Russia – Ukraine : russian identity as a cultural weapon

Around the world, sayings and stereotypes about Russians abound: greatness of soul, generosity, the vastness of the territory, unfathomable minds that inspired Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and the legacy of the Tsars and the Soviet Empire. These clichés often collide with a flatter reality, yet they remain part of what Russian identity and culture are in the 21st century. This Russian culture, rich in symbols, is deeply linked to the country’s place in contemporary geopolitics. It finds space and influence in regional political decisions and debates, and it may even be this very Russian culture that gives international relations in Eastern Europe all their complexity.

The foundations of russian identity

If most of what shapes today’s Russian people took form during the period of Kievan Rus (from the 9th to the 13th century) and then under the Tsars up to 1917, it was the Soviet era that marked its apex. Perhaps the poll by the independent Levada Center indicates that 66% of Russians regret that regime because its collapse meant a notable loss of power and the dislocation of territory, going from a population of 300 million inhabitants in 1991 and a surface area of 22 million km², to a Russian Federation whose population was halved (146 million in 2021) and whose territory shrank to 17 million km², stripped of its 15 regions that became independent republics. Among them were the Slavic states of Ukraine and Belarus; Central Asian countries such as Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan; Caucasus states like Armenia and Azerbaijan; the Baltic states—Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia—as well as Moldova. For Russia, the disappearance of the USSR was “the geopolitical catastrophe of the century,” to use Gorbachev’s words. While some lament the decline of Russian influence, others look for ways to reaffirm its culture and identity through other structures.

The orthodox church

The Patriarch of Moscow, head of the Orthodox Church, is among those who adhere to this imaginary of a Russian world, this world of “Holy Russia.” With a strong Orthodox presence in the region, Patriarch Kirill, serving Vladimir Putin, shares his fight against Western “forces of evil,” which he demonised in his speech of 27 February 2022, three days after the invasion of Ukraine began. In line with his predecessor Alexy II (1929–2008), whose missionary strategy in Western Europe in the 1990s helped consolidate and expand the base of believers, Kirill opens the doors of the Church by promoting the principle of a cohabitation of civilisations rooted in Russian religious and cultural tradition, mirroring the multipolarity advocated by the Russian head of state. A successful operation, if one believes the figures published by Atlasocio.com, which indicate an increase in the Orthodox population in Russia from 58 million in 2010 to 101 million in 2020.

The russian narrative, the antithesis of the west

While Russians know that the Russian Orthodox Church is one of the strongholds of their shared culture, the values carried by the West are its antithesis. This total repulsion finds its origin in the violation of a verbal agreement between U.S. Secretary of State James Baker and Gorbachev on 9 February 1990 concerning NATO’s non-expansion. “They lied to us repeatedly… with NATO’s expansion eastward […] and with the deployment of military infrastructure at our borders,” Vladimir Putin explained on 18 March 2014, to justify the war in Crimea. Since that assessment, the triumph of liberal values and the unipolar world has continued to enrage Russian supporters, heirs to the former Soviet Empire and its communist values.

A new discourse that appeals

In the face of a unipolar world, it is also the multilateral political culture asserted by the Russian head of state that makes his country so appealing to those who find an interest in it. Russia reasserts its own value system. The absence of a strong ideology to export allows it to deploy a range of arguments consistent with its multilateral policy: sovereigntism, respect for cultural particularities, rejection of Western universalism—“principles” far less constraining to embrace than communist ideology, and which find success from Bashar al-Assad’s Syria to Kim Jong-un’s North Korea, via Erdoğan’s Turkey and Díaz-Canel’s Cuba, not to mention African generals in Uganda, Tanzania, Uganda, or Zimbabwe.

