Category Archives: war

by | 7 August 2026 · 7:55 am

Honolulu FBI vs. Mass Internment

From Family of Spies: A World War II Story of Nazi Espionage, Betrayal, and the Secret History Behind Pearl Harbor, by Christine Kuehn (Celadon Books, 2025), Kindle pp. 160-161:

There was intense pressure to intern the entire Japanese population of the island—160,000 men, women, and children. Hoover and President Roosevelt, fearing an uprising, wanted a crackdown. Surprisingly, the man who stood in their way was the straitlaced conservative Robert Shivers. He fought it tooth and nail, astonishing Hoover and putting his career at significant risk. The close bond Shivers had formed with his Japanese American “adopted daughter,” Sue, had swayed him.

“I couldn’t have let you and thousands of people like you be arrested,” Shivers told her. The thought of Sue and scores of other innocents like her being forced into a camp had fueled a fire within that spurred him to take on the highest levels of the government.

On the west coast of the U.S. mainland, 120,000 Americans with Japanese heritage would be put into camps and not released until the end of the war, with virtually no one ever being charged with a crime.

Even the spy Yoshikawa, who was interned for a short time with Japanese Americans after his capture, saw the irony. “We were taken to a relocation camp full of innocent American Japanese,” he recalled. “They had done nothing. It was a cruel joke. You see, I couldn’t trust them to help me in Honolulu. They were loyal to the United States.”

While most of those held on Sand Island and in internment camps on the mainland were innocent of any wrongdoing, that was not the case with Otto and the rest of the Kuehns. Before it was over, they would have to navigate the ire of an enraged American public, a furious government, and federal prosecutors hell-bent on punishing someone for the heinous crime of December 7.

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Filed under Hawai'i, Japan, military, nationalism, U.S., war

by | 4 August 2026 · 3:03 pm

Dusko Popov vs. J. Edgar Hoover, 1941

From Family of Spies: A World War II Story of Nazi Espionage, Betrayal, and the Secret History Behind Pearl Harbor, by Christine Kuehn (Celadon Books, 2025), Kindle pp. 119-120:

Special Agent Shivers was convinced the Kuehns were spies; he just didn’t know for whom. The payments pointed to the Japanese, but the FBI was getting information that the Nazis also had an interest in Pearl Harbor. That revelation came from another German spy turned double agent for the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6: Dusko Popov.

Popov was a well-educated Serbian who attended law school at the University of Freiburg in Germany in 1935. A few years later he was recruited by a former classmate to work for the Abwehr, the German military intelligence service.

Popov immediately contacted the British diplomatic authorities, who enlisted him as a double agent. Within a short period of time, the Germans had come to trust him implicitly, even fronting him $50,000 to set up a spy ring in London. Popov was supposed to turn the money over to MI6, as part of a plan to fleece the Germans out of chunks of cash.

Ian Fleming, a British intelligence officer who would go on to create the character James Bond, was assigned to watch over Popov and make sure the cash made it back to London. After receiving the money from the Germans, Popov met Fleming in Portugal for the trip back to England. The Serbian, a well-known ladies’ man and gambler, made his way to Casino Estoril, an oceanside casino that was a well-known hangout for spies and other international highfliers.

While gambling at a nearby table, Popov overheard a Lithuanian businessman pompously declare he would match any bet, no matter how high the amount. Popov sauntered over to the table, sat down across from the man, and, without saying a word, dropped $50,000 on the table—MI6’s $50,000, the equivalent of $1 million today. The casino went quiet, and Fleming went white watching Popov potentially wreck the entire operation. The flustered Lithuanian asked the casino if they would lend him the money if he lost. Not unexpectedly, they declined, and the man walked away from the table, red-faced. Popov pulled the money off the felt with a grin, loudly proclaiming that gamblers like that are “an annoyance to serious players.”

Popov was, like Otto, a risk-taker, a bit of a narcissist—and Popov was purportedly Fleming’s inspiration for James Bond. The baccarat scene was even re-created, blow for blow, in his first book, Casino Royale.

In August 1941, the Germans sent Popov to the United States with $58,000 and a directive to establish a network of spies. Then he was to head to Hawaii and gather as much intelligence as possible on Pearl Harbor. Unbeknownst to Otto Kuehn, Popov was to be his replacement.

The Japanese had grown tired of Otto’s flamboyant lifestyle and considered him a growing security risk. Frequent phone calls and visits to the consulate, exorbitant spending, wild parties with military officers that made the local gossip column—Otto was becoming a threat to the operation. Fresh blood was needed, and Japanese intelligence asked Goebbels to replace him.

Arriving in New York, Popov set up a meeting with the FBI. J. Edgar Hoover was suspicious of the double agent, agreeing to let his staff meet with Popov only after the British reassured him. Popov was eventually summoned to the Commodore Hotel, where he showed the agents his orders, written in microdots, a new technology invented by the Germans that reduced entire pages of information down to the size of a period.

Almost half the hidden directives consisted of questions the Germans wanted answered about military operations in Hawaii: the depths of the water at Pearl Harbor, the torpedo nets under the water’s surface, exact locations of air bases at Hickam, Wheeler, and Kaneohe, and locations of submarine stations, along with sketches of the Pearl Harbor piers. “Is the Crater Punchbowl being used as ammunition dump?” read one question.

The warning was clear: The Nazis wanted Popov to gather intelligence the Japanese needed for an attack on Pearl Harbor. That got Hoover’s attention, and the FBI director decided to come to New York and meet with Popov personally. But when the two met face-to-face weeks later, the rendezvous was a disaster. The FBI director could barely contain his disdain for the German double agent. “You’re like all double agents,” he berated him. “You’re begging for information to sell to your German friends so you can make a lot of money and be a playboy!”

