Nine months into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it appears likely to fail to achieve any of its aims. It may be unable to seize Kyiv or occupy a significant portion of the country, even though its military has been making impressive gains on the battlefield. It will likely be forced to spend years rebuilding a damaged, expensive, and dispersed military. It will be constrained economically by a loss of high-tech exports and the prospect of years of recession and political isolation. It will have to pay for war reparations, and it will have to deal with a hostile Europe that sees its invasion as an act of aggression.

Yet the Kremlin’s hubris rested on a basic failure to grasp not just the deep roots of Ukrainian identity, but also the extent to which Ukraine has changed in the years since the Soviet collapse. While the oligarchs who backed Yanukovych in 2010 favored closer ties with Russia, the pro-Western policies of Petro Poroshenko and, now, Volodymyr Zelensky, have forged an identity that unites citizens across Ukraine’s regions, linguistic and religious backgrounds. They have pushed for international recognition of the Stalinist famine as a genocide, promoted education in Ukraine’s native language, and called for the country to receive a Membership Action Plan from NATO.

In short, they have fought for the path that the Ukrainian people voted for when they won independence: an open society with respect for human rights and the rule of law, fully integrated with Europe, where every Ukrainian citizen can realize their full potential – free of discrimination, corruption, and external influence. By contrast, Putin’s core aim – indeed his obsession – has been to erase this idea of Ukraine: its identity, its agency, its territory.