Why did Putin choose to invade Ukraine
Former KGB agent Vladimir Putin is not the most transparent world leader. The Russian president is considered mysterious and unpredictable and likes to mislead his opponents. His motives for the Russian invasion of Ukraine are therefore hotly debated. What do we actually know about that?
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Before the first shots were fired during the night from Wednesday to Thursday, the Russian president explained his justification for the invasion of Ukraine in two speeches, on Monday and Thursday.
He claimed, among other things, that most of Ukraine is historically Russian and was detached by the leaders of the Soviet Union at the beginning of the twentieth century. A mistake, said the Russian president. He considers the Ukrainian national identity to be fictitious, fake. Historians such as Yale professor Timothy Snyder make mincemeat of that argument: Ukraine’s historical identity is comparable to that of many other European countries.
After the Maidan Revolution in 2014, the popular uprising that put brutal pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych on the run and is considered an armed coup by Putin, Ukraine became a pawn of NATO (read: the US), according to the Russian president.
Putin initially spoke with a neutral face about NATO and the US, but his tone became noticeably more vicious when it came to Ukraine. He sees Ukraine as fundamentally Russian. Ukrainians who choose the West are not only pawns for him, but also traitors.
In 2014, Russia responded by appropriating Crimea and supporting pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine (who could be considered an extension of Moscow). The instability this entailed was a guarantee that plans for Ukraine’s NATO membership were shelved. Countries involved in a conflict over territory are not allowed to join under NATO rules.
Why did Putin choose to invade Ukraine
Ah, NATO. Russia is afraid that it will deploy all kinds of weaponry on its borders. Makes sense in itself, right?
Putin’s grievances against NATO go a little further than that. He believes that after the fall of the Soviet Union, the West did everything it could to keep Russia small. In fact, in his February 24 speech, he said the US and its allies have “tried to finish us, to destroy us completely”.
NATO “supports Nazis and nationalists in Ukraine, who will never forgive the people of Crimea for choosing to join Russia,” Putin said. According to him, Ukraine and the West are guilty of “genocide” against Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine. There is no evidence for that claim, clearly intended to arouse the Russian population for military action against Ukraine (read: the US).
The current crisis can be traced back to 2008, when NATO announced that Ukraine and Georgia had taken the first step in the membership process. That proved a bridge too far for Russia, which invaded Georgia to support two separatist areas (Abkhazia and South Ossetia).
From that moment on, relations between Russia and the West went downhill. Major points of tension have included the war in Syria (Russia provided dictator Bashar Al Assad with direct military support against the rebels), Russian attempts to influence the 2016 US presidential election and the poisoning of a former Russian double agent in the UK. Salisbury.
Russia was by far the most powerful country in the Soviet Union and therefore ruled the roost. Before that, too, it was the regional superpower on the eastern half of the Eurasian continent for centuries. That makes it painful when countries that – as it is called – belonged to the Russian sphere of influence, choose a Western course and turn away from Russia.
In addition, it is threatening for Putin that large parts of the populations of Georgia and Ukraine chose to deal with an autocratic and corrupt elite through a people’s revolution and to continue the democratization of their countries. For the autocratic and corrupt Putin, that is a threatening picture.
Why did Putin choose to invade Ukraine
What does Putin want with Ukraine after the conquest?
Putin’s plans this time seem to go well beyond those for Georgia in 2008. He has made it clear that his intention is to replace the government in Kiev and neutralize the Ukrainian armed forces, making sure they can no longer pose any threat. .
Initially, it was unclear whether the Russians would be satisfied with occupying the eastern provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk, which were already about a third in the hands of the pro-Russian separatists. We now know that Russia is also moving towards the northern Kiev. On Friday morning, the first Russian armored vehicles were sighted in a suburb of the capital.
In his speech on Monday, the Russian president may have hinted at the scope of his plans. He referred to Ukrainian efforts in recent years to deal with the communist past.
According to the Russian president, these also mean that the territory that the country received as a gift from the Soviet Union in his reading of history must be returned to Russia. On Putin’s map, Ukraine is then reduced to a small yellow spot just south of Kiev.
“Now grateful descendants have destroyed monuments to Lenin in Ukraine. They call it ‘decommunizing’,” he sneered. “Do you want to decommunize? Well, that’s fine with us. But you shouldn’t stop halfway. We are ready to show you what decommunizing means for Ukraine.”
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