Popov brushed off Hoover’s comments and reiterated to the FBI director his warning of an impending attack. “But he just wouldn’t listen to anything I had to say,” he said later.

Hoover had deployed a lot of manpower to the FBI office in Hawaii and stepped up the pressure on Shivers. Yet here was the plan for the entire Japanese assault in front of his face, and he ignored it. While Hoover did notify President Roosevelt that the FBI had discovered a new microdot technology, forwarding a small portion of the text from Popov, he sat on the most important information: The Japanese were planning an attack on Pearl Harbor.

The Abwehr, meanwhile, aborted Popov’s mission to Hawaii. The glaring spotlight thrown on him from Hoover would bring too much attention to Japanese operations there. Otto would remain in place as Japan’s spy. But Germany’s role in the Pacific was now obvious. It was working in concert with Japan toward a common goal of knocking out the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, and they were using a network of spies to do it.

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Filed under Britain, Germany, Hawai'i, Japan, literature, military, U.S., war

by | 2 August 2026 · 10:29 am

German Spies on Oahu in late 1930s

The Far Outliers are back in the Pacific now, as my reading reflects. I’ve been reading a new book that came out after we left for our academic year in Poland: Family of Spies: A World War II Story of Nazi Espionage, Betrayal, and the Secret History Behind Pearl Harbor (Celadon Books, 2025), by Christine Kuehn, the granddaughter of the family of spies. Honolulu Civil Beat author Kirsten Downey read an advance copy of the book and highlights some of its findings in her online commentary on The Secret Life of a Prominent Kailua Family Revealed. Here are some excerpts.

There were indeed spies among us.

A long-running tale of intrigue in Hawaiʻi will get a new twist later this year with the publication of a soon-to-be published book from inside the family of notorious Hawaiʻi spies. Wealthy German nationals Otto Kuehn and his family were paid by the Japanese government to spy on U.S. military operations at Pearl Harbor, and they funneled information to Japan that helped make the Dec. 7, 1941 attack so devastating.

…

In her book Christine — the daughter of Otto’s son, Eberhard — describes the family’s spy history as a secret concealed from the grandchildren. She gradually unspools how she unraveled the story and pressured her relatives into sharing some of the facts, with her own research filling in more of the specifics. Eberhard, sometimes crying, declined to share many details about what his family had done and then developed dementia.

Her account will be new to many people. But the tale has independently survived in Hawaiʻi, amid the whispered reminiscences of kamaʻāina, in published news accounts from the era, inside archival records housed at the University of Hawaiʻi’s War Records Depository and in books about espionage published after the war. It’s been included in a list of the FBI’s most famous cases. All shed more light on how the chain of events unfolded.

Otto Kuehn, a former naval officer in Germany, his wife Friedel and their three charming children made quite a splash in Hawaiʻi in the late 1930s.

Mr. and Mrs. Kuehn had first arrived on the ship Tatsuta Maru in the spring of 1935, stopping in Honolulu for two weeks before heading to Japan, which they visited several other times in the next few years, according to gossipy society news reports at the time.

By 1936, the Kuehns had permanently settled on Oʻahu, where they were mentioned as the hosts of a dance party at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel and as guests at a music recital attended by Hawaiʻi’s elite. He said he was in Hawaiʻi to learn Japanese.

The Kuehns became popular hosts at their posh homes in Kailua and Lanikai, frequently hosting the young naval officers who were squiring Ruth, their pretty 22-year-old daughter, around town and on outings. She and her mother operated a beauty salon near the Kāneʻohe Naval Air Station that was a favorite spot for Navy wives. Their two younger sons, Eberhard and Hans, were students at Punahou.

In August 1941, Ruth, then 25, married a widower, retired stock broker, J. Carson Moore, “who was flattered by her interest,” his family later recalled. Moore, 48, was a generous bon vivant who hosted an open bar at his home, with free-flowing booze, that was frequented by service members. Moore called his little saloon the S.S. Rum, according to archival records at the University of Hawaiʻi.

America was at peace at the time, but the Japanese Empire’s expansionist and militaristic ambitions were drawing increasing concern, particularly as Japan allied itself with Nazi Germany.

…

Many details of the Kuehn case were initially concealed because it was a wartime secret, which allowed both Otto and Friedel to vehemently protest that they were innocent of the charges.

In a letter to Otto, Hormann told him they felt misled, because they had considered him “a good Joe,” but that now they had been left hoping “that you were innocent of giving aid to the enemies of our country.”

Otto responded to Hormann in 1947, described the spying allegations as “ugly rumors,” and said his attorney had “demonstrated his innocence.”

“Mistakes will be made in time of national hysteria or danger,” Otto wrote in another letter. He added that his attorney “firmly believes in American justice and is sufficiently confident in a final success regarding my affair.”

In 1962, Friedel sued the U.S. government, saying that the charges against them were “all rot,” and that the allegations were brought against Otto to cover up the incompetence of the American military in allowing the surprise attack to occur. She sought $27,000 in damages from the U.S. government.

The facts, however, when they finally emerged, were damning. The Kuehns had done much more than make friends with amiable American military officers.

Otto had opened a steel furniture company, winning a commission to decorate a cocktail lounge at Pearl Harbor, which enabled him to get access to the base and take photographs of the ships in the harbor. He took pictures of other military installations, including Bellows, Wheeler and Hickam, revealing aircraft configurations. On at least one occasion, Otto took little Hans with him as he conducted his investigations, according to his granddaughter.

A Wikipedia article on the Kuehn family pieces together more sources on the family spy network.

