“Kievan Rus Is Ours!”: Ontological Security, National Memory, and Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine

Abstract To explain why Vladimir Putin launched Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, this article foregrounds a crucial but understudied dimension: national memory. It argues that both discontinuity in national memory and dislocation between national memory and territory threaten states’ ontological security. The Soviet collapse marked a profound break in Russia’s national memory. To restore the ontological security thus shattered, Russia’s ruling elite adopted a narrative of radical continuity of Russian statehood, linking Kievan Rus, the Grand Duchy of Moscow, the Romanov Empire, the Soviet Union, and the Russian Federation into an unbroken thousand-year tradition. Yet by placing its origins in independent Ukraine, this narrative was inherently precarious. While mending the discontinuity in national memory, it produced a dislocation between memory and territory, rendering Russia ontologically vulnerable. By asserting their own claim to Kyiv as the birthplace of Ukrainian nation- and statehood, Ukraine’s ruling elite exposed this dislocation and laid bare both the precarity of the radical continuity narrative and Russia’s resulting ontological vulnerability. The Kremlin’s response was to seek political – and, when that failed, military – control over Ukraine to redress this dislocation and eliminate the sources of ontological vulnerability that flowed from the radical continuity narrative.