To understand the conflict, look to colonialism

‘Icome today with an appeal to all citizens of Russia,’’ Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a televised address, just hours before Russian forces launched a fullscale assault on his nation.

He said he wished to talk to the Russian people not as the leader of a nation but as a citizen of Ukraine.

He wanted to tell them, in their shared language, that Vladimir Putin’s excuses for invading his country were mere fantasies. He wanted to remind the Russian people of all that they share with their Ukrainian neighbours, and to underscore that it was up to them to speak out to stop war.

‘‘You are being told that we are Nazis,’’ Zelensky said. But eight million Ukrainians died fighting with the Soviet army in World War II. Zelensky’s grandfather served in the Soviet infantry; my grandfather, born and raised outside Kyiv, spent the war running radio cables between the front line and Moscow.

‘‘You are told that we hate Russian culture,’’ Zelensky said. ‘‘But how can you hate culture? Any culture? Neighbours always enrich each other’s cultures, but that does not make them one entity,’’ he said. ‘‘We are different, but that does not make us enemies. We want to build our own history, peaceful, calm and fair.’’

Zelensky’s address was both an appeal and a prayer. He underscored that though Russians and Ukrainians may share kin and culture, that does not mean their relationship can forever be that of coloniser and colonised.

He addressed his remarks to the Russian people, but was also speaking to their president, who had claimed only a few days earlier that ‘‘Ukraine is not just a neighbouring country for us. It is an inalienable part of our own history, culture and spiritual space’’.

Putin prefers to think of Ukraine as a southern province of Russia, a territory that was mistakenly ‘‘gifted’’ lands by his predecessors. It is these supposed mistakes that this invasion aims to correct.

It is no accident that one of the most authoritative responses to the Kremlin’s rhetoric has come not from the US or European powers, but from Martin Kimani, the Kenyan ambassador to the UN, who explicitly linked the colonial history of his country to that of Ukraine in a speech to the Security Council last week.

Kimani’s countrymen, he said, ‘‘share deep historical, cultural and linguistic bonds’’ with people across their borders – borders they had no role in drawing.

The same is true of Ukrainians. Many families, including my own, have been split across the Russia-Ukraine border. These separations are largely accidents of history, one of the lasting effects of the collapse the Soviet Union.

But this sense of kinship, Kimani said, cannot justify invasion: ‘‘We must complete our recovery from the embers of dead empires in a way that does not plunge us back into new forms of domination and oppression.’’

Outside the halls of academia, the former Soviet states are rarely referred to as ‘‘post-colonial’’. Instead, they are usually called ‘‘postSoviet,’’ a term which suggests that the collapse of the Soviet Union passively gave birth to liberated nations, each with their unique language, history, literature and traditions.

In reality, the former Soviet countries – Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine and Belarus among them – nurtured national movements for hundreds of years before finally getting to experience independence.

Ukraine’s national poet, the 19th-century bard Taras Shevchenko, helped build national identity through his verse, which he composed in both Russian and Ukrainian.

In one of his most-cited poems, written in 1845, he ridicules Russian expansionism and mourns the immense loss of life it had already wrought. ‘‘We groan beneath the yoke of hangmen / While drunken justice sodden sleeps,’’ he writes.

He describes, with a telltale twinge of irony, how Russian assimilation swallowed up the voices of the empire’s dominated lands: ‘‘From the Moldovian to the Finn, / all are silent in their languages, / because they’re blessed!’’ His poetry salutes the warriors who battle colonial forces, urging them on: ‘‘Keep fighting – you are sure to win! / God helps you in your fight / For fame and freedom march with you / And right is on your side!’’

On Russian state television, a map showing territorial ‘‘gifts’’ to Ukraine from Russian and Soviet rulers aired this past week. It showed Ukraine divided into pieces, and claimed that the eastern region had been ‘‘given’’ to Ukraine by Vladimir Lenin in 1922; that Crimea was ‘‘given’’ to Ukraine by Nikita Khrushchev in 1954; that a large swath of the nation’s northern territory had been a ‘‘gift’’ from Russian czars.

What this map really shows is different periods of subjugation, moments when, as Kimani described, Ukraine’s borders were redrawn by outside forces.

‘‘We are different, but that does not make us enemies.’’ Volodymyr Zelensky addresses the Russian people last week

In his remarks early last week, Zelensky took pains to emphasise the similarities between Russians and Ukrainians because that is what the moment called for. But Ukraine is not Russia. Its people have been fighting Russian imperialism and colonial domination for hundreds of years.

In the chamber of the UN Security Council early last week, Ukrainian Ambassador Sergiy Kyslytsya invoked Soviet colonial history in an effort to challenge Russia’s status on the council.

He repeated an outstanding request to the secretariat to produce the reasoning for why the Russian Federation had been allowed to inherit the Soviet Union’s permanent seat, which had previously represented all of the Soviet Union’s constituent republics.

On their way into the chamber, he, the Russian ambassador and their fellow ambassadors would have walked by the newly restored tapestry of Pablo Picasso’s

that has adorned the UN halls since 1984, a warning of the grotesque horror of war.

Perhaps the Russian envoy glanced at it, or maybe he just stared straight ahead.

Linda Kinstler has covered Ukrainian politics and culture since 2014. Her first book,

will be published in August.

‘‘We must complete our recovery from the embers of dead empires in a way that does not plunge us back into new forms of domination and oppression.’’ Martin Kimani, Kenyan ambassador to the UN, to the Security Council last week, linking Kenya’s colonial history to Ukraine