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Filed under Germany, Hawai'i, Japan, migration, military, publishing, U.S., war

by | 27 July 2026 · 6:09 am

European Nationalist Revolts in 1905

This week’s edition of Culture.pl contains an article by Zachary Mazur written in 2022 that heralds his new book entitled To Kill a Spy: Everyday Nationalism and Political Violence in Fin-de-Siecle Europe from Amsterdam University Press’s CEU Press imprint later in 2026. Here are excerpts from most of the text of the article, without illustrations.

For decades, the Revolution of 1905 has been tucked away in history books as a mere ‘dress rehearsal’ for the Soviet rise in 1917. But for the Poles, Jews, Lithuanians and Ukrainians living under the Tsarist yoke, 1905 wasn’t a rehearsal for someone else’s drama – it was their own leading role. It was the moment the modern mass nation was born, an epoch-making explosion of culture and defiance that shattered imperial censorship and provided a blueprint for the independent states that would follow.

The catalyst: a war of hubris & machine guns

On the eve of the revolution, the Russian Empire was engaged in an embarrassing war with Imperial Japan. The two powers fought over control of northeast China (Manchuria) and the Korean peninsula. The Japanese, from the European perspective, were an upstart Asiatic power that had only recently emerged from isolation and the variable dark ages of feudalism. Fuelled by an unapologetic anti-Asian racism, most people expected that the tsar’s Russia would destroy the Japanese army in a matter of weeks when the war began.

Instead, Russian troops faced continuous setbacks. Japanese commanders used trenches and machine guns – new technologies of the day – to break the will of their opponents. On the seas, Japan’s gunships destroyed the Russian Pacific fleet, leading to an epic journey for the Baltic fleet around the horn of Africa, 18,000 nautical miles.

After the nearly 8-month ocean voyage, Russia’s sailors again faced a thrashing in May 1905. With two fleets destroyed and numerous losses on land, Russia admitted defeat in the summer. US President Theodore Roosevelt invited the sides to negotiate peace in New Hampshire at an American naval base and the Treaty of Portsmouth ended the Russo-Japanese War in September 1905.

On the home front, the people of the Russian Empire took the brunt of the war effort. Among the newly formed urban working classes, a concomitant economic slowdown put severe pressure on the people as they faced unemployment and hunger. Already in 1904, there were anti-war protests in Warsaw and in a few other cities around the Russian-controlled partition of the Polish lands.

The true beginning of the revolution, however, came when Russian subjects led by a charismatic young Orthodox priest tried to petition the tsar in January 1905. A crowd of calm marchers solemnly moved toward the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, and despite the fact that the tsar was not even there, the guards panicked and opened fire on the people. The resulting mayhem and death became the rallying cry for radicals all over the empire. The tsar had tried to cultivate an image of a benevolent father figure, but after ‘Bloody Sunday’, even his most fervent supporters were disillusioned.

A hotbed of revolt: strikes & the October Manifesto

For the next two years following the events of January 1905, protests and strikes broke out all over the Russian Empire. The Polish part of the empire, that included the large cities Warsaw, Łódź, Radom, Kielce, Piotrków and Białystok, was the most industrialised region. As a result, it was poised to be a hotbed for revolutionary activity. Organisers went to work gathering support for strikes, and confrontations with police often turned violent. In Łódź, a huge centre for textile manufacturing, workers fought pitched battles on the streets with barricades and makeshift weapons.

General strikes, where whole industries stopped work, and especially striking railroad workers, forced the hand of the tsar. Finally, he had to give up some concessions to the protestors. In October, the tsar issued a decree that allowed for limited democratic freedoms of press and assembly and the formation of a parliamentary assembly, called the Duma. Though many of the protestors felt that this did not go far enough and continued their fight for further privileges, the so-called October Manifesto created an outpouring of publications, theatre and cultural life that the Russian Empire had never seen before.

Prior to this moment, censorship had been stifling, strictly regulating the languages in which books could be published or theatre performed. Lithuanian, Yiddish and Ukrainian had been banned for decades. While the suppression of the Ukrainian language continued – seen as a threat to the Russian ‘heartland’ in a policy of identity erasure that remains tragically relevant today – Lithuanian, Yiddish and other suppressed languages finally began to gain legal recognition within the empire.

The linguistic renaissance: breaking the imperial silence

Lithuanians gained the right to publish newspapers in the Latin alphabet as early as the spring of 1904, but the popular press exploded thanks to the Revolution of 1905. The proliferation of daily newspapers, such as the Vilniaus žinios (Vilnius News) signalled the beginning of a mass Lithuanian culture. The first great national assembly of Lithuanians took place in Vilnius, with 200 delegates, between 4 to 5 December 1905. All sections of society – from Belarus, East Prussia (where many Lithuania speakers lived as well) – took part.

They ended by demanding political autonomy for Lithuania, and to have their own provincial parliament with boundaries defined on ethnographic terms. Lithuanian scientific and artistic associations grew at the time, establishing the cultural arms of the Lithuanian national movement. These became vital just a few years later for the establishment of the independent Lithuanian state after World War I.

Yiddish too experienced a renaissance (or naissance) based on new-found freedoms in cities with large Jewish populations, such as Warsaw, Łódź and Vilnius. The tsarist authorities lifted bans on Yiddish printing and theatre in 1905, allowing for the creation of art and literature in a vernacular that practically all Jews used on a daily basis. Finally distinctly Jewish art could move to the public stage and reach audiences that had never experienced such forms of culture. The demand was clearly there, since four new theatres popped up in Warsaw almost immediately after the ban was lifted. In Mokotów, there was Bagatela, Elizeum on Karowa Street, Jardin d’Hiver on Chmielna and Muranower on Bonifraterska, all performing exclusively in Yiddish. Sholem Aleichem’s play Scattered and Dispersed saw its debut at this time (directed by Mark Arnshteyn). Yiddish dailies also appeared, and their content shows the popularity of theatre at the time. Jardin d’Hiver was playing two shows per day, with the exception of Shabbat. In 1908, the dedicated journal Teater Velt (Theatre World) appeared. All this newfound energy for Yiddish culture caused a modernisation of the language and uniformity that did not exist before among the Jews of the Russian Empire. This emergence also allowed for literary theatre to grow. On top of that, American actors with new plays written in New York came over and were the most commercially successful pieces.

