Putin’s War on Ukraine: Russia’s Campaign for Global Counter-Revolution
By Samuel Ramani
Hurst and Co, 2023
Intent to Destroy: Russia’s Two-Hundred-Year Quest to Dominate Ukraine
By Eugene Finkel
Basic Books, 2024
Samuel Ramani’s book is divided into ten chapters with the first eight on the 2013-2014 Euromaidan Revolution, and Russia’s war against Ukraine from 2014 to the present day. Chapters 8-10 place the war within a global context of Russia’s isolation from the West, Moscow’s pivot to the East, and Russian attempts to cultivate influence and support in the Global South.
Eugene Finkel’s book is divided into ten chapters that analyse the ongoing Russian war against Ukraine within a historical context. The chapters trace Russia’s attitudes and policies towards Ukraine from the mid to late nineteenth century and World War I, through the Soviet Union and post-Soviet era. Chapters 7 and 8 focus on the first Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014, and chapters 9 and 10 analyse the 2022 full-scale invasion, Russian military aggression and war crimes. Finkel writes with a deep knowledge of Ukrainian history and politics that is not found in Ramani’s book and most other studies of the Russian-Ukrainian War. Finkel integrates Russia’s full-scale war within a two-hundred-year Russian campaign to prevent the emergence of, and destroy, Ukrainian identity.
Western Responses to Russia’s 2014 and 2022 Invasions of Ukraine
Ramani writes that the primary reason for Russia’s first invasion in 2014 was the Euromaidan Revolution, which the Kremlin viewed as a threat to its promotion of illiberalism in Eurasia (p.80). The Euromaidan Revolution was a threat to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s revival of Russia as a great power and was seen as a challenge from the US to the Kremlin’s domination of a Eurasian sphere of influence.
It is unclear what Ramani (p.76) means when he writes of the ‘impact of Western sanctions’ on Russia after 2014, as they were weak and had few negative influences on Russia’s economy and finances. Ramani does not explain why the Western response was weak in 2014 and why the West continued business as usual with Russia (as seen, for example, in Germany continuing to build the Nord Stream II gas pipeline). Additionally, between 2014-2021, all Western governments, including the then British Conservative government, were against supplying Ukraine with military aid to defend itself. The Barack Obama presidency (2008-2015) did not apply sanctions to Russia after its 2008 invasion of Georgia and de facto annexation of the Georgian South Ossetian and Abkhazian regions. Obama ignored US security commitments to Ukraine, which had been signed in return for giving up nuclear weapons under the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, and he vetoed the US Congress sending military aid to Ukraine. Obama’s ‘red line’ against Syria to halt its use of chemical weapons against civilians was ignored by Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and in 2015, Russia came to his assistance. Ramani could have analysed these weaknesses of the Obama administration as a guide to future flaws in President Joe Biden’s (who had been his vice president) weak policies towards the Russian-Ukrainian war from 2022-2024.
Ramani exaggerates Western unity in providing military support and imposing sanctions against Russia since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022 (p.381). In fact, there were three camps: the first sought Russia’s military defeat (UK, four Scandinavian countries, Poland, three Baltic states, Romania, Czech Republic); the second feared escalation, did not support a Russian defeat, and only provided enough military assistance for Ukraine to not be defeated but insufficient for Ukraine to defeat Russia (US, Germany); and a third incorporated a range of stances ranging from indifference (e.g., Spain), often changing its stance (e.g., France), being weakly committed (e.g., Italy, Spain) to being pro-Russian (Slovakia, Hungary). Turkey was both supportive of Ukraine and at the same time one of those countries re-exporting Western goods to Russia and assisting the Kremlin to undermine sanctions.
Drivers of Russia’s Full-Scale Invasion
Ramani outlines the factors that led Russia to launch a full-scale invasion. One of those which Russia claimed was allegedly pre-emptive, to prevent a Ukrainian an attack in the Donbas region, which had no basis in fact. This typical example of Russian imperial innocence; that is, blaming others for its own actions, could have been analysed to a greater extent, rather than simply cite Western media reports. An archetypal proponent of Russian imperial innocence is Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill who, Ramani quotes as saying Russia had never attacked anyone and was only ever defending itself (p.179). Russian claims of imperial innocence have remained a cornerstone of Kremlin disinformation as to why it launched its so-called ‘special military operation.’
