Putin’s Pointless WarBy Matt Johnson
February 25, 2022
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has been in the making for a long time. It’s a reverberation from the collapse of the Soviet Union three decades ago and the fall of the Russian Empire three quarters of a century before that. It’s also the product of Vladimir Putin’s paranoid, embittered, and power-addled mind—a mind steeped in a conspiratorial pseudo-history of Russia’s role in the world and of endless imagined foreign plots to undermine that role. This is not NATO’s war. It’s not Ukraine’s war. It’s Putin’s war, and he’s the one responsible for all the horrors that will follow.
In the months leading up to the invasion, many journalists and academics argued that it was caused by NATO expansion—that any great power would behave just like Russia if a hostile (or rather defensive) military alliance were marching toward its doorstep. People who say such things always ignore several pertinent facts. First, Ukraine was many years away from joining NATO (if its accession was going to happen at all). Second, the NATO countries on Russia’s doorstep are tiny Baltic republics with a combined population of about five and a half million people. And third, when Putin invaded and annexed Crimea in 2014, it was not because he thought Ukraine posed a military threat, but because—after the Euromaidan protests there had led to the ouster of Ukraine’s Moscow-backed kleptocratic leader, Viktor Yanukovych—he was terrified that Ukraine was becoming a modern western democracy.
Back when Putin absorbed Crimea, political scientist John Mearsheimer opined that the “taproot of the current crisis is NATO expansion and Washington’s commitment to move Ukraine out of Moscow’s orbit and integrate it into the West.” Similarly, a few days ago—just before Putin invaded Ukraine—international affairs professor Stephen Walt was still making the same argument, insisting that Putin’s actions are perfectly intelligible and predictable manifestations of great power behaviour:
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The idea that Putin would have been content with the status quo in his “backyard” if only NATO hadn’t expanded after the Cold War is belied by the obsessive revanchist ideology he’s been broadcasting to the world for many years. For example, in a recent address, he argued that “Vladimir Lenin’s Ukraine” was “entirely created by Russia or, to be more precise, by Bolshevik, Communist Russia.” He also argued that the “right of secession from the Soviet Union” and the “disease of nationalism” (by which he meant the existence of independent states like Ukraine) had destroyed Russian unity. And he repeated his belief—voiced many times over the years—that the dissolution of the Soviet Union was a historic tragedy, though not because he thinks the union was a particularly successful supranational entity:
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In 2009, Russia’s envoy to NATO dismissed the prospect of joining the alliance, which would have required Moscow to pursue democratic reforms. His explanation for Moscow’s decision was telling: “Great powers don’t join coalitions, they create coalitions. Russia considers itself a great power.” And Putin doesn’t consider Russia merely a great power—he considers it a great imperial power—and one that, after the Cold War, was betrayed, humiliated, and unjustly diminished. No analysis of Putin’s behaviour makes sense unless it takes these facts seriously.
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About the Author: Matt Johnson writes for Quillette, The Bulwark, Haaretz, Areo, Arc Digital and many other publications. He's the author of the forthcoming book, How Hitchens Can Save the Left: Rediscovering Fearless Liberalism in an Age of Counter-Enlightenment, to be published by Pitchstone in fall 2022.
Source:
https://areomagazine.com/2022/02/25/putins-pointless-war/