Shadows of the revolution: the Pimps’ Pogrom

In the midst of the social upheaval and suffering, people looked for scapegoats to blame leading to one of the most bizarre episodes of the revolution: the Pimps’ Pogrom. In the working class Warsaw neighbourhood of Wola (today the site of skyscrapers, giving it the nickname ‘Hong Kong’), a seedy underworld of pimps, prostitutes and the men who frequented these establishments operated with the approbation of the local police.

In the Russian Empire, the sex trade was officially regulated, requiring both brothels and individual prostitutes to register with the police. Pimps supported the Tsarist status quo rather than the revolutionaries, as they could turn a profit under the state’s protection. Consequently, the sex trade was seen as an extension of the Russian regime and its police – the same officers who beat protesters and fired into crowds. The violence, however chaotic, was a strike against the very infrastructure of Russian control.

A song from that time:

Oj, lumpy to szpiedzy, [Oh the pimps are spies]
Prowokatorzy; [Provocateurs]
Chodzą na ‘giełde’, podsłuchują [They go to the market, eavesdropping]
potem donoszą na policje [then they tell the police]

It’s unclear what exactly sparked the riots against the brothels, but at the end of May 1905, a series of events led workers to destroy dozens of brothels, leaving at least 15 people dead. They moved from one house to the next, destroying furniture, smashing mirrors, tearing up clothes and bedding.

In one bordello, the sex workers put up a fight. A prostitute grabbed a copper pipe and hit a rioter over the head with it. In response, someone stabbed her with a knife and she died on the spot. In another brothel, the pimps fled, leaving the girls alone. Frightened for their safety, they hid under beds and in closets. The rioters pulled them out and beat them. The women yelled hysterically, called them names and cried: ‘What do you want from us? What did we ever do to you?’

Although a majority of the pimps and prostitutes were Jewish, both Polish and Jewish workers gathered on the streets to exact vengeance. In this way, it was very different from anti-Jewish pogroms, many of which took place in the context of the revolution. Some historians see this event as a moral crusade, while others claim that the association of the pimps with the Russian police was the strongest motivator. There were also witnesses who claimed that competing pimps were the most virulent rioters, so some plain old business competition was at play too.

These events brought attention to problems with prostitution in the Polish lands, sparking some difficult public discussions about issues that were normally left undisturbed. It also inspired several poems, such as Leo Belmont’s Po Pogromie (After the Pogrom) and novels, mostly published in Yiddish.

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Filed under Baltics, democracy, Japan, labor, language, migration, military, nationalism, Poland, publishing, religion, Russia, Ukraine, war

by | 23 July 2026 · 6:20 am

Cannibalism in New Zealand, 1773

From The Traveler: One Man’s Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, 2026), Kindle pp. 148-151:

A week later, on 21 November, a group of Māori women paddled out and told the Resolution crew that they were worried. Their men, the crew learned, had left to attack their enemies. Who those opponents were remained unclear, but the next morning dozens of Māori warriors, their cheeks painted red, arrived in a flotilla of eight canoes packed with cloaks, weapons and greenstone objects to trade with the Resolution. Suspecting that the warriors must have raided a neighbouring settlement to sell their goods to the Europeans, George wrote, ‘I am much afraid that their unhappy differences with other tribes, were revived on our account’.

In any event, it was time for the Resolution to leave and the next morning Cook took a few men to a neighbouring island to collect sea celery, wild spinach and other greens as provisions for the long journey. Some officers rowed to a nearby cove to trade. When they pushed their boat ashore, they saw the Māori warriors from the previous day, and also something round and red impaled on a stick, possibly an organ, maybe a heart. As they looked around, they found more organs and intestines scattered on the ground—and to their horror a human head from which the lower jawbone was missing. The skull had clearly been fractured by something blunt, perhaps a club. The victim seemed to have been an adolescent boy. As the officers stared at the bloody heap, the Māori skewered the lung and showed them more body parts. When the officers asked what had happened, the warriors told them that there had been a fight with their enemies. With words and gestures, they explained that they had killed the boy and eaten parts of him, but they too had lost men, pointing at some weeping women nearby who were cutting their foreheads with sharp stones as they lamented the dead.

For Europeans, cannibalism seemed inconceivable. ‘In accordance with human nature,’ said Immanuel Kant, Germany’s most respected philosopher, ‘there cannot be many [man-eaters], or, more likely, perhaps none at all.’ As explorers had returned from South America and the South Pacific in previous centuries, there had been rumours and the occasional suspicious body parts but no one had ever actually observed the practice. In January 1770, during the Endeavour voyage, the Māori had confirmed that they did indeed eat people by picking up a human bone and pretending to bite into it. They ‘shew us that they had eat the flesh they bit a[nd] naw’d the bone and draw’d it thro’ their mouth and this in such a manner as plainly shew’d that the flesh to them was a dainty bit’, Cook had recorded in his logbook. The graphic demonstration had been enough to convince the crew. Richard Pickersgill, who had also travelled on the Endeavour, had noted that the ‘Barbarrous cruelty these savages is guilty of which ought to make them to abhord by all who may have occasion to tutch at these Islands’. This didn’t stop him from trying to purchase the half-eaten head now, so that he could take it to London to show his friends. He offered a nail and a bargain was struck.

