People around the world are riveted by the unfolding war in Ukraine - fearing for loved ones, the impact of the impending economic crisis or even the prospect of nuclear war.
For those who live in countries that were once part of the Soviet Union, the situation may indicate their own possible future, should their countries decide to leave Russia's orbit.
"I have colleagues in Georgia and Azerbaijan and other places, and they really see their prospects for a less authoritarian more democratic and law-based society as being absolutely tied to what happens in Ukraine," said Binghamton University Associate Professor of History Heather DeHaan.
A scholar of Russia, the Soviet Union and Eurasian history, DeHaan is currently a fellow at the Kennan Institute in Washington, D.C., which focuses on the study of Russia and Eastern Europe. The current war is grounded in forces that go back decades, even centuries, in a complicated region.
However, the large-scale nature of the invasion initially surprised experts. During a course on the former Soviet Union she taught last fall in Binghamton, DeHaan told students it was fully possible that Russia would attack Ukraine, but imagined a more limited engagement.
"What I had in mind was a much more limited attack that would have focused on consolidating control over the regions that Russia informally occupied, or controlled, already," she remembered.
Historical roots
Thanks to their experience in Soviet times, the Russian people are no stranger to state-run media, which can make them skeptical about the news; for example, many Russians were deeply suspicious of their country's Sputnik coronavirus vaccine, bucking the official state narrative. Why, then, do the majority believe the state's narrative on Ukraine: that it's not a war, but only a peacekeeping operation to "de-Nazify" the country?
"It resonates with a long-standing aversion to war in Russia, which I know sounds very strange because we think of Russia as the warmonger," DeHaan said.
World War II and its devastation hold a central place in Russian memory, something that Russian President Vladimir Putin has tapped in state propaganda. Through the years, Russians received negative propaganda about NATO actions and expansion through state media, along with stories that falsely portray Ukraine as a fascist state - a claim with a direct historical link to World War II.
The legacy of that war is a complicated one. For example, the western section of Ukraine, including the city of Lviv, wasn't brought into the Soviet Union until 1939, after the division of Poland between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany; the Ukrainians were thus caught between the two empires.
Some initially welcomed the Germans as foils to Moscow's control, but later rejected both German and Soviet authority. The Ukrainians resisted Soviet annexation and fought vigorously for over a decade, including an active insurgency that lasted well into the 1950s, long after the war ended.
"There is a complicated history of ethnic conflict between Ukrainians and Russians from that time period. A fascist-thinking faction of the Ukrainian resistance emerged during the war, and it aimed to cleanse its territory of non-Ukrainians, including Poles and Jews." she said. "Putin can use state propaganda to tap into those historic memories of conflict with the Ukrainian insurgency, particularly this xenophobic wing, and also the Soviet fight against Nazism; he has used this history to feed the deceptive narrative that Ukraine is a fascist state ever since 2014."
But there are older historical resonances as well, such as Putin's claim that Russia created the Ukrainian republic.
The 19th century saw the emergence of nationalist movements in the multi-ethnic Russian Empire, including on the territory of today's Ukraine; under the czars, the empire dismissed national identities as undermining the unity of the state. Surprisingly, Soviet leaders in the early 20th century did accept the idea of distinct national identities; to that end, they permitted schooling in the Ukrainian language and created the Republic of Ukraine within the Soviet Union.
However, in the 1930s, leaders began to worry about the impact of national identities on a unified Soviet administration. Asserting Russian language and culture as the glue holding the Soviet empire together, these leaders dialed back previous freedoms and enforced collectivization - a policy that aimed to modernize and industrialize farming by forcing peasant farmers onto collective or state-owned farms. Any dissent was brutally crushed, and the state seizure of farmers' grain ultimately resulted in the Holodomor, the starvation to death of more than 3.5 million Ukrainians. Today, this act is internationally regarded as a genocide.
After its collapse, the Soviet Union's national territories split off into independent countries. However, Putin's position is that these states were initially created by the Soviet Union, giving its successor - the Russian Federation - the right to force them back into the fold.
Former Soviet republics have encountered this situation before - in the Caucasus. In 2003, Georgia underwent what is known as a "color revolution," a grassroots movement intended to fight against corrupt elections and force regime change. Georgia's revolution is known as the Rose Revolution; a similar event in Ukraine, known as the Orange Revolution, occurred in 2004.
Color revolutions don't immediately result in a democratic society, DeHaan acknowledged; countries must first confront long legacies of corruption and establish laws and other measures to safeguard the democratic process. Nevertheless, it's an important step.
After the revolution, Georgia began to imagine a future more firmly tied to the West and began discussing the prospect of NATO membership. Russia objected - and went to war in 2008 under the same pretext that it used for the current conflict with Ukraine.
Then as now, Russia gave a different image of the war to its own people: It claimed to be engaged in peacekeeping efforts in Georgia, protecting people in two Georgian breakaway republics - Abkhazia and South Ossetia - from losing their culture and falling prey to Western-backed Georgian imperialism. As a result of the conflict, Russia recognized the breakaway regions, over which Georgia lost de facto control. The war prevented Georgia from joining NATO and aligning itself with the West, while sparking an internal refugee crisis.
"I think this is exactly the same game: Putin is saying, 'They're not going to join NATO and we'll make them pay for trying,'" DeHaan said. "But I think it's also something more because Putin didn't threaten Georgia with a loss of sovereignty."
But the gamble in Ukraine also may have backfired. After the war began, Ukraine applied to join the European Union - followed by the former Soviet republics of Georgia and Moldova.
The great unknown
DeHaan believes that Putin's ultimate objective is to prevent the emergence of a democratic Ukraine. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine has undergone two revolutions: the Orange Revolution, and the Maidan Revolution in 2014, which Ukrainians call the Revolution of Dignity. Both sought to set the country on a path independent of Russia - potentially joining NATO and the European Union.
DeHaan doesn't believe that Putin was attempting to forestall a NATO attack. Rather, he was worried by the prospect of Ukrainian resources - such as the land and power plants -entering Europe's orbit.
"I also think that a very successful democracy in Ukraine would be a challenge, or he would perceive it as a challenge, to the consolidation of an authoritarian system at home," she said.
The situation in Ukraine is changing daily, and experts such as DeHaan aren't entirely sure of the outcome. While there is a question of how long the smaller country can hold out, so far Ukraine has defied expectations.
A prolonged war also poses risks to the Russian side; the government may no longer be able to hide the realities of the war from the Russian people, in terms of losses and the impact of sanctions. Taking the larger view, the impact of those sanctions and the potential collapse of the ruble will ripple outward, both in Europe as a whole and post-Soviet republics in particular. The Georgian economy, for example, is almost entirely dependent on Russia, from tourism to the export of agricultural products, DeHaan pointed out.
And while Ukraine is currently receiving support from their neighbors, countries in the region haven't always gotten along. Prior to the conflict, for example, Ukraine was grappling with language laws and what the promotion of Ukrainian would mean for the speakers of minority languages such as Russian and Hungarian.
There is a danger that Putin will attempt to exploit those historic grievances and drive a wedge between Ukraine and its Western neighbors.
"This is a really complicated region where, in the 20th century with the formation of nation-states, you didn't have homogenous territories," she said. "There are a lot of wounds."
