Tucker Carlson’s more than two-hour-long interview with Vladimir Putin focused on Putin’s reflection on longue durée historical processes. In short, Putin’s interminable monologue had a clear goal: to prove that Ukrainians as an ethnic group do not exist, have never existed, but form one nation with Russians.
This is the thesis that Putin promoted earlier in his essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.” Putin wrote in that article:
Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians are all descendants of Ancient Rus, which was the largest state in Europe. Slavic and other tribes across the vast territory—from Ladoga, Novgorod, and Pskov to Kiev and Chernigov—were bound together by one language (which we now refer to as Old Russian), economic ties, the rule of the princes of the Rurik dynasty, and—after the baptism of Rus—the Orthodox faith. The spiritual choice made by St. Vladimir, who was both Prince of Novgorod and Grand Prince of Kiev, still largely determines our affinity today.
It is an idea that is largely the spiritus movens of Putin’s expansionism and is connected with the idea of the ‘Russian world’ (Русский мир). Hence the fixation on Ukraine, which for the purposes of specifically Western public consumption Putin presents as an alleged security concern. This he maintains even while Estonia, a NATO member, is never said to pose such a threat, despite the fact that the Estonian border town of Narva is about 100 miles from Saint Petersburg. For comparison, the distance between Kharkiv and Moscow is 475 miles.
However, with the very argumentation he laid out before Carlson, Putin in fact supplied enough arguments in favor of the existence of the Ukrainian nation to satisfy any historically knowledgeable individual. Putin’s narrative is as follows. Once upon a time (since 862 A.D.), there was a state of Rus, whose legacy is cherished by Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Russians, with its center in Kyiv. It was consolidated when Prince Vladimir (appropriately enough, given the current face-off, Ukrainians call him Volodymyr) accepted Christianity from Byzantium in 988. According to Putin, a state integrated by a common language and a common religion, and even centralized, was created. Soon various centrifugal forces (from the late 11th century) prevailed and there was no longer a state with a strong center. Other strong centers appeared in the north, such as the commercial city of Novgorod.
Because of this, the Russian lands became easy pickings for Mongol invaders in the 13th century. The Mongols conquered Kyiv in 1240. Parts of what Putin considers historical Russian lands were soon under the control of th eGrand Duchy of Lithuania, which later entered into a state alliance with Poland. Then one of the historical arch-enemies of the ’Russian world’ entered the historical stage. Poland, as one of the destroyers of Russian national unity, converted significant chunks of this Orthodox world to Greek Catholicism with the help of the Vatican—Greek Catholics retain the Eastern rite but recognize the primacy of the Pope, and are still the majority in western Ukraine. This created a fracture within a formerly unified Russian nation, and the authorities carried out Polonization. Ukrainians, on the other hand, when they rebelled against Polish rule in the Khmelnytsky Uprising (1648-1657), were not a separate ethnic group, but part of the Russian people. The rebellious Ukrainian Cossacks (who would later be deceived by Moscow) concluded the Pereyaslav Agreement in 1654 with Russia to form a union agreed on the basis of broad autonomy.
This happened 414 years after the fall of Kyiv to the Mongols and took place still further in time from the beginning of the gradual disintegration of Kievan Rus’ in the 11th century. Kyiv and Novgorod are more than 600 miles apart, Ivano-Frankivsk in the west of Ukraine and Novgorod more than 800 miles—roughly the same as the distance between Vienna and London.
First, let’s accept the fact that the inhabitants of ancient Rus’ were once a unified people. Kyiv fell to the Mongols in 1240, Novgorod preserved its independence, westernmost parts were integrated into other state formations. Ukrainians intermingled with Lithuanians, Poles, Hungarians, Turks, and so forth. The territories of today’s Russia likewise developed through interaction with Finns, Tatars, and various Turkic peoples from Central Asia. In the meantime, a different political culture, philosophy, and even religion developed in accordance with these various ethno-cultural and civilizational influences. Far from Orthodoxy enjoying any kind of universality, Catholicism had a great influence among Ukrainians. The Western form of feudalism penetrated the Ukrainian lands, while the Russian lands and political culture were influenced by the oriental despotism of the Mongols, who stayed there much longer. The Grand Duchy of Lithuania conquered Kyiv in 1362. Moscow ceased to be dependent on the Mongols in 1480 and developed its own political and civilizational direction, although at that time it was separated from Europe due to its geographical isolation. So, despite all of the above—interaction with various peoples, various cultural, civilizational, and religious influences, as well as a huge geographical distance—the ‘Russian world’ remained intact.
On the other hand, it took little more than 150 years or so for the English colonists in the Thirteen Colonies to evolve a distinctly American identity and feel ripe for independence. This happened despite the fact that, in ethnic terms, the overwhelming majority of the colonists were of English origin. These colonists did not experience much in the way of cultural cross-fertilisation with the natives, nor did they adopt or assimilate into their customs. Nevertheless, in part due to their remoteness from the mother country, they developed a new identity of their own—one for which they were willing to fight and die between 1776-83.
Between the collapse of the Kievan Rus’ to the renewed interaction between Ukrainians and Russians, more years have passed than from the establishment of the Spanish colony of New Spain (1521) and the declaration of Mexican independence from Spain (1821).
Mexico was mostly colonized by Spaniards who developed their own identity separate from the previous motherland. They also interacted with other peoples and cultures (Aztecs, Mayans, other indigenous populations), unlike the Spaniards in the Iberian Peninsula. Nations separate and amalgamate in a broad historical process. When the Angles and Saxons came to present-day England they created—over time at least—a new unity with the native Celtic peoples. Different cultural and civilizational systems, interactions with different peoples, and geographical isolation contribute to the emergence of new communities—a perfectly unremarkable historical phenomenon.
In truth, historical processes can bring certain groups together, but they can also lead to separation. After all, there used to be Proto-Indo-Europeans. Today they do not exist, but there are Englishmen, Irishmen, Croats, Persians, Greeks, and others. Putin unwittingly pointed to the process of gradual separation and the emergence of new identities, including separate Russian and Ukrainian ones. If Russians and Ukrainians (and Belarusians) have a common ancestor in Kievan Rus’, at the same time there is no exclusive right to the heritage of that medieval state.
Tucker Carlson, with his Scandinavian surname, would probably regard a Swedish nationalist who told him he was not American as a veritable lunatic. Let’s say that a Swedish nationalist went to tedious lengths to demonstrate to Carlson that his identity is nothing more than a hoax concocted by dark Anglo-Saxon forces to weaken the Swedish people. Let’s further suppose that he presented this spurious theory as giving Carlson every reason in the world to ditch Shakespeare and start wading his way through Swedish national epics instead. It is entirely irrelevant, this eccentric zealot would have to argue, that the Carlsons have been separated from the Scandinavian Peninsula for centuries and have spent generations interacting with their Irish, Swiss, Italian, and Cherokee neighbors. Tucker Carlson would probably roll his eyes at such a case, but he entertained similar guff from an unregenerate Russian nationalist for upwards of half an hour.