When the men returned to the Resolution, Pickersgill placed his grisly purchase on a railing and soon everybody on board had gathered to examine it. Another group of Māori had come to the Resolution to trade and they now asked for the head so that they could eat it, but the new owner refused. Second Lieutenant Charles Clerke, who was known and liked for his practical jokes—‘a genal favorite’, as young Elliott said—proposed an experiment. Taking a sharp knife, he cut off one cheek and handed it to the Māori, but they gestured that they only consumed cooked flesh. After debating what to do, Clerke put the cheek on a gridiron and grilled it over the fire in the galley kitchen.

Transfixed the crew of the Resolution watched the Māori eat the cheek. Some goaded them, and others were revolted. Some even seemed tempted to try a bite themselves. A little later, when Cook returned from gathering wild vegetables, he demanded that the spectacle be repeated. He wanted to prove the rumours once and for all. ‘Being desireous of being an eye wittness to a fact which many people had their doubts about’, Cook wrote in his logbook, ‘I concealed my indignation and ordered a piece of the flesh to be broiled and brought on the quarter-deck where one of these Canibals ate it with a seeming good relish.’ Describing the scene as calmly as a scientific experiment at the Royal Society in London, Cook concluded ‘that the New Zealanders are Canibals can now no longer be doubted’.

Hitihiti was appalled and ‘Metamorphosed into the Statue of Horror’. Crying inconsolably, he hid in a cabin and it took George several hours to calm his friend. George was also shocked but refused to regard the Māori as heartless barbarians, determined to understand their motivation. It couldn’t be hunger, given the abundance of fish in Queen Charlotte Sound and the Māori’s productive vegetable gardens. Perhaps, then, the motive was revenge. Weighing up the arguments, he noted: ‘The New Zealanders never eat their adversaries, unless they are killed in battle; they never kill their relations for the purpose of eating them; they do not even eat them if they die of a natural death, and they take no prisoners with a view to fatten them for their repast.’ Although he might never know their exact reasons, ‘the action of eating human flesh, whatever our education may teach us to the contrary, is certainly neither unnatural nor criminal in itself.’

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Filed under Britain, nationalism, New Zealand, Polynesia, science, travel, war

by | 16 July 2026 · 3:49 pm

Ukraine Invasion Begins, Feb. 2022

From The Russo-Ukraine War: The Return of History, by Serhii Plokhy (W. W. Norton, 2023), Kindle pp. 152-154:

Putin’s address was aired on Russian television in the early hours of February 24, on the eighth anniversary of Putin’s decision to start the Crimean annexation in 2014. He expected the results to be as quick, decisive, and positive as they had been then.

Putin concluded the speech with an appeal to Russian citizens: “I believe in your support and the invincible force rooted in love for our Fatherland.” The key motifs of his address, including the denazification of Ukraine, would be picked up and popularized by the Russian media in the days and weeks to come, although it was difficult to change the propaganda line right away. Leonid Slutsky, the head of the Russian State Duma Committee on Foreign Affairs, denied the invasion even on the very day it began. “We do not intend to unleash any war. We are not going to invade Ukraine as we are being accused of in Ukraine itself, and not only there,” he told journalists. As he spoke those words, Russian columns were moving toward the Ukrainian capital.

The Russian assault on Ukraine began shortly before 4:00 a.m. Kyiv time on February 24, 2022, on multiple fronts. The citizens of Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odesa, Zaporizhia, Zhytomyr, Mykolaiv, and Kherson, to list only the main regional centers, woke up to the sound of explosions—Russian aviation and missiles were attacking airfields and military installations all over the country. Radio and television covered the news on the basis of posts in social media from around Ukraine. There were also reports of Russian amphibious landings in Odesa on the Black Sea and Mariupol on the Sea of Azov. Those later turned out to be false.

The Russian armed forces bombarded Ukrainian command and control centers, air defenses, and critical infrastructure with more than 100 short-range ballistic missiles launched from the air and from the sea. Columns of Russian tanks and personnel carriers began to cross the Ukrainian borders from Belarus toward Kyiv, from Russia toward Kharkiv, and from the occupied Crimea toward Kherson and Nova Kakhovka in the south. Tens of thousands of troops were suddenly on the move. Ukraine, where neither the government nor the general population believed in the possibility of large-scale Russian aggression, was in for a rude awakening.

The entire military operation, underpinned by Putin’s belief in the nonexistence of the Ukrainian nation and the desire of Ukrainians to live under Russian rule, was modeled on the Russian takeover of the Crimea. In the first echelon of ground troops advancing on Kyiv immediately after the paratroopers were units of riot police, and in burned-out tanks and vehicles Ukrainians would find parade uniforms of Russian soldiers prepared for a victory march down Kyiv’s main avenue, Khreshchatyk. The soldiers had rations for only two or three days, as they were promised that the operation in Ukraine would take no longer. Since the invasion was billed as a mission of liberation, the officers and soldiers were ordered not to show any hostility whatever to the local population. They were told that the military operation was ordered to prevent the installation of NATO bases in Ukraine.

“Orders have been given to the Russian army not to assault cities or their inhabitants. The leadership of the Russian Defense Ministry emphasizes that the population of a fraternal country has nothing to fear from the Russian army,” confided the political consultant Sergei Markov to a reporter on the second day of the invasion, February 25, 2022. Regarding the further plan of the action, Markov suggested: “All groupings of the Ukrainian Armed Forces will be surrounded (mainly from the air) and given an ultimatum. They will have to surrender their arms. If everything proceeds normally, a process of disarmament will begin. Wherever normality does not prevail, those groupings will be destroyed. I think that most subunits of the Ukrainian Armed Forces will surrender their weapons. Part of them will continue to offer resistance. Those are the neo-Nazi military subunits.”

