8. Gathering the Russian Lands: Putin's Imperial Project

If not fear of NATO expansion, what else could have motivated Putin to invade?

Here is something that might surprise you. Vladimir Putin can be generally assumed to be telling the truth when he says something, at least to foreign audiences. Among other things, this means we can rely on Putin’s assertions that he harbours no imperialistic ambitions toward Ukraine and other neighbouring states.

At least, that is Mearsheimer’s view. And he knows this, how?

Here is what he said to a gathering at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies in June 2022:

One might argue that Putin was lying about his motives, that he was attempting to disguise his imperial ambitions. As it turns out, I have written a book, one of the few books about lying in international politics. It’s entitled Why Leaders Lie: The Truth About Lying in International Politics, and it is clear to me that Putin was not lying. For starters, one of my principal findings in the book is that leaders do not lie much to each other. They lie more often to their own publics.

Regarding Putin, whatever one thinks of him as a human being, he does not have a history of lying to other leaders. Although some assert that he frequently lies and cannot be trusted, there is actually little evidence of him lying to foreign audiences.

Little evidence of Putin lying to other leaders? Does Mearsheimer not recall that Putin and his cronies strenuously denied having any intention to invade Ukraine right up to the day of the invasion? This lie was exposed beforehand by US intelligence, who disclosed it to the world, thereby frustrating Russian plans to stage some “false flag” provocations to justify what was to come.

Indeed, Putin and his propagandists have done nothing but lie about the Ukraine conflict throughout the leadup to the invasion and since, with all manner of ridiculous claims about Ukraine being run by Nazis, having plans to develop nuclear and biological weapons, plotting aggression against Russia, not to mention their attempts to explain their military failures by claiming they are literally fighting against NATO.

One of Russia’s top propagandists Margarita Simonyan, head of the state news agency RIA-Novosti and a Putin favourite who has a direct line to the Kremlin, even contends that the war with Ukraine was actually over in the first three days and that ever since it has actually been a war against NATO. Then there is the bizarre claim from former president Dmitry Medvedev, now head of the national security council, that Russia is fighting a war against “satanists”. Putinite Russia is a proverbial empire of lies.

Actually, the above quotation from Mearsheimer’s talk exemplifies a key aspect of his way of thinking, and what is wrong with it. In his book on lying, which appeared in 2011, he arrives at several generalizations about the circumstances in which leaders might lie, the relevant one being that they rarely lie to foreign leaders, since “it is difficult for leaders to snooker other states, because inter-state lies are usually directed at potential or real adversaries who are understandably suspicious of anything their opponents might say about matters relating to security.”

Yet in the same book, Mearsheimer begins the conclusion by conceding “although lying is often condemned as shameful behaviour, leaders of all kinds think that it is a useful tool of statecraft that can and should be employed in a variety of circumstances.”

Too true. And one situation where it can be useful is when contemplating military aggression against a neighbouring state. The most notorious example from modern history was Adolf Hitler’s declaration in September 1938 leading up to the Munich sellout that stripped Czechoslovakia of the Sudetenland, and its extensive border fortifications, that he had “no more territorial demands to make in Europe.”

Having secured the Sudetenland on the basis of this lie, rendering Czechoslovakia effectively defenceless, several months later Hitler occupied the rest of the country with virtually no resistance. Mearsheimer briefly mentions this example in the book, without drawing the obvious conclusion. Does he seriously think that Putin, were he to hold imperial ambitions, would broadcast his intentions to adversary states, prompting them to prepare?

In reality, there is a wealth of evidence from the mouths of Putin, Lavrov and other regime propagandists that they do indeed harbour imperial ambitions, expressed in a distinctive nomenclature that has become an increasingly frequent feature of regime statements and propaganda, especially since the start of Putin’s third term as president in 2012.

The idea that Russia has a historical mission to defend a distinctive Russian civilization underpinned by Russian Orthodox Christianity has been refined and articulated by Russian ideologues, such as the “philosopher” Alexander Dugin, and probably far more importantly Ivan Ilyin, a reactionary monarchist philosopher and jurist who died in 1954. Ilyin’s view has been described as imperialist anti-nationalism according to which “any division of Russian dominions is categorically rejected, and the right to self-determination is explicitly denied.”

