Putin’s History Lessons

When the Russians invaded Ukraine on the morning of February 24, 2022, they took over the Antonov Airport near Kyiv. The military installation was meant to be a key capture in the Russian plan to overwhelm the capital in the first days of the invasion. The invaders had planned to seize the heart of Ukraine quickly, thereby forcing President Volodymyr Zelensky and his government to surrender. To prepare, the Russians had previously infiltrated the area with saboteurs who worked to smooth the way to an easy victory.

But easy it was not. 

The Russians did not realize that Kyiv had identified some of the infiltrators and taken them out before the initial attack. And the troops dropped in by helicopter were generally unclear about what their operation entailed, as evidenced by what one airport employee, whom I’ll call Oleg Mazurko, said he witnessed.

Mazurko was one of some 150 people working at the airport when the Russians landed. For an hour, Mazurko watched the soldiers—who’d been drafted from the far reaches of Russia—bumble around, unsure of what to do next. Mostly young and some drunk, the men were on a kind of high over capturing the airport.

“They were all fluffed up, looking like cocks,” Mazurko’s wife told me while I was in Kyiv last year. The extent of their infantile antics would be discovered after they had fled the site: Mazurko saw human feces on the top of an engine taller than a man in a hanger, and in a break room teapot. 

Mazurko’s wife said her husband had also heard the Russians calling Ukraine “Kievan Rus’,” a historical reference to the Slavic state founded by Vikings in the ninth century. This was the medieval region both Russians and Ukrainians (as well as Belarusians) claim as their cultural forebear. The soldiers used the term as a way to claim that Ukraine has always been part of Russia, a piece of Russian propaganda often repeated by Russian President Vladimir Putin. 

On that cold February day, the soldiers cheerfully invited their crowd of hostages to return to the country in which Putin believes Ukrainians belong: “Come join us!” they yelled.

Over the years, Putin has spouted this contorted view of history to justify his drive to “reunite” Ukraine and Russia. In 2021, he wrote on the president’s website that the claim that Ukraine is a separate country is meant to “sow discord among people, the overarching goal being to divide and then to pit the parts of a single people against one another.” 

The “existence of a separate and independent Ukraine,” writes the journalist Yaroslav Trofimov in his new book, Our Enemies Will Vanish—a meticulously reported account of Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s invasion—is “an existential threat to Russia’s foundational narrative.” 

A Wall Street Journal reporter, Trofimov shows the reader the chasm that separates the two nations and cultures, as well as Ukrainians’ fierce pride in their sovereignty. His discussion of Ukrainian history and his interviews with officials and civilians on both sides of the conflict affirm fundamental differences between Ukrainians, who badly want to hold on to their democracy, and Russians, who are subject to despotic rule and propaganda from birth. Despite the countries’ similarities, “the Muscovite is not a brother to us,” a priest in Kyiv told Trofimov. “It is Cain who has gone after Abel.” 

While in Kharkiv in March 2022, Trofimov spoke to the only pediatric neurosurgeon left in eastern Ukraine, Oleksandr Dukhovskyy. Dukhovskyy told the journalist he first decided that Russia is the enemy in 1994 while at a conference in Moscow. Over dinner, Trofimov writes, Dukhovskyy “was stunned to listen to people he had considered colleagues and friends as they mocked the Ukrainian language and asserted that Ukraine was an artificial nation that shouldn’t exist.” That was the moment he “understood that we aren’t brothers and never will be,” he told Trofimov. “We have a different makeup.”

Since Ukraine’s victory at the battle of Antonov Airport, the invasion has dissolved into a bloody stalemate. Among other factors, Russians have improved their defensive tactics on the ground, and Ukrainians lack long-range missile systems to sufficiently disrupt supply chains. 

Shifts in military capacity and tactics will eventually give one side an advantage and bring Putin’s “special military operation” in Ukraine to an end. But the profound divergence in beliefs between Ukrainians and Russians has fed a conflict that extends back long before Antonov—and will likely extend long into the future.