That was not just Markov’s plan but Putin’s as well. In his address at the start of the war, Putin had appealed to the Ukrainian military to lay down their arms. But the Ukrainian army continued to fight. Not a single unit would surrender, to say nothing of switching sides. Putin and his propagandists like Markov were in for a rude awakening.

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Filed under military, nationalism, publishing, Russia, Ukraine, war

by | 14 July 2026 · 8:23 pm

Russia Boosts Ukrainian Nationalism

From The Russo-Ukraine War: The Return of History, by Serhii Plokhy (W. W. Norton, 2023), Kindle pp. 131-134:

The eight years of hybrid warfare that Russia had waged against Ukraine in the Donbas, divided by the Minsk agreements, turned Ukraine into a different country and society from those of 2014. A country divided by issues of history, culture, and identity when the Crimea was annexed was now united by the desire to defend its sovereignty, democratic order, and way of life at almost any price.

The war had changed the electoral map of Ukraine. The first wartime presidential elections, held in May 2014, yielded unprecedented results: Petro Poroshenko won in the first round with 55 percent of the vote—the first time this had happened since 1991. Even more important, Poroshenko carried 187 precincts out of 188 remaining under Ukrainian control. The dividing line of the previous presidential elections, which had split Ukraine in half between pro-European and pro-Russian candidates, was now gone. The war had produced a much more homogenous country.

Russia’s annexation of the Crimea and takeover of significant portions of Ukraine’s Donbas removed the traditionally most pro-Russian areas, with the greatest number of ethnic Russians and Russian speakers in Ukraine, from Ukrainian political and cultural space. Those areas had also served as bases for Russia-friendly political parties. Russia did its utmost to support former allies of the ousted president, Viktor Yanukovych, but they were divided and weak after losing a significant part of their electoral base. The forces led by the Ukrainian businessman and politician Viktor Medvedchuk, who was close to Putin, also remained weak despite the support of television channels and newspapers funded with Russian assistance.

The growth of Ukrainian political identity began with the rejection of symbols of the Soviet past. The Maidan protests of 2014 unleashed a wave of demolition of monuments to Vladimir Lenin, the main symbol of communist and, in the eyes of many, Russian domination of Ukraine. More than 500 such monuments were toppled by anti-communist activists in the first half of 2014, mostly in the center of the country. The rest, more than 1,500 that remained in the regions of southeastern Ukraine controlled by Kyiv, were removed in the course of the next few years by decision of parliament, which adopted the so-called “decommunization laws” prohibiting the public display of communist symbols.

Ukrainians survived the Russian onslaught during the first stage of the war, in 2014–15, by uniting across ethnic, linguistic, religious, and cultural lines. The war itself also promoted popular identification with the Ukrainian language and culture. Since Putin’s official rationale for invading Ukraine was the defense of Russian speakers, many Ukrainians and Russians who knew Ukrainian but used Russian as their language of preference began to switch to Ukrainian as an act of defiance. The number of those self-reporting their use of Ukrainian at home and at work spiked in 2014–15. That number returned to the previous norm once the immediate danger of all-out invasion passed, but readiness to adopt Ukrainian as the dominant language of government and education remained. In 2019, parliament adopted a new law making the Ukrainian language mandatory for government officials and public-sector employees. The Russian Foreign Ministry protested, claiming that the law would deepen divisions in Ukrainian society. That did not prove to be the case.

City and village bookstores were flooded with Ukrainian-language books, reducing Russian-language publications to secondary status. Works on Ukrainian history and culture began to top bestseller lists. Before the war, the government had spent little or no money on the promotion of Ukrainian culture abroad; now it created a special Ukrainian Institute under the auspices of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Its task was to emulate Germany’s Goethe Institute and similar agencies in other countries, familiarizing foreign countries with the Ukrainian language and culture. At home, the Ukrainian Cultural Fund and the Ukrainian Book Institute were charged with supporting cultural events and promoting Ukrainian publications.

In 2018 the government provided strong support for the unification of the two branches of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church that were independent of the Moscow Patriarchate, which still dominated Orthodoxy in Ukraine, while striving to restrain competition between them. President Poroshenko attended the unification council of the two churches, which were placed under the jurisdiction of the Patriarch of Constantinople—a major blow to the prospect of continuing Russian Orthodox hegemony. Moscow protested and severed ties with the Patriarch of Constantinople but could do little more to maintain its position. The newly united Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) had mass popular support, and, given the ongoing if undeclared war with Russia, many Orthodox Ukrainians preferred a church independent of Moscow. The transfer of parishes from the Moscow Patriarchate to the OCU began in the first months of 2019.

Active government involvement in matters of language, memory politics, and religion met with substantial criticism not only from traditionally pro-Russian political forces but also from part of the country’s liberal establishment. Nevertheless, it was either supported or accepted by the population at large. After Russia’s aggressive weaponization of issues of culture and history in 2014–15, much of the population agreed that the new laws and policies were necessary elements of nation-building, designed to prevent further Russian aggression.

The new Ukrainian government fulfilled the promise of the Revolution of Dignity by moving closer to the European Union and Euro-Atlantic institutions, including NATO. The association agreement that had triggered the Maidan protests in 2017 was signed in June 2014. In March 2017 the European Union Council granted Ukrainians visa-free travel to the EU. The EU member nations provided badly needed financial assistance, altogether up to $14 billion, to help Ukraine deal with its losses of territory, population, and economic assets. An additional $2.2 billion came from the United States. Washington became the main sponsor of reform in the Ukrainian security sector, providing $1.6 billion for that purpose alone. Ukraine was rapidly acquiring a new professional army, and the government placed NATO membership back on its agenda by including it in the Ukrainian constitution.