Putin cited Ilyin to conclude his speech in September 2022 announcing the annexation of the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts (administrative regions) of Ukraine:

And I want to end my speech with the words of a true patriot Ivan Alexandrovich Ilyin: “If I consider Russia my Motherland, then this means that I love in Russian, contemplate and think, sing and speak Russian; that I believe in the spiritual strength of the Russian people. His spirit is my spirit; his fate is my fate; his suffering is my grief; its flowering is my joy.”

Here is Ilyin on Ukraine:

Little Russia [that is, Ukraine] and Great Russia are bound together by faith, tribe [meaning, apparently, Slavic descent], historical destiny, geographic position, economy, culture, and politics. Foreigners preparing dismemberment of Russia must remember that they thereby declare centuries-long war on all of Russia.

These are almost exactly the sentiments expressed by Vladimir Putin in his notorious 6,000 word article posted on the Kremlin website in July 2021, with a title that succinctly expresses its thesis On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians:

… the idea of Ukrainian people as a nation separate from the Russians started to form and gain ground among the Polish elite and a part of the Malorussian [i.e. Ukrainian] intelligentsia. Since there was no historical basis—and could not have been any, conclusions were substantiated by all sorts of concoctions, which went as far as to claim the Ukrainians are the true Slavs and the Russians, the Muscovites, are not.

Mearsheimer is unimpressed by this. After all, Putin did mention that it would be up to the Ukrainians to decide if they wanted reunification with Rusia—subject to a set of conditions that are hard to interpret.

No doubt, after swallowing Ukraine whole as was clearly his intention, Putin would have ascertained the will of the people by holding a referendum. Just like the ones he staged, under the Russian gun, in Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhian, after he occupied them—all impeccable expressions of the popular will! We can be assured that any such plebiscite would be every bit as democratic as the recent presidential “elections” in Russia itself.

In an article that appeared in the New York Times in 2016 by Timothy Snyder, a historian specializing in Central and Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, he discusses Ivan Ilyin’s take on democracy:

…  in the 1940s and ’50s, he provided the outlines for a constitution of a fascist Holy Russia governed by a “national dictator” who would be “inspired by the spirit of totality.”

This leader would be responsible for all functions of government in a completely centralized state. Elections would be held, with open voting and signed ballots, purely as a ritual of support of the leader. The reckoning of votes was irrelevant: “We must reject blind faith in the number of votes and its political significance.”

In the light of Ilyin’s rehabilitation as Russia’s leading ideologue, Moscow’s manipulations of elections should be seen not so much as a failure to implement democracy but as a subversion of the very concept of democracy. Neither the parliamentary elections of December 2011 nor the presidential elections of March 2012 produced a majority for Mr. Putin’s party or for Mr. Putin personally. Votes were therefore added to produce a decisive result.

Yet Mearsheimer thinks Putin’s assurance that the will of the people of Ukraine would be respected. The man’s naivete, if that is what it is, is astonishing.

What does Mearsheimer suppose was Putin’s purpose in posting on article titled On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians in July 2021, shortly after staging a full dress-rehearsal of the coming invasion in Spring, and several months before the actual invasion, if not to provide a rationale for Ukraine’s subjugation and absorption?

A recurring motif in statements by Putin and other Russian nationalists is talk of Russia’s historical mission to “be the centre of reunification, continuing the tradition of ancient Russian statehood and gathering the Russian lands.”

On the 350^th anniversary of the birth of Peter the Great in June 2022, Putin made reference to the Great Northern War, the long conflict with Sweden and a coalition of other states that established Russia as an imperial power, with the new capital Saint Petersburg established on land taken from Sweden. Other areas conquered in the war include parts of the Baltic states and Finland and the Ottoman Empire. Putin said this:

Peter the Great waged the great northern war for 21 years. It would seem that he was at war with Sweden, he took something from them. He did not take anything from them, he returned what was Russia’s.

