{"id":23747,"date":"2022-03-17T08:55:20","date_gmt":"2022-03-17T08:55:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/research.reading.ac.uk\/research-blog\/?p=23747"},"modified":"2023-02-23T11:10:30","modified_gmt":"2023-02-23T11:10:30","slug":"ukraine-putins-vision-of-russian-ukraine-misunderstands-how-borders-came-about","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/research.reading.ac.uk\/research-blog\/2022\/03\/17\/ukraine-putins-vision-of-russian-ukraine-misunderstands-how-borders-came-about\/","title":{"rendered":"Ukraine: Putin\u2019s vision of \u2018Russian Ukraine\u2019 misunderstands how borders came about"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Ukraine\u2019s ongoing negotiations with Russia over its invasion, Vladimir Putin\u00a0seems to be aiming<\/a>\u00a0at the very least to retain Crimea for Russia and ensure recognition for the Donetsk and Luhansk people\u2019s republics. These breakaway states claim much more territory than they control as of now, and to recognise them would be a decisive change in Ukraine\u2019s borders.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

One of the many striking aspects of the invasion has been how much histories of border-drawing seem to matter. Days before invading, the Russian president claimed<\/a>\u00a0that \u201cmodern Ukraine was entirely created by \u2026 communist Russia\u201d. In doing this, he said, Lenin transferred \u201cto the newly, often arbitrarily formed administrative units \u2013 the union republics \u2013 vast territories that had nothing to do with them\u201d.<\/p>\n

As with any claim that certain borders are arbitrary, it is not obvious what exactly that means. All land borders could somehow be considered arbitrary, if you think of the way modern states are expected to have\u00a0precise and fixed lines<\/a>\u00a0as borders. These are not found in nature but drawn by people.<\/p>\n

The world was not always divided up in this way. Historically, societies had various ways of understanding territory. In many societies from pre-colonial India to early modern Europe, territories could be exchanged simply by naming them.<\/p>\n

Where the boundaries of those named territories were, however, often depended on the memories of inhabitants, rather than official maps. The systematic measuring, marking, and mapping of political boundaries in order to fix them as precise lines began in the 17th century, and was applied globally only in the late 19th century.<\/p>\n

If all borders are somehow human-made, then, how should we approach Putin\u2019s claim that Ukraine\u2019s borders are arbitrary? A good point of comparison is the\u00a0Paris Peace Conference of 1919-1920<\/a>. This was the meeting of the victorious powers of the first world war to determine the post-war order \u2013 which took place just as Soviet Russia was in formation.<\/p>\n

It was widely expected that nation states would emerge throughout Europe, creating minimal ethnic minorities. However, sizeable majority\u00a0German-speaking areas<\/a>\u00a0were\u00a0incorporated into Czechoslovakia and Italy<\/a>, partly because it was thought that mountain boundaries brought security. The world discovered how wrong this was when Hitler annexed much of the mountainous borderland surrounding Czechoslovakia \u2013 the Sudetenland \u2013 in 1938 without firing a shot.<\/p>\n

The Soviet Union was not invited to the Paris Peace Conference, but the logic behind the boundaries drawn between its founding republics was remarkably similar. Both were generally based on demographic data, economic and geographical analysis, and prior administrative units. By that standard, the Russia-Ukraine border was by no means particularly arbitrary.<\/p>\n

The All-Russian Central Executive Committee\u00a0created<\/a>\u00a0the broad outline of the Ukraine-Russia border in 1919 by including in Ukraine, roughly, the former Russian imperial provinces of Volhynia, Kiev, Chernigov, Kharkov and Ekaterinoslav. It based this decision on the\u00a01897 Russian census<\/a>, where each district in these provinces shows a majority of \u201cMalorussians\u201d (\u201cLittle Russians\u201d \u2013 or Ukrainians).<\/p>\n

If the demographic data gave anyone cause to complain, it should have been Ukraine. In fact the Ukrainian delegates to the Central Executive Committee did ask in 1924 for Voronezh and Kursk provinces as well, on the basis of their significant Ukrainian population, but this request was denied.<\/p>\n

The idea of \u2018arbitrary\u2019 colonial boundaries<\/h3>\n

Another aspect of Putin\u2019s ideology is that it plays off the idea of Ukraine as part of what he referred to as \u201cthe so-called colonial heritage of the Russian Empire\u201d. He claims, in effect, that Ukraine\u2019s historical memory is selective. It erases its natural historic ties to Russia, but is still perfectly able to remember the boundaries imposed on it by Russia as a colonial power.<\/p>\n

Putin is putting a new spin on an old narrative: that borders inherited from colonial times are suspicious and must be open to revision. European colonialism imposed boundaries on much of the world, particularly Africa and Asia. According to this narrative, these boundaries are problematic, because they were vaguely delimited or paid no attention to previous boundaries of ethnic communities.<\/p>\n

The problem with this is that simply having a colonial history does not make some borders any more or less artificial than other borders. Nation-states can be\u00a0just as artificial<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In fact, modern borderlines, fixed and precise as they are, were systematically used for the first time in a colonial context \u2013 the\u00a0thirteen colonies<\/a>\u00a0of British North America. This was well before such borders became common in\u00a0Europe<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And, if colonialism was what brought fixed and precise borders to most of the world, surely correcting the \u201ccolonial legacy\u201d would involve eradicating all fixed and precise borders \u2013 not simply rearranging them. This is unlikely to happen.<\/p>\n

What does this have to do with Putin\u2019s explanation for Russia\u2019s recent military actions in Ukraine? Ultimately, attempts to correct \u201ccolonial\u201d borders tend to do little but recreate a new version of imperialism, and Putin made his imperial vision clear in his pre-invasion speech.<\/p>\n

Putin\u2019s is not the only proposal to correct \u201ccolonial\u201d borders to come out of an imperial power. A number of proposals to improve upon the\u00a0\u201cSykes-Picot\u201d<\/a>\u00a0borders of the Middle East, for example, surfaced in the USA after 2003. And in 2006, then-Senator Joe Biden suggested a federal partition of Iraq along sectarian divisions, while maintaining a loose central government.<\/p>\n

Critics<\/a>\u00a0claimed that the USA was no better than the former colonial powers, simply imitating their policies of dividing up the region from outside. The difference is that Putin has openly used this historical narrative as a pretext for invasion.<\/p>\n

Dr Kerry Goettlich is\u00a0<\/span>Lecturer in International Security, Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Reading.<\/p>\n

This article is republished from\u00a0The Conversation<\/a>\u00a0under a Creative Commons license.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Ukraine\u2019s ongoing negotiations with Russia over its invasion, Vladimir Putin\u00a0seems to be aiming\u00a0at the very least to retain Crimea for Russia and ensure recognition for the Donetsk and Luhansk…Read More ><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":469,"featured_media":26817,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"__cvm_playback_settings":[],"__cvm_video_id":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[2018,1084,1982,937],"class_list":["post-23747","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-prosperity-resilience","tag-borders","tag-politics-and-international-relations","tag-ukraine","tag-war"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nUkraine: Putin\u2019s vision of \u2018Russian Ukraine\u2019 misunderstands how borders came about - 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