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by | 11 July 2026 · 6:54 am

NATO’s Bucharest Summit, 2008

From The Russo-Ukraine War: The Return of History, by Serhii Plokhy (W. W. Norton, 2023), Kindle pp. 87-89:

As NATO leaders arrived for the Bucharest summit on April 2, 2008, Russia’s vocal protests against membership for Ukraine and Georgia were on their minds. Putin came to the Romanian capital in person to take part in the meeting of the Russia-NATO summit and warn the members of the alliance against extending invitations to the two post-Soviet republics. “The emergence of a powerful military bloc at our borders will be seen as a direct threat to Russian security,” Putin told President Bush. Bush was not particularly impressed. Before going to Bucharest he made a stopover in Kyiv, where he told the Ukrainians: “Your nation has made a bold decision, and the United States strongly supports your request.”

But key European members of NATO, France and Germany in particular, blocked the decision advocated by the United States and supported by the new East European members of the alliance to grant Ukraine and Georgia a Membership Action Plan. “We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO,” read the declaration before making it clear that no accession would take place any time soon. The MAP was promised but not given on the basis that the two potential applicants still had to meet some specific criteria in order to qualify. “[W]e will now begin a period of intensive engagement with both at a high political level to address the questions still outstanding pertaining to their MAP applications.”

The matter was postponed and would not return to the NATO agenda at the next summit or the one after that. Everyone knew that the decision to deny MAP to the two post-Soviet republics was a concession to their former master, Russia. Otherwise it was impossible to explain why the Bucharest summit invited Croatia and Albania to join NATO. For the two countries now perceived as threats by Russia, NATO’s non-decision on their membership was the worst possible outcome of the summit: their applications had been postponed indefinitely, leaving them with no protection from the alliance that they had publicly stated they wanted to join. While Russia would not dare to attack NATO, it could easily attack its aspirants, and it did so.

On August 8, 2008, a few months after the Bucharest summit, Russia launched a war on Georgia, ostensibly in defense of the Georgian enclave of South Ossetia, which had seceded from Georgia in the early 1990s. The Russian attack allegedly came as a response to the actions of the Georgian army, which had been ordered into South Ossetia, but there was no doubt that the war was directly linked to the outcome of the Bucharest summit. Russia had established official relations with South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the two Georgian provinces that it was now “defending,” almost immediately after Putin’s return from the Bucharest summit. The Georgians fought back under the leadership of President Mikheil Saakashvili, who had been educated in Ukraine and the United States, but the Russian army, larger and superior to Georgia’s, moved deep into the country and threatened to occupy its capital, Tbilisi.

On August 12, Yushchenko, together with the leaders of Poland and the three Baltic states, flew to Tbilisi to show support for Saakashvili and his country. That day the Russian advance was stopped by means of a ceasefire negotiated by President Nicolas Sarkozy of France. Russian troops eventually left a good part of the occupied territory but stayed in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, ostensibly protecting the independence of the two provinces from Georgia and perpetuating its territorial division. That undermined Georgia’s chances of ever joining NATO, as the alliance was reluctant to accept any state with unresolved territorial issues. The Russian war on Georgia became the first instance of its initiating a major war beyond its borders. It sent a clear signal to the West that Russia was prepared to use military force to stop any expansion of the alliance. It also demonstrated to other post-Soviet republics that NATO would not come to their rescue in case of Russian attack.

The decision of the Bucharest NATO summit, coupled with the outcome of the Russo-Georgian War, dealt a devastating blow to Ukrainian aspirations to join the alliance. The changing of the guard in Washington and the inauguration of Barack Obama as president in January 2009 led to a thorough revision of all elements of US foreign policy and an attempted “reset” of US-Russia relations. In January 2010 Viktor Yushchenko, defeated in the first round of that year’s presidential elections, left office to make way for Putin’s old favorite, Viktor Yanukovych. The new president promptly dropped NATO membership from the Ukrainian foreign-policy agenda and signed a deal that was devastating for Ukrainian security because it extended the presence of the Russian Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol until 2042.

The Bucharest summit put Ukraine in the most vulnerable position that it had experienced since declaring independence. Without nuclear weapons and NATO membership, Ukraine found itself at the mercy of Russia, which saw the ambiguous offer of membership extended to Ukraine by the Bucharest summit as a threat to its own security. Ukraine was a lone warrior on open ground pursued by hostile forces, running to take shelter in a secure fortress, only to find its gates closing because of disagreements among its defenders.

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by | 4 July 2026 · 11:17 pm

Ending the Soviet Empire

From The Russo-Ukraine War: The Return of History, by Serhii Plokhy (W. W. Norton, 2023), Kindle pp. 28, 31:

In 1995, in his review of Matlock’s memoir, titled Autopsy on an Empire, Kennan wrote: “I find it hard to think of any event more strange and startling, and at first glance more inexplicable, than the sudden and total disintegration and disappearance from the international scene, primarily in the years 1987 through 1991, of the great power known successively as the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union.” Kennan referred to the fall of previous empires as gradual. That of the Soviet Union was not. “How then to explain the extreme abruptness, the sharp quick ending, and not least the relative bloodlessness with which the great Soviet Empire came to an end in the four years in question, bearing with it those attributes of the earlier Russian Empire which it had contrived to incorporate into itself?” Kennan asked himself and his readers.

Was the Soviet experience unique? We can start by considering the British Empire, the most powerful such institution of the modern era, which offered the Russians a Commonwealth model for opting out of a traditional imperial project. British imperial disentanglement was gradual indeed. It began, arguably, with the eighteenth-century American Revolution, followed by slowly developing autonomism in the dominions of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Attempts to crush South African and Irish movements for independence proved unsuccessful in the wake of World War I; in the decades after World War II Britain withdrew from India and subsequently from its African colonies.

