One Year Later: The War In Ukraine
On Tuesday February 28, 2023, the Albert Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest hosted a virtual webinar to mark the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The webinar was a conversation between Dr. Volodymyr Kravchenko, a professor in History, Classics, & Religion Dept at University of Alberta and Dr. Michael Westrate, Assistant Vice Provost of the Graduate Research & Education Center and Assistant Professor of History at Villanova University. Dr. Mark Schrad, Director of Russian Area studies and Professor of Political Science at Villanova University provided a commentary to conclude the conversation. If you happened to miss or wish to revisit the conversation, check out the recording here.
To mark the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the Albert Lepage Center held a discussion centered around the circumstances and complexities of the ongoing war. The primary speaker for the event was Dr. Volodymyr Kravchenko, a prominent Ukrainian scholar of Ukrainian and Russian history. Dr. Michael Westrate of Villanova University introduced Dr. Kravchenko and fielded questions from the audience following Dr. Kravchenko’s presentation.
To begin the conversation, Dr. Kravchenko gave a presentation on the context and circumstances of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. There were a number of interesting ideas that Dr. Kravchenko presented to better contextualize the conflict, such as Russia and Ukraine’s entangled history and geography, the complexities of a borderland confrontation, and continuation of nation-state expansion. Central to his argument, Dr. Kravchenko believes the war is built on identities. In his presentation, Dr. Kravchenko lays out his intentions to understand the origins of the conflict and how it can be understood in the context of Russian and Ukrainian history. From this perspective, Dr, Kravchenko believes Russian aggression can be understood through explanations of identity, particularly the clashes between diverging Russian and Ukrainian identities.
By placing the conflict in terms of identity and identity struggles, Dr. Kravchenko can make claims on the ongoing relations between Ukrainian and Russian states (particularly in the context of a post-Soviet identity) and how these identities help understand the actions and rhetoric that has been used to explain the current conflict. Coming out of the collapse of the Soviet Union, both Ukraine and Russia needed a way to rectify their new identities with their Soviet past. The picture that Dr. Kravchenko paints is one of two entangled histories that diverge after the fall of the Soviet Union, with Russia reaching far back into its imperial past and pulling the thread of imperialism and Russian orthodoxy, and Ukraine looking forward into a more democratized and civil society centric path. In Dr. Kravchenko’s conception of post-Soviet history, Ukraine possesses a burgeoning civil society that is backing a democratic government, which in turn places it in a more western worldview and aligned with U.S. ideals. For Russia, having Ukraine — the second largest inheritor of the Soviet Union — move further and further towards this democratized state put their own identity into more and more danger as their imperial past and its desire to expand bring it into conflict with Ukraine’s desire to potentially disentangle itself. Dr. Kravchenko’s argued that Russia does not contain strong pro-democratic elements in civil society that could push for pro-democratic reform in Russia’s state structure. He argues that this is built out of Russia’s imperial and its Soviet past. In essence, Dr. Kravchenko argues that Ukraine acts as an existential threat to Russia, because Putin’s Russia has merged their imperial orthodoxy past with its Soviet past, and this merging has created a state that understands Ukraine’s divergence from its shared Soviet history towards democracy as a threat to its own identity. If Ukraine can move past its own Soviet history and move forward with a democracy, then Russians might see this and think that is possible, but Putin and the ruling elite in Russia want nothing more than to eradicate that possibility.
After Dr. Kravchenko introduced these ideas for the audience, he fielded questions from the audience that were facilitated by Dr. Westrate. Dr. Kravchenko covered a variety of questions from the audience. One audience member asked about President Volodymyr Zelensky and how his background interacts with the current conflict and how we might understand the future of Zelensky’s presidency in post-war Ukraine. Dr. Kravchenko laid out some of the trends of Ukrainian presidents and the pendulum-like move from democratization to pro-Russian policies from president to president. An often-contentious issue that exemplifies this divide in Ukrainian politics between democratization and pro-Russian policy, is the integration with the international community through the EU and NATO. If Ukraine integrates into a greater European community, it poses a threat to Russia’s conceptions of post-Soviet identity based in authoritarian rule and with expanding imperial ambitions. President Zelensky was set to be a pro-Russian president, as the previous presidency of Poroshenko was set to swing the trend back and because of Zelensky’s connection to the russ-ified zones of Ukraine. In Dr Kravchenko’s view, Zelensky’s unconventional background and his unexpected success as a leader during war had led to even more of a shift to democratization. It seems to Dr. Kravchenko that President Zelensky is doing the best he could under the circumstances, but once the war ends Zelensky might have a harder time transitioning into a peace time leader.
Dr. Mark Schrad wrapped up the evening by recapping important throughlines that Dr. Kravchenko had woven through his talk. One important thread with Dr. Schrad’s introduction of ontological security and its role in the discipline of International Relations, which would normally not view historical identities as important factors in understanding present day conflicts, like the current Ukraine-Russia conflict. Dr. Schrad also pointed out the importance of Zelensky as an example of the emerging and solidifying Ukrainian civil identity that is less constrained by its Soviet past and more invested in integrating into the West. The evening ended with these remarks and the panelists thanked Dr. Kravchenko for taking the time to better examine and understand this increasingly important matter between Russia and Ukraine that has some complicated historical components that many western audience members might not have been aware of before the event.
