Vladimir Putin has spent much of the past decade insisting that Ukraine has no independent claim to nationhood, that it is, in his formulation, an artificial construct carved out of “historical Russia.”
It is worth remembering that this is not a new argument.
It is Stalin’s argument, updated for a different century and pursued by different means.
What connects the two men is not merely that both ruled from the Kremlin and both fought wars touching Ukraine.
It is a shared premise: that Ukraine’s value lies in what it can be extracted from and denied to others, not in what its people might choose for themselves.
Stalin treated Ukraine as an internal resource to be broken and harvested. Putin is treating it as an external prize to be conquered and absorbed.
The logic is continuous. The method has changed completely.
Stalin’s Ukraine: Extraction Through Terror
Stalin’s relationship with Ukraine was never about governance in any normal sense. It was about output — grain, coal, industrial labor, political conformity — and about ensuring that Ukraine could never generate the kind of national cohesion that would let it act as a rival center of gravity within the Soviet system. Three instruments did the work.
The first was forced collectivization, launched at the end of the 1920s, which stripped Ukrainian peasants of land, livestock, and any autonomous claim on what they produced. The second was the deliberate weaponization of that collectivized system during 1932–33, when Moscow set grain procurement quotas for Ukraine that were impossible to meet without starving the countryside and enforced them anyway, sealing republic borders to stop peasants from fleeing in search of food. The result, the Holodomor, killed an estimated 3.5 to 5 million Ukrainians. This was not incidental famine. It was famine as an instrument of political discipline, aimed specifically at breaking Ukrainian rural society and any residual attachment to national or cultural distinctiveness.
The third instrument was the parallel assault on Ukrainian elites and identity, the purges of Ukrainian communists, writers, and clergy in the 1930s (what Ukrainian historiography calls the Executed Renaissance), the suppression of Ukrainian-language institutions, and the subsequent promotion of Russification as state policy. Stalin’s Ukraine was a place whose resources, agricultural and industrial, were to be fed into Soviet strength, and whose people were a security problem to be managed through terror, deportation, and demographic engineering. The war years compounded this: millions of Ukrainians died under both German occupation and Soviet reconquest, and the postwar Soviet state resumed the same pattern of extraction and suppression, including a second, smaller famine in 1946–47.
The throughline in Stalin’s approach to Ukraine specifically is this: its sovereignty was never acknowledged even nominally as something requiring separate treatment from Moscow’s interests. Ukraine existed to be used. Its people existed to be managed. This was internal colonization conducted inside the architecture of a single state, which made it invisible to most of the outside world for decades, famine and terror do not produce satellite imagery or wire service bulletins the way tanks crossing a border do.
Spain: Stalin’s Other Playbook, and Its Echo in Ukraine’s Coalitions
Stalin’s instinct to use a conflict abroad as an extension of domestic control did not stay confined to Ukraine. It surfaced again, barely three years after the worst of the Holodomor, in Spain — and the coalition structures that formed around that war offer a second, complementary way of reading what’s continuous and what’s changed between Stalin’s era and Putin’s.
When Francisco Franco’s military uprising began in July 1936, Spain became, in effect, a dress rehearsal for the Second World War. Hitler’s Germany sent the Condor Legion, giving German pilots combat experience and a live testbed for new aircraft and bombing tactics; the April 1937 bombing of Guernica became the era’s signature demonstration of a fascist power’s willingness to terror-bomb civilians. Mussolini’s Italy went further still, committing roughly 50,000 troops and substantial equipment, treating Spain as an opening to challenge French and British influence in the Mediterranean while advancing fascist ideology. Against them, Stalin’s Soviet Union became the Spanish Republic’s primary international backer — advisers, pilots, tanks, aircraft but that support came, as it always did with Stalin, with political strings attached. Moscow used its position inside the Republican coalition to purge Spanish communists and anarchists who didn’t fit Stalin’s line, extending his domestic terror campaigns into an international arena. Meanwhile Britain and France hid behind the Non-Intervention Committee, a diplomatic fiction that constrained aid to the Republic while doing nothing to stop fascist intervention on the other side.
The pattern is instructive for what it shares with Ukraine and what it doesn’t. Both conflicts turned local disputes into global proxy contests that tested the resolve and capability of the major powers. Both attracted foreign volunteers in the name of an ideological cause, the International Brigades drew some 35,000 volunteers from more than fifty countries, including George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway, who chronicled the war for global audiences; Ukraine has drawn its own international volunteers and, per open-source reporting, has become a training ground in small-drone warfare whose skills are already diffusing to conflicts and criminal networks far beyond Ukraine’s borders. Both, too, exposed the weakness of the era’s international institutions, the League of Nations’ paralysis over Spain anticipates the UN Security Council’s paralysis over Ukraine, Russia’s veto playing the role the Non-Intervention Committee played in the 1930s.
