Since the start of the Russo-Ukrainian war in 2014, one Russian phrase has haunted me. It translates to “They [Ukrainians] crucified a little boy wearing nothing but his underwear.”
It sounds grotesque, like something from a macabre fairytale. And it never happened, of course. But for many people in Russia, it might as well have.
Russian forces — disguised as “local uprisings” — swept through the eastern provinces of Ukraine while Russian state television peddled this brazen fabrication to millions. The story’s viral spread wasn’t just sordid propaganda at work. It demonstrated how the state, media, intelligentsia and “ordinary Russians” remain fatally entangled in the assertion of a colonizer identity that neither rulers nor the ruled are able to escape.
Russia is not a country forged by shared values, common beliefs or a unifying purpose — it is an empire assembled by force, bound together by lies and sustained through the theft of other peoples’ art, culture and history. It is true that conquest and cultural appropriation are nothing new in human history, but the existence of past colonial crimes by other powers does not justify Russia’s attempt to erase Ukraine today.
In 2021, Vladimir Putin penned a 5,000-word essay declaring that Ukraine does not exist — not as a culture and certainly not as a nation. Russians and Ukrainians are “one people,” he claimed, as tsars and commissars had done before him.
But this was no admission of kinship. It was a threat: Ukrainians must either accept that they are Russian or perish. Putin didn’t just challenge Ukraine’s right to self-determination; he framed it as Russia’s duty to invade, kill, rape and torture.
Moscow has had many chances but repeatedly failed to shed its imperial skin. Defeats in the Crimean War and the Russo-Japanese War did not prompt a reckoning. Unlike Spain, Portugal or Belgium, which relinquished colonies and transitioned into post-imperial nations, Russia viewed its losses as temporary setbacks. Even the Soviet Union’s collapse after the humiliating defeat in Afghanistan didn’t extinguish this imperial ethos.
Russia’s forerunner, Muscovy owed its rise in the 13th century to the role of a tax collector for the Golden Horde, allowing its princes to amass wealth and outmaneuver rivals. In contrast, Kyiv had already thrived for 600 years as a cultural and political hub before Moscow, founded in 1147, even emerged from servitude.
In 1547, Ivan IV (“the Terrible”) pulled off one of history’s greatest cons. Crowning himself “Tsar of All Rus,” he declared Moscow the rightful heir to Kyivan Rus, vaulting over five centuries of separation with a golden crown as a prop. At first, Europe refused to play along. Diplomats, travelers and scholars continued to refer to the realm as “Moscovia,” seen in the maps and manuscripts from the time. The name “Rus” was not inherited from Kyiv — it was stolen.
Historian Janusz Bugajski points out that, from the beginning, Moscow relied on control through force as an organizing principle. To this day, the Kremlin crushes dissent, clinging to the past because it can offer no future. Moscow rules through humiliation and oppression to legitimize a governance model where it extracts resources from its provinces, treating places like Siberia or North Caucasus as internal colonies.
Maybe it’s the West’s own tangled history with colonialism that makes us blind to the obvious. Academics have sidestepped the blood-soaked legacy of the Russian Empire, and we seem to struggle with granting agency to 40 million Ukrainians, a stateless nation until recently. Instead, we let Russia — the metropole — frame the discourse.
Many in the West prefer to think that Putin is the problem. A tyrant, a thug, the kind of man history occasionally coughs up and then spits out. But Putin is not the exception; he is the rule.
Russians are often seen as passive prey of state propaganda, unwilling participants in the horrors unleashed by their government. Yet “Russia’s war on Ukraine is popular with large numbers of Russians and acceptable to an even larger number,” writes Jade McGlynn in her book “Russia’s War.”
McGlynn observes that Putin doesn’t impose foreign policy views on Russians; he gives voice to what many of them already believe. The narrative from Moscow resonates not because it is forced but because it spares its audience from acknowledging its own complicity in an unjust, sadistic and criminal war.
Russia’s belligerence springs from a deep void of insecurity, impossible to fill. At home, its people are resigned to oppression, apathetic, always victims. Yet when they turn their gaze outward, the inhabitants of the Russian Federation assume the mindset of colonizers, seeking meaning in the subjugation of neighbors. This is not an innate trait, but a twisted cycle of projection, inflicting violence onto others as a means of coping with and suppressing the memory of the violence once suffered.
Ukraine’s fight today is a battle not for territory, but for historical justice and for truth. A little boy wearing nothing but underwear was never crucified, and the Russian people must learn this. Moscow’s criminal war has forced the world — and Russians themselves — to confront the delusions that have sustained the empire. What this aggressive re-colonizer requires, more than anything, is a resounding defeat. (The Hill)
‘Gardariki, Ukraine‘ ebook explores the topics above and provides a number of little-known facts.