…

To the surprise and relief of many, the Russians, led by Boris Yeltsin, refused to follow in the footsteps of the Serbs, who turned the former Yugoslav army into an instrument of Serbian aggrandizement and then of genocide. Nor did the Russians cling to the Soviet republics that Russia had dominated, as the French and Belgians did to their former colonies. Instead, the Russians seem to have taken a page from the dissolution of the Portuguese empire. Both empires ceased to exist as a result of relatively peaceful revolutions that took place in their capitals, where reformers tried to dismantle authoritarian government and initiate political, economic, and social reforms. In both countries, the existence of empire was an obstacle to such reforms.

Boris Yeltsin and his advisers sought to implement their reforms in Russia, not in the Soviet Union, where Gorbachev’s efforts to democratize the system were opposed by the conservatively minded communist elites that controlled most of the Soviet republics. To free his Russian reformers from the limitations imposed on them by Gorbachev’s vacillating political center, which was stymied by competing pro- and anti-reform factions, Yeltsin allied himself with pro-democratic reformers in the Baltic states and pro–status quo elites in Central Asia, all in an effort to undermine existing Soviet institutions. Yeltsin did not intend to subvert the Soviet Union in the process, but once the disintegration that he helped to set off developed a momentum of its own, he went along. His main political rival, Mikhail Gorbachev, and the Soviet Union itself were swept away as a result.

Keeping the secessionist republics under Russian control by military force was an unlikely policy choice for other reasons as well. One of them was the enormous political, ideological, and economic influence that the United States wielded over the Soviet Union at this time, as well as the place that America occupied in the imagination of Soviet-era reformers, from Gorbachev to Yeltsin and beyond. Washington did not want the republics to fight one another, fearing the possibility of a “Yugoslavia with nukes”—a scenario that Gorbachev never tired of raising in his conversations with President George H. W. Bush.

The Russian president was prepared to use force against autonomous republics within the Russian Federation if they should attempt to secede, but not against similar aspirations of Union republics such as Ukraine. Moreover, the Soviet Army was short of resources, and Russians serving in it were not eager to fight.

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by | 3 July 2026 · 12:10 am

Ukraine in 1917

From The Russo-Ukraine War: The Return of History, by Serhii Plokhy (W. W. Norton, 2023), Kindle pp. 15-16:

On the eve of his all-out invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Vladimir Putin would claim that it was the Bolsheviks, Vladimir Lenin in particular, who had created a Ukrainian state and, indeed, modern Ukraine itself. Even a cursory acquaintance with the history of the Russian Revolution and the concomitant fall of the Russian Empire indicates that the modern Ukrainian state came into existence not thanks to Lenin but against his wishes.

In May 1917, soon after the fall of monarchy, the Central Rada (Council), the revolutionary Ukrainian parliament, created in Kyiv and led by historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky, proclaimed Ukraine’s autonomy within a future Russian republic. But it was only after the Bolshevik coup in Petrograd in the fall of 1917 that the Central Rada declared the creation of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, which encompassed most of present-day Ukrainian territory within the borders of the Russian Empire, including the mining region of the Donbas. The new state wanted to maintain federal ties with Russia, but the Bolshevik invasion of January 1918 made that impossible.

The Central Rada declared the independence of Ukraine and entered in the anti-Bolshevik alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary. The Bolsheviks waged war on the Ukrainian government under the banner of their own Ukrainian People’s Republic—a fiction created to provide a degree of legitimacy for the Bolshevik takeover of Ukraine. Bolshevik troops massacred the population of Kyiv, killing hundreds if not thousands of its citizens, including Metropolitan Vladimir (Bogoiavlensky) of the Orthodox Church. The Bolshevik commander in Kyiv, Mikhail Muraviev, sent Lenin a telegram: “Order has been restored in Kyiv.”

The Central Rada had to leave Kyiv but soon returned, having signed an agreement with Germany and Austria-Hungary, whose troops moved into Ukraine in the spring of 1918 and drove the Bolsheviks out of its territory, including the Donbas. The Germans soon replaced the democratic Central Rada with the authoritarian regime of hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky, but the democratic Ukrainian People’s Republic was restored when the Germans withdrew from Ukraine late in 1918. The Bolsheviks moved in once again, this time under the banner of their adversary Ukrainian People’s Republic, formally independent of Russia.

By the time the Bolsheviks reemerged in Ukraine and launched their military campaign to bring the Ukrainian provinces of the former Russian Empire back under central control, Ukrainian national consciousness was so widespread that Vladimir Lenin felt compelled to change his strategy. He concluded that Ukrainian aspirations to independence were so strong, not only among Ukrainians in general but even among the Ukrainian Bolsheviks themselves, as to require the granting of a degree of autonomy and a status equal to that of Russia.

Not only were the Ukrainians recognized as a distinct nationality (as were the Belarusians), no longer a “tribe” of a tripartite Russian nation as in tsarist times, but pro forma recognition of independence was given to a puppet Soviet Ukrainian state, and Ukrainian became its official language.

Realizing that the national movements brought to power by the effects of World War I and the Revolution of 1917 would have to be accommodated, the Bolsheviks strove to gain the cooperation of Ukraine’s new political and cultural elites. This accommodation eventually went beyond issues of language, culture, and the recruitment of local cadres into de facto occupation administrations. It also included the creation of state institutions and recognition of the formal independence of the Bolshevik-controlled puppet states formed to delegitimize the new truly independent states and governments established by the national minorities in the borderlands of the former empire.

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