When US President-elect Donald Trump returns to the White House next week, his foreign policy priority will be ending the war in Ukraine. But as he seeks to engage the Kremlin, Trump is likely to find that Moscow’s military goals extend far beyond limited territorial gains, leaving little room for any meaningful compromise.
If Trump’s peace initiative fails to make progress, it should come as no surprise. After all, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is not a simple territorial grab that can be resolved with some kind of compromise agreement. Instead, it is an old-fashioned war of colonial conquest that is the latest chapter in Russia’s historic campaign of imperial aggression against Ukraine, which goes back hundreds of years.
Russian rulers have tried to suppress Ukraine’s aspirations for statehood and subjugate the country since the seventeenth century and the Ukrainian Cossack Hetmanate. Throughout the Tsarist and Soviet eras, successive generations of Russian rulers sought to dominate Ukraine and destroy the very idea of a separate Ukrainian nation. This resulted in a vast number of crimes and atrocities, including the Holodomor, a man-made famine instigated by Stalin’s regime in the 1930s that killed millions of Ukrainians in their own homes.
From the very beginning of his rule, Putin has enthusiastically embraced this Russian imperial tradition. When his initial attempts to regain control of Ukraine through political subversion were thwarted by the Maidan revolutions of 2004 and 2014, Putin decided to resort to force, ordering the Russian military to seize Crimea. This watershed moment in modern European history set the stage for a full-scale invasion in 2022. Putin himself has since emphasized his imperial ambitions, comparing his own ongoing invasion to the conquests of the Russian emperor Peter the Great in the eighteenth century.
International audiences often have difficulty understanding the true nature of Russian imperialism because they have been encouraged to view Russia as a nation rather than an empire. While scholars and historians have always made clear distinctions between Britain or France and their colonial holdings, for example, this has not usually been the case when it comes to Russia. Instead, occupied countries within the Tsarist and Soviet empires, such as Ukraine and Georgia, have often been viewed as ethnic minorities rather than captive nations.
As a result, contemporary Russia’s expansionist policies generally avoid angering those who identify as opponents of imperialism. This also helps explain why everyday cultural practices, such as the use of the Ukrainian language in Ukraine, are still sometimes perceived by outside audiences as evidence of dangerous nationalism.
The ultimate goal of Russian imperialism in Ukraine could hardly be more extreme. Putin and his predecessors have consistently sought to erase any sense of Ukrainian national identity and replace it with a Russian imperial identity. In other words, Russia’s historical goal has always been a Ukraine without Ukrainians.
For generations, Ukrainian community leaders were systematically silenced and all evidence of Ukrainian national memory was destroyed. Meanwhile, many of Ukraine’s most prominent intellectuals and cultural figures were appropriated by the empire and renamed Russian.
Over the centuries, Russia’s long war on Ukrainian identity has been most evident in the many legislative initiatives aimed at restricting or banning the use of the Ukrainian language. Often this has reached the point of outright denial. “A separate Ukrainian language has never existed, does not exist, and will never exist,” declared one particularly infamous Russian imperial decree from the mid-nineteenth century.
Efforts to erase all traces of Ukrainian identity in the regions of the country currently under Russian occupation are ongoing. In areas of Ukraine where the Kremlin has been able to establish control since 2022, anyone deemed pro-Ukrainian risks arrest. Thousands of people have reportedly disappeared into a vast network of prison camps.
Those who remain are forced to accept Russian citizenship. Those who dissent are stripped of their property rights, denied access to basic services like health care, and deported. They must also subject their children to indoctrination through Kremlin-approved school curricula that glorify the Russian invasion and demonize the idea of a Ukrainian state. It goes without saying that the Ukrainian language is no longer taught or tolerated.
The grim reality of millions of people living in Russian-occupied Ukraine makes it a complete travesty to suggest that the war can be stopped by simply handing over more land to Russia. In fact, the current occupation regime is not peace; it is a continuation of Russia's long war against the Ukrainian nation.
Any attempt to end the war in Ukraine must take into account Russia’s imperial agenda. At stake is the future existence of Ukraine, including everything it represents, from language and culture to national memory and ancient traditions. For Ukrainians, this is a fight for national survival against an enemy that makes no secret of its ambition to wipe the country off the map. For Europe as a whole, this is a turning point that will shape the continent’s security climate for years to come.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is not a war for territory or resources. So it would be an empty expectation to assume that Putin can be appeased by the promise of relatively small territorial concessions. Like many Russian rulers before him, Putin is determined to destroy Ukraine. The war will continue until he is forced to abandon his imperial ambitions entirely.
Anastasia Marushevska is a co-founder of the Ukrainian public organization PR Army, editor-in-chief of Ukraїner International and host of the podcast “Decolonization”.
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