-Russia”. In Ukraine, antagonism is fueled by the nationalist fear that friendly relations with Russia will prevent the emergence of a Ukrainian national identity. As former Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko put it, “If Russians and Ukrainians are one people, then the Ukrainian people do not exist.”
Neither of these elites is monolithic, and each is threatened by extremist factions who reinforce their fears—creating a dialectic of insecurity between Russia and Ukraine that overshadows the long history these two countries share and prevents any meaningful dialogue.
Since the main source of these fears is the Ukrainian Far Right, we should try to define this term.
In Ukraine, the Far Right encompasses a broad spectrum of organizations that seek to reshape public awareness in a nationalistic, even totalistic, direction. In Ukraine, such groups often have civic as well as paramilitary branches that were created to defend Ukraine against all enemies, foreign and domestic. The Far Right regularly applies the “domestic enemy” label to Ukrainian citizens who do not share the goal of establishing what the nationalist partisans deem a truly Ukrainian Ukraine.
In their mind, a truly Ukrainian Ukraine is a monolith in which Ukrainian is the sole language of public discourse, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (and now the recently formed Orthodox Church of Ukraine) are preferred by the state, and all state institutions are committed to creating a society in which “Ukrainian values” dominate the political, social, and cultural landscape. In the words of Ukraine’s first language ombudsman, Tatyana Monakhova, the “dream” is to create “a powerful, homogeneous Ukrainian monolith—a society of the like-minded, who speak the state language, having no disagreements on major issues of state.”
Historically, the Far Right has gotten few votes outside of three far-western regions of Ukraine. Still, because it played such a crucial role in organizing paramilitary opposition to the Ukrainian government during the 2014 Maidan, it can now set de facto limits on the policies that elected officials can pursue.
These limits were clearly signaled to both President Poroshenko and President Zelensky. In August 2015, President Poroshenko was forced to scuttle the regional autonomy provisions of the Minsk-2 Accords, after a grenade killed three national guardsmen in front of the Ukrainian parliament. And, despite winning more than 70% of the vote for promising peace, Zelensky, as president, was forced to make an about-face after Far Right activists openly opposed his 2019 peace plan, attacked the Presidential office building, and threatened to hang him if he continued to negotiate with Russia.
The internal conflict in Ukraine over who gets to define what it means to be Ukrainian… language usage and cultural identity have long been instrumentalized by politicians to rally local political support.
This leads us to the third level of this conflict—the internal conflict in Ukraine over who gets to define what it means to be Ukrainian. Since the country is largely Ukrainian-speaking in the West, and Russian-speaking in the East and South, language usage and cultural identity have long been instrumentalized by politicians to rally local political support. Unfortunately, this politicization of identity simultaneously stirred up tensions between the regions and polarized the country.
Over the past 150 years, these tensions have led to major military hostilities four times: during the First and Second World Wars, after the 2014 Maidan, and now again from February 2022. It is worth noting that each time, violence within Ukraine has been stoked by external powers, who sought to exploit Ukraine’s status as a cleft country to tip the geopolitical scales of this faultline state in their favor.
Let us now reconsider the origins and causes of this war in light of the tri-level holistic analysis provided above.
Russo-Ukrainian War Re-examined
At the global geopolitical level, Russia believed that the U.S.-led West had broken its treaty obligation to accept the interlocking nature of the security concerns of all European nations, including Russia. According to Moscow, at the 1999 Istanbul Summit and reiterated at the Astana OSCE Summit in 2010, Western powers committed themselves to the creation of a “common and indivisible Euro-Atlantic and Eurasian security community stretching from Vancouver to Vladivostok.” In this context, Russia especially emphasizes Articles 8 and 9 of the Istanbul Document, which obliges participating states to “not strengthen their security at the expense of the security of other States.”
From Russia’s perspective, once Ukraine amended its constitution in February 2019 to make NATO membership mandatory, it effectively became a military ally to NATO even without formal NATO membership. For example, Kiev was already receiving NATO equipment and training and had signed a security agreement with the UK to build and supply two new naval bases in the Black Sea. Thus, under U.S. leadership, the West had violated its pledge toward a “common and indivisible Euro-Atlantic security” by intentionally excluding Russia while encroaching onto what was historically the Russian security sphere.
On the bilateral Russia-Ukraine level, meanwhile, by 2022 the eight-year conflict in Donbas had become a war of attrition against the country’s Russophile population. The Minsk-II Process, which Russia promoted for seven years, envisioned that the rebel region of Donbas would return to Ukraine in exchange for limited regional, cultural, and administrative autonomy. These accords, however, were explicitly rejected by senior Ukrainian government officials in 2021. Earlier that year, the country’s leading opposition politician, Viktor Medvedchuk, was arrested for treason, and all dissident (read: Russophile) television and media outlets were shut down. In essence, opposition to the agenda of the Far Right was now equated with being anti-Ukrainian and criminalized by the state.
Having lost all faith in the willingness of the West to act as an honest broker in the conflict, and in Ukraine’s willingness to reach a mutually acceptable compromise with its own rebel population, the Russian government thus concluded that it had no choice but to reset the agenda. It chose to do so through a brute force invasion of Ukraine, aimed at reversing the outcome of the 2014 Maidan.
