"Russia Is Always a Peacemaker": The Myth of the Peace-Loving Empire

The myth

One of the running themes of Kremlin historiography is innocence. Supposedly Russia never conquered anyone in its whole history: lands “joined it of their own accord,” its wars were purely defensive, and the Russian (Soviet) soldier comes not as a conqueror but as a liberator and a peacemaker. In its colloquial version this sounds like “good job restoring order”^[4]; in its official version, like a centuries-long mission of “gathering the lands” and “bringing peace” to its neighbours.

The trouble with this claim is that it contradicts not “Ukrainian propaganda” but Russia’s own documents and its own chronology. It is enough to open the list of wars for which the state itself grants veteran status — and the image of the eternal peacemaker falls apart.

”Peacemakers” on paper: a list of wars in its own law

The foundation is the Ukrainian Law “On the Status of War Veterans, Guarantees of Their Social Protection” (No. 3551-XII of 22 October 1993). Its Article 6 counts as combat participants the servicemen who fought on the territory of other states, and it charges the Cabinet of Ministers with determining the specific list of those states and periods^[1]. That list was approved by Cabinet Resolution No. 63 of 8 February 1994 — “On Organisational Measures for Applying” the aforementioned law^[2].

An important detail: here the street historian Vitaliy Dribnytsia is quoting not journalism but a legal act. The annex to the resolution is the “List of states, cities, territories and periods of combat operations involving citizens.” The participants in those battles are equated with veterans of the Second World War^[1]. In other words, the successor state itself officially admits: its soldiers fought in dozens of countries beyond its own borders.

The Soviet era: from Hungary to Afghanistan

The list from the resolution reads like a geography of the Cold War: Algeria (1962–1964), Angola (1975–1979), Afghanistan (1979–1989), Vietnam, Egypt, Ethiopia, Cambodia, Laos, Mozambique, Syria, as well as the crushing of uprisings in Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968), combat near Lake Khasan (1938) and the war with Japan (1945)^[2]. In all — about a dozen and a half conflicts in the Soviet period alone^[2].

This is not “defence of the homeland.” The Soviet tanks in Budapest in 1956 and Prague in 1968 crushed not aggressors but the empire’s own satellites trying to break free of its control. The “limited contingent” in Afghanistan was an invasion of a sovereign country. Not one of these episodes fits the image of a peace-loving state merely guarding its borders — and all of them are documented so thoroughly that they made it into Ukrainian social legislation.

Afghanistan: the price of “peacemaking”

The Afghan war is the best illustration of what hides behind the word “peacemaking.” The Soviet Union fought there for almost ten years (1979–1989). Official Soviet losses were about 14,453 killed by Krivosheyev’s count, and up to 15,051 by updated figures^[6]. The video cites an understated figure of “13,000” — the real losses were considerably higher^[6].

The situation with Afghan losses is even more grim. The opponent in the debate throws out “two and a half million”^[6]; academic estimates are somewhat more restrained but appalling in their own right: from roughly 562,000 to 2 million dead, with Marek Sliwinski’s median estimate of about 1.25 million — that is, nearly 9% of the country’s pre-war population^[6]. Whichever figure from this range one takes, it cannot be called “peacemaking.”

Post-Soviet “peacemakers”: from Transnistria to Kazakhstan

The collapse of the USSR changed nothing in the pattern of behaviour — only the flags changed. The chain of Russian military interventions after 1991 lines up without a pause^[3]:

• 1992 — Transnistria. The Russian 14th Army under General Lebed, with an artillery strike on 3 July 1992, destroyed the Moldovan forces near Bender and effectively ended the war on the separatists’ side^[3].
• 1992–2008 — Georgia. Support for separatists in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, culminating in the outright war with Georgia in 2008^[3].
• 1994–2009 — two Chechen wars against Russia’s own citizens^[3].
• 2015 — Syria, a military operation on the side of Assad’s regime^[3].
• 2014 — Ukraine, the annexation of Crimea and the war in the Donbas, which grew into the full-scale invasion of 2022^[3].
• January 2022 — Kazakhstan, the deployment of troops under the banner of a CSTO “peacekeeping mission”^[3].

Tellingly, almost every one of these episodes was accompanied by rhetoric about “protecting the civilian population” and “restoring order.” It is exactly this verbal substitution that Dribnytsia’s interlocutor pins down: wherever the Russian soldier appears, instead of the promised peace there is “blood and tears”^[4].

Transnistria: a state almost no one recognised

A separate storyline is the fate of these “peacekeeping” projects. The “Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic,” for which the 14th Army fought, has in thirty years won recognition from not a single UN member state^[5]. It is recognised only by equally unrecognised entities: Abkhazia, South Ossetia and the former Artsakh^[5].

In the video the opponent is credited with the claim that Transnistria was “recognised by North Korea” — this is inaccurate: Pyongyang extended no official recognition^[5]. But the mechanism itself is telling: unrecognised enclaves recognise one another in a closed circle, forming a self-contained system with a single real patron — Moscow. “Peacemaking” whose end result is a frozen conflict and a phantom territory is not about peace but about control.

Why this matters

The myth of Russia-the-peacemaker does double duty. Inward, it justifies any new war as “forced” and “defensive.” Outward, it disguises conquest as a humanitarian mission. But the chronology cannot be hidden: the list of wars in its own law^[1][2], the dozen and a half Soviet conflicts^[2], the millions killed in Afghanistan^[6] and the unbroken chain of interventions from Transnistria to Kazakhstan^[3] — none of this requires “hostile” sources. A state that for centuries has waged war along the perimeter of its own borders and beyond them can call itself a peacemaker only on condition that its interlocutor has not read its documents.