In dit licht bezien was het besluit van Boris Jeltsin in 1993 om met militaire middelen een einde te maken aan de onafhankelijke positie van het Russische parlement van grote betekenis voor de toekomstige verhoudingen tussen Rusland en Oekraïne. Hij voerde daarna een nieuwe grondwet in die de macht verplaatste naar de president. De presidentiële verkiezingen van 1996, die Jeltsin slechts met grote moeite van de Communisten wist te winnen door zich te verbinden aan de nieuwe ‘oligarchen’-klasse, zetten de ontwikkeling van Rusland naar een “‘managed’ or ‘sovereign’ democracy” kracht bij. (48) Aldus werd de weg geplaveid voor een terugkeer naar een autoritaire regeringsvorm.

More than eighteen months later, Ukraine is still fighting, and Plokhy’s blue blazer hangs on a hook behind his office door at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, where he serves as director, as well as Hrushevsky professor of Ukrainian history. His scholarly work covers much of modern and early modern Eastern Europe—particularly Russia, Belarus, Poland, and Lithuania—but his driving interest has always been Ukraine and its fascinating, tangled, often tormented history. The Russo-Ukrainian War, published in May, chronicles the first 10 months of the conflict. This was an unconventional undertaking: unlike the histories Plokhy is used to producing—written from a contemplative distance, after the explosions have ended and the outcomes are known—this book unfolds amid the chaos it seeks to explain, a chaos in which his friends and loved ones are caught up, with no clear ending in sight. The work is punctuated by grief. Was für eine Frechheit, reines imperiales Machtstreben als kurzfristige Militäroperation zu bezeichnen und die Benennung „Krieg“ im eigenen Land zu verbieten. Mit Serhii Plokhy, kommt endlich einmal ein ukrainischer Historiker zu Wort und sagt ganz im Gegenteil: „Die Invasion, die Putin als „Militäroperation“ bezeichnete und die nur ein paar Tage oder höchstens ein paar Wochen dauern sollte, wurde zum größten konventionellen Krieg in Europa seit 1945.“ Dort stehen wir nun also und hören, wie Plokhy erkärt, wie es dazu kommen konnte und wie alles hoffentlich enden wird. Gut?On the other hand, however, Russia’s aggression did help arm and train Ukraine, which built a formidable, if still inadequately armed, army. When all-out war came in 2022, Ukraine was in a much stronger position to defend itself, particularly once NATO and the European Union overcame their reluctance to adequately support one of the few democracies in the former Soviet space. So far, Russia’s brazen challenge to a US-led system has failed. Putin expected the west to grudgingly accept his pan-Ukraine takeover, as it did with Crimea. Instead, the invasion gave rise to an extraordinary anti-Kremlin coalition. It rebooted Nato, with Finland and Sweden joining, and confirmed Washington’s status as the world’s pre-eminent power. It saw Boris Johnson emerge as Kyiv’s mop-headed champion. In his 2021 Kremlin paper Putin claimed that the notion of Ukrainian independence was the result of a great geopolitical error by Vladimir Lenin when the USSR was created in 1922: Lenin insisted that the document creating the Soviet Union recognize the right of any SSR to secede from the USSR. That assurance – an inducement for individual states to agreed to become SSRs – was a "time bomb" in the creation of the USSR. That bomb went off when the USSR disbanded in 1991 and modern Ukraine – the successor to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic that initially joined the USSR – took the exit door following after a general referendum that included Crimea: Only a minority of Ukrainians were "Russian" but 82 percent voted to secede; a majority of Crimeans were Russian, but still 54 percent voted for secession. Had Lenin's "time bomb" in the USSR constitution been respected, modern Ukraine's independence would have been settled. Instead,Putin chose to treat the right to secede as an error requiring correction. A child on an evacuation train in Pokrovsk in eastern Ukraine, November 2022. Photograph: Anatolii Stepanov/AFP/Getty Images Plokhy prefers “Russo-Ukrainian war” to alternatives like “ Russia’s war against Ukraine”. While the latter expression is well suited to emphasising Russia’s culpability in this war, the former stresses that Ukraine is not just a victim of Russia, but its equal.

