Since 2022, many (pro-)Ukrainian intellectuals rushed to demonstrate that this war is a part of a broader pattern of Russian relation toward Ukraine. Me too, I share the view that it is truly an important aspect to explore if we want to understand the present war. Especially, because there are still a lot of renowned western academics who continue to insist that Putin’s apparent obsession with history is just a manipulation for internal audience and that Russian foreign policy is purely pragmatic: “Russian officials just want Ukraine out of NATO”. When they say they want to destroy Ukrainian sovereignty in any form... well, let’s just ignore this strange discourse because it does not fit into our analysis. In other words, they tend to dismiss the role of ideology. I believe, on the contrary, that we cannot ignore that Ukraine is playing a very important role in the Russian political imagination. And historians could and should provide the public with the knowledge about the origins of this obsession, contributing to the ongoing effort to make sense of this war.
But too often a supposedly historical approach becomes unhistorical or even anti-historical. It takes form of a following narrative: Russia wants to exterminate Ukraine today because that’s what it was always doing, from time immemorial. A method is to pick the examples of anti-Ukrainian discourses and practices from the past, without contextualizing them. So the general public may make a conclusion that a hate toward Ukraine is somehow a part of a Russian DNA and will persist independently of any historical change.