But the coalitions themselves diverge sharply. The 1930s alignment was ideologically clean, fascist powers against the Soviet-backed Republic, with clear doctrinal stakes that inspired tens of thousands to physically travel and fight. Ukraine’s supporting coalition, by contrast, is institutionally dense (NATO, the EU, the G7, a Coalition of the Willing) and geographically broad (Japan, South Korea, and Australia have all contributed meaningfully), but Russia’s coalition is transactional rather than ideological, Chinese economic oxygen, Iranian drones, North Korean shells and troops, bound together by shared antagonism toward Western primacy rather than a common doctrine. And where the 1930s required physical presence, pilots had to fly the planes, advisers had to stand next to the guns, today’s high-tech proxy war lets outside powers provide real-time satellite intelligence, precision-guided systems, and even deep-strike targeting data without committing personnel at all, all while nations sustain the diplomatic fiction of non-belligerent status. Economic warfare has changed just as completely: Spain’s 1930s economies could sever trade ties without catastrophic consequence, while Ukraine’s war unfolds inside a genuinely interdependent global economy, where SWIFT exclusion, frozen central bank assets, and Russia’s own weaponization of energy exports create leverage and vulnerability that simply didn’t exist a century ago.
What Spain and Ukraine share, in other words, is Stalin’s underlying instinct — use an external conflict to extend and enforce a domestic political logic — filtered through radically different technological and institutional eras. In Spain, that instinct meant liquidating ideological rivals inside a coalition he nominally supported. In Ukraine today, the nearest Russian equivalent is Putin’s insistence, echoed at home through total state media control, that the war is a defensive necessity against Western aggression rather than a war of choice, domestic narrative discipline substituting for the purges Stalin once ran through the Comintern apparatus abroad.
The Buffer State That Wouldn’t Stay Buffered
I did not come to this comparison abstractly. In the early 1990s, traveling through Kyiv, Minsk, and Moscow on the first Pentagon study of the newly independent Slavic states, I watched societies in upheaval and identified Ukraine and Belarus as “awkward states”, buffer spaces too vital to be left alone and too contested to be settled by institutional habit.
Neither state fit comfortably into a Western or a Russian sphere. The West’s answer was to fall back on default structures, NATO and the EU, as vehicles for absorbing the rest of Eastern Europe, an approach that worked well enough for Poland, Hungary, and Romania but left the Ukraine-Belarus question unresolved for three decades. Russian leaders, meanwhile, never stopped viewing Ukraine and Belarus as buffer zones essential to their own security perimeter rather than as genuinely independent states.
Washington largely failed to register how durable that Russian view was. Then–Vice President Biden declared in 2011 that the United States regarded spheres of influence as “19th-century thinking.” Then–Secretary of State Kerry, reacting to Crimea in 2014, said much the same: that no one “in the 21st century” behaves “in 19th century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pretext.”
Both statements were, in effect, announcements that the American foreign-policy establishment considered the entire premise Stalin operated on, spheres of influence, buffer states, the subordination of smaller nations’ choices to a larger neighbor’s security anxieties, to be a historical relic.
It wasn’t. Putin’s disputes with George W. Bush over Ukraine’s 2004–05 Orange Revolution already signaled his real objective: keeping Ukraine either like Belarus or run by leaders willing to serve as loyal Russian clients rather than pursue Western integration. His July 2021 essay and the accompanying military doctrine declaring permanent civilizational conflict with the West were the fulfillment of a trajectory visible three decades earlier, not a rupture from it.
Putin’s Ukraine: Conquest as Restoration
Putin inherited none of the Soviet apparatus that let Stalin do this quietly, from the inside. Ukraine is a sovereign, internationally recognized state, a member of the United Nations, and after 2014 and especially after February 2022, a state at open war with its neighbor. Putin’s instrument therefore had to be invasion rather than internal administrative terror but the underlying claim is recognizably the same one Stalin’s system operated on without ever having to state it explicitly: that Ukraine’s separateness is illegitimate, that its resources and territory belong by right to a larger Russian project, and that Ukrainian national identity is a problem to be corrected rather than a fact to be respected.
Putin has had to be more explicit about this than Stalin ever needed to be, because he has had to argue for something Stalin could simply assume. His July 2021 essay, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” makes the claim in so many words: it explicitly denies Ukrainian national identity and statehood, framing Ukraine’s separation from Russia as a historical aberration to be corrected. Read against Stalin’s record, this is not a new theory of Russian-Ukrainian relations. It is the old imperial premise, restated for an audience that had assumed such premises were extinct.
