Nicolai Petro on Ukraine's internal divisions, Western influence, and the prospects for peace
Glenn Diesen interviews political scientist Nicolai Petro on the Ukraine conflict, Russian foreign policy, and the competing nation-building projects inside Ukraine.
Summary
Glenn Diesen speaks with Nicolai Petro, Professor of Political Science at the University of Rhode Island and former US State Department special assistant for policy on the Soviet Union. Petro argues that Russia's push for a multipolar world order is not new but a refinement of longstanding doctrine that Western policymakers have consistently failed to take seriously. He contends that the Ukraine conflict is best understood as a long-term competition between two nation-building projects — a Western one rooted in a narrow western-Ukrainian nationalist identity, and a Russian one premised on the coexistence of Russian and Ukrainian identities in the east and south. Petro argues that Ukraine's post-war political landscape will likely be shaped neither by pro-NATO nor pro-Russian sentiment, but by a Ukrainian nationalism that concludes it was betrayed by both sides. He also discusses Zelensky's political vulnerability, arguing that the West's greatest fear is that Zelensky might bypass Western intermediaries and negotiate directly with Russia.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Multipolarity, civilisational identity, and Western foreign policy
Glenn Diesen: Welcome back, everyone. We are joined again by Professor Nicolai Petro, a professor of political science at the University of Rhode Island, who also served as the US State Department special assistant for policy on the Soviet Union. Thank you for coming back on the program.
It's becoming more and more evident that the conflicts of the United States with Russia, Iran, and China — and you can put some others in there as well — are quite connected. A lot of the discourse coming out of Russia, and also those two other states, tends to be that these are, to a large extent, conflicts about a changing world order, which could explain why they're willing to risk so much. I was wondering how you see this discourse, and how you assess the international system here?
Nicolai Petro: I've followed Russian foreign policy doctrine for a long time — decades — not the other countries that are now in BRICS and conceptually aligned with Russia. But from Russia's perspective, what we are hearing today is not so much new as a refinement, a way of making more precise the type of multipolar order that Russia is aiming to create, presumably together with its allies.
The problem has always been that very few actors in the West — in government especially — took this rhetoric seriously. No matter who it was coming from — China, India, or Russia — they simply didn't have any way of addressing these concerns within the context of a self-centred and self-congratulatory America. Anyone who has lived here even briefly will know that the rest of the world is a very fuzzy concept to most Americans, and that is unfortunately especially true when it comes to foreign policy. YouTube is replete with videos of young people being asked by people on the street to identify a map — where is Iran, where is India, where is whatever country is now in the news — and the vast majority get it wrong. I guess that just proves what H.L. Mencken, the famous satirist of an earlier century in the United States, said: the way Americans learn geography is through war. But apparently in the modern age, not even war succeeds in breaking that barrier to understanding and geographical awareness.
So I think there's nothing fundamentally new here, just a further refinement of the concept. The concept of multipolarity and civilisational identity really has to be discussed more in the academic literature and by thoughtful journalists. That is where the conceptual framework, if it takes root, will flow from. It's no coincidence — and it tells us a lot about our day and age — that the term BRICS was simply invented by a financial analyst, Jim O'Neill, who said, "Look, there's this group of nations and they're taking off, and much of the traditional western financial markets where people are investing are stagnating." He just gave it a name, started to call it BRICS, and academics and analysts picked up on that phrase from the public media.
Unfortunately, at least so far, the same hasn't occurred with the concept of multipolarity or with civilisational identity — what a civilisational foreign policy might look like, and especially what it might look like for the United States from an American perspective. If we took seriously the idea that America is a civilisation of some kind, what would that civilisation stand for? How would it be distinct from other civilisations? And what should its relationship and its means of coexistence with other civilisations be?
I guess we don't have that because the debate is still, for the most part, between liberals and realists in our foreign policy. The realists feel — and I'm generalising, but I still think it's fair — that these kinds of identities are secondary to the essential drive of nations to survive and extend their power in an effort to guarantee security and influence for themselves. They're not interested in what other people call themselves or their identities. I think John Mearsheimer is very clear about that — it just doesn't really matter. He's had some interesting debates in China with Chinese scholars about that, but as far as I know he hasn't changed his view much. And the liberals also dismiss the idea of civilisation, but because they believe all civilisations will ultimately become American civilisation. That's the liberal assumption: that at the end of the rainbow is the American liberal order — sometimes called rules-based, sometimes called capitalist — that will dominate everywhere, and those who are not part of it will be irrelevant. So there's no need to identify what is important about other civilisations or to seek any coexistence, because as Marx said, they're destined for the dustbin of history.
