How Vladimir Putin turned Ukraine into a nation to be reckoned with

Putin’s assumption in launching the attack on Ukraine with a march on Kyiv was that Volodymyr Zelensky’s government would fall, Zelensky would flee, and the Russian army would be welcomed by residents with bread and salt. It was the same mistake the Bolsheviks made in 1920-21 with Poland – but this time the error was compounded by the egregious incompetence of Russia’s army, which came as a shock to everyone.

There was a mass exodus of Ukrainian women and children over the Western borders, while Ukrainian men were quickly and successfully mobilised. Retreating Russian forces committed atrocities in Bucha. Switching east, the Russian attack on Mariupol was notable for the astonishing fact that the Russians were bombing to smithereens a city that had, until recently, had a majority Russian population.

Staunch but ultimately unsuccessful resistance came from the Azov battalion, whose earlier Nazi sympathies (the main factual basis for Putin’s wildly exaggerated general claims of Ukrainian fascism) Plokhy does not explore.

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Relentless Russian bombing of urban infrastructure produced many civilian casualties, probably intentionally. Chernobyl and the nuclear power plant at Zaporizhia were put at risk. Russia was humiliated by the sinking of the cruiser Moskva by Ukrainian missiles (in Plokhy’s words, “a flagship lost in battle with a country that had no navy”). Kherson, a major port city on the Black Sea, fell to the Russians but was later recaptured by Ukraine. Bakhmut, strategically irrelevant, was the scene of inconclusive fighting, with a Russian mercenary force whose leader (Yevgeny Prigozhin) publicly talked back to Putin and hogged media attention.

Western sanctions were imposed on Russia, then tightened, with the British to the fore and the Germans uneasy. Seconded by the European Union, the US gave huge financial and military-hardware support but tried to hold the line on weapons that could be used to attack targets within Russia.

Useful as Plokhy’s detailed summary of events is, there are questions that remain unasked. The main one is about Ukraine’s and Zelensky’s stellar performance in the war. How did it happen, given the corruption and division of prewar Ukrainian politics? Plokhy’s implied explanation is that their cause was just, but alas that doesn’t always translate into success. And how on earth did Zelensky manage the overnight transformation from a TV celebrity with no deep interest in politics into a tough, determined and savvy national leader?

Zelensky is justly a hero in Plokhy’s book, but he remains a black box to the reader. His wartime government appears to exist in a curious vacuum caused by the absence to any reference to domestic politics.

Rather than exploring possible outcomes of the war, the book ends with a discussion of what has changed in the world, thus far, as a result of it. Europe, particularly the Germans, have had to wean themselves off Russian gas. China’s President Xi and Russia’s president Putin have a friendship “without limits” in which Putin is the junior partner and the West is the implicit enemy. For Russians in Russia, the idea of a kith-and-kin relationship of Russians, Ukrainians and Belorusians has been discredited, while Russians in Ukraine are switching to speaking Ukrainian.

Above all, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has done the opposite of what he set out to do. It has turned Ukraine irrevocably into a nation.

Sheila Fitzpatrick’s most recent book is The Shortest History of the Soviet Union (Black Inc.). She is a professor at Australian Catholic University and honorary associate at the University of Sydney.

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