An authoritative history of Europe’s largest military conflict since World War II, from the New York Times best-selling author of The Gates of Europe. Ukraine nationalists can point to a number of instances when Russia said Ukraine was independent; their opponents can also find many instances when the answer was otherwise. It's impossible for a layman to determine when an assurance is credible and when it is not. I suspect that even experts on diplomacy and international relations have no clear criteria to measure credibility. Until that time when we can determine whether an assurance is in good faith, its a "She says – He says" dilemma. Poetins plan voor een door Rusland geleide Euraziatische Unie als een van de machtsblokken in de wereld lag in 2014 derhalve in duigen door toedoen van Oekraïne. De Russo-Oekraïense oorlog liet daarna niet lang meer op zich wachten: “Having failed to keep all of Ukraine in his orbit, Putin opted for the annexation of part of its territory to develop his Greater Russia project, meant to integrate territories with ethnic Russian majorities into the Russian Federation.” (111) In een tv-interview in april 2014 maakte Poetin duidelijk dat “Nieuw Rusland” in zijn ogen niet alleen de Krim maar ook de oblasten Kharkiv, Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, Mykolaiv en Odessa omvatte. Hij maakte gebruik van het machtsvacuüm dat in Oekraïne was ontstaan door het plotselinge vertrek van Janoekovitsj om zich dit deel van Oekraïne gewapenderhand toe te eigenen. Ook de Russische inlichtingendiensten waren belangrijke actoren in de militaire campagne van Moskou. “The importance of Russian agents in destabilizing the Donbas and turning it into a separatist enclave is hard to overestimate,” aldus Plokhy. (125) Plokhy schreibt in absolut verständlicher Form von dem Angriff Russlands auf die Ukraine, den in der Ukraine kaum einer für möglich gehalten hat, auch Wolodymyr Selenskyj nicht, obwohl mehrfach von den Amerikanern vorgewarnt. Plokhy erzählt von den ersten Tagen und Wochen, von dem Entsetzen, von den Gräueltaten der Russen, von ihren falschen Erwartungen, von dem Leiden der Bevölkerung, vom tapferen Widerstand des ukrainischen Militärs und Paramilitärs, von den Massenfluchten. The further from 1991 we move, the further the rift between an increasingly autocratic and neo-imperialist Russia and a democratic Ukraine, orienting itself away from the old imperial metropole and towards Europe and the Atlantic. The current war is one result of this rift: Russia tried to reassert its dominance and Ukraine resisted subjugation by the old imperial overlord. The Russo-Ukrainian war is a delayed war of Soviet succession.Opmerkelijk genoeg relativeerde de Oekraïense regering de Amerikaanse waarschuwingen in die periode steeds. De realiteit was dat Oekraïne weinig opschoot met de Amerikaanse waarschuwingen, die het vertrouwen in de Oekraïense economie schaadden. De positie van Kiev was in de kern: 'Give us weapons, not warnings.’ Historians, used to slow-burning research projects, have so far been absent from this developing historiography of the war. This is beginning to change, and it is only appropriate that the lead is taken by one of the most accomplished English-language historians of Ukraine, Harvard University’s Serhii Plokhy. In 2014, using a trove of newly declassified documents, Plokhy published a book called The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union. In it, he countered the usual triumphalist American interpretation of the Soviet collapse. What doomed the superpower wasn’t U.S. foreign policy, Plokhy argued, but its own political structures and ethnic fractures, its imperial weaknesses. It “died the death of an empire,” he wrote, “splitting along lines roughly defined by ethnic and linguistic territories.” As Ukraine and then the other republics broke away, Soviet (and American) leaders were reacting to events, not steering them. Man kann in einer Rezension das Gesamtgeschehen nicht zusammenfassen, dazu ist es zu komplex. Man kann höchstens das Faß anstechen. Fest steht, die Weltordnung ist dabei, sich zu verändern und wir sollten uns durch Zeitunglesen und Sachbuch so umfassend informieren wie möglich. Weil es uns alle angeht. Serhii Plokhy endet mit den Worten: „Unter enorm hohen Kosten und mit einem gewaltigen Blutzoll ihrer Bürger beendet die Ukraine die Ära russischer Dominanz in einem großen Teil Osteuropas und stellt Moskaus Anspruch auf die Vormacht im restlichen postsowjetischen Raum infrage.“ Wie konnte dies alles geschehen, dieser Brudermord? Wird doch von Putin, dem alleinigen Aggressor, die Ukraine häufig als Brudervolk benannt und die gemeinsame Geschichte betont; aber wiederum spricht Putin dem Land wiederholt die Berechtigung, ein eigenständiger Staat zu sein, ab. Nationalistische Bestrebungen gab es in der Ukraine aber von jeher, selbst damals, als die ukrainische Sprache verboten war und Veröffentlichungen in ukrainischer Sprache schwer bestraft wurden, wenn sie überhaupt möglich waren.