Historical Context
Some time in the Middle Ages, a nascent proto-Russian state was formed known as Kievan Rus’. This new kingdom was helmed at the banks of the Dnieper, near modern-day Kiev (or Kyiv if you happen to swing that way). Over the years and following many different wars, incursions, and feudal reorganizations, the center of power for this new state eventually moved to modern-day Moscow, St. Petersburg and Kiev taking second- and third-place centers of power respectively.
Eventually, these fractured Slavic political bodies merged into one unified Russian Empire. This Empire began to expand well outside its borders, settlers following shortly thereafter. Russification followed as well, both in the form of settling previously nomadic steppe and mountain peoples, and in the form of ethnic cleansing. But early on in this Russian state’s organization, the peoples which fell under its rule did not have strong sentiments of nationalism. Nationalism as a concept had barely taken off in the West, let alone in Eastern Europe; to poorly quote an Ottoman/Bulgarian peasant who may or may not have even existed, “I speak the language and claim the religion of whomever collects my tax.”
Unlike Western Europe, which eventually developed its borders and body politic to conform to sharpened ethnolinguistic boundaries, Russia preferred to absorb people living in the borderlands between herself and other great powers, taking defensible buffer zones where she could. Without the Carpathians to the southwest, a large section of integral Russian territory—the birthplace of Kievan Rus’— would be a flat plain nearly impossible to defend in the long term.
The peoples living in those Carpathians have known many names, at various points referred to as Galicians, Ruthenians, and eventually, Ukrainians. The less settled mountain peoples from this place, this Little Russia, have waged repetitive rebellions against the Russian core at various points in time, but much of the territory east of the Dnieper had always been populated by ethnic Russians, Cossacks, and Russified Ukrainians. Rarely were these rebellious hill peoples ever successful in establishing a state for longer than a few years before being reconquered.
The Central Asian nations of the Soviet Union, it can be reasoned, were never really integral to Russia proper. Long-term imperial subjects, yes; holding large numbers of ethnic Russians, sure; but not integral territory. They are Turkic through and through. Bessarabia, the territory today containing the Republic of Moldova and the separatist republic of Transnistria, has always been home to ethnic Romanians, and has never truly been “integral” to Russia either (though there is a mild contemporary case to be made regarding Transnistria, as much as the nationalist in me would like to pretend otherwise).
The bulk of Ukrainian territory, on the other hand, has always been considered integral to Russia, both by the recent ancestors of its present inhabitants and by the Russian government. With the breakup of the Soviet Union, it was expected Belarus and Ukraine would become independent, but it was also expected that they would remain firmly within the Russian sphere of influence as sister nations; Mother Russia, White Russia, and Little Russia.
The transition to capitalism was a vicious one in every former Eastern Bloc state. Gang warfare, drug addiction, alcoholism, family abandonment, emigration, hyperinflation, homelessness, corruption, deindustrialization, deep state meddling, unemployment; all these ills and more affected the vast majority of the newly independent republics. Ukraine had among the greatest potential to overcome these hurdles as it was the industrial and agricultural base for nearly the whole of the Soviet Union. Nowhere was more educated and more productive, nowhere nearly as industrialized and as densely populated.
But Ukraine never lived up to its potential. It never recovered in the ways many of the other ex-Warsaw Pact states have. Though there is much to be said about corruption in Romania or in Russia, these ex-communist gangster states pale in comparison to the nakedness of organized crime in Ukraine. At the very least, the other organized criminal outfits were forced to become subservient to the state, then turned legit to greater or lesser extents. Ukraine’s mafioso aristocracy never got with the program, preferring to share and compete for state power amongst themselves. Their corruption problem is so bad that Wikipedia includes oligarchical affiliations as part of the summary inset for major political parties. It is no wonder that with such a weak democracy run exclusively by literal criminals, a rapidly deployed internet infrastructure, and a tidal wave of easy money for NGOs and their paramilitary wings coming in from both East and West, Ukraine devolved into civil war not even 25 years into its independence. This civil war is the true beginning of the proxy war between the US and Russia.