Ramani writes Russia was confident of a quick victory for its ‘special military operation’ because it believed the Ukrainian armed forces were a ‘depleted force’, a sign of poor Russian intelligence on how they had fundamentally improved since 2014 (p.15). In addition, the Kremlin believed the Western response would be weak once more — as it was in 2014. These two factors account for only part of the reason for the initial failure of Russia’s ‘special military operation.’ A third reason, which is not discussed by Ramani, is related to identity questions, with the Kremlin believing Russian imperial nationalist myths of Ukraine inhabited by Little Russians, eager to be ‘liberated’ from Nazis who had come to power in an ‘illegal putsch’ in the Euromaidan Revolution. This myth led to failure of the ‘special military operation’ and its transformation into a full-scale and global war that would generate one million Russian casualties by May 2025, the same month Russia celebrates Victory Day at the end of World War II.
Corruption and the Myth of Russia’s ‘Second Best Army in the World’
Ramani writes about Russia re-asserting itself as a great power after ‘military modernisation,’ without sufficiently investigating the roots of why this was a fiction (p.67). Russia claimed its army was the second-best in the world when it invaded Ukraine in 2022, but after three years of full-scale war, we must conclude it is the second-best army in Ukraine.
Eliot A. Cohen and Philips O’Brien provide a detailed study of how Western policymakers, academics, and think tank experts were wrong to believe that Russia’s army was the second best in the world and that it would quickly defeat Ukraine. In other words, Western policymakers, academics, and think tank experts held the same mistaken views of Ukraine as did the Kremlin. One major reason, ignored by Ramani and Western policymakers, academics, and think tank experts, is that Russia is a mafia state, as a US diplomatic cable described the country as far back as 2010. Most of the funding for Russian ‘military reforms’ was in fact stolen, contributing to a chronic inefficiency of the logistical supply chain, a culture of greed and cynicism among officers, insufficient and poor training of soldiers, low quality military technology, and incompetence and weak capabilities of the Russian armed forces and security services.
Russian Imperial Nationalism
Ramani describes how the annexation produced ‘nationalist euphoria’ in Russia (p.52). Finkel writes that the 2014 annexation of Crimea let the imperialist genie out of the bottle and set in motion Russia’s full-scale invasion eight years later (p.195). When Western governments advised Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to accept Crimea was forever lost, they were sending a weak signal to Putin and encouraging future Russian land grabs that took place in 2022. Finkel mentions how in 2014, calls for violence were restricted to Russian imperial nationalists, but by 2022, genocidal calls to destroy Ukrainians and torture and kill them had become mainstream in the state-controlled Russian media and in the discourse of Russian leaders (p.214).
Ramani is mistaken to write that opposition leader Alexei Navalny opposed the annexation of Crimea (p.52); unfortunately, he supported it like many in the Russian opposition. Ukrainians have a century-old saying that Russian democracy ends at the Ukrainian border. Ramani points towards the direction of Russia’s political evolution but doesn’t take this to its logical conclusion, writing that if Putin reconstitutes the Russian political order around an ultranationalist ideology, future scholars could label Russia a fascist state (p.27). I believe, however, that Russia has already transitioned from an authoritarian regime with a collective leadership to in 2020-2022 a fascist dictatorship.
In 2020, the Russian constitution was changed to allow Putin to be de facto president for life. Since 2022, all independent vestiges of media and civil society life were extinguished, and Navalny was murdered in prison. One million Russians have fled abroad. With approximately one thousand political prisoners, Putin’s Russia has more people incarcerated for their political views than post-Joseph Stalin Soviet Union. The same is true of the Russian puppet state of Belarus, where there are approximately 1,200 political prisoners. Unfortunately, Ramani’s suggestion that scholars would come to describe Russia as a fascist state is not the case as most academics are conservative and are unwilling to quickly change their positions.
