https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/russian-contempt-for-ukraine-paved-the-way-for-putins-disastrous-invasion/Since the 2022 Invasion Of Ukraine is a current topic here, here is a brief article by Swedish economist and Atlantic Council Fellow Anders Åslund.
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/russian-contempt-for-ukraine-paved-the-way-for-putins-disastrous-invasion/As the historic scale of Russian losses in Ukraine becomes increasingly apparent, debate is raging over how Putin’s invasion could possibly have gone so badly wrong. One common argument is that Moscow completely misjudged the mood of Ukrainians while fatally underestimating the country’s ability to defend itself.
This is a highly plausible explanation. For many years, it has been obvious that the Kremlin holds Ukraine in contempt and lacks even a rudimentary understanding of modern Ukrainian realities. This culture of ignorance fueled by imperial arrogance has now paved the way for one of the greatest military disasters of the modern era.
Ukraine’s national origins can be traced back for over a thousand years, but Vladimir Putin refuses to acknowledge that Ukraine is a nation at all. Instead, he disavows its history, language, culture, and religious traditions while publicly insisting that Ukrainians are in fact Russians. Since he does not accept Ukraine’s right to exist, his entire understanding of the country is hopelessly distorted.
Such thinking is by no means limited to Russia’s current leader. On the contrary, denial of Ukrainian statehood and identity is deeply rooted in modern Russian society, reflecting imperialistic instincts that make it impossible for many Russians to accept Ukraine as anything other than a component part in their own country’s national narrative.
During decades of meetings in Moscow, I became accustomed to the patronizing Russian responses that would be sure to follow whenever the topic of Ukraine arose. Russians typically look down on Ukrainians and consider them to be younger siblings incapable of managing their own affairs. While some individual Russians may view Ukraine sympathetically, relatively few regard their neighbor as worthy of the respect due to a fellow sovereign state.
While working in the post-Soviet region during the early 2000s, I learned that the Russian Embassy in Kyiv did not appoint anyone to monitor the Ukrainian media. As far as Russian diplomats were concerned, Ukraine’s domestic debates and national affairs were simply too parochial to be worth following. This is exactly the kind of contemptuous mindset that helped set the stage for today’s military miscalculations.
[Because of legal copyright considerations, please utilize the link above to see the complete article.]
There is also a religious component in all this that cannot be overlooked:
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-long-holy-war-behind-putins-political-war-in-ukraineIn the eight weeks since Russia invaded Ukraine, the war there has been interpreted in terms that are familiar from previous wars—terms that often seem to be in contradiction with one another. It is a proxy war, and it is a fight for national self-determination. It is a reprise of the Cold War, and a reset of Yalta. It is an inevitable consequence of nato expansion, and an unprovoked act of aggression by an autocrat bent on reclaiming a “greater” Russian unity that he thinks was taken by Western forces of globalization and political integration. All those ways of seeing the war are apt, but another familiar interpretation is pertinent, too. This is the view of Ukraine as a religious hot spot, where competing claims to a holy city, Kyiv, can be traced back hundreds of years, and where religious commitments and rivalries are deeply enmeshed in the society.
Since March 6th, when Kirill, the patriarch of Moscow and primate of the Russian Orthodox Church, gave an incendiary homily likening Russia’s invasion to a culture war against the West, plenty of questions have been asked about his role and his motives. Is he a tool of Vladimir Putin or Putin’s spiritual adviser? Is his vision of “Russky Mir” (“Russian World”) the basis for Putin’s war or just a rhetorical glaze applied to it? How can a religious leader with any integrity support so brutal a war, and might another leader—Pope Francis, with whom Kirill entered into dialogue in 2016—persuade him to withdraw his support and urge Putin to stand down?
Ukraine is where, more than a thousand years ago, a warrior prince took up Christianity to marry a daughter of the patriarch of Constantinople, and then compelled thousands of others to convert as he had. The conversion of St. Vladimir—also known as St. Volodymyr—is claimed as the foundational act of Christianity in the region, to which both Russian Orthodoxy and Orthodoxy in Ukraine trace their roots, and Ukraine has been religiously controverted territory ever since. José Casanova, a sociologist of religion at Georgetown, with Ukrainian family ties, sets out the modern religious history of the country in a recent essay. The historic center of Orthodoxy is Constantinople—present-day Istanbul—and the ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople is recognized by other patriarchs (there are nine in all) as primus inter pares, or first among equals. In the nineteenth century, national churches that were allied with Constantinople but autocephalous (each with its own head) became “the norm throughout the Orthodox world,” Casanova writes, but Ukraine, which had not gained national sovereignty, remained mainly Orthodox but dividedly so, with the west in the sphere of Constantinople and the east in that of Moscow, due in part to a grant of authority that the ecumenical patriarch gave to the Moscow patriarch in 1686—and which has been contested repeatedly since then.
All this maneuvering, José Casanova writes, has resulted in “three competing ‘national’ churches”: one loyal to the ecumenical patriarch; one loyal to the Moscow patriarch; and a third, much smaller one that is loyal to the Pope. In polls conducted in 2019 and 2021, between a third and just over half of Ukrainians identified with the new church, and between a fifth and a quarter with the Moscow-allied church; others identified as “simply Orthodox,” as Ukrainian Greek Catholics, Roman Catholics, Protestants, Jews, or Muslims, or claimed no religion. Yet the striking element was how well all these communities (the Russian Orthodox excepted) were working together. Given Russian Orthodoxy’s long sway over Ukraine and the historic pattern of religion in the region—a dominant state-allied church in each country, and a limited presence for other churches and other faiths—the religiously diverse post-Communist Ukraine, Casanova says, was a “sociological miracle.”
After the Russian invasion, Ukraine’s religious diversity has been subsumed into national unity. Whatever the war’s outcome, the biggest loser, in religious terms, will almost certainly be the Russian Orthodox Church. Last month, nearly three hundred R.O.C. priests and deacons signed an open letter in which they denounced the “fratricidal war in Ukraine” and called for an “immediate ceasefire.” (Those church leaders, however, are a tiny minority of the forty thousand clerics in the R.O.C.) Ukrainians who worshipped in churches tied to Moscow may sour on a religious leader who has lent holy purpose to Russia’s bombing of their country and its killing of their neighbors, and whose stature has been diminished forever by those acts. During services in Moscow on April 10th, Kirill gave a long discourse on the exercise of power, and concluded with a prayer: “May the Lord help us all in this difficult time for our Fatherland to unite, including around the authorities,” in order to “have true solidarity and the ability to repel external and internal enemies” for the sake of “goodness, truth, and love.”
But, if it’s clear that Kirill is not going to waver in his support of Putin, it is less clear what his Eastern Orthodox counterparts can do about it. They have encouraged the ouster of the R.O.C. from the World Council of Churches, and lauded the suspension of Kirill’s deputy, Metropolitan Hilarion, from the theology faculty at the University of Fribourg. Some have openly supported Ukraine’s effort to defend itself militarily and have spoken of it in terms not unlike those that Putin used last month: as a Christ-like act, a sacrifice, as Borys Gudziak has said, “for something that is greater than their very lives.” Mostly, though, they have been forced to look on from a distance, having no more power to stop the carnage than seemingly anyone else.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/26/2022 04:21PM by Tevai.