Photo by Igor Zakharenko | Kyiv region. April 13, 2022 | A Ukrainian teenager lost his leg during the shelling of his village by the Russian army.
Russia’s war on Ukraine is a war fought over memory as much as territory. Russia seeks a return not just to Soviet-era borders but also to an imagined Soviet-era consensus about the recent past. Indeed, Putin’s recognition of the terrorist false-states of Donetsk and Luhansk, paving the way for war, came at the end of a bitter and distorted history lesson of Ukraine.