Today, Western geopolitical discourse has come to completely ignore and deride the concept of ideology, or that nations and individuals can be motivated by non-material, non-security factors. Instead, in America and Europe, rationalistic and utilitarian concepts like economic interests, military projection, and balance of power are thought of as the only meaningful categories of inter-state conflict. It is this latter, ultimately myopic perspective which explains the Trump administration’s belief that a meaningful peace agreement with Russia is possible.
In Trump’s view — shared by some proponents of the realist school of international relations— diplomatic overtures offer a reasonable alternative to continuing a seemingly unwinnable war. In this scenario, Russia will be recognized as the de facto ruler of occupied Ukrainian territories in parts of Donetsk, as well as Kharkiv, Kherson, Luhansk, Mykolayiv, and Zaporizhzhya oblasts, permitting Vladimir Putin to secure his legacy as a wartime victor. Ukraine will cut its losses and arrest the downward spiral of bloodletting that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives and displaced 11 million citizens to date. America, as the broker of peace, gains access to Ukraine’s rich critical minerals, and the promise of potentially billions of dollars for American corporate interests.
The problem with this approach is not that Ukraine or Russia won’t formally agree to lay down arms. While Ukraine may not consent to any lasting agreement without stronger American or European security guarantees (conditions which Putin has flatly rejected), Trump’s persistence and the realities of warfare are nevertheless likely to result in some sort of ceasefire. Instead, the bigger concern is that Putin, unlike Zelenskyy and Trump, does not perceive the world through the supposedly objective categories of thought which guide the West.
From the outset, Western liberal analysts have misunderstood Putin’s goals and intentions in Ukraine, which were never (entirely) about conquering rich arable land, appeasing the domestic Russian population, reclaiming old Soviet borders, maintaining an authoritarian grip on power, escalating tensions with Europe, or disrupting the American-led rules based international order. These are but icing on the cake. Nor was the war fundamentally about Ukraine’s request for ascension to NATO membership, despite Putin’s recent assertion about “root causes.” Instead, the sources of Russian aggression are much deeper, more sinister, and far more difficult for Westerners to comprehend.
In speech after speech (as well in essays and revealing interviews), Putin and his senior officials have conveyed an ideological view of history that places Kyiv as the birthplace and spiritual center of ancient Russian civilization (‘Kyivan Rus’). As scholar Marlene Laruelle has argued in a new book, Putin’s “imperial strategy is focused obsessively on Ukraine” for precisely ideological reasons.
There is no similar desire on the part of Moscow to reconstitute the former Soviet Union by reintegrating Central Asia or the South Caucasus into its sovereign orbit. Instead, Putin seeks to recreate the “mythical Russia” of the tsars, many of whom he looks toward for geopolitical inspiration (Sergei Lavrov once remarked that Putin had “three advisers”: Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, and Catherine the Great). An independent, Western-oriented Ukraine poses an existential threat to this vision of a “mythical East Slavic unity.”
Putin’s geo-imaginaries long precede the current war, and therefore cannot be discarded as mere ex post facto propaganda. In 2008, for example, after the NATO Bucharest Summit, Putin exclaimed, “Ukraine is not even a state! What is Ukraine? A part of its territory is [in] Eastern Europe, but a[nother] part, a considerable one, was a gift from us!” Several years later, after the annexation of Crimea, Putin addressed representatives of the Russian Duma. Ukrainians and Russians were “one people. Kiev is the mother of Russian cities. Ancient Rus is our common source and we cannot live without each other.”
Moreover, these views are not unique to Putin. It is the official position of the Russian Orthodox Church, under Patriarch Kirill, who, similarly, several years before the war, referred to Kyiv as the “the mother of all Russian cities”, which Russians could never “abandon.” And this is a view widely shared by the Russian citizenry. As historian Serhii Plokhy points out, the view that Ukraine was once historic Russia is almost universally held by the entire Russian population, from Machiavellian politicians to harmless babushkas.
National mythology shapes foreign policy, perhaps nowhere as much as in Russia, where Putin and his inner circle regularly reference their ideological interpretation of history (in Laruelle’s analysis, Russian presidential speeches have, in recent years, made between one hundred and three hundred references to Russian history per year). There is simply no reason—beyond Western naivety and the inability to look beyond our own rationalistic and secular political categories—not to take Putin at his word when he asserts his belief (and that is merely what it is) that Kyiv is the crown jewel of the Russkiy Mir (Russian world).
Seen from this perspective, it is unsurprising that Russia’s original invasion plan sought to subjugate Kyiv itself. The “special military operation” was modelled after the Soviet era Operation Danube, which crushed the Prague Spring in 1968 and installed a puppet regime in Czechoslovakia for another twenty years. Only after this initial plan had failed did Moscow scale back its objectives, readjusting its military strategy to focus on the occupation of the Donbas region and the Sea of Azov. And it is likely that, several years from now, a reconstituted Russian army will once again seek to push Russian borders westwards towards the Ukrainian capital.
For this reason, any peace agreement will in all likelihood be a repeat of the 2015 Minsk II agreement, which set the stage for the 2022 invasion. It would no doubt succeed in postponing further bloodshed for a time, as did Minsk, but will do nothing to staunch Putin’s long-term aspirations. Some describe Putin as a thug while others see him as a geopolitical mastermind. He is both, but he is also first and foremost an ideologue. One should always be wary of negotiating with ideologues.