This divide implicitly raises a question: Will this be a forever war?

While reporting in Kyiv in 2022, I stumbled upon a wall of thousands of faces of soldiers—a memorial commemorating men who have died in the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict since 2014. Stretching out beneath the gold spires of St. Michael’s cathedral, the wall cemented for me the idea that last year’s invasion of Ukraine is the realization of a nightmare for the people of Ukraine—a nightmare that began even before Russia’s annexation of Crimea a decade ago. “What we are hearing today is not the explosion of missiles, the sound of combat, and the war of aviation, but the sound of a new iron curtain coming down and isolating Russia from the civilized world,” Zelensky said on TV last year. Since returning from my reporting trip, I’ve watched how the American and international press falsely make the war sound like a sudden conflict that sprang to life in 2022. 

Trofimov sets the stage for today’s struggle by sprinkling his own experience into what could, in the wrong hands, be a dry historical read. “The city that invaders had come to take had been my home,” he writes. “The Russians thought it was theirs, in a country that they believed didn’t exist, part of a nation they told themselves had been invented. Kyiv seemed on its deathbed, listless, bled of its people. How dare they, I thought.”

Trofimov returns often to how the Russia-Ukraine conflict historically is the story of division not only across borders but also within them. Ukraine has had its share of corruption since its liberation from the Soviet Union in 1991, and trust in government is a work in progress. Some Ukrainians continue to mentally defect to the former USSR. Trofimov lays out the many ways in which the lines of ideology, place, and identity are blurred in Ukraine. Russian is spoken in many parts of Ukraine as a first language (particularly in the east), he writes, and classic books by Anton Chekhov and Leo Tolstoy are often read in the original. A native Ukrainian, Trofimov describes some of his fellow citizens’ hagiography of Russia—mainly in occupied parts of the country like the Donbas—and of Putin in particular. 

Some Ukrainians even welcome Russia’s ambition to annex their country. Signs left behind when Russian troops withdrew from various cities attest to this. “Together with Russia—Forever” reads a giant billboard in Kharkiv. “We are one people with Russia!” shouts a sign in the red, white, and blue of the Russian flag on a plaza overlooking the Oskil River in the same city. “Russia, Donbas, Forever” exclaims a sign in the city of Lyman, in the occupied province  of Donetsk.

While at a hospital in Kyiv, I met a doctor who told me that her family is divided, that her sister moved years ago to Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine and supports the Russians, which has led to a familial split. This is the reality for many Ukrainian families. Born on the same land, their geography has dictated belief.

But with the 2022 invasion, this began to change. Kharkiv’s mayor, Ihor Terekhov, described to Trofimov the shifting politics of his city, which previously had been loyal to the Russian Federation. “But now the situation has turned 180 degrees,” he said. Since the war began, many pro-Russian Ukrainians have fled to the eastern occupied territories, and witnessing the brutality of the siege up close has led to a shift in loyalties, according to the mayor. “The east of Ukraine has become more radically anti-Russian than the west of the country,” he said.

Our Enemies Will Vanish sometimes relays the logistics of battles at tedious length, but Trofimov lights up the narrative with pictures of how Ukrainians think and act—some betraying others to the Russians, some proudly sacrificing their lives for their country. Trofimov was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his Ukraine reporting in 2022 and 2023, and his eye for telling moments is again on display. For instance, he conveys an overheard conversation between a Ukrainian soldier and a Russian captive from Belgorod, right across the border.

“Ah, neighbors!” the Ukrainian man exclaimed, asking if the Russian had ever been to Kharkiv before the war.

“Of course,” the soldier replied.

“Did you see any Nazis there?”

“No.”

“Then why the fuck did you come here to fight?” the Ukrainian soldier asked, exasperated.

