Throughout its war history, Russia has celebrated itself as a "liberating power." The "liberated" states saw things differently.

Is Russia an aggressive nation? Four days before Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov unflinchingly claimed that Russia "has never attacked anyone in its entire history." And after reality had already refuted Peskov's reassurances, Russian Patriarch Kirill preached in May 2022: "We don't want war with anyone. Russia has never attacked anyone. This is astonishing when a large and powerful country never attacks anyone, but only defends its borders."

One could dismiss Peskov's and Kirill's statements as cheap propaganda lies. However, these two Putin puppets perpetuate a stereotype that is widespread in Russian society. The roots of the myth of "Russia as a force for peace" reach deep into the Soviet era. The poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who filled entire football stadiums in the 1960s, gave voice to a widespread conviction in his poem "Do the Russians Want War?" when he wrote: "Ask the dead soldiers lying under the birch trees, and their sons will tell you if the Russians want war."

Soviet history textbooks justified the Hitler-Stalin Pact with the paradoxical phrase "fight for peace": The Winter War against Finland served Soviet self-defense. The occupation of the interwar independent states of Eastern Europe was celebrated as "liberation from the Nazis."

The same narratives, with slight shifts in emphasis, can be found in an official history textbook from 2024. In the wake of Stalin's gradual rehabilitation in Putin's Russia, the text exclusively discusses the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which, incidentally, is merely a continuation of earlier German non-aggression pacts with Poland, England, and France. The Soviet Union was "forced" to attack Finland. While the relationship between the socialist countries and Moscow was "not always optimal" after the war, "overall" they formed "a united front in the international arena."

Meanwhile, the Kremlin is working on two more historical myths: "Anglo-Saxon fascism" and the "genocide of the Soviet people." The most ardent propagator of "Anglo-Saxon fascism" is former President Dmitry Medvedev, who, in a text on the Russian Security Council website a year ago, tried to convince his readers that Great Britain and the United States had cultivated, financed, and ultimately exonerated German National Socialism in order to harm the Soviet Union.

Among Medvedev's evidence is an alleged Coca-Cola advertisement for the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games: "One people, one empire, one drink (sic!), Coke it is." In fact, this is an art project from 2004 – this fact escaped Medvedev, an amateur historian. The "genocide of the Soviet people" has been the subject of numerous Russian court cases since 2020 and was also mentioned by Putin in a speech in 2023. This line of argument reinterprets the indeed high number of civilian war victims among the Soviet population as genocide – ultimately relativizing the Holocaust.

Contrary to the assurances of Kremlin spokesman Peskov and Patriarch Kirill, the list of Russian wars of aggression is long and stretches far back into the past. A number of patterns can be observed that are also constitutive of Russia's invasion of Ukraine: Decision-makers surrounded themselves with a narrow circle of nationalist ideologues, they were driven by an imperial expansionist drive, the armed conflict was religiously legitimized, their own strength on the international stage was overestimated, and the negative reaction of the population in the conquered territories came as a surprise.

From the reign of Catherine the Great until the First World War, the conquest of Constantinople (Russian: Tsargrad) was one of Russia's most important ideological goals. Even the novelist Dostoyevsky was convinced that "the Golden Horn would one day be ours." Russian control of the Dardanelles still motivated the last Tsarist government, and even in April 1917, after the abdication of Nicholas II, Pavel Miliukov, the hapless foreign minister of the provisional government, confirmed this war aim. Catherine had conceived a "Greek project." She wanted to establish a Byzantine buffer state on the Bosporus, dependent on Russia, and have her grandson rule there—he was baptized with the Greek name Constantine for this purpose.

Catherine's annexation of Crimea in 1783 was already part of the "Greek Project" – the two most important cities in Crimea still bear the Greek names Sevastopol and Simferopol. Tsar Nicholas I attempted to realize his grandmother's imperial dream militarily in the Crimean War (1853–1856). He spoke of the "sick man of the Bosporus" and trusted that the Christian monarchies would give him a free hand in the war against the Turks. However, Great Britain and France saw their own interests so threatened by the threat of Russian dominance in the Black Sea that they even allied themselves against Russia as historical archenemies.

The course of the war proved disastrous for the Russian army. The Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph, whom Nicholas had helped to crush the Hungarian uprising just five years earlier, forced the Tsar to withdraw from the Balkans. The war shifted to Crimea, where even Sevastopol was defeated. The war ended in Russia's defeat. The fatal campaign cost Russia over half a million lives.

After the assassination of the Austrian heir to the throne, Franz Ferdinand, in Sarajevo in 1914, Nicholas II hesitated for a long time before deciding to go to war. However, he ultimately gave in to the nationalist sentiment of the public, who were unwilling to hand over their Orthodox brother nation, the Serbs, to their rival Austria. Due to the complicated alliance mechanism, the German Empire and the Russian Empire became bitter enemies, even though the two related monarchs addressed each other as "Nicky" and "Willy."

Shortly after the outbreak of war, the Duma rallied behind the Tsar and declared a "holy war against the enemy of Slavdom." However, the Russian campaign in Austrian Galicia turned into a fiasco in terms of nationalist policy.

The Russian occupiers viewed the Ukrainians as "Little Russians" who had to be brought back into the fold of the Great Russian nation. Ukrainian was replaced by Russian as the language of instruction in local schools. Ukrainian activists in Galicia formed a volunteer unit of 2,500 "Sicher Riflemen," who fought against the Russians on the side of their "father," Franz Joseph. In the 19th century, Ukrainian culture encountered fewer obstacles in the Habsburg Monarchy than in the Tsarist Empire. The First World War not only led to the end of the autocracy but also to the loss of extensive territory in the west, where the new states of Finland, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania emerged.

In 1979, the Red Army invaded Afghanistan. The Soviet Union thus supported the communist rulers in Kabul, who had seized power a year earlier in a coup. The Kremlin leadership initially assumed that the invasion would be a short-lived intervention like the one in Czechoslovakia in 1968. However, the Mujahedin fought bitterly against the Soviet occupiers. Osama bin Laden was among the US-funded fighters at the time. In Afghanistan, the Soviet Union experienced its Vietnam. The Red Army only withdrew from Afghanistan during perestroika. The number of civilian casualties probably exceeded one million, and the Soviet Union lost 115,000 soldiers.

Russia was and remains an expansionist power that does not shy away from the use of military means. Vladimir Putin sees himself as the executor of a historic mission to bring all Russian lands back under Moscow's control. This includes not only the hot conquest of Ukraine, but also the cold takeover of Belarus and the covert control of Georgia and Moldova.