RE: LeoThread 2025-08-16 03:50

What's up everybody? My name is Dmitriy Kafinas and you're listening to Hidden Forces, a podcast that inspires investors, entrepreneurs, and everyday citizens to challenge consensus narratives and to learn how to think critically about the systems of power shaping our world. My guest in today's episode is Professor Sergei Plohji, the director of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University and a leading authority on Ukraine, Russia, and Eastern Europe. He's published extensively on the international history of World War II and the Cold War, and he joins me today to discuss the subject of his latest book on the war in Ukraine and the return of history. This is a conversation about national identity, the disintegration of empires, and what will follow from the largest European land war since World War II. How will the outcome of the war in Ukraine inform the evolution of the international order? And what are the most compelling theories that explain Putin's decision to invade (1/40)

in the first place? Was it to build a greater Russia, as some of his detractors have claimed, or did Moscow face legitimate security concerns from NATO enlargement that on their own can explain the course of events? The answer to this last question holds important lessons about the future of European security and US policy towards China, which is what we spent part of the second hour discussing. If you want access to that part of the conversation and you're not already subscribed to Hidden Forces, you can join our premium feed and listen to the second hour of today's episode by going to hiddenforces.io. All of our content tiers give you access to our premium feed, which you can listen to on your mobile device using your favorite podcast app just like you're listening to this episode right now. If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius Community, which includes Q&A calls with guests, access to special research and analysis, in-person (2/40)

events and dinners, you can also do that on our subscriber page. And if you still have questions, feel free to send an email to infoathiddenforces.io and I or someone from our team will get right back to you. And with that, please enjoy this incredibly informative conversation with my guest, Professor Serhii Blokhi. Professor Serhii Blokhi, welcome to Hidden Forces. It's a pleasure. Thank you for having me. The pleasure is all mine, Professor. So before we get into the subject of today's conversation, which is going to build off your latest book, The Russo Ukrainian War, The Return of History, I'd love if you could take a moment to tell me in my audience a little bit about you, your background and your interest areas and focus in the field of history. I am Professor of Ukrainian and European History at Harvard University. And this is more or less what I have been doing for my entire life, my professional life. I was educated in Ukraine, which was at that time part of the Soviet Union. (3/40)

I started my academic career at the University of Dnipro, which is now relatively close to the front lines of this war. I continue it in Canada, University of Alberta in Western Canada. And I am Professor of Ukrainian History at Harvard since 2007, Director of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard. And my field is Ukrainian and European History, but also Global History. One of the courses that I teach at Harvard is on the Yalta Conference. I teach course also on the Cold War, that on the top of course, of course is on Ukrainian and European history. And in that sense, the book that we are discussing today, it brings together different fields, my different interests, but also my connection to the region, connection to Ukraine, connection to the things that are happening today on the battleground. So while I was reading the book, I came to the view that it dealt with two, if not maybe three topics. One was the origin of the war in Ukraine. And folded within that was also a (4/40)

conversation, a big part of it was really a conversation about Russian and Ukrainian identity and the sense of Russian nationhood and how that has evolved both up until the end of the Cold War and then subsequently with the fall of the Soviet Union. And the other part of the book is really a look forward into what the consequences of this war will be for the future and how the global order is evolving. Would you say that that's pretty much an accurate description? Yes, I would say it is an accurate description and the origins of the war, the issues of identity. This is the focus of the first chapters, few chapters, and then the future is the focus of the concluding two chapters. What is also in between, I try to look at the actual developments on the front lines in the course of the last year. So the book was written between March of 2022 and February of 2023. So what certainly the reader will get out of that book will be not just the origins and consequences of the war, but there will (5/40)

be a lot of war itself. Yeah, there's, you devote many chapters to describing actually the progression of the war in the last year. So that was extremely useful as well. And I'm sure it'll be a really good history for people who are maybe in the future and learning about the war later. So when did you begin writing this book? I started writing it really in late March, so it would be more or less one month into the war. And by that time, the shock that came with the war, I was able to overcome it on some level. But also for me, it became clear already in March, in late March, the overall outcome of that war. So we still don't know when it will end and exactly how it will end. But already in late March, it was clear for me that Ukraine would survive as an independent state. And that would be certainly mean defeat for Russia and for Russian aspirations as it was and plans it was going to the war. So from that point of view, at least I thought that I knew what I was talking about in (6/40)