The invasion that followed pursued Stalinist ends by wartime means. Deportation of Ukrainian children into Russia and Russian-controlled territory, filtration operations in occupied areas, and the annexation of agricultural and industrial regions in the east and south all echo the logic of demographic engineering and resource capture that ran through the 1930s. Grain, again, is a weapon, not through induced famine this time, but through the blockade and mining of Black Sea approaches and Russia’s 2023 withdrawal from the Black Sea Grain Initiative, a decision that manufactured a global food crisis as deliberately as Stalin’s procurement quotas manufactured a Ukrainian one. Ukraine’s own countermove, the “Grain from Ukraine” humanitarian program launched that same autumn, using its agricultural exports to build diplomatic credit across Africa and the Middle East rather than merely absorbing aid — is itself a pointed inversion of the earlier history: the same crop that Stalin turned into a weapon against Ukrainians, Kyiv has turned into an instrument of its own international legitimacy.
Continuity of Logic, Divergence of Method
The comparison is not that Stalin and Putin are the same kind of leader, or that the Holodomor and the current war are morally equivalent atrocities in scale or mechanism: they are not. The comparison that matters is structural.
Both men approached Ukraine as a strategic asset whose value was instrumental to Moscow rather than intrinsic to its own people. Both treated Ukrainian national distinctiveness as an obstacle rather than a legitimate fact. Both used food and resource flows as instruments of coercion. Both accompanied material extraction with an assault on the idea of Ukrainian identity itself, Stalin through Russification and the liquidation of Ukrainian cultural elites, Putin through the claim that Ukrainian nationhood is fictional and through the deportation and re-education of Ukrainian children in occupied and Russian territory.
There is a useful reframing worth carrying into this comparison, one that applies to how the current war should be understood generally: the more analytically useful axis is not “democracy versus authoritarianism” but “sovereignty versus imperial subordination.”
Ukraine’s governance imperfections don’t negate the nature of Russia’s project any more than the flaws of the 1930s Soviet client states negated the nature of Stalin’s. The core Russian foreign-policy premise that former Soviet space lacks full sovereignty and remains within Moscow’s legitimate zone of control runs continuously from Stalin’s Ukraine through Georgia in 2008 to Ukraine in 2014 and 2022. Putin’s essay simply gave that premise its clearest public articulation.
The divergence between the two men is a function of context rather than intent.
Stalin operated Ukraine as a subject territory inside a state that had already absorbed it; his terror could be domestic, bureaucratic, and largely hidden from outside scrutiny by the isolation of the Soviet system. Putin is operating against a sovereign state embedded in an international order with satellite imagery, instant reporting, a NATO alliance whose eastward expansion he has spent two decades resenting, and a Ukrainian government and population that has organized both military and civil resistance on a scale nothing in the 1930s permitted. Where Stalin could starve a province quietly, Putin has had to fight a war in the open, under sanctions, with his own economy and military reputation increasingly on the line. The method changed because the world changed. The premise, Ukraine as resource, not as a people entitled to self-determination, did not.
Why the Distinction Matters Now
This is not merely a historical curiosity.
It bears directly on how the current war is likely to be understood, negotiated, and possibly ended.
If Putin’s war is read simply as a 2022 aberration, a Ukraine-specific overreach that a negotiated settlement or a change in Kremlin leadership might resolve, then the diplomatic logic of the current shuttle process, aimed at freezing lines and restoring some version of normalized relations, makes sense on its own terms.
But if the war is read, as both the Stalin comparison and my own 1990s field assessment suggest it should be, as the latest expression of a much older Russian state disposition toward Ukraine, one that predates Putin, predates the Soviet Union’s collapse, and indeed predates the Soviet Union itself, then any settlement that leaves that underlying disposition unaddressed is a pause rather than a resolution.
Territory changes hands, casualties accumulate, and the negotiating table resets, but the strategic premise that produced the Holodomor and produced the 2022 invasion remains available to the next Russian leader who inherits it.
There is a line from General Pasquale Preziosa’s foreword to my book on the global war in Ukraine that applies with particular force here: memory is a strategic resource. Forgetting the Partnership for Peace era, the cycles of failed resets with Moscow, and the lessons of the 1990s narrows Western options and condemns policymakers to repeat familiar errors. The Biden-era conviction that spheres of influence were an artifact of the 19th century was one such error, and it was made possible by a kind of institutional amnesia about what Stalin’s Soviet Union had already demonstrated about how Moscow regards Ukraine. Structure outlives mood. The structural fact, geography, resource endowment, and a persistent Russian claim on Ukrainian sovereignty, proved more durable than the West’s post–Cold War assumption that such claims belonged to history.
For readers of this site’s broader work on the war’s reshaping of Russia’s domestic future and global position, this is the deeper argument the tactical and operational reporting sits on top of: Ukraine’s war is not simply a contest over borders.
It is the latest round in a century-long argument over whether Ukraine is a people or a resource, an argument Moscow has answered the same way twice, a hundred years apart, by different means.