Why Russia’s oppression of Ukraine stretches back centuries
In the acknowledgements for his new book on Russia’s subjugation of Ukraine, historian Eugene Finkel credits not just the usual rollcall of researchers and editors, but a promising former student of his at John Hopkins University, Victor Muller Ferreira. A bright, diligent graduate, Muller Ferreira emailed Finkel in 2020 to ask for a recommendation for an internship at the International Criminal Court in the Hague. Finkel “happily” obliged. It was a whole two years later, in June 2022 – three months into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – that Muller Ferriera was unmasked as Sergei Cherkasov, a spy for Russia’s GRU military intelligence.
It horrified his old professor – not just because he’d vouched for him, but because it suggested Cherkasov’s handlers had known about the invasion for a long time. “Was the GRU trying to infiltrate the ICC in 2020 because Moscow was already planning a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, [or] at least strongly thinking about it?” Finkel writes. It’s easy to see why Cherkasov sought out Finkel for a reference: he’s Ukrainian-born, has written extensively on the Holocaust and was among the first scholars to argue that Moscow’s invasion met the legal definition of genocide.
Finkel’s new book, Intent to Destroy: Russia’s 200-year quest to dominate Ukraine, was written to “fight back” against Cherkasov’s deceit. It narrates Ukraine’s long and unhappy forced marriage to Russia, in which Moscow has been variously controlling partner, neighbour-from-hell and spurned lover – the madness of Putin’s “special military operation” being a final fit of murderous jealousy.
“Since the mid-19th century, dominating Ukraine and denying Ukrainians an independent identity, let alone a state, have been the cornerstone of imperial, Soviet, and, eventually, post-Soviet Russian policies,” Finkel writes. He adds: “Nothing scares a Russian autocrat more than a democratic and free Ukraine, because if Ukrainians can build a democracy, then the supposedly fraternal Russians might too.”
The rot, Finkel argues, goes back nearly 1,000 years, to when Kyiv, not Moscow, was the capital of the ancient state “Rus”. After Kyiv was destroyed by the Mongols, Moscow gained the upper hand, from then on viewing Ukraine as its backyard, be it as a wheat-growing breadbasket or buffer zone against Europe. The Czars curbed the publication of Ukrainian language books, and institutionalised Russian as the tongue of the educated elite. Crucially, the relationship also acquired a spiritual dimension. When the Crimean war prevented young Czarist nobles going on grand tours of Europe, they would travel around Ukraine instead, re-imagining it as a Slavic Rome.”In Russian travelogues of the era, Ukraine is often described as ‘Russian Italy’,” writes Finkel. “A land of antiquity and the cradle of Russia’s own civilisation.”
After the Soviet empire replaced the Czars, things improved at first. Lenin was happy to promote local languages and cultures as long as they championed Marxist ideology, calculating that to do so would also defang nationalist movements in the bloc’s republics. But that policy was reversed under Stalin, who felt that Ukrainianisation had become a movement “against Russians in general”. Stalin responded with the Holodomor, or “Death by Hunger” in 1932-1933, the Kremlin-orchestrated operation to dispossess Ukrainians of their land and grain. In the cities where educated Russophiles lived, food was kept available. But in rural areas, five million starved to death. Today, Ukrainians regard it as their genocide.
Under Khrushchev – who spent part of his boyhood in Ukraine – restrictions on Ukrainian language were eased once more. But Ukrainian national identity only really flourished following independence in 1991. That, though, pitted a new generation of Ukrainians with no attachment to the Soviet Union against throwbacks like Putin – inaugurated as Russia’s president in 2000 – who wanted it restored. While Finkel blames this neo-imperialism mainly on the “Red-Brown” alliance of Soviet nostalgics and Russian ultra-nationalists, he points out that Moscow’s intellectual class never really accepted loss of empire either. The writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, for example, railed against Ukraine’s independence, whinging that Russia “lost 12 million Russians and 23 million more Russian speakers”.
Finkel’s book is a well-written, accessible account of the Moscow-Kyiv dynamic, as well as a good general history of the region. He is as perceptive on Ukraine’s future as he is on its past, making a strong case for Kyiv’s Nato membership. The alternative, he warns, could be Ukraine becoming a “big Israel”, which will seek its own independent nuclear deterrent.
“The Israel model might unfortunately mean... a society where the memory of war and genocide is the key pillar of national identity,” he adds. “In this model, each threat and attack could trigger existential fears and drive violent overreaction.”
Cherkasov, the would-be Hague spy, was sentenced to 15 years in jail (now reduced to five). Finkel says that even if his former student one day reads the book he inspired, he doubts he will ever “understand the damage and injustice carried out by the state he serves”. For the rest of us, though, Intent to Destroy helps explain just why Putin has spilt so much blood on Ukraine’s soil.
Intent to Destroy is published by Basic at £25. To order your copy for £19.99, call 0330 173 0523 or visit Telegraph Books