In 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine, the London Review of Books posted an article by the English philosopher Glen Newey. Its title, “Remember Eastern Rumelia,” referred to a short-lived statelet set up during the late nineteenth century. Designed to curb Pan-Slavic ambitions in the declining Ottoman Empire, Eastern Rumelia was soon absorbed by independent Bulgaria.

The implication was clear  —  Ukraine, too, is a fake state, a Western protectorate with meaningless borders that will be forgotten by history, just like Eastern Rumelia, which is remembered now only by rare-stamp collectors. To an English ear, Rumelia suggests “Ruritania,” an imaginary kingdom devised by the Victorian novelist Anthony Hope in The Prisoner of Zenda. Ruritania is usually located in Eastern Europe and denotes silly pageantry, pompous dictatorships, and poverty  —  the European equivalent of a banana republic.

In the run-up to Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine, it was not hugely uncommon to hear speculation on the fringes of the Left about whether its borders could be more effectively drawn. Perhaps Vladimir Putin and Joe Biden could have sat down together and decided what parts of the country should be given to its eastern neighbor. Around this time, an organization on the British left that should have known better published a map of the country that featured Crimea, recognized by international law as part of Ukraine, as part of Russia. This habit of thought is usually applied to post-Soviet states such as Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, and the “stans” of Central Asia in particular  —  countries whose ethnic diversity, Soviet-drawn borders, and emergence onto the map apparently invite a strange bien-pensant disbelief in their realness.