Russian President Vladimir Putin is a master crafter of narratives, and the world is caught in the web. “Ukraine invaded” or “Troops enter Ukraine,” read the headlines on many places Tuesday. But it is a trick of the eye, a deft move by a deceiver: The Ukraine that Putin invaded Monday night is territory Moscow has influenced or controlled since the 2014 revolution. So far, no Ukrainian-held territory has been invaded.
But there has been a sea change, something that shook even Ukrainians: In his Monday speech, Putin made a wild case to erase the history of Ukraine as an independent country.
“From the very first steps (the Ukrainians) began to build their statehood on the denial of everything that unites us,” he said, sounding like a sultan trying to imprison an unwilling wife or J.R.R. Tolkien’s Smeagol going for the ring. “They tried to distort the consciousness, the historical memory of millions of people, entire generations living in Ukraine.”
Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity
We could examine history and show that Ukraine is its own nation, much like the Irish, despite centuries of oppression. But to argue that point would be to fall into Putin’s narrative web. What he is after is erasing Ukraine not because of historical quibbles but because of what several friends here say is Ukraine’s superpower: its 2014 Revolution of Dignity, also called Maidan (“public square”).
Just as Beijing never mentions Tiananmen Square, Putin never in his rhetoric mentions Maidan, which was the moment when hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets for months protesting the pro-Moscow regime of Viktor Yanukovych. The people succeeded and the regime fled to Moscow, ushering in a flourishing of Ukrainian culture, language, free speech. This is the most free-speaking country I’ve visited.
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The Maidan is a threat to tyrants everywhere, and looking closely at Putin’s speech, we can see just how much he hates the Maidan: Monday, he said that those governing in Kyiv “seized and hold power” – in other words, the legitimate regime is the one that, terrified of the peaceful protesters, fled to Russia.
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And here we see the bee in Putin’s bonnet: Everything was so lovely when his puppet government was in charge.
The West would do well to look at this perspective instead of only following Putin’s narrative. I doubt Putin is really worried about Ukraine joining NATO, which until he started the troop escalation was not even a real near future possibility. No, as he made clear Monday, he wants the annihilation of Maidan, of a free Ukraine.
Observing the behavior of the Canadian government against the trucking protesters, I wonder whether even Western regimes might be a tad threatened by the power of Maidan, which perhaps is why most media and politicians portray Ukraine as a damsel in distress, an image that creates fear because it exaggerates Russia’s strengths.
Contrary to narrative, Ukraine is strong
“After 2014 people understood that they are in charge of what is going on; 2014 changed everything,” Melanie Podolyak, a Ukrainian civic activist, told me in a video interview. “It’s not so easy being a corrupt politician anymore in Ukraine.”
“(Maidan) was a turning point in the history of the Ukrainian narrative,” says filmmaker Alexandner Denysenko. “A modern Ukrainian hero was born, the Ukrainian narrative is shaping. A narrative that makes us unique.”
That is the narrative Putin willfully ignored.
Yes, his Monday speech sent chills through Ukrainians in a way I haven’t seen in the nearly two years I have been here, initially exiled by the pandemic. But as evidenced in all of my conversations today, Ukrainians awoke recalling not Putin’s narrative but their own.
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Monday “was tough,” said my friend Misha just now having a smoke outside the cafe where I write this, in a peaceful Lviv, where strangely the U.S. State Department has evacuated. He added with a wry, fierce smile, but now “I feel that we are all Ukrainian.”
If anything, a good number of Ukrainians are impatient for this to be over, even if they have to fight, because the longer the fake war of threats drags out the more it harms Ukraine’s reputation, business and tourism prospects.
“I’m not worried about Russia,” another friend, a business owner, told me recently. “Because if they do come here, we will just have to fight them, and we will fight them, and we will win, because we have nowhere else to go. This is our country.”
Joe Lindsley is editor of Lviv Now and LvivLab.com
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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Ukraine’s superpower defies Putin’s authoritarian overreaches