He then compared Peter the Great’s project with his own mission:

Apparently, it is also our lot to return what is Russia’s and strengthen the country. And if we proceed from the fact that these basic values form the basis of our existence, we will certainly succeed in solving the tasks that we face.

Mind you, Putin has left it a bit late in life if we planned to replicate Peter the Great’s 21-year war, which he embarked on in his late 20s.

In early 2023 the head of the state broadcaster RIA-Novosti Margarita Simonyan, who has very close ties to Putin and a direct line to the Kremlin, made the following extraordinary acknowledgement in a panel discussion on state television:

Q: During the press conference the following day, I heard of a new goal orientation when Putin spoke about the intrinsic unity of the Russian people which we have to achieve without fail. It was voiced for the first time, that all of our activities pertaining to Ukraine are mainly or largely determined through this goal. Do you see this as an advancement in our common and governmental worldview or am I exaggerating?

Margarita Simonyan:  To me this is not an advancement, but a more sincere and more public acknowledgement that this was always the goal. I’m sure you have no doubt that even 20 years ago Putin wanted to gather the Russian world, to defend Russians and to have this opportunity. It was a matter of when we had the ability to do it. Even now our abilities are not ideal, honestly speaking. We can see it, let’s not deceive ourselves. Still it’s better than 20 years ago. I understand this is not the situation that a man suddenly woke up and remembered that Russians have to be unified, or at least be under protection.

So, there you have it, not quite from the horse’s mouth, but pretty close to it. The invasion was motivated mainly by the imperial impulse to gather in the Russian lands, rather than existential terror of approaching NATO.

Putin’s aspiration to restore Russia’s imperial greatness may have originated even earlier than Simonyan thought, well before he become president of Russia.

The former American diplomat, ambassador and senior aid to successive presidents Harald Malmgren has described a lengthy discussion he had with Putin in 1992, when he was working in the office of the mayor of Saint Petersburg.

Putin talked at length about the historic tragedy of the collapse of the Soviet Union, but also added that the Soviet Bloc was the wrong model for what Russia needed. He made an impassioned explanation that what Russia really needed was a new Peter the Great.

Malmgren continued:

He [Putin] argued that after the total collapse of the USSR, it had become necessary to rebuild a Greater Russia under the leadership of a new version of Peter … Peter, he told me, had set in motion the magnificent strengthening of Russia completed by Catherine the Great: the establishment of Novorossiya, or Imperial Russia, spanning all of the Baltic Sea, the Nordics and Poland, as well as the peoples and nations to the west and to the south to the Azov and Black Sea.

He then made it clear he did not think the Soviet Bloc was the right model to achieve this, and what he longed for was a return of Imperial Russia, not Soviet Russia.

This inherently expansionist ideology also includes the closely related concept of Russky mir, or Russian world, a distinct civilization space encompassing the lands of the imperial Russian and Soviet empires. According to an article in the Moscow Times, a dissident Russian print publication that moved online and relocated to the Netherlands in 2017, this concept is Russia’s “new version of manifest destiny.”

The Russky mir concept has surfaced in different forms over the course of Russian history, and is front-and-central once again, a core feature of Russia’s state ideology strongly backed by the head of the Orthodox church Patriarch Kirill, a former KGB man who is one of Putin’s most influential supporters. From the Moscow Times article:

Several times Russian church and state leaders have been enraptured by the idea that the Russian people and its political expression have a special mission or “manifest destiny” to accomplish. Successive iterations of this “Russian idea” reflect a growing convergence of religion, ethnicity, and nationalism with state power into an explosive secular ideology bent on imposing its worldview within Russia, surrounding countries, the Orthodox Church, and worldwide.

The notion of a divinely-appointed mission of the Russian people and the Russian State is thus deeply engrained in Russian consciousness, and it did not require much effort on the part of Patriarch Kirill and Vladimir Putin to re-awaken it in support of the ambition of the Russian Church to dominate world Orthodoxy, and of Vladimir Putin’s personal and geopolitical ambitions, especially the restoration of Russia’s territorial limits to those of the former Soviet Union. In practice in official state discourse, the religious component of Russky mir is decidedly secondary, far behind naked Russian nationalism and expansionism.

