Putin's Old Brain, The New Ukraine, And Russia After NATO

An excerpt from, “Russia’s Imperial Mindset Hasn’t Changed” by Ilan I. Berman, American Foreign Policy Council, April 11, 2025:

Once upon a time, Vladislav Surkov was a key architect of Russia’s political system and a close adviser to its long-serving strongman president, Vladimir Putin. More recently, however, the man who was once known as “Putin’s brain” fell out of favor in the Kremlin’s corridors of power, eventually departing the Russian political scene altogether.

Yet Surkov remains a figure of considerable controversy, with some observers crediting him with exerting continued influence over the Kremlin’s worldview. So when he recently sat down for an interview with France’s L’Express newspaper—his first since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2023—it was inevitably a subject of intense interest for Russia-watchers in the West.

They were not disappointed. Surkov used the occasion to expound upon the current state and future dimensions of the so-called “Russian World” (Russkiy Mir)—a concept which he himself helped to popularize. In the process, he gave the international community a glimpse into what Moscow is thinking about its geopolitical fortunes, and where the Kremlin might be headed next.

Most immediately, of course, this concerns Ukraine. In an echo of Putin, Surkov argues that Ukraine is not a real state, but rather an “artificial political entity.” He also posits that Russian victory—or, as he puts it, the “military or military and diplomatic crushing of Ukraine”—is inevitable.

An excerpt from, “Revising History and ‘Gathering the Russian Lands’: Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian Nationhood” by Björn Alexander Düben, London School of Economics Public Policy Review, 2023:

At a conference in Kyiv in July 2013, Putin spoke about Ukraine’s ‘reunification with Russia’ from the 17th century onwards and referred to Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Russians as ‘a single people’.

While Putin’s public denial of Ukraine’s historical statehood was initially subtle and implicit, it became increasingly explicit in later years, particularly following the ouster of Viktor Yanukovych’s pro-Russian government in Kyiv in early 2014 and Russia’s subsequent annexation of Crimea. In his speech marking the annexation on 18 March 2014, Putin proclaimed that Russians and Ukrainians

are not simply close neighbours but, as I have said many times already, we are one people. Kiev is the mother of Russian cities. Ancient Rus is our common source and we cannot live without each other.

In subsequent years, Putin went on to make similar assertions. In February 2020, for instance, he stated in an interview that Ukrainians and Russians ‘are one and the same people’, and he insinuated that Ukrainian national identity had only emerged as a product of foreign interference – claims which he repeated in his annual marathon press conference in June 2021.

Meanwhile, some of Putin’s closest associates went considerably further in their public derision and denial of Ukrainian state- and nationhood. Vladislav Surkov, for instance, formerly one of Putin’s top advisers and his point man on Ukraine prior to 2020, stated in February of that year that

there is no Ukraine. There is Ukrainian-ness. That is, a specific disorder of the mind. An astonishing enthusiasm for ethnography, driven to the extreme. … But there is no nation. 

Throughout the last decade, Putin has shown a remarkable interest in historical themes, taking time out of his presidential schedule to write lengthy treatises on historical topics. In June 2020, he published an article in The National Interest which tried to revise the academic narrative about the outbreak of the Second World War by justifying the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and its secret protocol [9]. The article was roundly dismissed by foreign historians as unprofessional and poorly researched. But few historical topics appear to have preoccupied Putin as much as the history of Ukraine. This became particularly evident in July 2021, when he published a 6900-word article titled ‘On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians’. Providing a sweeping (but extremely selective) account of Ukrainian history stretching back to the early Middle Ages, Putin tried to make the case that Ukrainians and Russians – along with Belarusians – form ‘a single large nation, a triune nation’, and that they are essentially ‘one people – a single whole. … It is what I have said on numerous occasions and what I firmly believe.’ According to Putin, it has been Moscow’s historical mission to be ‘the center of reunification, continuing the tradition of ancient Russian statehood [and] gathering the Russian lands’.

In Putin’s historical account, Ukrainians always thrived most when they were under Moscow’s rule, and the common people in Ukraine consistently wished to remain close to Russia. By contrast, whenever there had been manifestations of ‘the idea of Ukrainian people as a nation separate from the Russians’ (an idea for which ‘there was no historical basis’), these were merely the aberrant schemes of self-serving, detached elites, usually acting at the behest of manipulative foreign powers that wished ‘to divide and then to pit the parts of a single people against one another’. These historical villains ranged from 18th-century anti-Muscovy Cossack leader Ivan Mazepa, ‘who betrayed everyone’ to Lenin’s Bolsheviks, who, according to Putin, instigated the consolidation of the Ukrainian language and identity in the early 20th century. The ultimate result of these misguided policies was that ‘in 1991, all those territories, and, which is more important, people, found themselves abroad overnight, taken away … from their historical motherland’ [10]. In his article, Putin also repeatedly claimed that, historically, ‘people both in the western and eastern Russian lands spoke the same language’. While not explicitly denying the development of a separate Ukrainian language, he implied that it was a mere outgrowth of ‘regional language peculiarities, resulting in the emergence of dialects’ which remained virtually indistinguishable from Russian. To Putin, the works of Ukrainian writers ‘are our common literary and cultural heritage’ which must not ‘be divided between Russia and Ukraine’.