I agree with President Putin.
I feel a little dirty to be agreeing with something that this fascist, dictator, war criminal, genocidal maniac says.
But yes, to secure a lasting peace in Ukraine we need to address the origins of the current conflict. Putin is absolutely correct. Only the origins of the conflict are nothing that Putin suggests but actually Putin himself. Putin is the problem. Without Putin there would have been no war and without him the war could end now.
Putin even did us the service of writing a long essay over his grievances over Ukraine in July 2021.
I always took the above as Putin’s call to arms to Russian troops for the subsequent full-scale invasion of February 2022.
Essentially in this essay Putin denies the existence of Ukrainians, Ukrainian sovereignty and Ukraine’s very right to exist. For Putin the creation of Ukraine in 1991 was due to a huge historical mistake – a calamity – the collapse of the USSR which Putin has described as the biggest catastrophe of the 20th century. Bigger then than the Holocaust, the Holodomor, WWI and WWII, and the Stalin terrors.
Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022 and continues his war on Ukraine as he sees this as his historical mission to reunite Russia and Ukraine. He will stop at nothing less. He might agree to a peace deal with Trump over Ukraine, but that would have to be such a deal so as to render Ukraine unsustainable – such a bad peace for Ukraine that he knows this will ferment so much unrest in Ukraine as to create conditions for social upheaval, even revolution akin to the Euromaidan and providing an opportunity therein for further Russian onslaughts against Ukraine.
Putin simply cannot leave Ukraine to peace – he wants the full control and subjugation of Ukraine as in his mind there is no Russia without Ukraine.
The only peace Putin wants is a bad peace for Ukraine and certainly not one which would give an independent and sovereign Ukraine any kind of security from inevitable future attack from Russia under Putin.
Putin simply cannot leave Ukraine to peace – he wants the full control and subjugation of Ukraine as in his mind there is no Russia without Ukraine.
But what about NATO membership, was not this one of they key reasons for Russia’s invasion? Was Putin not incensed by NATO’s constant enlargement eastward and the military threat from NATO to Ukraine.
No, this is a total fallacy.
First, back in 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea, then first invaded Ukraine through the Donbas, Ukraine and Ukrainians had little ambition to join NATO. Opinion polls showed single digit support, and the vast majority of Ukrainians supported Ukraine’s existing nonaligned status.
That soon changed in 2014 with the annexation of Crimea then the invasion of Donbas as Ukrainians realized that their nonaligned status had got them nowhere – only invasion by Russia – and they hoped that NATO membership would have given them protection.
As it was, few NATO members had any desire to agree to NATO membership for Ukraine as they assumed that would have meant going to war with Russia. Russia was well aware that Ukraine had no realistic chance of joining NATO but launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine anyway – see above for Putin’s real motivations.
But was Ukraine not a threat to Russia’s military presence in Crimea – which explains the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and then the push in the full-scale invasion in 2022 to build a land corridor to Crimea?
Again, no. I think best explained by the lack of Ukrainian resistance to the annexation. The Russian military took the peninsula in a matter of hours. Where was the Ukrainian capability/threat then? Indeed, back in 2014 Ukraine had a pretty threadbare military, one quarter its current size and with a military doctrine which looked West to the threat, not East.
Well, even if Ukraine was not a threat, what about the argument that NATO enlargement eastward was a huge threat to Russia, justification then for the invasion of Ukraine as a push back against that.
Again, a pretty ridiculous argument, as in each round of NATO enlargement members have tended to spend less on defense. The feeling of collective security from enlargement saw less, not more defense spending by NATO. And this is the reason European NATO is in such a parlous state now.
The threat from Russia instead explains NATO enlargement. Think the threat is now so great that committed neutral states like Finland and Sweden even recently joined NATO.
Prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 relatively few NATO members had met the 2% of GDP defense spend. Most had run down their militaries to skeletons, now hardly able to defend Europe against Russian attack, let alone attack Russia. Germany and the UK had cut the numbers of MBTs from thousands at the time of the Cold War to several hundred only and most of these were barely serviceable. The UK had the smallest number of troops since before WWI, and its navy is now struggling to put even one submarine to sea. Where is the threat?
The threat has instead come from Russia to Europe with invasions of Moldova, Georgia and Ukraine, and multiple drone, cyber and WMD attacks on NATO members. The threat from Russia instead explains NATO enlargement. Think the threat is now so great that committed neutral states like Finland and Sweden even recently joined NATO.
And don’t tell me that poor Russia felt isolated and felt threatened. Russia knew – through its enormous intelligence capacity – the limited military capability of European NATO. I would argue that it invaded Ukraine in 2022 as it assessed this capability to be limited and of little threat of coming to the assistance of Ukraine. Rather it was NATO’s lack of threat that gave Putin the opportunity to attack in 2022 and given his ambitions for Ukraine he could not resist. Putin saw weakness and the opportunity and acted.
In summary, it’s crystal clear from the above what Putin’s motivations were for the invasion and still are in his war against Ukraine. This is not about the military threat from Ukraine, or NATO. It’s not about just “territory” as Witkoff and the Trump administration keep banging on about. It is about the very survival of Ukraine.
It’s binary, it’s a zero-sum game for Putin against Ukraine. And Trump and his team totally fail to grasp this, or do but simply don’t care – Ukraine and Russia are either just business opportunities for the family or there is some grand vision at play – a great power land swap (Ukraine to Russia, Trump gets sway over the Western hemisphere including Venezuela and Greenland), a reverse Nixonian to ally the US with Russia against China, or that Ukraine is just collateral damage in an alliance of autocratic regimes against a woke liberal Europe.
Trump does not care whether any peace deal assures Ukraine’s long-term security or stability – that’s Europe’s problem. He wants to sell any peace he gets, however sustainable, as his Nobel prize pitch and to move on to business as usual – or highly unusual – with Russia.
But I fear the deal currently being forced down Ukraine’s throats will not leave it secure – but subject still to constant attack and destabilization from Russia. That’s a disastrous outlook for Ukraine but also Europe.
Reprinted from the author’s @tashecon blog. See the original here.
The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.