Four years of hell

Putin’s misjudged effort to subjugate Ukraine has only helped cement its national identity, and it won’t ever stop fighting

Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Galuzin recently proposed placing Ukraine under UN control in order to “place a capable government in power with which a full-fledged peace treaty could be signed.”

Though Galuzin’s comments can hardly be described as new in any way — Putin himself was already describing Ukraine's leadership as ineffective and claiming that it didn’t represent its own people a year ago — it’s nevertheless rather remarkable that after making those comments Galuzin then travelled to Geneva to negotiate directly with its representatives in an attempt to broker a peace deal that would grant Russia some spoils from its highly ill-advised war.

Ukraine’s supposedly second-rate nature has long been a topic of discussion in Russia, but it received significant amplification by state propaganda following the illegal Russian annexation of Crimea and the start of the war in Donbas in 2014.

What kind of country forces its president to flee while protesters armed with little more than with wooden shields roam the government quarter, apparently unconcerned at the presence of special police units, they asked. A little outside interference was all that was required to detatch the coveted Black Sea peninsula from Kyiv, whose own miners in the east were soon prepared to meet government troops with a hail of bullets. “A failed state”, Russian propagandists laughed on state TV.

This contemptuous attitude further intensified when Ukraine voted in a landslide to make a literal comedian the country’s next president, a man who just weeks earlier had been coming to Moscow to make people laugh on TV. This strange development, which was accompanied by blanket assurances from Putin’s personal choice for Ukrainian president, Viktor Medvedchuk, that an invading Russian army would be greeted by civilians wielding bunches of flowers, led the Kremlin to yearn for a repeat of the Crimean conquest — and the euphoria that followed — in February 2022, though this time on a truly grand scale, to be capped off by a Victory Day parade through central Kyiv.

What a stinging slap in the face it would be to Russia’s “Western partners”, whose weakness was exposed for all to see when they failed to convincingly respond to the annexation of Crimea, the invasion of Donbas, or even the tragic downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17.

As another Russian deputy foreign minister, Sergey Ryabkov, said just a month before the invasion began, NATO should “pack its bags” and retreat to its 1997 borders — words that were dictated by the same contempt.

The Russian military was astonished to encounter such fierce resistance from the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

But then something went wrong once the invasion finally got underway. The Russian military was astonished to encounter such fierce resistance from the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU), which was all the more remarkable given that the AFU had also gravely miscalculated, expecting the Russian invasion to focus exclusively on Donbas.

As a result, Russian elite special forces and paratroopers found themselves on the outskirts of Kyiv being engaged by motley detachments of volunteers, police officers, National Guard troops and military units pulled together from all over the place.

Then the war gained momentum, and within a month the invading Russian military suddenly found itself on the back foot and was forced to make a humiliating retreat from the Kyiv, Chernihiv and Sumy regions.

By September, they were scattered in the Kharkiv region, and by November they surrendered the city of Kherson, the only regional centre they had managed to capture. The brutal legacy of Russian occupation discovered by the AFU as they recaptured towns and villages only served to galvanise the Ukrainian side, which came to understand that it had no choice but to fight.

Since then, there have been almost no major changes to the front line, with Putin’s forces crawling, at enormous human cost, just 60 kilometres from Donetsk to Pokrovsk in the past three years, with losses exceeding 1 million.

At the same time, the Russian military retains sometimes overwhelmingly superior manpower, aviation, weaponry, and artillery, not to mention the fact that in the fourth year of the war, the Kremlin received an incredible deus ex machina in the re-election of Donald Trump, who upon reassuming office, immediately ended military and humanitarian aid transfers to Ukraine and placed Washington’s entire relationship with its ally on a commercial footing. Nevertheless, Ukraine has not yet perished, and two massively mismatched militaries remain in stalemate.

Trump, incidentally, doesn’t know anything about Ukraine either. “You don’t start a war against somebody 20 times your size!” he said indignantly at the start of his second term. Ukraine’s temerity and guile are truly astounding!