Two sides of the same coin? The liberal order versus multipolarity
Glenn Diesen: When we see a lot of these Eurasian powers meeting — be it in BRICS or the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation — the rhetoric is often organised around these concepts of multipolarity and civilisational distinctiveness, and the conflicts are defined in these terms. But in the West, whenever we discuss these conflicts, we tend to use other words. We refer to defending the liberal international order. Do you see this as two sides of the same coin?
Nicolai Petro: No, I don't think it's two sides of the same coin. Two sides of the same coin implies that the coin is one and there are two sides of it — that there's a fundamental commonality. That commonality in this case is no more than the aspiration for order, for some kind of set of rules, and that's not enough to reach an agreement. All human beings organised into a society are organised on the basis of some principles and some order, and yet that's precisely what they fight over, because they can't agree on the meaning behind that order or the ideals that should be promoted by it.
So it's nothing to rely on if one is hoping for some sort of convergence — what used to be popularly known in the late 1950s and early 1960s as convergence theory. There was a period when convergence theory was very popular, applied to capitalist systems and communist systems. The argument was that due to functional similarities in the way large-scale political and economic units operate, eventually the differences in values between units in communist countries and units in capitalist countries would erode entirely, and it would simply dawn on some future generation that what they were fighting about was trivial and they should work toward establishing a common framework for behaviour based on the compatibility of their institutions — what those institutions were actually set up to do.
Russia's war aims and the limits of battlefield resolution
Glenn Diesen: If we look at the power interests of Russia from a realist perspective, as well as its world view in terms of what creates order — be it multipolarity or preserving civilisational distinctiveness — how do you see this translated into Russia's war aims? It seems the Russians are winning on the battlefield, there are no serious peace talks on the horizon, which more or less translates into the Russian thinking that peace will have to be resolved on the battlefield. What exactly does that mean? How do you see Russia's endgame here?
Nicolai Petro: I don't think it's peace that is established on the battlefield — that would be an interesting paradox. What happens on the battlefield is exhaustion: the ability to reach an end to conflict while still holding on to your initial objectives. In other words, the defeated power only sees itself as defeated on the battlefield, but not in its own image of itself and its mind — unless, as has happened occasionally in history, the defeated country is physically occupied, its elites are removed and re-educated, and an investment is made by the occupying power to re-educate the entire population by controlling all of its public media and educational resources.
This is the lesson that some liberal analysts take from World War II. Whenever nation-building efforts fail, as they have since World War II, it's because we didn't invest as much as we did then. That's an interesting hypothetical, because the assumption is that we could do something like that in countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, maybe Venezuela, others. That model essentially becomes an updated model of colonial administration — we come to the colonies with American democratic and economic know-how and impose it. But we have to be ready to do that for a very long time, and this issue has actually been studied by political scientists who sometimes make this case. How long should it take?
I remember surveys done when I was looking at this issue in Germany. There was a World Values Survey — the famous World Values Survey out of Michigan — that traced the changes in attitude of the German population after World War II toward authoritarianism. They found a way to measure whether Germans had become less authoritarian as a result of the occupation and the Marshall Plan after World War II. They found that the tipping point — when Germans became noticeably less authoritarian than they had been during World War II and the time leading up to it — only came in 1971. So let's calculate: 1945, 1955, 1965 — that's another ten, fifteen years — so roughly 25 years.
So one way to look at it is: if this is even feasible, prepare to invest heavily in the country you want to transform for no less than 25 years. And then the question to pose to our current political elites is: is that possible? Is that desirable? And let's remember we're talking about Germany — a country with a strong European tradition, a strong cultural affinity, a familiar country in the European and American cultural context — which is not the case in Afghanistan, not the case in Asia, not the case in Africa, and probably not even the case very much in Latin America, where the extremes seem to swing from affinity to antipathy depending on personalities on both sides.
So I think it's a very difficult and probably unfeasible proposition, and one that realists certainly would reject in principle.
Competing nation-building projects in Ukraine
Glenn Diesen: Would you say that's part of the conflict over Ukraine? Because it does appear that, because of the internal divisions within Ukraine, both the West and Russia have their own nation-building project. When NATO has absorbed some of Ukraine's sovereignty, the rhetoric from NATO is that they're democratising Ukraine — the more it leans toward the West, the more they can instil these values and essentially transform it. While the Russians look at this process very differently. They say NATO went in, took over some of the governance, and now they're purging — with the nationalists — the political opposition, the media, the culture, religious freedom, the language, the historical memory, and restructuring the national identity based on the nationalist tradition of western Ukraine. And you also hear in the rhetoric of some Russian commentators that once Ukraine has been defeated, not only is regime change required, but all of these things done to Ukraine since 2014 have to be reversed. So is this a way of looking at the conflict — competing nation-building projects?
