As the Russia-Ukraine war rages on with an uncertain outcome, it is perhaps premature to speculate on how future historians will assess its consequences for Europe’s geopolitical landscape and Russia itself. But it is already clear that the war is part of two historical dramas, each with far-reaching implications for the security and stability of Europe. One is the centuries-long process of drawing a dividing line between Russia and the West, which has shifted back and forth across the European continent. The second drama focuses on the equally fateful question of Russian identity, posed in an acute form by the breakup of the Soviet Union: can there be a Russian nation-state? And, if so, what is its territorial extent?

The big strategic question is whether these dramas can unfold in ways that are conducive to peace and prosperity across the European continent, including Russia, or whether they must continue to unsettle European affairs as they have for the past three centuries.

For a century after Peter the Great formally founded the Empire in 1721 following victory over Sweden in the Great Northern War, Russia steadily expanded westward, seizing much of the territory that is now Belarus and Ukraine. Catherine the Great annexed, in particular, land that constituted Novorossiya (New Russia), the southern and eastern provinces of modern Ukraine, as well as Crimea in 1783. By the end of the Napoleonic Wars, Russian power was entrenched in Warsaw. The dividing line was set for the next 100 years – Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War of the mid-19th century and its victory over Turkey in 1878 came with minimal territorial adjustments in Europe.

The next big shift came with the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 and the punitive Brest-Litovsk peace that Germany imposed on Russia the following year. Those two developments shattered the Russian Empire. The loss of territory in Europe was vast, including Finland, the Baltic States, Poland, Bessarabia, and most of what is now Belarus and Ukraine. During the ensuing civil war, however, the Bolsheviks managed to reconstitute the Empire, now in the guise of the Soviet Union, recovering Ukraine and Belarus. Stalin then regained most of the former imperial land, minus Finland, as a consequence of the Second World War, and, with western acquiescence, established a Soviet sphere of influence that brought Russian power to the heart of Europe for more than 40 years. Russia’s control of East Germany marked the furthest westward extent of its power in Europe in history.

The East European revolutions of 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 returned Russia roughly to the borders of 1721, negating nearly three centuries of geopolitical advance. Since then, Moscow has managed to claw back some of its lost territory, turning Belarus into a vassal state, for example. It is now waging war against Ukraine to extend the line further westward.

The war’s outcome will determine the final path of the dividing line, which now extends from the Barents Sea to the Black Sea, for the most part along NATO’s border with Russia and Belarus. At issue is whether the line will run along Ukraine’s western border or through Ukraine.

If Ukraine, with western support, manages to preserve its independence and sovereignty, the line will run through Ukraine, since Kyiv is unlikely to expel Russia from the Ukrainian land it now occupies. If Putin achieves his maximal goal — the subjugation of Ukraine — the line will be drawn along Ukraine’s western border. That would return the Russia-West divide to roughly where it stood at the end of Catherine’s reign, minus the Baltic States. In other words, Putin would have recovered Russia’s territorial gains of the 18th century.

Putin could, and certainly would, present either outcome as a victory, although only in the second case would there be no serious dissent. For Ukraine and the West, however, only the first scenario could be considered a success, and then only if Ukraine were to continue on its path toward Euro-Atlantic integration. In the broad historical perspective, that outcome would transform the current conflict into Ukraine’s successful war of independence, a crucible that forged beyond doubt a genuine Ukrainian nation-state out of the disparate regions that found themselves within the borders of the Ukrainian polity when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Whether Ukraine would eventually regain the land Russia has seized during the current war would remain to be seen.

The formation of a Ukrainian nation-state would in a sense also transform the current conflict into a war of Russian national self-determination, even if that was hardly Putin’s intent or the conscious goal of any part of the Russian people. But a war that ended with Russia recognising the existence of a Ukrainian nation-state beyond its control would at least implicitly acknowledge the boundaries of the Russian nation. Call it national self-determination by default. Russian nation-building would thus constitute the second drama of current events, and the delayed consequence of the Soviet break-up.

At that time, the administrative lines between the Soviet Union’s constituent republics were recognised as international borders, leaving most of the new states multi-ethnic to a greater or lesser degree. In particular, some 25 million ethnic Russians woke up one day to find themselves beyond the borders of the Russian Federation; 12 million were in Ukraine alone, concentrated in the regions now under Russian control.

In August 1991, after the failed Soviet putsch, the Ukrainian parliament voted for independence, which a popular referendum endorsed overwhelmingly in December of that year. All of Ukraine’s provinces voted for independence, including Crimea, which at that time had a significant ethnic-Russian majority, although low voter turnout meant that only just over one third of Crimea’s total electorate supported independence (compared to at least 60 per cent in all the other provinces). The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and other international observers deemed the vote to be free and fair.

Nevertheless, many contemporary Russian leaders, including so-called democratic reformers, were opposed to recognising what they considered historical Russian lands, including Crimea and the Donbas, as part of the new Ukrainian state. That attitude fuelled continuing tension between Russia and Ukraine, which exploded into military conflict in 2014, when Russia seized Crimea and instigated rebellion in the Donbas, and again, more catastrophically, in 2022.

The current war will draw the western border of the Russian state. More importantly, if Ukraine’s independence and sovereignty is preserved, the war could also draw the Western limit of the Russian nation.  As the United States’ former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski noted shortly after the breakup of the Soviet Union, ‘without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire’, and by implication could become a genuine nation-state for the first time in history.

Ideally, the final borders of the Russian and Ukrainian nation-states would in time be determined by the exercise of local democracy in the five regions of Ukraine that Russia has formally annexed –Crimea in 2014, and Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson in 2022. Free and fair referenda would enable the local populations to determine whether they wanted to be part of Russia or Ukraine. That would complete the processes of Ukrainian and Russian national self-determination and could foster stability between the two countries.

Even then, much work would remain to be done to subdue the profound anti-Russian animosity instilled in Ukraine by Russian aggression, and to overcome Russia’s deep lack of respect for Ukraine and Ukrainians. But once the issue of national survival has been resolved positively, possibilities should multiply for the restoration of beneficial commercial, cultural, and political cooperation between two nations that have had a long shared history.

The benefits of such a development for European peace, stability, and security would be immense. It could bring to an end the centuries-old process of Russian expansion westward into Europe and finally transform Russia into a ‘normal’ European country, a century after the Ottoman and Austria-Hungarian Empires broke up into nation-states, 80 years after Germany was stripped of its empire and territorial pretensions in Europe, and 50 years after Great Britain and France abandoned their empires.

The geopolitical divide between Russia and the West would lose the salience it has had for Europe’s stability for the last three to four centuries. And that would enable the United States to shift resources away from the defence of Europe against Russian aggression to other pressing strategic regional challenges. In this light, the defence of Ukraine could bring enormous benefits obviously to Ukraine, but also to Europe, the United States, and, as loath as the current Kremlin would be to admit it, to Russia itself.