Geopolitics of identity: why Russia cannot help but invade
Since 2014, the start of the Russo-Ukrainian war, one phrase still haunts me: “Они распяли мальчика в трусиках”—they [Ukrainians] crucified a little boy wearing nothing but his underwear. It sounds grotesque, like something torn from the pages of a macabre fairytale. It never happened, of course. But for the vast majority of people living in Russia, it might as well have.
Russia is not a country forged by shared values, common beliefs, or a unifying purpose—it is an empire assembled by force, bound together by lies, and sustained through the theft of other peoples’ art, culture, and history
Moscow’s forces—disguised as “local uprisings”— swept through the eastern provinces of Ukraine while state TV peddled this brazen fabrication to millions. The story's viral spread revealed something deeper than unrestrained, sordid propaganda—it showed how Russian society once again participated, wittingly or not, in the assertion of its colonizer identity, a pattern centuries in the making.
Russia is not a country forged by shared values, common beliefs, or a unifying purpose—it is an empire assembled by force, bound together by lies, and sustained through the theft of other peoples’ art, culture, and history.
It is true that conquest and cultural appropriation is neither new nor unique, but the existence of past colonial crimes by other powers neither excuse nor justify Russia's attempt to erase Ukraine now.
For years, we indulged the Moscow-centered narrative that defined a vast region and Russia’s place within it—a tale full of holes that few cared to question. Today, that fiction is unraveling, shocking many in the West. But for those who have had the misfortune of living next to Russia, it is a “we told you so” moment. Full of anger and regret.
One people, one lie
Every modern state today contends with what I’d call the geopolitics of identity—the interplay between a country’s sense of self, its founding myths, relationships with neighbors, and actions on the global stage. It is what happens when identity politics spill over borders, get weaponized as justification for war and infused with messianism.
In 2021, Vladimir Putin penned a five thousand-word essay declaring that Ukraine does not exist—not as a culture and certainly not as a nation. Russians and Ukrainians are "one people," he claimed, echoing sentiments expressed by many tsars and commissars before. But this was no admission of kinship; it was a threat: Ukrainians must either accept that they are Russian or perish.
Putin didn’t just challenge Ukraine’s right to exist; he framed it as Russia’s duty to invade, kill, rape and torture.
Colonized peoples gain statehood by casting off imperial chains. But the reverse is also true: former empires that inflicted suffering, humiliation and disempowerment on others can and do become thriving nation-states—if they examine their past, confront the injustices they wrought, and, ultimately, atone. Consider France, which came to terms with its past, becoming a post-imperial state only after its bitter loss in Algeria as late as 1962. In 2020, Dutch King Willem-Alexander apologized for the “excessive violence” inflicted on Indonesia. As Yale historian Timothy Snyder convincingly argued, every expansion-hungry polity must lose its “last colonial” war if it is ever to become a viable, post-imperial, democratic state.
A nationless state
Moscow has repeatedly failed to shed its imperial skin. Defeats in the Crimean War (1853–1856) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) prompted no reckoning. Unlike Spain, Portugal, or Belgium, which relinquished colonies and transitioned into post-imperial, normal nations, Russia viewed its losses as temporary setbacks, not turning points. Even the Soviet Union's collapse after the Afghanistan debacle failed to extinguish the imperial ethos, which persists in the Russian Federation—like a matryoshka doll.
The country's refusal to pivot to a post-imperial identity traps Russia in a cycle of conquest and oppression. When Chechnya dared to defy the colonizer in 1991, Moscow sent troops to slaughter locals by the hundreds of thousands while simultaneously claiming them as citizens. Compare this to Britain's handling of "The Troubles" in Northern Ireland—despite thirty years of conflict, London never considered razing Belfast to the ground. Perhaps the true measure of a nation’s break from empire lies in the willingness to view its people as citizens with rights, not subjects to silence and abuse.
A tale of two cities
Moscow, founded in 1147 on the swampy banks of the Moskva River, rose more by chance than design. While Kyiv already thrived for 600 years as a cultural and political hub, Moscow’s early days were defined by servitude. In the 13th century, it became a vassal to the Mongol Empire, serving as a tax collector for the Golden Horde—a role that allowed its princes to amass wealth and exploit rivals.