“Fraternity” at the heart of putin’s rhetoric

“Russian culture is the habit of protecting one’s own,” explained Mikhail Mishustin, a member of Putin’s government since 2020. This meaningful phrase, which has been examined in the work of Tatiana Kastouéva, a researcher at IFRI, helps to understand how Russia justifies incursions that depart from its stated policy of respect for sovereignty. In Ukraine, it was necessary, according to the official version, to rescue 7.5 million Russian-speakers who were victims of genocide and to respond to calls for help from the “people’s republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk. In the same logic, it was imperative to “guarantee the security of our own in Donbas”… hence Russian intervention. The researcher explains the vision Vladimir Putin holds of history, speaking of one same people whom he nevertheless bombs in a fratricidal war. This notion of brotherhood also reappears in Putin’s criticisms of the “fraternal betrayals” he suffers when anti-tank missiles such as American Javelins are delivered to several Slavic countries.

A “family” extending beyond orthodox russians

The core of Russian identity is clearly defined by Orthodox Russian-speakers, but the Kremlin claims to bring together all Slavic communities under a single flag—one of a shared history born with the baptism of Kievan Rus in the 10th century. Beyond this supposed community grouping Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and several Balkan countries, Alexander Dugin advanced in the 2000s the idea of a vast post-Soviet Eurasian complex. The idea that would ultimately mark the borders of Russian culture and identity proved instead to be that of the “Russkiy mir” (“Russian world”), whispered in Vladimir Putin’s ear by the political scientist Gleb Pavlovsky: a cultural and political ensemble similar to the Francophonie or the Commonwealth, which stops neither at ethnicity nor at religion, and which makes it possible to think of “Russianness” as a transnational civilisation. Russia brings together ethnically and religiously very diverse populations; their number can be estimated at more than 120. The North Caucasus region, including Ingushetia, Dagestan, and Chechnya, is Muslim and shares a tradition of Sufi confraternal Islam.

There are also Jewish, Buddhist, Catholic, and Protestant minorities. A vector of identity cohesion, this “Russian world” brings together Slavs, Turkic-speaking peoples, Orthodox Christians, and Muslims. Effective through its inclusiveness, it also encompasses Russian diaspora populations. In former Soviet regions, Russian is frequently spoken in the street. In Latvia, for example, a passer-by interviewed by Hélène Richard for Le Monde diplomatique in September 2022 said that “Russian [was her] mother tongue even though she speaks Latvian without problems.” This ideological construction draws widely across history for arguments pointing toward Russian regional and cultural unity. By making it its spearhead in recent years, it is under this broad banner of the “Russian world” that Vladimir Putin develops and defends values around tradition and against Western postmodernity.

Culture in the service of the kremlin’s rhetoric

Even if Russian culture and identity undeniably exist, they are above all tools of the Kremlin’s powerful rhetoric: a rhetoric of protecting “one’s own,” mistreated by Nazi and anti-Russian governments, which then justifies diplomatic conflicts—especially in the Baltic states—and military interventions. Under the rhetoric of a protective approach toward its borders and its people, Russia takes part in conflicts in Georgia (2008), Ukraine (2014 and then 2022), and in Azerbaijan and Armenia (2020). Patriarch Kirill, whom Hubert Védrine once jokingly called “Putin’s employee,” places religion at the service of this Russophone policy by replacing Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilisations” with “the clash of a global Euro-Atlantic project against traditional cultures and local civilisations.”

The rapprochement with euro-atlantic structures

Lack of loyalty or the fulfilment of a natural need for emancipation? The rapprochement of post-Soviet and Baltic states with the European Union raises the question. The logic of the “Russian world,” which considers these 15 independent countries almost as regions that rightfully belong to it, looks unfavourably upon the waves of NATO enlargement in the 2000s. In 1997, GUAM (the Organisation for Democracy and Economic Development), bringing together Georgia, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, and Moldova, expressed its desire to integrate European structures. Then in 1999, the countries of the Warsaw Pact joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and in 2004 seven new members—including the Baltic states—did the same, propelled by the colour revolutions (2003–2005). Faced with these rapprochements, crowned by the American intervention in Yugoslavia (1999), Russia is tempted to cut the region off from the influence of this Western culture, competitive and attractive to some. But is it capable of doing so?

