The myth that Russia and Ukraine are fighting over

It seems strange now that any of us ever imagined that Putin might not invade. He thinks of Ukraine as rightfully Russia’s, heart, mind and soul. It’s there in that essay he wrote last year: Russians and Ukrainians are ‘one people’, he said, meaning not that they’re brothers so much as that Ukrainians have no right to a separate identity. And I wonder whether, in attempting to take Kiev, he isn’t also trying to lay final claim to the founding myth that Russia and Ukraine fight over and both think of as their own.

Kiev is the setting for the epic tale of Kievan Rus, the first great Slavic state founded in the 900s by enterprising Viking Swedes. Putin clearly identifies with its warlord saint, Vladimir the Great. In 2016 he unveiled an enormous statue of that earlier Vlad, 100 yards from the Kremlin walls. Kiev has a statue too, but the Moscow Vlad is almost four times the size and his cloak billows ominously around him as if he’s on the move.

In 988, Vladimir the Great converted his people to Christianity, encouraging them into the Dnieper to be baptised in a very Putinesque way: ‘Come, lest you risk becoming the prince’s enemies…’ For Putin, this mass baptism was the moment that the Russian Orthodox Church was born. ‘St Vladimir laid the moral foundation on which our lives are still based today,’ he says.

This is very much not how Ukrainians see things. For them, the founding of Kievan Rus is their own story, not Russia’s. Russia didn’t exist back then, says the former Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko, and anyway, St Vladimir ‘made a European choice’ in opting for Christianity. So alongside the grinding ground war drifts this long-running memory war. Does Putin see his invasion as a crusade? Well, he can spin it as a crusade to his more credulous countrymen, which amounts to the same thing.