Nicolai Petro: Yes, I think that is the longer-term perspective which we are now beginning, intellectually among analysts, to understand. Those people who say this is not a war that has been going on five years, or thirteen years, or another four years — going back to 2004 — this is a long-term project aimed at toppling or changing the regime in Russia. And if we topple the regime in Russia, that at least opens the door to the possibility of transforming Russia's geopolitical weight in the world, which can only be accomplished ultimately by dismembering it. It's too large to deal with as an adversary. It has too many resources, is too well endowed. And as a result, there has to be a way to defeat Russia — the Russian imperial consciousness, its sense of its identity as a multinational and multiethnic state — in order to divide it ultimately, which is the only true guarantee of Western victory or Western security.
So I agree that analysis is correct: the West has its long-term ambition and Russia has its long-term ambition. What I find interesting to debate now is: given the geography, culture, religion, and language, whose vision is likely to succeed over time — 20, 30, 40, 50 years? Who has the better cards to play in this poker game over who gets Ukraine into their camp, the West or Russia?
I don't see much in any of those areas — the cultural, historical agglomeration that has historically defined Ukrainian identity, that has given us Ukraine, the consciousness of a Ukrainian people — that the West can rely on in terms of pulling it over to its side. With Poland, that process started in the tenth century and had to be constantly fought over with the support of the Catholic Church and the German Teutonic Knights. And even that was a very bloody and uncertain conflict until the dimensions of Poland were shrunk from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the eastern third of the country — which was overwhelmingly Orthodox — was sacrificed to give us a much smaller but homogeneous Poland which could plausibly be culturally part of the West.
There is only one segment of Ukraine in which a similar strategy could plausibly be pursued, and those are the four western provinces of historical Galicia and Volhynia to the north. But moving anywhere further east or south in what is modern Ukraine today, there is very little that can be relied on — which is why the West makes no cultural arguments. It makes an economic argument. It says forget about all of that; if you join the West now, we have a special deal for you. It's like a fire sale — hurry up, buy it now or this offer will disappear. The argument is that if Ukraine commits, the West will invest heavily and support the financial well-being of Ukrainians. Average Ukrainians believed this was a pledge to bring their standard of living up to the level of a Norwegian or a Pole — much higher than it ever was. Unfortunately, that impact has not materialised.
The other argument is a security argument, which is being demolished as we speak, because there is no lack of arguments now in the Ukrainian media, in the Ukrainian Rada, even from sporadic low-level government officials who have left office, who say candidly: we were consistently lied to by the West in terms of the kind of support we thought they would be offering. We assumed that when they said they were supporting us with everything they can, that actually meant full military support. It turned out to be insufficient — both financially, even for the war, and not to mention for the defence of Ukraine.
This is now an existential crisis for the Ukrainian elite, which really cannot be resolved while the war is on, because first you defend your country, and after the military conflict has been settled there will be a reckoning with all the people who promised that life would be so much better if Ukraine pursued this Western strategy. I think there will be a space — not for pro-Russian political parties, they will be dismissed in those terms — but for pro-Ukrainian political parties who will say: we were subjugated, there was an attempt made to subjugate us by the Russians, and the West lied to us at the same time. Therefore, we need to rely on ourselves first and foremost. And I think that will receive considerable attention after the war.
Ukraine's post-war identity and the trajectory of internal division
Glenn Diesen: I was going to say that Ukraine could only have been used as a proxy if it wasn't so divided within — between east and west, not to oversimplify, there are other elements as well. But how do you see the trajectory of this internal division in Ukraine having shifted? The Ukraine seen from 1991 to 2014 is not the same Ukraine anymore, obviously. We don't really know much about the opposition because they're being purged. But what do you think it could look like after this war? Because I also think the conclusion after this war will be that the West used Ukraine as a proxy and the Russians destroyed them and stripped them of territory. So I don't think they're going to be overwhelmingly either pro-NATO or pro-Russian in the foreseeable future. But they're not going to be a homogeneous group nonetheless. How do you see nationhood developing in Ukraine after this war?
