For more than twenty years, Vladislav Surkov was a known quantity in Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin.
Dubbed the ‘Grey Cardinal’ and the Kremlin’s main ideologist, Surkov is commonly regarded as the
mastermind of Putin’s Ukraine policy which plunged Moscow into open conflict with the West. By late February 2020, however, he had apparently fallen from grace and was unexpectedly
sacked from his position as personal advisor to the president. Surkov has been
prone to making frank, off-the-cuff public remarks that stand in marked contrast to the
omertà practiced by most of Putin’s inner circle, offering rare glimpses into what policymakers in the Kremlin appear to be thinking. True to form, within days of his dismissal he stirred up fresh controversy by publicly questioning the existence of Ukrainian statehood. In an
interview published on 26 February, Surkov stated that “there is no Ukraine. There is Ukrainian-ness. That is, a specific disorder of the mind. An astonishing enthusiasm for ethnography, driven to the extreme.” Surkov went on to claim that Ukraine is “a muddle instead of a state. […] But there is no nation. There is only a brochure, ‘The Self-Styled Ukraine’, but there is no Ukraine.”
“Ukraine is not even a state”
Surkov is not the first Russian official to make such a claim. The notion that Ukraine is not a country in its own right, but a historical part of Russia, appears to be deeply ingrained in the minds of many in the Russian leadership. Already long before the Ukraine crisis, at an April 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, Vladimir Putin reportedly claimed that “
Ukraine is not even a state! What is Ukraine? A part of its territory is [in] Eastern Europe, but a[nother] part, a considerable one, was a gift from us!” In his March 18, 2014 speech marking the annexation of Crimea,
Putin declared that Russians and Ukrainians “are one people. Kiev is the mother of Russian cities. Ancient Rus’ is our common source and we cannot live without each other.” Since then, Putin has repeated similar claims on many occasions. As recently as February 2020, he once again
stated in an interview that Ukrainians and Russians “are one and the same people”, and he insinuated that Ukrainian national identity had emerged as a product of foreign interference. Similarly, Russia’s then-Prime Minister Dmitry
Medvedev told a perplexed apparatchik in April 2016 that there has been “no state” in Ukraine, neither before nor after the 2014 crisis.
Such slogans and insinuations might be little more than a rhetorical smokescreen concealing a pursuit of sober, hard-nosed
realpolitik. But there is much to suggest that these beliefs are in fact informing policymaking at the highest levels of power. What’s more, they appear to have rubbed off on other world leaders as well. In an autumn 2017 briefing, US President Donald Trump reportedly
exclaimed that Ukraine “wasn’t a ‘real country,’ that it had always been a part of Russia”.