The Russia Conundrum

The leaders of modern Ukraine and their external ‘patrons’ prefer to overlook these facts. And we know why: if they bring about the weakening of Russia, our ill-wishers are happy with that. Ukraine is being turned into a springboard against Russia … comparable in its consequences to the use of weapons of mass destruction against us … under the protection and control of the Western powers. We are witnessing direct external control and the deployment of NATO infrastructure.

He then hints that he is ready to re-take the lands he believes should belong to Russia, advancing a number of spurious claims to prove that Moscow would be justified in doing so.

In 1954, the Crimean Region of the RSFSR was given to the Ukrainian SSR, in gross violation of legal norms that were in force at the time … The right for republics to freely secede from the Soviet Union was the most dangerous time bomb planted in the foundation of our statehood and it exploded … in 1991, when all those territories and people found themselves abroad overnight, taken away from their historical motherland … It is crystal clear that Russia was blatantly robbed.

Having established the narrative of historical injustices and interfering foreign enemies ‘robbing’ Russia of her rightful territory, Putin lays out the pretexts on which he might take it back. Just as Hitler alleged mistreatment of ethnic Germans in the Sudetenland as a reason for its annexation, Putin cites tales of oppressed Russians in eastern Ukraine, bullied, abused and demanding the Motherland come to their rescue.

[They] have peacefully made their case. Yet, all of them, including children, have been labelled as separatists and terrorists. They have been threatened with ethnic cleansing and the use of military force … after the riots that swept through Ukrainian cities, after the horror and tragedy of Ukrainian neo-Nazis burning people alive. Russia has done everything to stop the fratricide … but Ukraine’s representatives, assisted by Western partners, depict themselves as ‘victims of external aggression’ and peddle Russophobia. They arrange bloody provocations in Donbas, pandering to their external patrons and masters.

The Ukrainian government, says Putin, is no more than ‘a tool in foreign hands’, being used to wage war on Russia. In the face of such injustice, Russia will not stand idly by.

The machinations of the anti-Russia project and its Western authors are no secret to us. We will never allow our historical territories and people close to us living there to be used against Russia. And to those who would undertake such an attempt, I would like to say that this will result in the destruction of their own country.

It is worth pausing to consider what psychological impulses lie behind Putin’s decision to write his July 2021 article, which appeared like a bolt from the blue. If you read it carefully, its language is very much in the tradition of the pseudoscience that Stalin and Brezhnev used to come up with. On closer analysis, though, we can see it as a natural result of the evolution of Putin’s views on Ukraine and a conscious political provocation that betrays his very concrete, real-world intentions.

At first, Putin had no strong opinions about Ukraine – like most Soviet and Russian people, he simply didn’t think about it because it didn’t impinge directly on the daily life of their country. Ukrainian independence was no great tragedy; he probably regretted the loss of Crimea, but it wasn’t something worth fighting for. As the Putin regime evolved, however, he began to realise that ‘post-imperial nostalgia’ could be a useful tool to deploy at times of economic decline. He based his imperial idea on a couple of ideological tropes: the concept of a Slavic brotherhood of the three nations – Russia, Ukraine and Belarus – which Putin borrowed from Solzhenitsyn; and the old Slavophile movement, which venerated the Russian empire and believed that owning Ukraine was vital to keeping the empire going. These were the deep-seated historical stereotypes that got him into thinking that Ukraine is an inseparable part of Russia – and now, as a result of Putin’s rhetoric, there’s a good part of Russian society that believes it, too. Putin’s thesis represents a deep historical prejudice that is unlikely to disappear anytime soon.

Putin’s discovery of these post-imperial possibilities might have remained a matter between him and his conscience if history hadn’t intervened. When the Ukrainians ousted Yanukovych, Putin saw it as an attack on Russia’s sovereignty, a personal slight that kick-started the transformation of his personal beliefs into a national policy. And the essence of this policy is that Russia must control Ukraine at all costs. So, annexing Crimea clearly wasn’t the end of things: it was just an intermediate step on the path to the full-scale invasion of 2022.