How Extensive are Putin’s War Aims?

  By Henry Srebrnik, [Halifax, NS] Chronicle Herald

Let’s put aside, for the sake of this article, the issue of state sovereignty and the inviolability of borders, and examine the Ukraine war through the lens of ethnicity. First, some history.

We can all agree that from the instant he took power in Germany, Adolf Hitler was a monster, who committed arguably the greatest crimes in known human history. (My own parents were in a Nazi concentration camp in the Second World War.)

But from January 1933 through to the Munich Crisis in September 1938, all his territorial acquisitions were irredentist. This is a term that refers to the belief that a territory inhabited by a population having the same identity, but now living in a different jurisdiction, should be reclaimed by the nation. Combined with extreme nationalism, it is a dangerous combination but is technically containable.

When Hitler’s troops marched into the Saarland in 1936, followed in 1938 by Austria and then the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia, they were all German-majority entities which (to their shame!) welcomed the Nazis. Maybe that’s part of the reason British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain gave way to Hitler’s demands at the notorious Munich conference.

Hitler only became a full-fledged imperialist when he marched into the rest of the Czech lands in March 1939. And, of course, in his invasion of Poland later that September, it became clear he was out to conquer and destroy non-German nations.

Soviet ruler Joseph Stalin, when he took his share of Poland that same month, was actually also an irredentist, as these were areas with Belarusian, Ukrainian and Lithuanian majorities. He even returned Lithuanian-majority Vilnius to the still-sovereign Lithuania. But Stalin too became an imperialist when he attacked Finland that December, and in 1940 when he grabbed the three Baltic republics.

When the Soviet Union dissolved, a sovereign Ukraine was one of the states that emerged, within the same boundaries it possessed as a Soviet republic. Ukraine had been a distinct political entity only as a Soviet republic, and approximately one-sixth of Ukraine’s 44 million people were ethnically Russian. The new country was effectively a binational state, with ethnic Ukrainians and Russians fairly equal in terms of political power.

This changed in 2014 when nationalistic Ukrainians took over the country, leaving the Russian minorities, most of whom live adjacent to Russia, fearful. It was at that point that Russian President Vladimir Putin took control of Crimea, while separatist Russians in the Donbas areas of Donetks and Luhansk created de facto statelets. And so the current crisis began. 

The question now regarding Putin is this: is he being an irredentist, wishing to conquer and keep ethnically Russian and Russophone parts of Ukraine – Crimea, the Donbas region, and maybe Novorossiya (New Russia), areas that had never been ethnically Ukrainian? Or is he now an imperialist, wishing to conquer all of Ukraine (and perhaps even more of Europe)?

This is actually a distinction with a difference, regardless of the horrific atrocities now being committed, because it will have a bearing on how to end this conflict without it spiraling completely out of control.

If there is no possible road to peace, it may turn into a wider NATO-Russian war and a potential nuclear conflagration causing incalculable damage. That disastrous outcome would leave much of Europe and North America in ruins for the foreseeable future.