Tag: Russian

Why does Putin insist Ukranians and Russians are ‘one people’? The answer spans centuries of colonisation and resistance

Why does Putin insist Ukranians and Russians are ‘one people’? The answer spans centuries of colonisation and resistance

by | Dec 10, 2025 | , , | 0

Reading time: 8 minutes
The Kremlin’s insistence that Ukrainians and Russians are the same mirrors the older imperial model: expand, absorb and claim these territories were always part of Russia. Breaking free from this “mental empire” demands a deep shift in how Russians, Ukrainians, and the world view Eastern Europe’s past and present. When the Soviet Union collapsed, many hoped for a new era of cooperation in Eastern Europe. Instead, authoritarian politics and old beliefs about empire have led to a devastating conflict. By refusing to be pulled back into Russia’s orbit, Ukrainians send a message about self-determination. They reject the claim bigger nations can absorb smaller ones simply by invoking a shared past.

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The sources of Russian conduct

The sources of Russian conduct

by | Jul 28, 2025 | , | 0

Reading time: 14 minutes

This essay examines the sources of Russian power and conduct from an historical, cultural and geopolitical perspective. It aims to help assessment of Russia’s future behaviour. My approach is based on the essay The Sources of Soviet Conduct written by the famous US State Department diplomat and leading Russian expert George Kennan (under the pseudonym ‘X’) in the journal Foreign Affairs in 1947. Kennan was struggling to get Washington to understand the threat from the Soviet Union so soon after the end of World War II, when the USSR had been an ally of the United States.

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Ukraine isn’t invited to its own peace talks. History is full of such examples – and the results are devastating

Ukraine isn’t invited to its own peace talks. History is full of such examples – and the results are devastating

by | Feb 20, 2025 | , , | 0

Reading time: 7 minutes
Ukraine has not been invited to a key meeting between American and Russian officials in Saudi Arabia this week to decide what peace in the country might look like.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukraine will “never accept” any decisions in talks without its participation to end Russia’s three-year war in the country.
A decision to negotiate the sovereignty of Ukrainians without them – as well as US President Donald Trump’s blatantly extortionate attempt to claim half of Ukraine’s rare mineral wealth as the price for ongoing US support – reveals a lot about how Trump sees Ukraine and Europe.

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Who Would Be the Roman Emperor Today?

Who Would Be the Roman Emperor Today?

by | Oct 10, 2024 | , | 0

Reading time: 10 minutes
The Roman Empire continues to fascinate the world and dominate many cultural aspects of modern Western life. From language to law, the Romans left quite the legacy.
But one thing they didn’t leave was a clear successor to the Roman Empire.
If the Roman Empire still existed today, how could we determine who its ruler should be?

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Putin’s failure to learn from history has led to Russian quagmire in Ukraine

Putin’s failure to learn from history has led to Russian quagmire in Ukraine

by | Nov 6, 2023 | | 0

Reading time: 4 minutes

As the Russo-Ukraine conflict continues with no resolution in sight, we are painfully reminded of not only the horror of war, but also how often major powers’ interventionism, for whatever objective, hasn’t paid off. These powers have repeatedly failed to learn from the futility of their past adventures to avoid future ones. Counterproductivity has often become the hallmark of their efforts.

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Ukraine war: how Gorbachev’s 1987 INF missile treaty has limited the arsenal available to Putin

Ukraine war: how Gorbachev’s 1987 INF missile treaty has limited the arsenal available to Putin

by | Sep 27, 2023 | | 0

Reading time: 4 minutes
Thanks to the final Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who has died aged 91, a disarmament treaty has denied Vladimir Putin thousands more missiles which he could have ordered to be used against Ukraine. Russian forces attacking Ukraine have not been able to use land-based missiles with ranges of between 500km and 5,500km because this entire category of weapons was scrapped under the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which the former Soviet leader was instrumental in establishing.

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Regimes Around the World are Manipulating History and Threatening Historians

Regimes Around the World are Manipulating History and Threatening Historians

by | May 31, 2023 | , | 0

Reading time: 6 minutes
In March 2022, overshadowed by British asylum policies, Human Rights Watch (HRW) published its findings about the state of free speech in Rwanda. In 2018, the government of President and “darling tyrant” Paul Kagame adopted the latest version of a law making punishable, by up to seven years imprisonment, public speech questioning the events and statistics related to the 1994 Genocide. However, the law lacks clear definitions and its vague language is seen as instrumental in prosecuting legitimate debate, in particular over crimes committed by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), of which Kagame was the commander. Prosecution of legitimate historical discourse took place under earlier versions of the law, but in the lead-up to the thirtieth anniversary of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, the Kagame government has increased its efforts to combat “genocide ideology.”

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On the screen: Cold warriors

On the screen: Cold warriors

by | Apr 6, 2023 | | 0

Reading time: 4 minutes
The Courier, directed by Dominic Cooke, is a film of the Cold War with the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 as backdrop. The central characters, British salesman Greville Wynne (Benedict Cumberbatch) and GRU (Soviet military intelligence) Colonel Oleg Penkovsky (Merab Ninidze), are centre stage, but the real dynamic is the challenge issued by the Soviet Union and its empire to the United States and its Western allies. Infamously, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had boasted that the USSR would bury the West and this claim features in the opening of the movie. A nuclear war between the two superpowers of the time emerges as possible as the Soviet presence in Cuba is revealed to be more threatening than originally thought.

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PUTIN’S PAST: The Return of Ideological History and the Strongman

PUTIN’S PAST: The Return of Ideological History and the Strongman

by | Apr 5, 2023 | , | 0

Reading time: 8 minutes
From Russian Constitutional Court chairman Valery Zorkin, to former Russian culture minister Vladimir Medinsky, to presidential adviser Yuri Kovlachuk, amateur history is everywhere in the Russian government today. This is not an accident but a deliberate way to build official state ideology in Russia. For instance, in a recent interview discussing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the deputy secretary of the Russian Security Council, Oleg Khramov, said that the West is trying “to stop the course of history” by “blinding” many Ukrainians to the historical truth of their shared civilizational identity with Russia.

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