Why is Russia’s Vladimir Putin so obsessed with invading Ukraine?

Why is Russian President Vladimir Putin so obsessive about Ukraine?

That’s the query on many minds as Russia’s invasion of the previous Soviet republic continues.

The reply entails a mixture of historical past, geography, and Putin’s want to return his nation to the glory days of Soviet Union superpower.

Putin mourns the Soviet Union

A former KGB operative, Putin has mentioned the collapse of the Soviet Union was one of many biggest disasters of contemporary historical past. He says he doesn’t regard the previous Soviet republic of Ukraine as an actual nation, nor Ukrainians as separate folks.

In what historians took as an excessive assault on historical past, Putin mentioned in a rambling speech Monday: “Fashionable Ukraine was solely and absolutely created by Russia.”

The Ukrainian folks voted overwhelmingly in 1991, in a democratic referendum, to go away the Soviet Union and change into unbiased.

A lot of the West, most likely unwittingly, purchased into a part of the narrative by referring to Ukraine as “the Ukraine,” the best way Putin and Russian nationalists do. It’s just like how Individuals check with “the South” or “the Midwest,” elements of the U.S., not separate nations.

No Russian empire with out Ukraine

There’s a Russian adage which you can’t have a Russian empire with out Ukraine, owing to its lengthy cultural and financial historical past because the beating coronary heart of the defunct Soviet Union. And Putin is hell-bent on re-creating a brand new empire to revive his declining nation to superpower standing.

To know how Putin views Ukraine, and why it’s so entangled in his nationwide mythology, first take a look at a map.

Former Soviet republics

Belarus, Ukraine and Georgia — in that order, north to south — are former Soviet Union republics that broke away into ostensibly unbiased nations after the communist energy collapsed in 1991. They sit like an enormous land barrier between Russia and Europe to the west.

However Ukraine is by far the biggest, a minerals-rich huge land of fertile fields.

Tiny Georgia was invaded by Russia in 2008, and the 2 fought a quick battle. Then, as now, Moscow accused Georgia of attacking pro-Russia breakaway enclaves like South Ossetia. France negotiated a cease-fire that ended most preventing, however Georgia didn’t regain the disputed territory.

Ukraine’s transfer towards the West

Belarus, together with a number of different former Soviet republics, have, or had, Kremlin-friendly leaders. However Ukraine broke from the sample in a 2014 revolution that seated democratically elected officers and moved the nation solidly towards the West. The then-pro-Russia president, Viktor Yanukovych, fled to Moscow in what turned often called the Maidan revolution.

However as Ukraine sought to step out of Russia’s sphere of affect, Putin more and more sought to attract it again. Following the Maidan revolution, he started consuming away at jap Ukraine, declaring swaths just like the Donbas to be Russian as a result of many individuals there converse Russian and have Russian passports.

It’s additionally in regards to the cash

Ukraine had additionally served as a profitable supply for Putin’s coffers. A Russian fuel pipeline crosses Ukraine en path to Europe, ginning huge earnings for Moscow — cash that Putin used to co-opt pleasant Ukrainian politicians in addition to to purchase off his oligarch cronies, based on Russia consultants and former diplomats.

A brand new Russian-backed pipeline, referred to as Nord Stream 2, would circumvent Ukraine and take fuel on to Germany. That is the pipeline, not but up and working, now focused by U.S. sanctions.

Honor guards open Kremlin doorways for Russian President Vladimir Putin as he and Crimean leaders signal a treaty in 2014 to annex the peninsula from Ukraine.

(Sergei Ilnitsky / Related Press)

Putin versus ‘rule of legislation’

Franklin Foer, a author on the Atlantic journal who traces household roots to what’s at this time Ukraine, argues that Putin is much less involved about Ukraine becoming a member of NATO than he’s about Ukraine turning into a part of Europe “with its insistence on rule of legislation.”

Ukraine signed an “affiliation” settlement with the European Union, on March 21, 2014, a month after the Maidan revolution and the identical month Putin took management of Crimea.

Rule of legislation and a marketing campaign in opposition to rampant corruption, each of which the U.S. and Europe have been urging on Kyiv with some success, additional robs Putin of a device to regulate or manipulate the nation and its potential quislings, analysts say.

A protester wrapped within the Ukrainian flag holds a drawing of Putin, Stalin and Hitler at a rally in Kyiv on Feb. 12.

(Efrem Lukatsky / Related Press)

Fears of Ukrainian democracy

“What he feared most was Ukrainian democracy, which might deprive him of affect over the colonial possession that he felt was his birthright,” Foer wrote final week.

U.S diplomats in Europe — together with ambassadors to Russia and Ukraine — warned all through the 2000s that exhibiting any inclination towards incorporating Ukraine into Western organizations like NATO could be “neuralgic” for Putin.

Putin’s objective? A submissive Ukraine

Putin now could not need to take over all of Ukraine, however he definitely desires to swallow up sufficient of the nation to render it a submissive ghost nation, consultants and analysts say. One state of affairs floated by U.S. intelligence is that Putin would make the invasion swift and solely lengthy sufficient to put in a brand new chief.

“The elemental disaster is not going to finish,” Carl Bildt, former prime minister of Sweden and now a senior envoy in Europe, said on Twitter, “till Putin leaves the Kremlin and [Russia] lastly decides whether or not it is going to construct a contemporary nation state or whether or not it nonetheless seeks an empire.”