It is hard to imagine a more crowded record of disastrous unintended consequences and ruinous self-fulfilling prophecies than the one that Russia brought on itself in the wake of President Vladimir Putin’s bungled blitzkrieg.
Intended to “de-Nazify,” “demilitarize,” and “neutralize” Ukraine, the invasion has forged instead a de facto NATO-allied state along 1,200 miles of Russia’s land border — and made Ukraine the most pro-American country in Europe outside Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania. Assuming continued support by the West, the proud and battle-hardened Ukrainian army may be a key constraint to further Russian aggression until Putin’s imperial restoration dies with his regime.
This war has also revealed and may have accelerated Ukraine’s evolution toward modern democratic statehood, where ethnicity no longer dominates national identity and is replaced instead with civic citizenship.
In a region riven by ethnic hatreds and ethnic cleansing, and in a country with a four-century history of anti-Jewish violence, where Jews today account for less than half of a percent of the population, President Volodymyr Zelensky, who is Jewish, leads the fight against Russia. (Putin called Zelensky “a disgrace to the Jewish people,” to which Ukraine’s chief rabbi replied, “I’m proud of my president.”)
The Black Sea port city of Odesa was the site of some of the worst pogroms, the horror of which was recorded with chilling detachment in the “History of My Dovecot,” written by Russian writer Isaac Babel, an Odesa Jew. Today, even if the city’s Jewish contingent is no more than a few percentage points, the city’s Jewish past and present are celebrated in the language, culture, music, and food of this new Ukraine.
Less noted has been the story of ethnic Russians in Ukraine. Although sharply reduced by Russia’s annexation of the heavily Russian Crimea and Donbas regions — from over 8 million, or 17 percent, of the country’s population in Ukraine’s most recent 2001 census — 2 million, or 5 percent of Ukrainians, still self-identified as Russian in 2022. Their support almost certainly featured in Putin’s plans. Instead, the Russian Ukrainians overwhelmingly affirmed their loyalty to the civic, rather than ethnic, motherland: to Ukraine instead of Russia.
No fifth columns arose to aid Russia the aggressors in the mostly Russian-speaking cities of Odesa and Kharkiv — despite their one-fourth and one-fifth ethnically Russian population, respectively. Their mayors, as well as those of two of the other largest Ukrainian cities outside of Kyiv, Dnipro, and Zaporizhzhya, have Russian surnames — typically ending with “ov” and “ev,” as opposed to the Ukrainian “ko,” “uk,” and “ak” — as do the governors of one-fifth of Ukraine’s 24 regions.
Guiding their resistance to Russia the aggressors is the Jewish minister of defense, Oleksii Reznikov,whose fluent Russian prompted a pro-Kremlin website to claim that it was his first language. His colleague, the head of the National Security and Defense Council, Oleksii Danilov, is an ethnic Russian from the heavily Russian Luhansk region and a former governor of Luhansk province. The commander of the ground forces of Ukraine, Colonel General Oleksandr Syrsky, was born and bred in the heart of Russia and graduated from the Moscow Higher Military Command School.
There is no higher proof of allegiance to Ukraine than fighting for it in the trenches. Virtually every newspaper report from the front line features soldiers with Russian surnames. In one publicly available roster of those killed in the past 16 months, the number of Russian last names was more than double their share in the population at large. By that measure, Russians were also overrepresented among those awarded the Gold Star of Hero of Ukraine for exceptional bravery since the beginning of war. Among them was Sergeant Inna Derusova, the first woman to receive Ukraine’s highest military award posthumously. A field medic, she was killed on the first day of the Russian invasion, on Feb. 24, 2022, after saving the lives of 10 soldiers.
Central to the emergence of a Ukrainian statehood, the devotion of Ukrainian Russians to their civic motherland is vital for Russia’s future as well. Putin attacked Ukraine not for what it had done, or would do, but for what it was, or was likely to become. A budding Western-oriented modern democracy, a free, stable, and eventually prosperous Ukraine is an existential threat to the Putin regime. Sooner or later, the Russian people would have asked, why can’t we have what our Ukrainian cousins have?
Unable to derail Ukraine’s progress, Putin has already failed to reach his war’s key objective. A heavy blow to his regime’s legitimacy, the choice made by Ukrainian Russians will be an inspiration for Russia’s own transition to a post-Putin future.
Leon Aron is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. His new book, “Riding the Tiger: Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the Uses of War,” will be published in the fall.