To Unite the Rus’ — Why Russia Is Fighting

Editor’s note: What follows is an article RIA Novosti published three days into the war and then quickly took down. The article was probably taken down because RIA had jumped to the gun in publishing it. It was written for when the war would be in its closing stages and all but won.

The article is well-written and lays out the real reason Russia is fighting. It is very much a war to unite the East Slavs. Europe is uniting, Germany has reunited, why should the Rus’ nation alone remain disjoined?

And why should a huge chunk of Rus’ land and people (people whom until 1900 would have called themselves Rusini) end up with the West rather than in a union with Russia? 

To alienate Kiev from Russia, to submerge it into an Anti-Russia, and to incorporate it into the West was a radical development indeed.

If there is a difference between the Rus’ in Ukraine and the Rus’ in Muscovy, it is a smaller one than existed between the French proper and the Occitan, or the various nationalities of Italy and Germany.

Historically the only reason the Rus’ of Ukraine were not assimilated in the exact same way as were the sub-German, sub-French, and sub-Italian groups, but were spun off into what in 1917 was still a fringe identity, are Lenin’s peculiar nation-building policies which made Soviet Russia the only major power in Europe where the state policy was to break up the dominant nation as much as possible, rather than to complete its unification.

Machine translated from Russian.

A new world is being born before our eyes. Russia’s military operation in Ukraine has ushered in a new era in three dimensions. And of course, in the fourth, domestic Russian. Here begins a new period both in ideology and in the very model of our socio-economic system – but this should be discussed separately a little later.

Russia restores its unity – the tragedy of 1991, this terrible catastrophe of our history, its unnatural dislocation, has been overcome.

Yes, at a high price, yes, through the tragic events of the actual civil war, because now brothers are still shooting at each other, separated by belonging to the Russian and Ukrainian armies – but Ukraine as there will be no more anti-Russia. 

Russia is restoring its historical fullness by gathering the Russian world, the Russian people together – in all its totality of Great Russians, Belarusians and Little Russians. If we had abandoned this, if we had allowed the temporary division to take hold for centuries, we would not only have betrayed the memory of our ancestors, but we would have been cursed by our descendants for allowing the disintegration of the Russian land.

Vladimir Putin took upon himself, without a drop of exaggeration, historical responsibility, deciding not to leave the solution of the Ukrainian question to future generations.

After all, the need to solve it would always remain the main problem for Russia – for two key reasons. And the issue of national security, that is, the creation of an anti-Russia from Ukraine and an outpost for the pressure of the West on us, is only the second most important among them.

The first would always be the complex of a divided people, a complex of national humiliation – when the Russian house first lost part of its foundation (Kiev), and then had to accept the existence of two states of not one, but two peoples. That is, either to abandon their history, agreeing with the insane versions that “only Ukraine is the real Rus”, or to impotently gnash their teeth, remembering the times when “we lost Ukraine”. To return Ukraine, that is, to turn it back to Russia, with each decade would be more and more difficult – recoding, de-Russification of Russians and turning against Russian Little Russians-Ukrainians, would gain momentum. And if the full geopolitical and military control of the West over Ukraine is consolidated, its return to Russia would become completely impossible – it would have to fight for it with the Atlantic bloc.

Now this problem does not exist – Ukraine has returned to Russia. This does not mean that its statehood will be liquidated, but it will be restructured, re-established and returned to its natural state part of the Russian world. Within what borders, in what form the union with Russia will be fixed (through CSTO and Eurasian Union or Union State Russia and Belarus)? This will be decided after the history of Ukraine as an anti-Russia is ended. In any case, the period of split of the Russian people is coming to an end.

And here begins the second dimension of the coming new era – it concerns Russia’s relations with the West. Not even Russia, but the Russian world, that is, three states, Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, acting geopolitically as a single whole. These relations have entered a new stage – the West sees Russia’s return to its historical borders in Europe. And the West loudly resents this, although deep down it must admit to itself that it could not have been otherwise.

Is there anyone in the old European capitals, in Paris and Berlin, seriously believed that Moscow will refuse Kiev? That Russians will forever be a divided people?

And at the same time, when Europe is uniting, when the German and French elites are trying to seize control over European integration from the Anglo-Saxons and assemble a united Europe? Forgetting that the unification of Europe became possible only through the unification of Germany, which happened by Russian good (albeit not very clever) will.

To swing after that also for Russian lands is the height not even of ingratitude, but of geopolitical stupidity. The West as a whole, and even more so Europe individually, did not have the strength to keep in its sphere of influence, and even more so to take Ukraine for itself. Not to understand this, one had to be just geopolitical fools.

More precisely, there was only one option: to bet on the further collapse of Russia, that is, the Russian Federation. But the fact that it didn’t work should have been clear twenty years ago. And fifteen years ago, after Putin’s Munich speech, even a deaf person could hear that Russia was returning.

Now the West is trying to punish Russia for the fact that it returned, for not justifying its plans to profit at its expense, for not allowing the expansion of Western space to the east. In seeking to punish us, the West thinks that relations with it are of vital importance to us.

But this is no longer the case – the world has changed, and this is well understood not only by Europeans, but also by the Anglo-Saxons who rule the West. No Western pressure on Russia will lead to anything. The losses from the escalation of confrontation will be on both sides, but Russia is ready for them morally and geopolitically. But for the West itself, an increase in the degree of confrontation carries huge costs – and the main ones are not economic at all.

Source: RIA Novosti