What Was Putin Thinking When He Attacked Ukraine?

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Halifax, NS] Chronicle Herald

Vladimir Putin has now been compared to Hitler, Stalin, and a host of other tyrants throughout history. His aims, some say, are boundless – the reconquest of the entire former Soviet Union, maybe even the rest of eastern Europe, if not indeed the whole continent.

I’ve never seen a war where our media have done nothing but serve as cheerleaders for one side. They don’t make any attempt to present Russia’s view, which we should at least know about, regardless of whether it is credible.

So I’m writing this so people can at least understand, though they need not accept, what motivated Russia’s president.

Putin attacked Ukraine because he felt Russia was being pushed against a wall. This, for him, was a war of necessity, not choice. Why?

If Ukraine were allowed to join NATO – a military alliance, remember – Russia’s eastern boundary would be almost where Hitler’s armies stood in 1942, as they marched towards Stalingrad, on the Volga River. The name – North Atlantic Treaty Organization – hardly suits it now.

Not only would Ukraine be part of the new encirclement, but so might even Georgia, in the Caucasus. After all, U.S. Senator John McCain’s dream was only stopped after Moscow’s 2008 war with Tbilisi.

Russia may appear to be a giant compared to “plucky little” (actually, not so little) Ukraine, but to all intents and purposes it is now really fighting against an infinitely stronger opponent, comprising almost all of Europe and North America.

The 30-member NATO alliance outmatches and outguns Russia manyfold. The United Sates alone is stronger, and NATO comprises at least four other major powers – France, Germany, Great Britain and Turkey.

And it keeps growing: From the original 12 states in 1949, when it was a defensive alliance against Soviet aggression, to today’s 30, including many former Soviet client states and even three ex-USSR republics. And we know it is not averse to using its muscle, as it has shown in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo in the 1990s, or Libya in 2011. On its side, Russia has only Belarus – hardly a major ally.

Not everyone thinks Kyiv has made the right choices in recent years. Ukrainian soldiers standing up to Putin are very brave, but it was Americans that put them in harm’s way by using their country as a weapon against Russia.

Of course, Putin wants to prevent NATO from expanding to Russia’s border. But he finds the U.S. government’s relationship with Ukraine genuinely threatening, because for nearly two decades U.S. administrations have used Ukraine as an instrument to destabilize Russia.

Ukraine is situated between two greater powers, Russia and the European Union. That makes Ukraine a buffer state, both geographically, religiously and culturally.

In his most famous book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, published in 1996, Samuel Huntington predicted the crisis in Ukraine. His theory that nations would return to their historical and cultural roots had a natural corollary: nations that were divided between civilizations, so-called “cleft” countries, would most likely generate great-power conflict.

Ukraine is a severely cleft country, divided internally, with western Ukraine firmly in the European corner and eastern Ukraine and Crimea firmly in the orbit of Orthodox Russia. So any attempt to upset this equilibrium meant that Ukraine “could split along its fault line into two separate entities, the eastern of which would merge with Russia.”

Yet in 2014 the United States helped organize regime change in Kyiv – the Maidan Revolution -- to assemble a new Ukrainian government friendly to the United States and therefore hostile to Russia. Neo-conservatives such as Victoria Nuland and John McCain actively supported the protests. The Russians have complained bitterly about this.

While almost one third of Ukraine’s population has Russian as its first language, mainly in the east and southwest of the country, on the first day in power the new nationalist regime declared Russian no longer an official state language. Kyiv also refused to consider some form of autonomy for them. The secession of Donetsk and Luhansk are a direct result.

As for Crimea, with its majority Russian population, it had been part of Russia since 1783 until it was transferred to Ukraine in 1954 by Communist ruler Nikita Khrushchev, for no good reason. Its population, Russian from the 18^th century on, feared the new Ukrainian government.

By 2021, President Volodymyr Zelensky had begun to shut down Russian media sites in Ukraine. He placed Viktor Medvedchuk, a close ally of Putin and chairman of the pro-Russian political faction Choice in the Ukrainian Parliament, under house arrest last May on suspicion of treason. He also banned three television stations owned by Medvedchuk.

NATO’s original remit was the worldwide battle against Communist ideological and military imperialism. But that all ended in 1991. “Real existing” Communism is a spent force.

There was a near universal understanding among diplomats and political leaders at the time that any attempt to expand NATO was foolish, an unwarranted provocation against Russia that emerged at the end of the Cold War.

But instead of disbanding, or being replaced by lesser bilateral or multilateral arrangements, NATO just kept expanding, and a weakened post-1991 Russia was helpless to stop it. In 1997, the Clinton administration promised Moscow that NATO combat troops would not be stationed in Eastern Europe – but that turned out to be a lie.

In 1962 the United States drew a red line saying the Soviet Union could not install missiles in Cuba. They threatened a world war to make this stand. The distance from Havana to Washington is far greater than that from Kyiv to Moscow.

Is Putin really a paranoid lunatic to think America and the European Union – the political analog to NATO and also economically far richer than Russia -- want to create a global world headed by the United States, one relegating Russia and even China to the status of “rogue states” refusing to accept the “rules-based international order,” as defined by Washington? 

Our own prime minister imposed the Emergencies Act because there was an alleged plot by a bunch of “pro-Trump” truckers to bring down the government of Canada. 

That’s certainly the view from Moscow, and just shouting at Putin and calling him names won’t change that.