Serhii Plokhy on Russia, Ukraine, and the History of Their Relationship

Serhii Plokhy on Russia, Ukraine, and the History of Their Relationship

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Serhii Plokhy on Russia, Ukraine, and the History of Their Relationship

Source: Lex Fridman Podcast #415 Speaker: Serhii Plokhy Date: ~2023 Link: https://lexfridman.com/serhii-plokhy

Key ideas

  • Three distinct endings. The Soviet collapse involved three separate events that are often conflated: the ideological collapse of Marxism-Leninism, the Cold War’s end, and the legal dissolution of the USSR. Ukraine’s December 1991 independence referendum — 90%+ in favour — was the decisive blow; without Ukraine, the Soviet project was mathematically unviable.
  • One shared heritage, two competing claims. Both Russia and Ukraine claim descent from Kievan Rus (8th–9th century). The Mongol invasion of the 13th century fractured the East Slavic world; the western portions were absorbed into the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth while the eastern portions consolidated into Muscovy under Tatar suzerainty. These divergent trajectories produced different political cultures claiming the same origin myth.
  • Bandera: myth vs. history. Stepan Bandera is a symbol of Ukrainian nationalist resistance, but the historical figure spent most of his active life in Soviet, German, and Western European prison; he was assassinated by the KGB in 1959. The mythologised Bandera deployed in contemporary rhetoric bears little resemblance to his actual biography.
  • KGB as institutional template. Andropov’s KGB in the 1970s–80s cemented an institutional worldview — state primacy over law, dissent as foreign sabotage, surveillance as governance — that Putin directly absorbed as a KGB officer and applied at state scale.
  • Ukraine as distinct political tradition. Ukraine developed its political culture through resistance to central authority across successive overlords (Mongols, Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Russian Empire, Soviet Union); Russia developed through state-centred identity where legitimacy flows downward from the state. These structural differences make Putin’s “one people” claim historically indefensible.

Overview

Serhii Plokhy traces the deep history of the Russia-Ukraine relationship from the Kievan Rus origins through Mongol fragmentation, the centuries of Ukrainian political existence under successive empires, the Soviet period, and the escalating conflict that culminated in the full-scale 2022 invasion. His argument is that the current war is not a sudden aberration but the product of long-developing structural divergence — in political culture, democratic tradition, and relationship to state authority — combined with Putin’s specific KGB-derived worldview in which Ukrainian statehood represents an existential threat to Russian identity.

Key escalation sequence: 2004 Orange Revolution → 2013–14 Euromaidan → 2014 Crimea annexation + Donbas conflict → 2022 full-scale invasion.