In the name of Russia

An (unlikely) reason for invading Ukraine

In July 2021, seven months before launching an attack on Ukraine, Vladimir Putin wrote a history essay that implicitly made the case for war. Ukrainian independence, his reasoning went, is only justified “through the denial of its past”, as it is a country “shaped on the lands of historical Russia”.

The Ukrainian question is of high emotional significance for the Russian national story. It goes deep into one of the central elements that form the very concept of Russia: its own name. Modern Russia derives its appellation from the Land of Rus’ (commonly referred to as Kyivan Rus’), a medieval state that existed between the 9th and 13th centuries and that had its center of gravity in the city of Kyiv. The Russian foundational myth portrays the Rus’ as a semi-legendary people at the apex of all East Slavic populations: “Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians are all descendants of the Ancient Rus”, Putin writes. At the time, the Rus’ were one of many warrior tribes that roamed around Europe in pursuit of conquest. They were originally foreign, Scandinavian Vikings that, sailing across the Baltic Sea from the shores of modern Sweden, established their rule over predominantly Slavic populations all the way to the Black Sea. The term Rus’ itself originated from an Old Norse word meaning “the men who row” and has the same root as the Swedish coastal region of Roslagen and the Finnish name for Sweden (Ruotsi).

Map of Kyivan Rus’ in the 11th century

The Nordic origin of the name of Russia is a subject of debate with considerable political charge. During World War II, as German troops advanced towards Moscow in the midst of Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi propaganda machine used the Viking origin of the Rus’ to spread the slander that the Russian nation owed its existence to a racially superior Germanic elite. This prompted alternative theories to proliferate within the Soviet Union, the most popular being one that suggested a link to the Ukrainian river Ros and an Old Slavic term meaning “river people”. After the crushing victory by the Red Army put the theories of Germanic supremacy to bed, the historiographic consensus slowly shifted back towards the Normanist hypothesis. Common Russian names such as Olga and Igor are Scandinavian in origin and trace back to the first rulers of the Rus’, all of which had etymologically Norse names.

But why is the most powerful Slavic nation, the largest country on Earth, still waging wars in the name of a long extinct state founded by Vikings? This may have to do with the way the Duchy of Moscow cemented its authority as it evolved from a small Principality into the vast Eurasian empire it is today. When in 1480 Ivan the Great, direct descendent of the Rus’ rulers, freed Moscow from over two hundred years of Mongol domination, he set out to bring all the former Rus’ territories under the same roof. By crowning himself as “Tsar of All the Russias”, his grandson Ivan the Terrible laid claim over areas, such as modern Ukraine, that had belonged to different political entities for centuries. “Two Romes fell, but the third – Moscow – stands, and a fourth will never be” says the first Tsar in Sergei Eisenstein’s brilliant movie about his life. The nascent Russian state was modelled after the Roman empire, with a centralized rule around the city of Moscow and an autocrat whose title was the Slavic version of the word “Caesar”. Moscow used the narrative around a common ancestral people to justify its imperial wars of conquest, and the region that was known as Muscovy gradually became recognized as Russia.

By sending a column of tanks to Kyiv, “the mother of all Russian cities”, Vladimir Putin resumed the old Tsarist goal of ruling over all the territories of the Ancient Rus’. By failing to take Kyiv, Putin may have added a key new chapter to Ukraine’s own foundational myth, away from the rowing men.   

Rurik, founder of the dinasty that went on to rule Kyivan Rus’ and the Tsardom of Russia. “Millennium of Russia”, Veliky Novgorod