Through regime change in Kiev—which it sometimes labeled “de-Nazification”—Moscow has sought to impose neutrality and federalism on Ukraine, and thereby reverse its disadvantages on all three levels of conflict simultaneously: 1) At the geopolitical level, to force the United States to heed Russia’s “red lines” and make Washington understand that ignoring them meant war. 2) At the bilateral level, to impose neutrality on Ukraine and effectively end NATO’s military plans for the country. And, 3) At the internal political level, to safeguard the well-being of the Russian-speaking populations by forcing an end to the ongoing war of attrition in Eastern Ukraine.
Initially, some in the Kremlin seem to have hoped that Russian military intervention might help to restore the balance of interests between Eastern and Western Ukraine to what they were before 2014, but failure to achieve a negotiated settlement early in the war now appears to have led to a more ambitious Russian agenda for Eastern Ukraine.
What Comes Next?
Two years into this war, many observers are convinced that Putin miscalculated—his strategic, bilateral, and internal political objectives for Ukraine now seem more distant than ever.
There can be no doubt that Russia is engaged in a much more costly conflict than it ever anticipated. Moreover, Western political leaders have been clear since the beginning that their ultimate objective is to extract such a high toll from Russia for its incursion that would make Moscow a defeated power, whose interests will be clearly circumscribed by the United States and China.
It will take many decades to see if this scenario plays out the way that Western leaders anticipate. For now, however, Russia appears to have regained the upper hand, halting the Ukrainian counteroffensive, outperforming all G7 economies in 2023 despite economic sanctions, and rapidly re-supplying its military—while Ukrainian and NATO forces are struggling to do the same. Most Western analysts now believe that the military situation will continue to worsen for Ukraine throughout 2024.
While it is true that battlefield results will determine what sort of peace settlement is eventually reached between Ukraine and Russia, given the multi-tiered nature of the conflict, this can only be the first step toward resolving it. What happens next will depend on how we address both the strategic problems and Ukraine’s domestic crisis, which will still linger even after the fighting ends.
Just as the strategic conflict between Russia and the West is certainly not going away, neither is the mutual fear between Russians and Ukrainians. The best hope of managing it lies in holding a pan-European security conference, aimed at reaching a broad accord on the principles of a new, stable post-war order.
In addition to NATO countries, such a conference will have to include Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia (and perhaps other former Soviet states as well).
While some might envision a new set of Helsinki Accords, modeled on the 1975 agreement, we should be thinking instead of an agreement commensurate with the expectations of a new, post-unipolar global order in which the BRICS+ powers are rapidly replacing the G7 as the primary locus of power. It would be very much in Europe’s long-term interest to conclude such a new, global “Treaty of Westphalia,” while it still has some geopolitical influence.
Meanwhile, the ethno-political conflict within Ukraine will almost certainly also persist. This is likely to be true regardless of where Ukraine’s borders are drawn, although it would be greatly intensified if Ukraine winds up regaining the territories that are currently under Russian control. It will only be defused when Ukrainians on all sides reach out to each other in compassion, and establish a new inclusive social compact in which there is a place for every Ukrainian, regardless of religion, ethnicity, creed, or language.
Resolving this internal political conflict in Ukraine is critical to bringing peace to it.
Reaching an internal accord among Ukrainians that replaces an exclusionary ethno-religious nationalism with an inclusive civic loyalty to pluralistic institutions and practices is the only way to remove the main cause of domestic tension that foreign actors have used to stoke conflict throughout the region.
But this cannot happen without dialogue, empathy, and mutual reconciliation among Ukrainians themselves.
In my book, The Tragedy of Ukraine, I suggest that a Truth and Reconciliation Commission could help start the process of social healing. And there is no universal formula for doing so. Among the four dozen such commissions that have been set up since the first one in Uganda in 1974, some were established after the end of hostilities, some during the peace negotiations, and still others as part of a power-sharing agreement.
In sum, there is a wealth of experience to which the Ukrainian government can turn, once it decides to prioritize healing the country’s social trauma and repairing its social fabric. Indeed, before his untimely death, Zelensky’s close friend and political confidante, Sergei Sivokho, was actively exploring these options.
The same, by the way, holds true for Russians. They too will need to find compassion and understanding in their hearts for those Ukrainians who do not see themselves as part of the “Russian World.” As long as such empathy continues to elude both Ukrainians and Russians, they will be easy prey for politicians, both foreign and domestic, who feed on their fears to fuel the tragic cycle of mutual recrimination.
Ultimately, as social critic Raymond Williams reminds us, there is only one way to break this tragic cycle. It is to embrace a “quite different peacemaking that would attempt to resolve rather than to cover the determining tragic disorder. Any such resolution would mean changing ourselves, in fundamental ways.”
Nicolai N. Petro is a Senior Washington Fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy, Professor of Political Science at the University of Rhode Island, and the author of The Tragedy of Ukraine: What Classical Greek Tragedy Can Teach Us About Conflict Resolution (De Gruyter, 2023).
