Law, Power, and Justice

Last week in Alaska, Putin described Ukrainians as “a brotherly nation” with “the same roots” — which must be liberated by violence from their own mistaken belief that they constitute a separate people.

The monks were using a very distant past to support their present rulers, to say that they were more important than their rivals in the Baltic region. Eight hundred years later, Putin is using their text, the Tale, to do the same thing on a far more extravagant scale. It supposedly means that Moscow must rule Kyiv — although Moscow did not even exist at the time of the ninth-century events recorded.

If it were true that Ukraine belongs to Russia in the 2020s because a Russian dictator knows a legend about a Viking in the 860s, then the tens of millions of people who actually live there would have no voice in their own identity: no choice but to accept the executions, the torture, the kidnapping of children.