The ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War is one of the most important events in recent European history. Vladimir Putin’s war of aggression and conquest against Ukraine marks a belated ‘return of history’, where major wars are no longer unthinkable, and fantasies of perpetual peace and soft power have been banished by the stark reality of blood and violence from Kyiv to Mariupol, from Lviv to the Donbas.

The historical importance of the Russo-Ukrainian War is undeniable, as is the powerful role that history plays in providing a context for the aims and objectives of both sides. While the Ukrainian leader, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has taken comfort in the example of Winston Churchill, President Putin has also found history to be a powerful source of legitimacy for his own worldview; one suffused with Russian nationalism and resistance to foreign powers, who he accuses of seeking to divide and weaken his country.

It has become evident that Putin is looking back not just to the Cold War or even to the Second World War, but even earlier to provide the rationale for his actions. In his infamous essay ‘On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians’, which was published in July 2021, Putin stated that Russians and Ukrainians are ‘one people – a single whole’, and that their division and separation is a ‘great common misfortune and tragedy’.

For Putin, a key part of this story of division was the First World War, which had a devastating effect upon the stability of the European empires, and caused the collapse of the three great powers – Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia – that controlled Central and Eastern Europe, allowing new states to rise up, including Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Ukraine.

Such a dramatic turn of events had been unthinkable in 1914 when Russia mobilised her vast army – then the largest in the world – and poured west towards German and Austrian forces in what became the Eastern Front. This was what Churchill called ‘incomparably the greatest war in history. In its scale, in its slaughter, in the exertions of the combatants, in its military kaleidoscope, it far surpasses by magnitude and intensity all similar human episodes’.

The Eastern Front has tended to be overshadowed by the trenches of the Western Front, but it was no less awful, and it witnessed some of the worst battles of the war, including at Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes, at Przemyśl and Lemberg (later Lviv). Although the Russians proved to be a dangerous adversary, they struggled to devise a coherent strategy for fighting a modern total war, lacking vital equipment, and hamstrung by low morale and poor leadership.

The crucial moment came in the summer of 1915. When Germany decided to mount a series of major offensives on the Eastern Front, they were able to drive the Russians out of Poland and the Baltic region in what became known as the ‘Great Retreat’. By the end of the year, the Russian army had been shattered, retreating hundreds of thousands of square miles, and sending millions of refugees into the homeland. They never recovered.

By the end of 1916 the legitimacy of the Tsarist regime was crumbling, and Tsar Nicholas II abdicated in March 1917 after losing the confidence of his generals. The months of political uncertainty and chaos that followed only made matters worse, until the radical Bolshevik Party, led by Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (‘Lenin’), seized power in November of that year.

The Russian Revolution transformed the political and cultural landscape of the east, and ended any hopes that Russia would continue to fight on. This eventually resulted in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918, the bizarre peace agreement between the Bolsheviks and the Central Powers, which carved up what had once been the great Tsarist Empire and left Russia a wounded rump, having lost a huge swathe of European territory, most of her coal mines, vast tracts of valuable agricultural land, and billions of marks owed in reparations.

For Putin, the arrival of Ukrainian representatives at Brest-Litovsk, where they successfully called for an independent Ukrainian state, was a historical anomaly: rather than the being the result of a genuine national community and a growing national consciousness, for Putin a free, independent Ukraine demonstrated the influence of outsiders and foreign powers. Therefore, Ukraine was an ‘inherently unstable’ creation that would collapse if pressed hard enough. Even though the Bolsheviks had once supported national minorities within the empire, they soon became determined to crush all opposition, and invaded Ukraine in January 1919.

Putin has long railed against the ‘mistakes’ of Brest-Litovsk and the eradication of Russian influence in Eastern Europe. But, however flawed the treaty may have been, it was just a reflection of Russian weakness, not the cause of it. The Russian Empire had broken under the strains of war, and was no longer able to contain the national groups and minorities that had been brought under its control over the previous two centuries.

Putin, no less than the tragic figures of 1914, thought he could control and direct war, that it was his loyal servant, and that its use would protect and expand Russian power. He has found much to the contrary since February 2022. The war against Ukraine has been unpredictable, highly dangerous, and dragged in other powers, even spilling onto Russian soil. Putin may yet prove unable to avoid the fate of the men of 1914.