Trofimov offers readers a look at how we report on wars—the extreme risks we take to ensure that the story gets told, as well as the day-to-day survival and drudgery involved. Trofimov is lightly present, a witness to brutality and political posturing, suffering and confusion, all while making split-second decisions about things like whether a highway is safe to travel and marveling at the strangeness of wearing body armor in his home city that he’d used in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. In one scene, he describes the constant “thud of explosions” in Kharkiv, while staying at the only hotel in the city: “I pushed my bed to the corner away from the window at night, sleeping wedged between the wall and an unfastened flak jacket to shield me from glass shards or worse.”

“It’s one thing to see the horrors that they inflict on TV,” the mayor of Kharkiv said to Trofimov of the Russians, “and it’s another to live them in real life.” This is the difference a good journalist must take to heart, and Trofimov does. I tell my students at New York University’s graduate school of journalism that I want to be able to smell their stories. Trofimov, I think, comes from the same school of thought. In northern Kharkiv, he comes upon a hatchback set ablaze by a Russian Grad rocket. As paramedics pull out body parts of the people inside, a bystander shouts, “The skull, don’t forget the skull!” 

But Our Enemies Will Vanish resists a simplistic morality tale. Instead, Trofimov insists on the humanity of the Russian soldiers who invaded his country. “In the forest outside Lyman, these freshly dead Russian men with their civilian backpacks containing their meager possessions, with their sleeping bags and pouches of fever and pain medication, were no longer anonymous and generic invaders,” he writes. “I looked at their faces and felt anger. What had they died for? Putin’s megalomania? The wounded pride of old men whose empire collapsed in 1991, just as they were supposed to inherit it? The Russian idea, whatever that may be?”

In September 2022, Putin held an elaborate rally outside the Kremlin to celebrate his illegal annexation of Ukrainian territories. During a modern-day “Triumph of the Will,” an actor took the stage, maniacally shouting, “Goida! Goida!” Ivan the Terrible’s 16th-century armies used this word—difficult to translate, but roughly a militaristic form of “Let’s go!”—to spur on the terrors of torture and murder throughout Russia. Nobody gets the sobriquet “the Terrible” unless they are a true brute. The horrors that Czar Ivan inflicted are well documented. The use of the phrase now was nothing less than a cry for the same against Ukrainians. 

“The battlefield to which fate and history have called us is the battlefield for our people, for great historical Russia, for future generations, our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren,” Putin said to the crowd. He referred to Ukrainian “satanists,” saying they were making the war a fight of good against evil, the righteous against the perverse.

Putin’s rhetoric at the September annexation ceremony referred again and again to the West as plunderers. Putin’s lies have convinced many Russians that the invasion is right and just, that he is “liberating” Ukrainians from the West and its perverts and satanists. And as he tends to do from deep down in his rabbit hole, Putin tried at one remarkable moment in his speech to spin his enemies as the real propagandists:

They drowned the truth in an ocean of myths, illusions, and fakes, using extremely aggressive propaganda, lying recklessly, like [the Nazi propagandist Joseph] Goebbels. The more incredible the lie, the faster they will believe in it—that’s how they act, according to this principle.

He is a masterful manipulator, Putin. If the consequences weren’t so deadly, his word games would sound juvenile, the subtext a typical schoolchild taunt: “I’m rubber, you’re glue, whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you.” But Ukrainians are being killed by the thousands, and the madman in Russia is doing everything he can to convince his people that this, somehow, makes sense, and must be done to preserve his version of Russia, like Hitler’s version of Germany—for millennia. 

Despite Russia’s military power, in September 2022, Trofimov tells us, in the Kharkiv region, Ukrainian troops reached the border with Russia. There stood a Stop sign near a ripped-down Russian flag. “Shut it down,” a commander named Vsevolod Kozhemiako told his troops. “And turn the Stop sign their way, so they can see it!”

So stands a red warning to Putin. Whether Ukraine can back up such a warning remains to be seen.