Modern Ukrainian Ethnogenesis
As mentioned above, ethnic Ukrainians and Russians of Ukrainian origin had always shared the same land, the ethnic identity of that land ebbing and flowing with the tide of history, the political claim over that land always favoring Russia or the Soviet Union. Even so, there was always a bit of a distinction between those descending from the Russian civilization and those descending from the Carpathian tradition, even if they could all be considered “Ukrainian” by virtue of having been born within the land called Ukraine.
Given that this territory had pretty much always belonged to Russia, it didn’t really matter. It especially didn’t matter during the Soviet era given that everybody was a Soviet citizen, an identity signifying their belonging to what was meant to be a universal proletarian culture that would grow as the revolution asserted itself abroad. Land considered integral to Russia proper (Novorossiya and Crimea) was given over to the Ukrainian SSR, with other ethnicities moving there from throughout the Union. Ukraine, having been a more prosperous region of the USSR, attracted many and ultimately kept many. Again, at the time, this didn’t matter very much, since no one expected the Soviet Union to fall.
But fall it did. Nascent nationalisms in the outer republics contributed to this, including in Ukraine; however, a greater factor was disillusionment with communism, with independence from the Union being seen as the most viable means of achieving liberal democratic reforms. As such, massive majorities voted to secede from the Union, Ukrainians included. Now independent, Ukrainians had to forge new identities for themselves. A solid 20% still identified as Russian, with a majority speaking Russian in daily life. Most famous Ukrainians are considered heroes of Russia or the USSR, having identified themselves with what was in style at the time. There was not much of an independent national past to look back on given that most of their history is tied up in Russia’s.
As Western power began to infiltrate and ethnic Ukrainian gangs began to dominate, the project of building Ukraine took on a more nationalistic tone. Russian-affiliated gangs attempted more of a civic nationalism, a Ukraine for all Ukrainians, even the ones that weren’t Ukrainian per se. This was not in the cards for their more aggressive and better-funded competitors. After the 2014 Euromaidan Revolution, the Ukrainian nationalist network of gangs and parties predominated. Many ethnic Russians decided to assimilate into this project of Ukrainian ethnogenesis, rewriting their own family histories as though they had also been subjugated by Russian power, even readily adopting the rapidly-evolving civic language of Ukrainian as though they had been previously deprived of it. Those to the east did not for multitudinous reasons—some historic, some political, some cultural—and policies repressing Russian identity and language left a particularly bad taste in their mouths.
The reality is that for Ukraine to be truly independent of her ties to Russia, it is a necessity for her to carry out this project of ethnogenesis. This does not mean Ukraine can be truly sovereign (I make this case in a prior essay), but she can differentiate herself from Russia. Given their extremely close historic, ethnic, linguistic, and cultural ties, this project will require a bitter divorce from every obvious Russian influence and a radical rewriting of Ukrainian history dating all the way back to the Kievan Rus’. This is additionally complicated by the fact that most Slavic nations in general, however embittered they may be by their larger neighbor’s conduct over the years, appear almost identical to Russians in traditional dress, cuisine, and appearance when observed from the outside. Even so, this project is ongoing, and though it may appear contrived for now, it raises the chances of a new national consciousness successfully taking hold even if Ukraine is to lose this war.
Though revisionist, modern Ukrainian ethnogenesis could be seen as commendable. This is no small undertaking, and it has clearly given many Ukrainians something which many in the West appear to lack: A historical mission to carry out. This is not on its own a negative thing, as much as it would appear to be from a Russian perspective.
Where it is negative though is within the context this project is taking place. Zelensky is not a Founding Father, merely a figurehead puppeted by Western and mafia interests. He is only playing the role of a national defender for the cameras, he does not appear to be truly driven by a desire for legacy, for glory, for the preservation of a great culture. He is a great mouthpiece whose propagandistic appearances touch the hearts of foreign liberals ignorant of Ukraine’s true situation, but he is no leader.
This nationalist project appears haphazard not only because the scale of their historic divorce with Russia is so difficult to manage, but also because it is not truly driven by a clear, centralized, nationalist movement. Though the average Ukrainian enlistee may harbor a certain zeal, his leaders do not; they are guided by a corrupt cynicism, and the last thing they would want is for the country to fall in line behind a charismatic demagogue intent on a true national revitalization campaign. Whatever vitalism sprouts from this project is doomed to fail the second Western money and arms taps start to dry up. When that happens, these gangsters will begin to eat each other and the project will fall apart. A second Ukrainian civil war, this one entirely internal, is not off the table.