historical perspective. In historical perspective, I mean, I could talk about the origins, I could discuss the developments, and I could also talk in my opinion quite confidently about the future, not the immediate future. I don't know what will happen tomorrow. I don't know exactly what will happen one year from now. But historical frame gives you understanding of the ultimate outcome, long-term outcome of those processes. Because I look at this war as the war of the Soviet succession or Russian succession, one of the wars of the history, story of the disintegration of the Russian Empire, one of the biggest world empires. And we know where the wars end of that sort. They end up with ultimately the victory of the national movements, the formation of the states. And another thing that the first months of the war made me confident of was the ultimate Ukrainian victory. So the victory meaning survival. In the after World War II, in now almost 80 years since then of World War II, there was (7/40)

no one single example of major power, great power, winning a war against a rising nation and a rising state. So none. And we didn't know whether the Russian aggression against Ukraine would be different or not by late March at least. I saw that it would probably not be different and that gave me some foundations again, moral historical in terms of standards of my profession to write that book. One more question for you about process before we get into the book itself. How do you feel that your identity and background as a Ukrainian impacted your writing of this book and impacted your objectivity of the war itself? I was thinking about that more than once, but this is the case where I think me coming from Ukraine, really an asset because I certainly now understand many things that anyone who didn't grow up there, didn't go to school there, probably it would be difficult for people to grasp that. I am clearly on the side of Ukraine, but I don't think about my position as being a partisan (8/40)

position. I think about myself and about my book as being part of this really broad community of people in the United States, in Europe that pose this war, oppose aggression, who are supporting Ukraine because this is one of the very few wars, at least in the last again, 80 years when the moral dimensions of the war are so clear. It's very clear who is the aggressor. It's very clear who is the victim. It's very clear who is right, who is wrong, where is the right side of history, where is wrong side of history. It's also a clash between democracy and autocracy. In the United States, there was a very interesting book written about the Second World War, it's the title Good War. What that meant was that the World War II was one, the probably most horrible war in the history of the world, but it was also the war where from the American perspective it was very clear the moral dimension of that war. The United States was on the right side of history. The Russian-Ukrainian war is the largest (9/40)

war in Europe since World War II, but it also comes with that sort of a moral clarity. I was proud to be on the side of millions, millions of other Americans who really considered this Russian aggression against Ukraine to be a crime. How far back do we need to go in order to understand the origins of this conflict? This war is quite unique, at least in my experience, of studying wars, writing about the wars, unique in a sense of how much history has been used and often abused to justify it. Vladimir Putin, who is certainly the primary culprit in all that story, published an essay on the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians, and certainly he starts there with medieval times with Kiev and Rus. His speech that was de facto declaration of the war was dubbed by some as a history lecture. There was a lot of history in articulation of the goals of the war and justification of it. The major point was that Ukrainians don't exist and shouldn't exist as a nation. The argument was put a (10/40)

little bit differently, saying that Russians and Ukrainians are one and the same people. History was misused to make that argument. I felt that in my book, I had to take seriously those claims. I had to deal with them as a professional. My first chapter of the book is called Imperial Implosion or Imperial Collapse. This is where I engaged again the Putin's argumentation from time to time. But also I'm trying to tell what, at least from the perspective of the professional historical field, what the Russian Empire was about, what were the relations between Russia and Ukraine within that empire. This is very important because Putin and many in Russia today still trace their origins to the Kievan Rus, to the city of Kiev, when after annexation of the Crimea in 2014 Putin erected a monument to Prince Volodymyr of Vladimir, his namesake. That was the prince who ruled in Kiev. Now the monument to that prince is at the very center of Moscow. There is a lot of confusion about the origins of the (11/40)