What we now call Russia was born not from a set of shared ideals but from the machinery of conquest followed by oppression. A historian, Janusz Bugajski, points out that from its early days, Moscow relied on control through force as an organizing principle. To this day, the Kremlin crushes dissent, clinging to the past because there is no future vision to offer. It rules through humiliation and oppression to legitimize a governance model where Moscow extracts resources from its provinces, treating places like Siberia, the Far East, and the North Caucasus as internal colonies.
In 1547, Ivan IV pulled off one of history’s greatest cons. Crowning himself “Tsar of All Rus,” he declared Moscow the rightful heir to Kyivan Rus, vaulting over five centuries of separation with a golden crown as a prop. It was an act of historical alchemy, transforming a provincial, yet aggressive backwaters into the supposed successor of a medieval civilization. While it is true that Moscow had prevailed in a few important military campaigns and that victors get to write history, facts are stubborn things. A perjured national narrative is a ticking time bomb.
For more than a century, Europe refused to play along. Diplomats, travelers, and scholars continued to refer to the realm as “Moscovia,” seen in the maps and manuscripts from the time. The name Rus was not inherited from Kyiv—it was stolen.
The cost of willful ignorance
Maybe it’s the West’s own tangled history with colonialism that makes us blind to the obvious. Our academia has sidestepped the legacy of the Russian Empire, its long shadow of colonization. We seem to struggle with granting agency to forty million Ukrainians—a stateless nation until recently. Instead, we allow Russia—the metropole—to frame the discourse.
The Kremlin wields deceit as a weapon to shape the present, but also to colonize the past. And once a narrative, no matter how false, is claimed, it can harden into an unassailable truth for generations. As Victor Rud explains, this is as if the United States were to claim London as its founding city, with modern Britons reduced to Americans in denial. A laughable oxymoron that, until recently, we refused to even consider in the context of Moscow’s preposterous pseudo-historical claims.
It’s Not Putin’s Russia; It’s Russia’s Putin
We like to think that Putin is the problem. A tyrant, a thug, the kind of man history occasionally coughs up and then spits out. But Putin is not the exception; he is the rule.
In the West, the Russians are often seen as passive victims of state propaganda, unwilling participants in the horrors unleashed by their government. Yet:
“Russia’s war on Ukraine is popular with large numbers of Russians and acceptable to an even larger number,”
Jade McGlynn detailed in her book Russia’s War.
McGlynn observes: Putin doesn’t impose foreign policy views on the Russian people; he gives voice to what many of them already believe. The narrative coming out of Moscow resonates not because it’s forced but because it spares its audience from the unbearable. To reject it would mean acknowledging their complicity in an unjust, sadistic, criminal war. ‘Мы вне политики’—we are apolitical—is the moral escape hatch many cling to. If you’ve ever been to Russia, you would’ve heard it often.
This dehumanization of Ukrainians makes the atrocities tolerable, and the unwillingness to confront the truth feeds the delusion. Propaganda plays a significant role in Russian life—it always has—but ultimately, what we are witnessing is a collective act of self-preservation, refusal to accept responsibility.
What’s at stake
Russia’s belligerence springs from a deep void of insecurity, impossible to fill. Like all colonizers, it measures its worth not by what it builds, but by whom it enslaves. This explains Russia's obsession with Ukraine. As Vladislav Surkov, a chief ideologue of early Putinism, once said: Russia will either expand or implode. Without war, without the subjugation of others, Russia ceases to know itself.
At home, its people are resigned to oppression, apathetic, always a victim. Yet when they turn their gaze outward, the inhabitants of the Russian Federation assume the manic determination of a colonizer, seeking meaning in the subjugation of neighbours. Not an inane trait, but a brutal cycle of projection, inflicting violence on others as a means of coping with and suppressing the memory of the violence once suffered.
Ukraine’s fight today is a battle not for territory, but for historical justice. For truth. A little boy wearing nothing but underwear was never crucified, and the Russian people must learn this.
Moscow’s criminal war has forced the world—and Russians themselves—to confront the falsehoods that have sustained the empire. What this aggressive re-colonizer requires, more than anything, is a resounding defeat.
An abbreviated version of this article first appeared in The Hill on January 28, 2025
Everything you wrote is true!
Incredibly well said!