Russian Identity and War Against Ukraine
Ramani’s discussion of the period between Russia’s two invasions (2014-2022) shows a weak understanding of the widening divergences in Russia’s and Ukraine’s political systems and national identities. On this divergence, which has been taking place since as far back as the disintegration of the USSR in 1991, I recommend Maria Popova and Oxana Shevel’s Russia and Ukraine: Entangled Histories, Diverging States (2024). Indeed, one of the Kremlin demands in peace talks is for Ukraine to repeal legislation adopted since 2014 on language, education, media, memory politics, and religion.
There is little mention in Ramani’s book of why the Kremlin was becoming alarmed at legislation adopted by Ukraine after 2014 in the fields of language, education, media, and identity. Ramani’s discussion of the religious crisis in 2018-2019 (p.81) is weak, an area where Finkel has a far greater understanding of its significance for Russian-Ukrainian relations. Moreover, Ramani’s discussion of Putin’s July 2021 long essay ‘On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians’, the ideological treatise which underpinned the full-scale invasion eight months later, is too short and perfunctory. Ramani lacks an understanding of why Russians of all political persuasions found it difficult to accept a Ukrainian identity distinct from a Russian one and the concept of a fully independent Ukraine outside the Russian World and Eurasia (pp.102-103).
Finkel, correctly in my view, places identity at the centre of Russia’s war against Ukraine. Finkel’s main argument is that Russia is undertaking what it has always done under Tsars and Communist Commissars to destroy Ukrainian identity. Russia’s violence and military aggression against Ukraine “did not spring into being in 2022” — instead, Finkel claims it is the “product of a two-hundred-year-old history” (p.3). Ramani highlights how, since the mid-nineteenth century, “dominating Ukraine and denying Ukrainians an independent identity, let alone a state, have been the cornerstone of imperial, Soviet, and eventually, post-Soviet Russian policies” (p.3). According to Finkel, Soviet dictator Stalin pursued, and Putin is pursuing, the same goals of destroying Ukrainian identity, language, history, and culture through “time-tested methods of Russian domination over Ukraine and its residents” using ‘massacres, deportations, famine, and torture” (p.3). Finkel also writes that Russia is simply doing what it always has done – murdering, looting and destroying identities (pp.223, 257). Anne Applebaum’s Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine (2017) similarly argued that Stalin and Putin were both obsessed about ‘losing’ Ukraine.
Russia’s Invasion Goals
Ramani’s analysis of Russia’s two goals in 2022, of ‘de-nazification’ and ‘de-militarisation’ is not compelling (pp.125-126). This is unfortunate because first, the goals were long-standing and go back as far as President Dmitri Medvedev’s 2009 open letter to Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko; and second, they provide an insight into the identity roots of the war. Russia’s ‘de-nazification’ goal was – and remains – to annex what Russian imperial nationalists call ‘New Russia’ (southeast Ukraine), and after genocidally destroying Ukrainian identity, create a smaller Little Russian entity as a Russian puppet state. Little Russia’s domestic policies on education, language, culture, and religion would resemble those undertaken in Belarus since 1994 by Alexander Lukashenka, a president nostalgic for the Soviet Union and accepting of his country’s status as a White Russian province and Russian puppet state. Russia’s goal of ‘de-militarisation’ would permit Little Russia to only possess very small 50,000-strong armed forces with a Kremlin definition of ‘neutrality’ forever ruling out membership of NATO and the EU.
Finkel believes this is Russia’s war and genocide — not just Putin’s war against Ukraine. I agree with this premise, but this is an area that remains surprisingly contested. The two leading academic studies which uphold Finkel’s premise of the Russian people supporting the war against Ukraine are Jade McGlynn’s Russia’s War (2023) and Ian Garner’s Z Generation: Into the Heart of Russia’s Fascist Youth (2023). Russian liberal oppositionists, such as Vladimir Kara-Murza and Yulia Navalnaya, academics Mark Galeotti and Keith Gessen, and Economist Russia and East European Editor Arkady Ostrovsky disagree, claiming Russians do not support or are indifferent to the war, and that this is Putin’s war against Ukraine. Ukrainians agree with Finkel, McGlynn and
