Putin's Rationale for Invasion Gets the History Wrong

“He who loves Russia and wishes it well can only pray for Vladimir, placed at the head of Russia by God’s will.” The monk Tikhon Shevkunov, who pronounced these words, had a double entendre in mind: He was connecting a 10th-century ruler of a country called Rus, whom Russians call Vladimir the Great, with present-day Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin. Shevkunov, who is close to Putin, was legitimating Putin’s rule with a gesture at eternity.

Shevkunov spoke those words in 2009, when Putin was prime minister, in the interregnum between his presidencies. After Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012, he endorsed this understanding of his role. It’s not so much that he keeps extending the term limit of his rule indefinitely into the future (it is now 2036); it’s more that he justifies perpetual rule by reference to the ancient past.

In a 2012 address to the Russian Parliament, Putin suggested that he was fulfilling an eternal cycle initiated by Vladimir. Within such a logic, Russians have no need to think of any other leader. A central problem of Russian politics — who comes next — is pushed to the side.

Since then, Putin has repeatedly invoked his namesake, who ruled from Kyiv, to claim some essential unity between Russia and Ukraine. While visiting Kyiv in July 2013, Putin claimed that God wanted the two countries to be together — that their union was based upon “the authority of the Lord,” unalterable by an earthly force. That September, he made the same claim in secular terms, speaking of an “organic model” of Russian statehood, in which Ukraine was part of the Russian body.

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But this is not how history works. Nothing is predetermined. There are countless lines between the past and present, not just one.

The actual history is different and much more interesting. Vladimir is a much later Russian transliteration of Valdemar, a Scandinavian name. Valdemar descended from a group of Viking slave traders called the Rus, who had established a trade route that ran through Kyiv down the Dnieper (Dnipro) River. Kyiv became their main trading post and later their capital.