Opinion Anastasia Piliavsky writes | Russia vs Ukraine is war between Empire vs Nation
This war is a standoff between a ravenous tyranny and a democracy fighting for its life. Its outcome will determine whether or not the world will descend into a new age of imperial conquests.
Relatives of soldiers from the Azov Regiment, who were captured by Russia in May after the fall of Mariupol, sit at the Christmas table in a flashmob action under the Christmas tree demanding to free the prisoners, in Kyiv, Ukraine, December 24, 2022. (AP) “We have no fear. Nor should anyone in the world have it…Ukraine holds its lines and it will never surrender.” These words were addressed by Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to all Americans on this year’s darkest day, the winter solstice on December 22. Zelenskyy spent the previous day in Bakhmut, a frontline town in the Donbas where Ukrainian soldiers have held their lines since May, refusing to surrender.
One year ago, most of them were busy decorating Christmas trees, cooking meals and reading books to their children. Today, they are freezing in mud-filled trenches. Many readily abandoned their peaceful lives, comfortable homes and the people they love for a frozen hellhole. They did this not because they are bloodthirsty warmongers or because they were forced into fighting by their government or by Americans, or because they fell into a mad nationalist frenzy. On the contrary, every Ukrainian soldier I met is eminently sane, lucid and steady in their purpose. “We will fight with everything that we have,” said Vitaly Ustimenko, a sergeant now stationed in Bakhmut: “The human civilisation is with us. We have everything to lose.” Grim and exhausted, Vitaly was anything but grandstanding; he simply voiced what most Ukrainians now think and feel.
The war that Russia has unleashed against Ukraine is a struggle not only for Ukrainian lands and lives. It is a battle for all our collective futures, for the future of humankind. Just as the outcome of the Second World War shaped the world we now live in, this war – already a world war in all but its name – will determine our inexorably conjoined destinies. In the era of weapons that can wipe out half the world in a quarter of an hour, the significance of this outcome is as global as it is existential.
The Second World War was an apogee of European imperialism, when the empire came home to self-destruct. Hitler shared with the other European imperialists’ the conviction that the strong have a natural right to subjugate the weak. Just like rulers of the French and British empires, Hitler believed that countries that have bigger armies and more advanced arms can legitimately conquer, enslave or kill anyone else. Just like them, he assumed that those with more means to conquer constitute a superior race. His war of imperial conquest followed this idea to its macabre logical end. The realisation that in the industrial age, empire is a fatally misguided idea came to Europe at the cost of 20 million European lives, and twice as many worldwide. A new world map arose out of the devastation, as did a new global order that gave every state, whether a former coloniser or a colony, the right to govern itself within its borders. If most of human history has been a history of empires, the Second World War put an end to empire as a legitimate political principle.
But empires refuse to die. In the post-War world the Russian/Soviet and American empires displaced the European ones and brought an era of new imperial wars. Illegal and covert, proxy and justified through contortions, these wars have normalised the reasoning of empire – of might’s right — and rolled back the order of sovereign states.
Putin has always appealed to this to justify his invasions – of Chechnya, Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine — citing Russia’s “sphere of influence” and “interest zone”. In other words, colonies. A global chorus of “Putin-Verstehers” purveys this vision, insisting that Ukraine must concede its lands, people and properties to strike a peace deal because Russia is bigger and stronger, and Ukraine smaller and weaker, and that is how the world works. This chorus has singers on the political right and left, among Austrian neo-Nazis and Bengali Communists, among supporters of Trump and – most peculiarly – critics of imperialism across the Global South.
Ukrainians have defied all this. With every Russian tank they stopped with their bare hands, with every town they liberated, with every surgery they conducted without light or heat they have shown that it does not have to be this way. By standing up to the most unceremoniously aggressive coloniser-state 18 times its size, Ukraine has shown that the tyranny of crude force can be stopped. Indeed, it must be stopped for all our futures.
This is why, in his speech, Zelenskyy said that aid to Ukraine “is not charity, it is your investment in global security” for “this war will define what world our children and grandchildren, and their children and grandchildren will live in.” This is not a hyperbole. This war is not only a standoff between a ravenous tyranny and a democracy fighting for its life, but it is also a clash between the old order of empires and the new order of sovereign states. Its outcome will determine whether or not the world will descend into a new age of imperial conquests. And if the last large-scale attempt at imperial conquest took away 60 million human lives, any such attempt in the future may wipe out most of humanity.
The Ukrainian peace deal, which Zelenskyy urged on his audience, and which begins with Russia’s total withdrawal from Ukrainian land, is neither unreasonable nor unrealistic. In fact, it is the only real peace for the modern world. Any other gives up on international law as a guarantor of collective security. As Immanuel Kant noted more than two hundred years ago in his essay on “Perpetual Peace,” when we let go of universal law, we abandon peace. This is what Zelenskyy insists that we take seriously. And this is why Ukrainian soldiers have such steady resolve. This war comes at the end of a long history that has shown their choice to be simple and stark — either the peace of sovereign states or the permanent war of empires.
(The writer is Reader in Anthropology and Politics at King’s College, London)
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