Contemporary Russian Antifascism
The prevailing narrative justifying the “Special Military Operation” to those in the Russian mainland is the emergence of Ukrainian neo-Nazis inspired by Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera. Russia has used international human rights convention to intervene in its neighbors’ affairs before, as in Georgia in 2008, claiming they have a “responsibility to protect” (R2P) Russian minorities under siege by ethnonationalist forces. In the case of Ukraine, there is indeed some truth to the claim of ethnic annihilation beyond the cheeky use of Banderite symbols. The blood-and-soil nationalism of groups such as Right Sector, Azov Battalion, and others, demands an ethnic cleansing of Russians and Tatars in Novorossiya and Crimea respectively because these are the populations which are unwilling to cede their heritage to the new Ukrainian state.
There are obviously many other more prevalent reasons why this war has escalated in recent years which are entirely non-ideological. Principally, this is a geopolitical war, not really about the handful of cities which demanded annexation in the wake of 2014. NATO expansion was looming, the Minsk Agreements had been broken, the Russian economy needed a major kick in the ass after the pandemic, and the need for a much more independent anti-US political and economic bloc became ever more prescient for those who found themselves belonging to it. The antifascist ideological justifications of the war are for the Russian public, encouraging them to enlist and to endure whatever sacrifices must be made to defeat the specter of Nazi Germany.
The Eastern Front of the Second World War was the deadliest European conflict of modern history. Russians today remember their victory over the Nazis proudly, and justifiably so. After years of sieges and scorched-earth tactics, constant fighting on the back-foot, being under-equipped and over-manned, they managed to take Berlin and create their own military superpower. For Americans, our memory of the Nazis is inextricably linked to the Holocaust, an atrocity committed against an “other” in defense of whom we valiantly and unselfishly rushed, singlehandedly creating a new international order to prevent such an act from occurring again (all according to the modern nationalist propaganda); for Russians, their primary memory of the war is of a struggle against their own annihilation, without the need for many propagandistic liberties. Had the US lost the war, it’s unlikely we would have lost everything; had the Soviets lost the war, this was an absolute certainty.
As such, “Banderite” became a perjorative against anybody espousing Ukrainian nationalist sympathies, however mild, similar to what “Nazi” became in the West. This perjorative carries with it an additional connotation, that of a fratricidal traitor with whom no reasonable person can negotiate. Thus, it is a fairly effective perjorative against the Ukrainian army, while not necessarily alienating to those ethnic Ukrainians who may still be sympathetic toward Mother Russia.
The real Banderites would have never been able to form an independent state as the Nazis would have inevitably attempted to annex Ukrainian land as part of their lebensraum policies. Ukrainians were still Slavs, and all Slavs were still untermenschen, so it is unlikely this coalition would have held together and, like with all rebellious hill peoples, they would have been subjugated or destroyed without a stronger power to intervene on their behalf. The very real neo-Banderites of today do not rule Ukraine (Zelensky is Jewish and his domestic handlers hail from the Ukrainian Jewish mafia), but the perjorative no longer deters pettier nationalists now that Ukraine and Russia no longer share the same government.
This fairly recent history colors the conflict on both sides as they alternately accuse each other of being genocidal in public view while more quietly recruiting ardent ultranationalists of their own. In the same unit on either side, one can expect to see both Black Sun tattoos and antifa patches, though the Russians lean much harder into the antifascist image in their domestic messaging while the Ukrainians merely downplay the extent to which they utilize neo-Nazi militias.
What this reveals is not that each combatant sees this war as another civilizational struggle on par with what occurred in World War II (or the Great Patriotic War if you swing that way), but that each combatant wishes it was exactly such a war. They want it to matter more than it really does, since even they know it’s not the same. Banderite lebensraum doesn’t extend beyond Novorossiya; so ultimately, what would they really gain? A couple of decaying industrial cities they never bothered to revitalize when they had the chance? Russian antifascism may remind her soldiers of the sacrifices at Stalingrad, but did Donetsk really experience anything on the same order of magnitude? Even if a case can be made, the shelling of Donetsk and Luhansk was not part of a much larger offensive into sovereign Russian territory, so should it even matter that much to the average Russian? Obviously not and obviously it doesn’t, even if there is now the odd terror attack in and around Moscow.