Russian state, about the origins of the Russian nation, which led to this war on the one hand. But on the other hand also is responsible to a degree for miscalculations, Russian miscalculations in the war. Putin now it is very clear, really believed what he was writing, that Russians and Ukrainians were one and the same people, that allegedly Ukrainians were captured by the evil forces, by Nazis and nationalists, led by the only Jewish president outside of Israel, Volodymyr Zelensky, Jewish by background. And that led him, I mean President Putin, to think that Ukrainians would welcome Russian troops with flowers. And we know that they welcomed them with javelins and stingers. So what is the basis of Putin's claim beyond the fact that there was a founding prince? I think Vladimir, the prince that he erected a statue of, was a Viking. I mean, I'm a little confused because you went back to at least, I think the 15th century in the book, recounting the history of the peoples that sort of (12/40)

populated that region. So what is the exact basis of his claim and what is the justification for an alternative history or the more definitive history that let's say other historians agree about? Kievan Rus was a medieval empire, with its capital, with its center being based in Kiev. And from that point of view, the comparisons can be made, let's say, with the more ancient, of course, Roman Empire or Charlemagne Empire. And imagine today that, let's say, someone in Britain or in France or in Germany goes and takes over Rome, claiming that they're the real descendants of the Roman Empire. So the same we see with thinking in today's Russia. Today's Russia, its central part was part of this Kievan Rus of this medieval empire. And the myth of origins, one of the sections in my book is called myth of origins tells them that they come from Kiev, which is also the foundation for thinking about not just political history, not just history of the state, not just history of dynasty, but also (13/40)

about history of nations. And this is one of indications that really Russia today has difficulty divorcing itself, not only from Russian Empire or the Soviet Union, but also from medieval, medieval history and medieval imperial history and so on and so forth. Vladimir Vladimir himself, yes, he was a Viking. The Kievan Rus was one of those states, principalities, empires that was created or reformated by Vikings all over Europe. So from that point of view, Ukrainian history and to a degree, Russian history is very, very European in a sense. This is the same phenomenon. This is more or less the same Vikings. But they, as it happened in all other places, they didn't create Sweden or Norway in France, right? Eventually they were acculturated. They became part of the local elites. We see the emergence of different states and eventually nation states. So the story of Eastern Europe, the story of Ukraine is pretty much the same. So you have an influx of Vikings that they take over militarily. (14/40)

They create their own principality, but eventually they go native. They speak Slavic language, they write Slavic or Old Ukrainian or Old Ruthenian, Church Slavonic, the Slavonic language of the literature of the Church is there. We don't hear about Vikings per se after the first to second generation. You know, reading your book made me realize that not only do I not know anything about Viking history, but it sure seems fascinating. I had no real appreciation for how much Vikings were using the river systems in Europe to come down into the continent and conquer territories. Yes, this is fascinating story and history in its own right. It is also very interesting that today archaeologists can tell you who the Viking is and who not is the Viking in places like Ukraine. Because the Vikings have, they were traveling on the boats, right? So they were rowing. One theory is that rowers, that's the meaning of the term also Rus, the term Rus and eventually Russia comes from the Finnic or Swedish (15/40)

term rowers. And you can see the formations to the skeletons that come with spending the life on the boat. And when you look at the population of the Ukrainian steppes, there would be different deformations coming from the lifespan on the back of the horse. Right? Because they're Mongolians. Right. So today you don't really even, for archaeology, you can identify who was who by looking at the skeleton. So yes, it is interesting and fascinating story. And Ukraine was exactly the place where the horse riding cultures met with the boat people. So this is also an important point to mention. And you alluded to it earlier when you talked about imperial disintegration. But so much of what we consider to be European history, particularly in the Eastern side, is the result of the coming apart of empires, the Ottoman Empire, certainly in the case of Greece. And now you're drawing a similar parallel in the case of Russia and Ukraine. I have one more question before we go to the Bolshevik era (16/40)

because I want to parse out Putin's claims about Lenin's role in giving rise to what we think of as an independent Ukraine and the blame that he puts on Lenin. And that question has to do with really what the value is of investigating these historical origins to begin with. Because from my perspective, power is the most important thing that really matters to define what is a national boundary or not when it comes to a state's ability to impose its will. But insofar as history is important, it seems that the only importance of history, and it's not a small thing, is in the population's sense of legitimacy over the ruling order. So how much of this is really about claiming a sense of national legitimacy and aligning state policy with that view and getting the public's support to believe it? So how much of this was already in the Russian public's mind, the theories that President Putin has put forward, and how much of this has been actively cultivated by him and more importantly, other (17/40)

