The director of the CIA, William Burns, collects in his memoirs a conversation with President Vladimir Putin in 2008, when he was the United States ambassador in Moscow, in which Ukraine appears portrayed as an impossible political reality in the eyes of Russian nationalism. “Doesn’t your government know that Ukraine is politically unstable and immature and that NATO is very divisive there?” Putin told him, adding: “Don’t you know that Ukraine isn’t even a real country? One part is really from Eastern Europe and another part is really Russian.” It was in 2008 when NATO opened the door to the future entry of Ukraine and Georgiaand that was the year of the segregation of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, possible thanks to the intervention of the Russian Army.
Putin’s source of inspiration was then and is now the Pan-Russian nationalism, encouraged from the Tsar’s court since at least the mid-19th century. Regardless of the reasons of a strategic nature that have led the Kremlin to unleash the Ukrainian tragedy, in the President’s words he encourages the conviction that the so-called European Russia – from the Urals to the West – is only a geographical reality, but not a political and cultural. And if things are like this, to understand that Ukraine is a national artifice is a relatively easy step to take; deny the possibility of Ukraine being a state does not entail greater difficulty.
The second historical factor, which Putin did not mention in the interview with Burns, is contained in a double question for a better understanding of Russian identity: if Russia is not part of the fabric of European culture, which one is it part of? What weighs more in the construction of the Russian identity: the European ingredients or the Asian ones? Or is it possible that the enigma is not such, is it possible that Russia is a Eurasian multicultural singularity in its capacity as a state-continent? If this last possibility is taken for granted, it turns out that the federalizing purpose of Lenin and, on the other hand, the forced marches Russification of the Soviet space, activated by Stalinwhich made possible a unitary fiction that collapsed when the USSR disappeared.
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Putin’s route goes down the path of tsarist nationalism and Stalinist unitarism. The complement of an emotional nature is the memory of the Soviet sacrifice during World War II –no less than 26 million dead–, something that is etched in the Russian soul and that explains the emotional force that the description of neo-Nazi applied by Putin to the Ukrainian government can have. By resorting to it, he seeks a form of supervening legitimation by presenting the battle of the present as a moral duty with the dead of the past. It’s all propaganda, but it’s a fairly effective strategy within a society where the media is a simple sounding board for the primary nationalism exhibited by power.
In that frame of reference to justify recourse to war there is not a trace of ‘toská’, that elusive Russian feeling or melancholy that there is no way to translate and that Olga Merino describes so well in ‘Cinco Invierno’. The attack is not the rescue mission of a Russian minority; the armored vehicles have not started moving out of a “spiritual feeling”, as Nabokov would say. Behind that war there is only the will to overturn the ‘status quo’ in Europe, the operation being financed with the 600,000 million in foreign currency hoarded by Russia with the sale of gas and oil. The rest is just leaf litter.