What kind of Christianity is this? What ever happened to “blessed are the peacemakers”? The author of the Moscow Times article, a professor theology, puts it thus:

Under the Russky mir banner, Putin and Kirill are instilling into the Russian soul anti-Christian values far more successfully than Lenin and Stalin ever did, the cultivation of profound hatred, aggressiveness, and violence against all enemies — those who refuse to submit to the personal and geopolitical ambitions of the Russian State and Church.

To which the author could have added the increasingly genocidal tone of official Russian propaganda, which has justified and incentivized the atrocious behaviour towards Ukrainians, exemplified by the Bucha massacre, in the areas the Russians have occupied. The journalist Julia Davis, who grew up in Soviet Ukraine and runs a YouTube channel with translations of Russian state television propaganda shows and panel discussions, provides a disturbing compendium of examples in this article.

This provides a foretaste of what the Ukrainians can expect if the Russians ultimately prevail. No wonder the Poles, the Finns, and the people of the Baltic states are nervous.

Contra Mearsheimer, there is overwhelming evidence that Putin aspires to restore Russia’s status as a great imperial power.

But here is the puzzle: Why is Mearsheimer so anxious to deny this when his own offensive realism theory legitimizes and indeed mandates behaviour that would be largely indistinguishable from what you would expect from a power motivated by imperial aspirations?

Recall that Mearsheimer stresses that offensive realism is both a descriptive and prescriptive theory. It purports to describe not just what states do, but what they should do. As the moral philosophers might say, it is about both the Is and the Ought of international conduct.

From The Tragedy of Great Power Politics:

It should be apparent from this discussion that offensive realism is mainly a descriptive theory. It explains how great powers have behaved in the past and how they are likely to behave in the future. But it is also a prescriptive theory. States should behave according to the dictates of offensive realism, because it outlines the best way to survive in a dangerous world.

So, a guide to state conduct then. But what sort of conduct? Mearsheimer distinguishes his offensive realism theory from Kenneth Waltz’s defensive version that merely seeks to preserve the international status quo:

Offensive realists, on the other hand, believe that status quo powers are rarely found in world politics, because the international system creates powerful incentives for states to look for opportunities to gain power at the expense of rivals, and to take advantage of those situations when the benefits outweigh the costs. A state’s ultimate goal is to be the hegemon in the system.

On this basis, in the same book he criticizes Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm II for failing to attack France in 1905, thereby passing up the opportunity to become the hegemon of Europe:

So France stood virtually alone against the mighty Germans, who “had an opportunity without parallel to change the European balance in their favor.” Yet Germany did not seriously consider going to war in 1905 but instead waited until 1914, when Russia had recovered from its defeat and the United Kingdom had joined forces with France and Russia.

Therefore, Mearsheimer concludes:

According to offensive realism, Germany should have gone to war in 1905, because it almost surely would have won the conflict.

So, he thinks Germany should have started a war with France in 1905 because it almost surely would have won the conflict. Quite apart from the immorality of such conduct—a matter Mearsheimer is completely uninterested in, except when it concerns the conduct of the world’s only Jewish state—is it prudent to start a war on an assumption of near certainty about the outcome? How many wars have been launched by aggressors confident of success, only to see their regimes annihilated in the end?

So, what would distinguish the conduct of a state intent on regional (or global) hegemony, and prepared to use military force to achieve it, and one that aspired to be an imperial power? Indeed, the quest for hegemony may induce a state to be even more open-ended in its aggressive intentions than one motivated by the revanchist goal of restoring its old imperial territories.

Ironically, Mearsheimer’s offensive realism theory provides a rationale for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine independent of any imperialist aspirations. For that matter, it also provides a rationale for the US and its allies to expand NATO into the post-Soviet space to gain power at the expense of Russia, quite apart from the obviously defensive motives of the democracies liberated from the former Soviet bloc themselves who were desperate to join.