nationalists from who he's gotten these ideas over the last several decades? Putin's argument about what the title of his essay says, the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians is not original. He's not a historian, he's not a thinker, he's a political figure. But he spent a lot of time during the COVID pandemic in isolation, having time to read Andrew Reid books, and the books that he was reading were mostly coming from the either Russian imperial thinkers and historians of the pre-revolutionary era of 1917, or from the writers that ended up to be in immigration after the Bolshevik Revolution, but who continued to develop the imperial views and imperial ideas. And in the Russian empire of the 19th century, the dominant view was that there existed a big Russian nation which consisted of three tribes, great Russians for today's Russians, little Russians or Ukrainians, and white Russians or Belarusians. They could maybe speak a little bit different languages, but all of them were (18/40)

Russians, and that was the big political Russian nation. The revolution of 1917 really ended that because that was a social revolution, of course, there was a lot about the working class and so on and so forth, but it was also the revolution of nations. It is called Russian revolution, which is a little bit ironic. The right term for that is the revolution in the Russian empire, and any revolution in the empire at the beginning of the 20th century, even in the 19th century, would be about also national self-determination. So the revolution really ends the old Russian empire and ends with the view of the Russian empire that there existed such thing as big Russian nation. Ukrainians and Belarusians are recognized as separate nations and parvies Russians. They get their republics in the Soviet Union and so on and so forth. And Putin has been very vocal in showing how unhappy he is, what Lenin's transformations and reforms were, and even Joseph Stalin's. He was talking about that in this (19/40)

speech on the eve of the war. So his ideas is going back to the empire, bringing back the imperial modes of thinking and thinking not just about the future, but also about the past. And you're absolutely right that history is being used here as a political tool for justification, something that has to come, but really he tries to move forward in his mind by looking back at the glory of the Russian empire rather than the glory of the Soviet Union. Yeah. I brought up the Greek case because a history that we all grew up thinking was settled, both in scholarship and in international law, is now being challenged by Turkish nationalists as part of this larger, revisionist set of claims over the Eastern Mediterranean. And I can't help but go back to my earlier point about history being constantly rewritten because history doesn't have any adjudicative power in and of itself. People make history, might makes right. And yet, even as I say that, I recognize that people's historical understanding (20/40)

does influence their sense of legitimacy over the ruling order. And in that sense, the rewriting of history, whether you want to call that revanchism or nationalist propaganda, does serve an important function insofar as it provides a legitimizing narrative for the aggressor state that's looking to change the status quo by making itself the true victim of a historical process that goes back much further than any immediate conflict. And the power of these sorts of narratives is also important for the defenders who are encouraged to fight for their country, which obviously has been an important part of what's motivated the Ukrainians and helped them form their sense of nationhood, which I'm sure we'll have a chance to get into. But I have another question here because what you're referring to is this tripartite view of a greater Russia. And you said, quote, big Russians are the people that we call today Russians, little Russians are Ukrainians and white Russians are Belarusians. What I (21/40)

didn't understand in the book was the distinction between the tripartite view of a greater Russia and the Eurasianist view. What's the distinction between these two perspectives? First, a short comment on the Greek story because the war in Ukraine is a continuation of the story that really starts with the Greek revolution of the beginning of the 19th century, because that was one of the first cases of the revolt against empire, one of Eurasian empires, in this case, the Ottoman Empire. And it really, the fight, the heroic fight of the Greeks, was supported by the entire Europe. So there was this mobilization, Lord Byron was involved in that and so on and so forth. And Ukrainian war is also a war against against the empire or post-imperial state. And we see the same sort of maybe comparable sort of the mobilization. People are on what I referred to before, that right side of history. But this are the pages from the same book, the book of the disintegration of the big empire, the Ottoman (22/40)

