The tragedy of Ukraine stems from efforts to realize nationalist fantasies, says Professor Nicolai Petro

Born to a German mother and a Russian father, both of whom had emigrated to the US after the Second World War, Petro is fluent in Russian and found himself early on in his academic career in Washington DC, working in the State Department as Special Advisor for Policy in the Office of Soviet Union Affairs. It was from this vantage point in the early 1990s that he witnessed the fateful collapse of the Soviet Union, with his two immediate supervisors at the time both going on to become US Ambassadors to Russia. Since returning to academia in the mid-1990s he has written extensively on Russian foreign and domestic policy, and since 2008 – when he was invited by the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences to come and talk about 'future visions' of Ukraine – he has taken a direct interest in Ukrainian politics, visiting the country nearly every year since for at least one month, and twice for an entire year as a visiting scholar. Most recently he has published a book with the curious title The Tragedy of Ukraine – What Classical Greek Tragedy Can Teach Us about Conflict Resolution, which takes a close look at the violent civil conflict in Ukraine since 2014 and its long historical roots.

Although Petro is quick to point out that he believes Russia’s 2022 invasion was in no way justified, he nonetheless believes that Ukraine's internal political situation since the Maidan Revolution eight years earlier – in particular the rise of Ukrainian nationalism (the country's 'far right') with its strong anti-Russian sentiment – played a key role in creating the conditions that led to the current war.

I read Petro's book after my interview in May of last year with exiled Ukrainian pacifist and dissident Ruslan Kotsaba (which you can read here). Among other things, I wanted to know if the book would confirm what Kotsaba had told me (as a Western Ukrainian) about the post-Maidan government's hostile and humiliating treatment of its Eastern, Russian-speaking citizens. It did. I decided to get in touch with Nicolai Petro and ask him directly for his take on Kotsaba and what he had told me.

Have you heard of Ruslan Kotsaba?