Putin was confronted with that temerity and guile in 2004. Prior to that, he had cajoled and bullied Ukraine’s then-president Leonid Kuchma into forging ever closer ties between Ukraine and Russia. In 2003, Kuchma was even made the head of the Commonwealth of Independent States at Putin’s behest, while the Single Economic Space (SES) agreement was signed in Crimea.

However, a couple of months earlier, Ukraine’s parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, had adopted a law defining the nation’s foreign policy objectives as “gaining membership of EU and NATO, while maintaining good, neighbourly relations and a strategic partnership with Russia”. Just before signing the SES agreement, Kuchma had had the audacity to launch his book Ukraine is not Russia, and in Moscow, no less.

But 10 days after the CIS summit, Russia launched the Tuzla Island conflict, a territorial dispute over an uninhabited island between Crimea and Russia, which was Ukrainian territory. At the peak of the conflict, Alexander Voloshin, then head of Russia’s Presidential Administration, half-jokingly declared: “We’ll drop a bomb on it if we have to.”

Intense schmoozing then followed, with Putin and Kuchma meeting dozens of times in 2003 and 2004, with some meetings lasting for days, a sure sign of how important retaining Ukraine as a close junior partner was for the Kremlin at the time. Indeed, in the run up to Ukraine’s pivotal 2004 presidential election, Putin spent three days in Kyiv on what was his 10th visit to Ukraine that year alone, during which he openly campaigned for pro-Moscow candidate Viktor Yanukovych.

Alas, neither his superhuman effort, nor the poisoning of opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko, helped. Now that we know Putin’s passion for poison, any lingering doubt there may have been about who ordered Yushchenko’s poisoning can be confidently cast aside.

The result was the Orange Revolution, in which Ukrainians demonstrated plainly that they would be making the decisions, not the authorities, whether their own or somebody else’s. Kuchma later recalled that Putin had insisted he use force against unarmed protesters, which, to his credit, the Ukrainian president refused in what must have felt like the ultimate rebuff to the Kremlin.

The Orange Revolution has since become a bogeyman in Russia, and the progressive iPhone-using President Dmitry Medvedev, from whom Russia’s liberal public giddily hoped for impossible miracles, gave Yushchenko the cold shoulder, promising to send an ambassador to Kyiv only after a change of leadership. Ukraine then had the gall to support Tbilisi in the five-day Russo-Georgian war of 2008.

Medvedev, and then Putin, met Yanukovych, who did eventually get his dirty hands on the presidency, many times. Once a corrupt leader in their own image was finally installed in Kyiv, the Kremlin saw its chance to back Ukraine into a corner, and only realised it had made another miscalculation once it was too late. The result was 2013’s Euromaidan, which culminated in the Revolution of Dignity the following year, which this time was accompanied by bloodshed.

Ukrainian blood has been spilled ever since, the price it has been forced to pay for its intransigence, defiance and unwillingness to bow to the Kremlin’s henchmen. Perhaps, too, Ukraine is being punished for being incontrovertible evidence that Putin’s “strategic genius” was always a hollow joke and for laying bare the moral turpitude of the terrorised criminal state built by and for him.

Ukraine has borne the responsibility and consequences of living according to the maxim coined by Belarusian poet Yanka Kupala: “Don’t be cattle.” But turning everyone and anyone that he can reach into cattle is Putin and his state’s priority. A huge difference in philosophy that is plain to see on this, the fourth anniversary of the full-scale war, 12 years after the Revolution of Dignity and the start of Russian aggression.

No, we cannot simply write Russia off as an autocratic basket case, though it seemingly wears that fact on its sleeve for the entire world to see. By resisting efforts to make it follow in Moscow's footsteps, Ukraine appears destined to be locked in eternal conflict with its giant neighbour, and yet it won’t stop fighting. Glory to Ukraine. Glory to the heroes.

Views expressed in opinion pieces do not necessarily reflect the position of Novaya Gazeta Europe.