Empire, the Russian Empire, the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. What the Greek case reminds us about is that the story of the disintegration of the empires, this is not an event. This is a process. And unfortunately, this is a process that can take not just decades, but even centuries. And that's, again, a useful case, but also an important perspective to have. In terms of the vision of the one big Russian nation and ideas of Eurasianism, Eurasianism, it's a bigger umbrella that is used by many Russian thinkers to a degree by Putin as well to extend the imperial tent, Russian imperial tent. Because what's the concept of the three-part type Russian nation doesn't allow for, it doesn't allow to provide justification for keeping under the Russian control Chechens, for example, right? Or to keeping under the Russian control Buryats, Tatars, and so on and so forth. So this is another step of the imperial project. It's not just you form a big imperial nation out of a number of nations, but also (23/40)

then you may claim for someone who is not Slavic at all, who can't consider it to be Slavic, but you still provide philosophical and historical justification for the continuation of the imperial rule. And it turned out in this war that the entire undertaking of the continuation of the Russian rule over non-Slavic groups in the Russian Federation is extremely important for a billy to offer Russia to fight the war. The Chechens, the Buryats, the Yakuts, the people from Tuva were disproportionately recruited into the Russian army and sent to die in the fields of Ukraine. So you can imagine that as concentric circles at the center would be Russians or great Russians, the next circle would include Ukrainians and Belarusians as allegedly Russians, and then there would be non-Slavic and non-Orthodox non-Eastern groups that by idea of Eurasianism would provide some form of justification of the continuation of the Russian rule. So the Eurasianist view encompasses the perspective of Greater (24/40)

Russia. Yes. It's within the Eurasianist perspective. So how did these ideas evolve or factor into what became notions of Russia's sphere of influence after the Bolshoi Revolution and then subsequently after the beginning of the Cold War? The ideas of a big Russian nation and Eurasianism went into immigration after the victory of the Bolshoi. The Eurasianist movement really was fully formulated and articulated during the interwar period. You mean people who left Russia after the Bolshoi Revolution continued some of these ideas? Yes, exactly. And now they serve as a reservoir of ideas for Putin, who rejects the Soviet model of dealing with the nationality question in the empire. And the Soviet model was that they recognized the existence of Ukraine, they recognized the existence of Belarus, they created a number of national republics, 15, they were all together at the end of the Soviet Union, and they provided especially immediately after the revolution. They provided some concessions (25/40)

to the nationalities. Concessions were mostly in the form of endowing them with formal institutions that didn't have much power, local governments or local parliaments that didn't function because there was no elections per se. Concessions in the arm or in the field of language and culture. But all of that was done in the situation where the political control over those peripheries was really strengthened, strengthened especially during Stalin and his dictatorial rule and his dictatorial power. The official ideology was not Russian nationalism or was not Eurasianism, the official ideology was internationalism, the communist internationalism. The movement, the communist movement. Yes, yes, the communist movement certainly was something that took over the government in the former Russian empire, but also something that the Bolsheviks like Lenin and 30 degrees Stalin were trying to exploit. Lenin for the purpose of the world revolution. The Soviet Union was formed with an eye that one day (26/40)

the United States of America would become one of the republics of the global union of the Soviet Socialist Republics. If you look at the court of warms of the Soviet Union, you will see that there is the sun, the sun of communism rising over the globe. So the aspirations were from the very beginning global. But by the early 1930s, Stalin realizes that the world revolution is not happening. The Britain is not Russian with the socialist revolution and the United States as well are not doing that. Whatever attempts were they in the early 20s were crushed and they start thinking about building socialism in one country. But World War II and spectacular successes of the Soviet Union in that war produces such phenomenon as Eastern Europe. Poland and Hungary and Czechoslovakia, Romania, all of these countries were overrun by the Red Army and Stalin introduced communist regimes in all those places. And that's where you see it. He didn't integrate, he didn't incorporate them into the Soviet (27/40)

Union, but that would be a classic sphere of influence model, which was also combined with the ideological uniformity and the imposition of the so-called small Stalin's or small dictators in East Germany, in Poland, in Romania, and other places. So what you see is that the imperial instinct is the same in the Russian imperial thinkers and the communist leaders. But the way how they go over this imperial project of establishing and maintaining control over a number of nations and politics, their approach differs, at least ideologically, historically and otherwise. So I'm fascinated by how the Russian elite, the Russian people, the institutions of government in Russia came to grips with the collapse of the Soviet Union and attempted to internalize that as a working model of influence over the new Russian Federation, as well as the former Soviet Republics and even Eastern Bloc countries. How long did it take for Russian elites to begin to formulate an idea of what Russia's place in the (28/40)

