‘All of Ukraine is ours’: The imperial logic of Putin’s war

Russian president Vladimir Putin’s United Russia Party easily retained its overwhelming majority in the state Duma in Russia’s election held over the weekend.  It was the first Russian parliamentary election since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022.  Most explicitly antiwar candidates were excluded, and the only openly antiwar party (Yabloko) was taken off the ballot after initially being allowed to take part.  Voting also took place in Ukrainian territory that Russia claims it has annexed, something that Ukraine and its international supporters condemned.

The Kremlin has presented the election as evidence of national unity and support for the war (though the results should not be taken as an unambiguous expression of Russian public opinion).  Putin said participation would show “millions of people stand behind our soldiers” and that Russians are a “united people” bound by shared values and historical memory.  In this way, too, the election reinforces Putin’s broader historical narrative about Ukraine — that it always was and is still part of Russia.

Putin’s view of Ukraine is not just that of a neighboring state whose military alignment is a security problem for Russia.  He has repeatedly said Russians and Ukrainians are one people and invoked “historically Russian lands.”   In June 2025 at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, Putin said, “I have many times said I consider Russians and Ukrainians to be one people.  In this sense all of Ukraine is ours.”   He also added that, according to an old rule of Russia, wherever a Russian soldier sets foot, it “is ours.”

This is imperialism at its most explicit historical and territorial level.  Putin is not just lamenting that the Russian Federation no longer possesses those territories that used to be under the Russian Empire or Soviet Union; he is using that history to make a claim today on sovereignty over them.  His constant reference to “historically Russian lands,” Russians and Ukrainians being culturally and politically related, the heritage of the Russian Empire, and shrinking territory after the dissolution of the Soviet Union turns imperial legacy into a modern political agenda; history provides a foundation for current claims.  So his statement “all of Ukraine is ours” is not just about Russia’s security concerns; it says Ukraine, because of its history (and relationship to Russia), belongs to Russia’s political and territorial sphere.

The key move is from interpretation of history to political sovereignty.  Ukraine is not just a country that happens to have historical and cultural ties with Russia; in Putin’s account, the emergence of an independent Ukrainian state can be explained as a result of a historical rupture — a political decision separating what was supposedly one historical community.  That is, Ukrainian independence after the fall of the Soviet Union in December 1991 is not just a fact of international politics, but a historical process whose legitimacy Moscow contests.

In this sense, “all of Ukraine is ours” cannot be understood as a conventional argument about Russian security or NATO expansion.  A conventional security argument would say Russia needs a strategically neutral neighbor because military geography requires it, or an opposing alliance exists.  Putin’s historical argument goes farther.  It concerns Ukraine’s political identity and sovereignty itself.  Ukraine’s history, territory, and relationship with Russia are argued to give Moscow special (in its most expansive formulation) sovereign interest in Ukraine’s political future.

This aligns with what analyst Sean Nottoli said in an August 2025 interview with World Geostrategic Insights.  He argued that Russia is the aggressor in the war and that support for Ukraine remains necessary while negotiations are ongoing.  He also held that Putin’s demands and his approach to negotiations could not be understood as a conventional dispute over security arrangements (and Putin’s rhetoric after that makes that historical dimension even more important).

The question, then, is not simply whether Putin fears NATO enlargement.  It is rather whether Russian security as articulated by Putin is bound up with an imperial conception of territory — in which Ukraine’s sovereignty is constrained by Moscow’s understanding of Russia’s historical inheritance.  Putin’s history is, in this sense, a language through which sovereignty is claimed: The past becomes an argument about who has the right to determine the political future of the present.

The Russian parliamentary election was a domestic counterpoint to Putin’s imperial conception of Ukraine.  Held under restrictions on political competition, it cannot be treated as an unambiguous expression of Russian public opinion.  But the Kremlin nevertheless used it as evidence of national unity and support for the war.  Putin invoked shared values and historical memory, too.

In this context, the election reinforces the political narrative that Russia is a historically continuous entity whose territorial and political inheritance goes beyond the Russian Federation today.  Domestic political control and imperial historical consciousness thus converge in the Kremlin’s presentation of the war — not just as conventional geopolitical conflict, but also as part of a struggle over Russia’s historical identity, territorial inheritance, and claimed prerogatives in determining Ukraine’s political future.

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Image: www.kremlin.ru via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.