These ideological labels are simply a mishmash of excuses provided from the powers that be to encourage fighters to throw themselves into battle, to feel alive by risking their lives and to make their sacrifices feel as though they have a greater moral weight than they do. The soldiers of fortune involved in the conflict are much more honest about what is taking place, and that would include a large number of Russian enlistees who only joined for the generous kill/capture bonuses.
North Atlantic Fella Organization
By far the most disturbing and nihilistic faction “involved” in this war are the American observers cheering on the Ukrainians. I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before, but I was absolutely disgusted by the initial American reaction to the Russian invasion. People who had never heard of Kiev before in their lives, could not locate it on a map, possibly were not even aware there was already a civil war in Ukraine in the first place were stopping just short of tattooing the blue and yellow standard on their foreheads. A year in, a stalemate reached, and those flags disappeared just as quickly as they came into view.
The average American no longer has the capcity to care, and based on recent conversations I’ve had, are largely unaware it’s still going on. What bothers me is not that they didn’t and don’t “care” but their false and odious display of “caring” which they dropped the second it wasn’t trendy. That period between 2020 and 2022, that rapidfire switch from pandemic to BLM back to pandemic to Ukraine, revealed a lot about the American public’s willingness to rapidly fall in line, not ask questions, and recruit themselves as ideological enforcers, a masterclass in psychological warfare which I hope will be studied closely in the decades to follow.
“NAFO” was a meme forged in the fires of that early rabid anti-Putin fervor and has stuck around among those who don’t know when to let a joke die. They gleefully share grisly body- and drone-cam footage of Russian soldiers getting killed, as if they have any real reason to be happy about it. Many of their predictions of a Ukrainian comeback are completely delusional, they rely on a middle-school psychoanalysis of Putin as an evil expansionist dictator to anticipate the Russian military’s next moves, and their general understanding of geopolitics, war strategy, Eastern European history, etc. borders on the vegetative. They are loud and proud LiveLeak addicts who justify their love for death and gore by attaching it to an extremely recent “appreciation” for the Ukrainian people (an appreciation mostly expressed through how much they hate Russians) and “military history” that they learned mostly through memes about grand strategy games they may or may not have played themselves (but always with the cheats on, of course).
However, just like the Ukrainian nationalists and Russian antifascists, I can sympathize as well. During the peak of the Syrian War, I too was hopelessly obsessed with the day-to-day movements of troops in Northern Syria, completely taken in by the anarchistic ideology of the Kurdish YPG forces. I had such high hopes that that faction of the war was going to change the world, ushering in a new model for statehood. I watched bodies drop often, not out of glee, but out of wanting to see the conflict, wanting to understand the tactics and the strategy. It was in the middle of taking all of that in that I recognized the Kurds would never achieve true sovereignty as they were only being propped up by the US to be a spoiler for both the Assad government and for ISIS. Had I not been an obese agoraphobe barely capable of running down the block, I would have gladly taken what savings I had to Greece to train with them as an internationalist volunteer because I wanted my life and death to mean something more than what I was wasting it on. I wanted (and still find myself wanting) a place within a historic mission.
The big difference between myself and these retards is that I was eventually able to realize that I was backing a losing horse that didn’t have the solution to its own problems, much less to the whole world. The other difference, of course, is that I was a communist, and these guys are mostly just liberals who believe in the NATO project. They believe NATO exists for the sake of countries like Ukraine, countries which in their view just want peace and stability and sovereignty, something NATO allegedly grants to all who belong to it. Yet, they often contradict themselves; when Poland announced they were drawing back some of their military aid to Ukraine, these NAFO dickheads lost their minds, accusing Poland of leaving their brother behind, some of them even arguing Poland should be forced to give everything it’s got to Ukraine under threat of being expelled from NATO.