world should be? And did that really begin to solidify after Putin came into power? Yes, it did. It started to solidify. But the basic ideas were already there back in 1991 at the time of the disintegration of the Soviet Union. People around Boris Yeltsin, in particular his economic advisor and prime minister for some period of time, Yegor Gahidar, were saying that in the conditions of the disintegration of the USSR and economic collapse, Russia really didn't have resources to maintain its control over the post-Soviet space in the way how it was doing that during the Soviet times, which meant a lot of expenses, also subsidies, coming from the process that Russia was getting from selling oil and gas. And the argument was, okay, we need this money for ourselves. We need this money to rebuild Russia. And 20 years from now, the Republics would come back one way or another, not in the form of the former Soviet arrangement, where it would be a burden, continuing burden on the economic loan (29/40)

Russia, but in a different form, in a different way. But the model was that the sovereignty of those other republics was conditional, was recognized as conditional on being allied with Russia, not joining the West. So really, that's where the thinking about the post-Soviet space as Russian sphere of influence had started. So the borders of the Russian sphere of influence, what was the Soviet spheres of influence and cover Eastern Europe, now shrunk and were moved inside of the borders of the former Soviet Union. So the former republics like Ukraine, like Belarus, even Baltic states, Kazakhstan, were imagined as part of that sphere of influence. And there was a formal organization created for those purposes, which was called the Commonwealth of Independent States. And what you see is from the very beginning, the tensions are growing between Russia and Ukraine, which were the largest Soviet republics in terms of population, in terms of the economic output, because Ukraine looked at the (30/40)

Commonwealth of Independent States as an institution that was supposed to assure what in Kiev they called the civilized divorce. So an institution where we can negotiate how we divide the common property, how we arrange our relations for the future. In Russia, from the very beginning, the Commonwealth of Independent States was viewed as an instrument for maintaining Russian influence and Russian geopolitical control over the post-Soviet space. And all of that is happening before Putin. All of that is happening in the 1990s. So what Putin's innovation is, is that he realizes that the Commonwealth of Independent States, it's not a working mechanism to assure those goals. He comes up with the number of projects of creating different forms of what would be called the Eurasian Union, a much closer connection between the former post-Soviet republics under the Russian control than was the Commonwealth. And he's prepared to use the army to achieve that goal outside of the borders of the (31/40)

Russian Federation. So in 2008, we have a war in Georgia. In 2014, we have the annexation of the Crimea and start of the hybrid warfare in Donbass. And in 2022, we have the all-out aggression against Ukraine. But the goal is still the same. The goal didn't change from the times of Boris Yeltsin. It's reassuring Russian control over this post-Soviet space. And it would be impossible to achieve that without Ukraine, the second largest Soviet and then post-Soviet republic being part of that project. So there are a couple of places I want to go now. It's going to get a little difficult because there are a few threats to follow. But let's start with this one, which has to do with the evolution of institutional and state power in Russia versus in Ukraine. And why was it that these two nations diverged so significantly? Even though Ukraine's economic crisis post the fall of the Soviet Union was arguably worse than in Russia, but there was more optimism around sovereignty in Ukraine and also (32/40)

Ukraine took a more democratic direction. So what explains those differences and how have those contributed to where we find ourselves today? From the start, what you see within big segments of elites in Russia is a really a shock from the fall of the Soviet Union. So the overall idea is that Russia lost its geopolitical position, lost territory in the minds of a big part of the elite who didn't distinguish between Russia proper and the Soviet Union. And you see much more optimism on the Ukrainian side where Ukrainian elites gained. They gained statehood. They gained independence, at least a declaration of independence and working hard to make it a reality. But despite these differences, there was also a feeling among the Ukrainian elites that they should follow a Russian model in terms of the political changes and transformations that Yeltsin was going through in the 1990s. But the reasons are different, but one of them was that Ukraine as a republic of the Soviet Union really didn't (33/40)

have an independent elite. Those were mostly the yes man, the thinking was happening in Moscow, the institutions were there, the decisions were made there. Then the orders were going to the republics and there were the people who were implementing those orders. So for them it was difficult to think about themselves fully independently in terms of what do you do with this country. So they were trying to follow in the 1990s Yeltsin's models and Yeltsin's model was really creating a strong presidential system. He orders the Russian tanks to shoot at the Russian parliament in 1993. He rewrites constitution and he has a referendum on strengthening of the presidential powers. And the Ukrainian elite, post-communist elite, was actually trying to emulate it. And then by the beginning of 2000s, they realized that whatever political, quote-unquote, solutions or models or policies worked in Russia, they didn't work in Ukraine. It was a different country, it was a different population, it was a (34/40)