Nicolai Petro: In 2022, after the invasion, I was struck by a number of journalists and political analysts who highlighted how this attack by Russia had not yet fundamentally changed people's pre-war outlook. But over time I think positions have hardened and solidified, and as a result we still have vastly different narratives and vastly different perceptions of Ukraine's role in Europe and the world.
In order to talk about how this might evolve in the future, we need more information than is available to us right now. First, we don't know what the borders of Ukraine will be, and so we don't know what the population within those borders will be. If we're talking about eastern and southern Ukraine, I think they remain as they have always been — largely Russified. With respect to western Ukraine, they remain as they have always been — largely Russophobic. In the centre, where people speak by and large on a conventional daily basis some mishmash of Ukrainian and Russian called Surzhyk, support for Ukrainian independence and for a Ukrainian self-identity has definitely increased. But we don't know how that will all play out, because we don't know who will be voting within Ukraine.
Secondly, what about the people outside of Ukraine who are technically still Ukrainian citizens? Which of them will the government allow to vote while living abroad? Which of them will the government allow to come back to Ukraine, and under what conditions? That is also a big question mark. You might think that, given Ukraine has undergone such a disastrous demographic decline — losing roughly half of its population to war and immigration — they would welcome the return of every Ukrainian. But if you listen to Ukrainian officials ever since 2014, that has not been the case.
There were public plans adopted by the Minister of Interior and then subsequently Minister of Defence Reznikov with respect to liberated Crimea and liberated areas of Donbas — after Ukraine's anticipated victory in those regions before 2022 — that involved the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of people deemed by the state not loyal. They were planning essentially their own depopulation campaign in order to retain only what nationalists view as true Ukrainians. And the profile of a true Ukrainian is very narrow: someone who speaks only Ukrainian as a matter of personal choice as well as political obligation, who votes specifically for NATO and EU membership, and who is, if religious, a loyal follower of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. There is an alternative that is more or less acceptable — the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, which is the state-sponsored version of the Orthodox Church. But the ideologists of the Ukrainian National Movement have never come from the Orthodox community. They have always come from the Greek Catholic community, which was historically rooted in western Ukraine.
As former President Kravchuk said, the big problem in Ukrainian history has been the effort of Galicia to expand its version of Ukrainian identity over the entire country, and this has led to pushback from the rest of the country. This hasn't changed. You can see it manifested daily today, even in the struggle of the state to raise fines on the public usage of any language but Ukrainian — specifically Russian — and in efforts to tailor the national curriculum and the historical curriculum to reflect only western Ukrainian national heroes. Even during World War II, the people that historically we in the West have considered Nazi collaborators are being elevated as the true heroes of Ukraine, while the roughly 95% of Ukrainian Soviet soldiers who fought for the Red Army are treated as questionable in their motivation, because they fought against those who wanted Ukrainian independence under a regime allied with Nazi Germany.
All of this does not augur well for any sort of peaceful resolution and future reconciliation. There have always been calls for reconciliation, always calls for governments of national unity — why not avoid politicising individual people's choices, be it to speak this language or go to this church or have their own community celebrations? Why not have an inclusive Ukrainian identity rather than an exclusive one? That is not in the cards right now.
I want to mention another thing. Even during the fighting itself, this issue is not resolved and it is affecting people's attitudes toward the war. We have popular singers who have recently said: I'm tired of being forced to avoid speaking my native language, which is Russian. Even though I'm a proud Ukrainian and I support the war effort, I'm tired of being told that I can't be a true Ukrainian if I speak anything else. It's this kind of effort to offend people based on the way they were raised, the families they grew up in, and the histories they have, that does not portend well for a peaceful and prosperous future for Ukraine after the war ends.
Glenn Diesen: I was going to say that a very similar argument has been made by the former adviser to Zelensky — as you know, Alexei Arestovych — who made the point that this was probably the biggest mistake of Ukraine: to have that minority identity, the Bandera supporters essentially imposing their position on the whole country. Because what they did was alienate huge portions of the country and then ask them to die for this new Ukraine. What are we dying for — a Ukraine that doesn't accept us? Why am I fighting if I can't fight for a country where I would be recognised and valued as a loyal citizen?
Nicolai Petro: There's another part of this which I think people don't touch upon. Let's say you are a Ukrainian in the centre somewhere — not a western Ukrainian raised only in that specific culture. You're somewhere in the middle, and then you have an eastern Ukraine which is now under Russian rule. In fact, in those territories — let's assume they remain in Russia after the war — they're a tectonic part of Russia. But already ideologically and in terms of political aspirations, the current government, and presumably every future government, will still say those are Ukrainians and we want them back.