There is another asinine thing that I cannot stand about NAFO and nearly every American who defends our generous support for the Ukrainian mafia state: The idea that once Ukraine is neutralized, Putin (himself, personally, in unilateral fashion) will move on to invade NATO countries (almost always referring to Poland and the Baltic states maybe), the claim being that he wants to resurrect the Soviet Union despite his not being a communist, Poland not having been part of the Soviet Union after 1945, the fact Belarus still isn’t part of Russia despite their mutual affinity, and the glaringly obvious omission of the non-NATO Central Asian republics from their concern trolling.
“No but really, what’s to stop him from trying to do it?” Depending on who’s asking, this can reveal one of two things: 1. They genuinely do not understand the very basics of contemporary geopolitics and think Putin is literally Doctor Doom or 2. They fundamentally (and unconsciously) do not trust that NATO, possibly including the US, will defend the Baltics or Poland. Case 1 is uninteresting and to be expected. Case 2 however… well there’s something to be said about that.
The latter case may indicate an underlying anxiety about the US’s place in the world, a fear that perhaps we really have exhausted our imperial might or have strayed from the historic mission we created for ourselves when we conquered half of Europe in 1945. It may betray a fear that our influence in the furthest reaches of this decentralized empire is not actually for the best, that it has been destructive in some way, and that the allies we have will not rush to defend that influence from our competitors. It may also be an admission that despite all the saber-rattling, they don’t think we should back up our threats of mutual nuclear armageddon if all we end up losing is Estonia. It’d be a tragedy of course, a sad day for democracies everywhere, yadda yadda, but is a frigid, empty country with barely a million people (a quarter of whom are Russian anyway) with limited strategic or economic value really worth ending the world over? And if it’s not, what would that imply about the rest of NATO? Hopefully they’re mulling that one over in their hearts.
Whatever the case may be, and it may be all these things or none of them at all, there is something within that very mild distrust of the international defense apparatus we’ve created. It’s clear the rapidly adopted consensus view that Russia must be stopped by any means necessary is not a deeply held belief premised on a sincere adherence to the principles of a democratic international order, but a malleable emotion-driven position premised on evanescent propaganda.
Conclusion
Seemingly no one today really believes in anything other than as an excuse to get up and move because they have to. There is no historic mission truly held by the leadership of movements and conflicts of today. The East’s senile late Cold War somnambulation has largely continued into the 21st century and infected the West as well, even as advances in information and psychological warfare technologies more reliably produce self-destructive fanatics with flexible beliefs. To echo what was said in my latest, our leaders have reached what appears to be a stable consensus on how the world should be run; they only disagree on who should be running it, but are very conservative in their approaches to changing leadership.
There is vitalism in threatening the extermination of a race or a class or a nation or even just a vision and there is vitalism in defending against such extermination. Without such an existential struggle playing out, existing states must wave around vanquished corpses as scarecrows to call a small fraction of their populations to arms. Everyone wants for a reason to kill and die so that their own lives have any meaning at all, any impact on the course of world events beyond just a changing of the guard, trading one president, gangster, CEO, or intelligence officer for another without any restructuring from below. Each faction in this war calls upon events which occurred nearly a century ago to justify moving anybody to act in their state’s short- to medium-term self-interest, but most of the public can see right through it, despite their repetition of social media propaganda. It’s visible by their lack of sustained, self-directed follow-through in repeating it, raised only in the context of fleeting domestic political disputes.
The only real threat is the threat we pose to ourselves, our own self-destructive tendencies, our own feeble leaders who cannot muster a vision for the world beyond the one which already exists. In the 2010s, it felt to many as though history was frozen, that nothing of consequence would happen again save for the continued expansion of democracy and American hegemony. In the 2020s, despite major historic events unfolding, despite that trajectory changing slightly, it still mostly feels that way since even the emerging great power rivals look and feel and stand for virtually the same exact things. It’s as though everyone is just rehashing and repurposing the existential threats of bygone eras because they’re trying to recapture the spiritual vigor of when change still tangibly felt like change rather than a slow shuffle into a retirement home (or euthanasia pod). Looking beyond the shoddy theatrics and into their subtext: Entire civilizations are going through the motions because that’s just what you do when you’re too depressed to accomplish anything else.