different level of tolerance towards the possibility of state violence. So in Ukraine, in response to the rise in authoritarian tendencies, there were two uprisings, popular revolutions called Maidan. The first one became known as Orange Revolution in 2004. The second one is Revolution of Dignity in 2013-2014. And already around the time of the first of those revolutions, the Orange Revolution, president of Ukraine at that time, Leonid Kuchma wrote, or at least co-wrote a book which had a very, very talent title, Ukraine is not Russian. And the book first appeared not in Ukrainian but in Russian and it was first presented not in Kiev but in Moscow. That was clearly, we know where the main reader of that book in mind of Kuchma was supposed to be, it was supposed to be in Kremlin. But that was the lesson that the Ukrainian elites learned over the period of the 1990s and the beginning of the new century, that Ukrainian population is different. It's not prepared to allow the state to take (35/40)

away the democratic practices, the democracy that was given to Ukraine with the fall of the Soviet Union. At the end, by the time we have the start of the war in 2014 and then in 2022, you see that this war is also can very easily and justifiably characterized also as the war between authority and democracy, between authoritarian state and another state that became democratic, one of very few states in the post-Soviet space that maintained democratic institutions and functional democracy. There's another important framing here and I think this is the opportune moment to bring it up, which is that of Russia versus the quote West or more specifically Russia versus the United States. A framing that is omnipresent in the formulation of Russian foreign policy and in the country's domestic political discourse and which looms much larger in the minds of Russian elites and in the Russian public than I think most Americans and Europeans realize. In part because the reverse isn't true, even with (36/40)

all the Russia collusion hysteria during the Trump administration, Americans never really saw their national power as being constrained or defined by Russian power. So what I'd like to do in the second hour professor is to try and reconcile and compare two adjacent theories for the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, each of which pull from some of the themes that we've explored today. The first theory is based on the imperial argument for Russian aggression, that in other words, Russia's invasion of Ukraine in both 2014 and again in 2022 stemmed from imperial ambitions and desires for territorial expansion informed by this disputed history that we've discussed today and which incidentally would have also explained the expansion of NATO in terms of legitimate security concerns on the part of Russia's neighbors. That in other words, it wasn't so much the US and Europe moving east as it was Eastern Europe and some of these former Soviet republics moving west. The second theory is one that (37/40)

takes a much more sympathetic view of Russian behavior, seeing it as an understandable and predictable response to the enlargement of NATO and to Western military encroachments on Russia's border structural realists like John Meersheimer who's been on the show before, are prominent proponents of this view, but he's not alone. I think both of these perspectives have merit and like I said, I'd like to devote the second hour of our conversation to exploring them in detail and that will I think ultimately bring us to a conversation about China because unlike in the case of the US and Russia, the policy towards China was one of accommodation and I think most of us can agree at this point at least that this policy didn't work. So if it didn't work for China, why would it have worked for Russia? You know, just some food for thought there. So for those of you who are new to the program, Hidden Forces is listener supported. We don't accept advertisers or commercial sponsors. The entire show is (38/40)

funded from top to bottom by listeners like you. If you want access to the second hour of today's conversation with Professor Plohe, head over to hiddenforces.io slash subscribe and sign up to one of our three content tiers. All subscribers gain access to our premium feed, which you can use to listen to the rest of today's conversation on your mobile device using your favorite podcast app, just like you're listening to this episode right now. Professor, stick around, we're going to move the second hour of our conversation onto the premium feed. If you want to listen in on the rest of today's conversation, head over to hiddenforces.io slash subscribe and join our premium feed. If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius community, you can also do that through our subscriber page. Today's episode was produced by me and edited by Stylianos Nicolaou. For more episodes, you can check out our website at hiddenforces.io. You can follow me on (39/40)

Twitter at Kofinas and you can email me at info at hiddenforces.io. As always, thanks for listening. We'll see you next time. (40/40)