Post-imperial syndrome and the concept of the “near abroad”

In its relations with the states of the former Union, Russia shows that it is far from having renounced the imperial posture that characterised both Tsarist power and the USSR. But it no longer has the means, as shown both by the continuation of the war in Chechnya and by the decline of its influence in the Caucasus and in the new states born from the USSR’s disintegration—states it now perceives as the “near abroad.” In 2014, the first war in Ukraine marked the activation of a post-imperial syndrome within the Kremlin. The desire to reunite and mobilise populations to restore Soviet power clashes with the independent policies of the region’s states. Concerned by the erosion of its “Russkiy mir,” Russia massively deploys propaganda media to preach its message and diffuse its post-Soviet aura from Latvia to Ukraine, via Kazakhstan. It also develops “Runet,” an independent network of the global internet, aiming at sovereignty and controlled content. Beyond the transnational narrative that claims to unify, Russia develops a multitude of intergovernmental tools.

Organisations as guarantors of russian unity

In reaction to its loss of influence, the Kremlin institutionalised its presence in economic and political domains as early as 1992. The CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States), which brought together 12 of the 15 post-Soviet states, nevertheless saw Turkmenistan, Georgia, and Ukraine leave the organisation, respectively in 2005, 2008, and 2014. That same year, the CSTO was created, with Russia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan as members. In 1995, the creation of a Customs Union between Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Russia led in 2014 to the EAEU (Eurasian Economic Community), later joined by Armenia. Thus these three organisations—the CIS, the EAEU, and the CSTO—bind the post-Soviet space around Russia while pushing back NATO, EU, and U.S. advances eastward.

While Russia also strengthened, between 1991 and 2014, its energy agreements, it is the Russian diaspora—numerous, at around thirty million—that it would use as a lever of influence. These “compatriots abroad,” sharing the same culture, justify the Kremlin’s attention, as explained above. In order to make Russia’s presence abroad tangible, Russia Today (2005), the Russkiy Mir Foundation (2007), and the Federal Agency Rossotrudnichestvo (2008) were created. These influence structures abroad then make it possible, as Vyacheslav Nikonov, president of Russkiy Mir, explained, “to expand the borders of Russian culture and affirm this global Russian phenomenon that cannot be described by any definition.”

Ukraine as a perfect illustration of russian cultural ambiguity

At war with Russia since 24 February 2022, Ukraine is a perfect illustration of the subtlety and ambiguity of the geopolitics pursued by Putin. Through the examples it provides, it shows the anchoring of Russian culture among its citizens and exacerbates the deep links connecting identity and geopolitics. Obsessed with the continuity of Russian history, interrupted by fratricidal and traumatic ruptures, Vladimir Putin considers Ukraine as one of his provinces. “Ukrainians are not a people; they are a tribe,” explains Sergei Shoigu, Russia’s defence minister. Yet Ukrainian resistance draws on patriotism by bringing back into fashion a song of the Austro-Hungarian army from 1914.

Journalist Ksenia Bolchakova measures the scale of the rupture between the two countries: the Ukrainian “little brother” is emancipating itself from Russian domination and old Soviet paternalism; it has alternatives. The Kremlin’s arguments that Ukraine was arbitrarily detached by Lenin and is therefore illegitimate clash with Zelensky’s historical arguments that Ukraine has been detached from Russia longer than it has been attached throughout history. The fifth European Values Study, which directly asks Ukrainians about their position toward Russia, notes that 72% of them are proud to be Ukrainian and that 91% favour joining the European Union.

Yet while 53% of interviews were conducted in Ukrainian, 47% of respondents preferred to speak Russian, and that same percentage said they were more receptive to information broadcast on Russian TV channels (Sputnik) before the war began. If Russian culture is indeed present in the post-Soviet spaces and beyond, then—following the logic of the “Russian world”—it is against his brothers and compatriots that Vladimir Putin directs his army, exposing the consequences of betrayal. By bringing this contradiction to the surface, the Kremlin reasserts an identity it opposes to the West and its values, and continues to seek to anchor itself in Russophone countries, which experience the link between cultural influence and military intimidation—unable to turn away from this “benevolent big brother,” whose independent impulses or alternative political orientations would awaken wrath.