The anatomy of revanchism: how the Kremlin has weaponized history

History has never been a science for the Russian Federation; it has become a weapon, with propaganda serving as one of the primary methods and foundations for the mass manipulation of society and an integral part of politics. Specifically, in the case of Ukraine, history has been used to distort Ukrainian statehood and identity, thereby providing a pretext for war. The Kremlin’s aim is to provide a pseudo-historical basis for conventional aggression. Moscow’s key propaganda narratives boil down to two interlinked constructs. Firstly, Ukraine is allegedly an artificial geopolitical entity, “accidentally” born in 1991. Secondly, Russian aggression is positioned as a forced “self-defence” against NATO’s eastward expansion.

The development of a “Russia-centric perspective” in the West was long based on the logic of Realpolitik, which tacitly recognized the former Soviet republics as a legitimate “sphere of influence” for Moscow and ignored their national sovereignty. However, whilst this imperial approach aimed to completely deny Ukraine’s historical right to exist, in geopolitical strategies concerning the Baltic states, Moldova and Armenia, the Kremlin has transformed its influence through hybrid and institutional pressure. The common denominator across all these cases remains the Kremlin’s fundamental refusal to recognize the equal sovereignty of these states, where any independent choice regarding European integration or security is interpreted by Russia as “geopolitical aggression by the West”.

In relationships with the Baltic states where direct military blackmail is impossible due to NATO protection, Russia has deployed a “legal and ideological front”, using international institutions to level accusations of “Russophobia”, discredit language legislation, and artificially stoke historical revisionism surrounding the Soviet legacy. In contrast, with regard to Moldova, Moscow is employing a strategy of hybrid takeover: it maintains a military enclave in Transnistria as a permanent lever of destabilization, wages a total information war, and uses the remnants of energy blackmail to provoke social protests and the toppling of the pro-European government in Chișinău.

At the same time, the situation in Armenia highlights Moscow’s shift towards overtly punitive diplomacy in response to Yerevan’s attempts to fill the security vacuum following the CSTO’s complete inaction during the Karabakh crisis. The Armenian government’s attempts to diversify its defence policy through cooperation with France and the US, as well as its drive for closer ties with the EU, have provoked fury in Russia, which is now openly blackmailing the country with economic sanctions within the Eurasian Economic Union and funding the domestic revanchist opposition. Ultimately, Moscow’s aggressive actions across all these fronts demonstrate to western elites that the former post-Soviet space is not a “sanitary cordon” for Russia, but has become an active front for its imperial revanchism.

For a long time, the western political and intellectual elite viewed Central and Eastern Europe exclusively through the prism of “Russocentrism”, perceiving the former Soviet republics as Moscow’s legitimate “sphere of influence”. The consequences of this cognitive trap proved disastrous: in 2014, during the annexation of Crimea and the invasion of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, and even on the eve of the full-scale invasion in 2022, western analysts, blinded by the myth of “Ukraine’s inevitable return to the imperial fold”, predicted the fall of Kyiv within 72 hours. So let us return to the end of the 20th century. The Act of Declaration of Independence of Ukraine on 24th August 1991, from the perspective of international law, was not an innovation or a geopolitical surprise, but a process of restoring sovereign status.

In 1917, amidst the ruins of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires following the First World War, the Ukrainian people came together to form a single sovereign state – the Ukrainian People’s Republic (UPR). On 22nd January 1918, the Ukrainian Central Rada proclaimed the UPR “an independent, free and sovereign state of the Ukrainian people, independent of anyone”. At that time, the Ukrainian People’s Republic possessed all the hallmarks of a state with its own legislative, executive and judicial powers, which were later codified in the 1933 Montevideo Convention.

Under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk of 9th February 1918, the Ukrainian People’s Republic was recognized de jure by the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire and the Kingdom of Bulgaria). Even Soviet Russia (the RSFSR), in accordance with Article 6 of the same treaty, as well as under the terms of a separate peace treaty in May 1918, undertook to immediately cease hostilities, sign a peace treaty with the UPR, and recognize its legitimate borders. In addition to international recognition, the UPR had its own established currency (the hryvnia), national symbols (Prince Volodymyr the Great’s trident, the blue-and-yellow flag) and a regular armed force – the UPR Army, which waged an exhausting war against the Russian Bolsheviks for over four years.

Putin’s recent statement that Ukraine was allegedly “accidentally created by Lenin” bears a striking resemblance to Hitler’s remarks, who once described the Second Polish Republic and Czechoslovakia as the “artificial, monstrous offspring of the Versailles Dictate”. In reality, the creation of the Soviet Ukrainian Soviet Republic was not a “gift” from the Bolsheviks, but a forced tactical compromise on their part, aimed solely at neutralizing and incorporating the powerful Ukrainian independence movement, which the Bolsheviks had been unable to suppress by military force alone. However, even during the Stalinist period, Ukraine’s separate statehood was enshrined at the highest diplomatic level. As a result of the Yalta and San Francisco conferences of 1945, Ukraine became one of the founding members of the United Nations.

Thus, the 1991 borders are not an “administrative oddity”, as Putin often likes to describe them, but the legal borders of a subject of international law recognized by the world. In 1992, a legitimate transfer of the Ukrainian statehood tradition took place: the last President of the Ukrainian People’s Republic in exile, Mykola Plavyuk, officially handed over his powers and the state insignia to the newly elected President of Ukraine, Leonid Kravchuk.

The Kremlin’s second geopolitical argument – that the current invasion is a pre-emptive measure against “NATO expansion” – is completely refuted by Sweden and Finland’s membership of the Alliance and serves merely as a smokescreen for the domestic audience. In reality, the only threat to Moscow is Ukraine’s definitive departure from the post-Soviet neo-colonial model and its mental and institutional integration into the European democratic space.

As the American historian Timothy Snyder points out, modern Russian ideology operates within the framework of an outdated imperial paradigm, in which aggressive aims are masked by victim rhetoric. The Kremlin’s claims that Russia is “backed into a corner by the expansion of western blocs” are an exact replica of the German geopolitical theory of Einkreisung (“encirclement of Germany”), which the Kaiser’s government used to justify militarization prior to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. The Third Reich also used the Lebensraum doctrine in 1939 before invading Poland. The history of international relations proves that appeasing an aggressor through territorial concessions (as was the case with Czechoslovakia during the Munich Agreement of 1938) does not prevent global conflict, but only makes it larger, bloodier and more threatening to the entire world.

The war in Ukraine is a classic decolonization struggle for the right of the Ukrainian people and state to physical and political existence, in which Kyiv is defending its legitimate, historically and legally established sovereignty. In contrast, Russia has destroyed the architecture of global security established after 1945, attempting to drag civilization back to the logic of the Middle Ages, where the rule of force prevails over the rule of law. But history has repeatedly shown that attempts to forcibly revive deceased empires always end the same way – with their inevitable and final systemic collapse.

Alina Ponypaliak has a PhD in History and is an analyst at the Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Center (USCC).