In fact, you will have competing models of Ukrainian identity coexisting right there: between western nationalism and an eastern section where people are freely able to choose whether to speak Russian or Ukrainian. Hopefully that will be the case — I understand that now there is an effort in the schools to reintroduce and stress the usage of Russian, which has been subordinated to the state language for the last 30 years. But I think historically those territories — Donbas and Novorossiya down to the south, and even Crimea, although Crimea is a different case — they're not going to stop thinking of themselves as Ukrainians. They're going to say: we are Russian and Ukrainian, which is what they've always thought of themselves as for as long as those areas have been settled.
So there will be these two competing models competing for the sympathies of the people in the middle. I would say the areas where it will be possible for Russians and Ukrainians to coexist in eastern Ukraine will have a powerful appeal in central Ukraine — more so, I would suspect, than a harsh and narrow Ukrainian nationalism proposed by western Ukraine.
Glenn Diesen: So if you have two identities in Ukraine — one being that Ukrainians and Russians are brotherly peoples, versus the other which is that Russian culture is simply an imperial relic that should be snuffed out of the country — then obviously the former will be more appealing.
Nicolai Petro: The key point being: if individuals and their families are allowed to choose in the east the degree to which they want to be Ukrainian, whereas in the west they won't have that choice — because they will have no opportunity to even identify with the historical Russian identity. Historically, western Ukraine was known as Chervona Rus — Red Russia — and at the time of World War I it was one of the most patriotic areas supporting the fight of the Russian Empire.
Zelensky's political survival and the West's fear of direct negotiations
Glenn Diesen: Just as a last question: given all of these internal problems, how is this affecting the ability of Zelensky and his leadership to hold on to power? We see a lot of cracks in the military, in the economy, socially — the mobilisation is really starting to cause a lot of anger — and of course a political crisis which continues to brew. When does the identity issue start to impact all of this? How long is it possible for Zelensky to keep all of this under wraps, and when does it start falling apart?
Nicolai Petro: I don't think Zelensky has any choice, so long as he is in power, but to pretend that he is in charge. So I would rephrase the question as: what would lead him to resign?
I don't think the West, under any foreseeable circumstances in the near future — absent an obvious and catastrophic collapse of the front — would support the ouster of Zelensky, because the individual political leaders in the West have too much history with him. There are too many photos of them with him, too many congratulatory statements about how he is the indispensable leader for Ukrainian independence. They've supported him all the way, even through his postponing of elections and putting the constitution on pause — all of which has been described in glowing terms as examples of democracy. There's simply too much linkage there. Western leaders cannot plausibly cut their ties to Zelensky in a way that would lead them to force him out.
But if he should choose to go, he might be encouraged to do so. The only reason that remains a question up in the air right now — given all the obvious indications of corruption scandals circling and narrowing, coming closer and closer to Zelensky's inner circle, and a military strategy which has been a failure — is that there is no other better candidate yet. Look at how Fedorov Mykhailo, the young Minister of Digital Transformation, took off like a rocket and then disappeared. He didn't even stay in Ukraine, which he promised he would do. Now he's a strategic consultant to the Italian Minister of Defence, which means he just gets to live in Italy until the end of the war and make money for himself and his companies.
Could Zelensky be offered the same thing — say, in Britain? Of course he could, and it might even be an attractive option for him and his family. But that doesn't solve the West's primary problem, which is: who could they get who would have at least some sort of plausible authority within Ukraine, be able to unite different factions, and would be beholden to Western interests?
Right now the West has Zelensky exactly where they want him, which means he can be coerced into making concessions with the threat of scandal — the threat of being identified as at the centre of corruption. Although there are limits to that strategy, because if they push too far he can bolt and say: I'll just go, I'll just negotiate myself with Russia. That is the great fear in the West — what if Zelensky actually decides, along with key members of his entourage and the military, to initiate direct negotiations with Russia and say to the West: you lied, you didn't give us the assistance we needed, we can get a better deal ourselves.
So it's a difficult thing to project — how far the West could push its control over the current Ukrainian government. But again, there are so few plausible alternative candidates to Zelensky. He has cleared the political field of any viable alternative, sending them away to be ambassadors or just keeping them under wraps. It's very difficult to predict. But I do think that if there's going to be any change in the policies pursued by the government, it will be after Zelensky leaves office, under whatever circumstances that might be.
Glenn Diesen: Well, Nicolai, thank you so much for taking the time. I know you're studying the internal workings of Ukraine, so thanks for sharing those perspectives.
Nicolai Petro: Thank you.