While Russia is the belligerent actor and it is their fault, pre-2014 Ukraine was hardly “neutral”, having mulled both NATO and EU ascension discussions. The latter being the actual provocation rather than the former. (This isn’t at all to say any of this is Ukraine’s “fault”, only to point out they were not “neutral”)
Which is what Lord Robertson, the former Secretary General of Nato, has stated was the start of the crisis:
"One theory, propounded by realists such as the academic John Mearsheimer, is that Nato expansion in eastern Europe was the reason that Putin invaded Ukraine. Robertson dismissed the idea. “I met Putin nine times during my time at Nato. He never mentioned Nato enlargement once.” What Robertson said next was interesting: “He’s not bothered about Nato, or Nato enlargement. He’s bothered by the European Union. The whole Ukraine crisis started with the offer of an EU accession agreement to Ukraine in 2014.”
Putin fears countries on Russia’s border being “fundamentally and permanently” changed by EU accession. “Every aspect [of society is affected] – they woke up very late to it… I don’t think they ever fully understood the EU,” Robertson said, adding the caveat that the EU was not at fault because accession was what Ukraine, as a sovereign nation, wanted."
[end quote]
Putin has modeled his rule after the Csarist monarchy of the Russian Empire. He notably despises communism and blames it for the collapse of the USSR. He calls himself “president” but many within the state Duma believe the title to be an embarrassing western descriptor and would prefer to bestow on him the title of “pravitel” or “ruler”.
But Putin ran into a bit of a problem. Just as to be called Caesar you need to rule Rome, to be called czar you need to rule over all of Rus. For him, the cultural, historical, and religious significance of Kievan Rus was just too large to be ignored.
When it existed, the Russian Empire tried to erase the other eastern Slavic languages from their shared cultural memory. They acted as if there was no Ukraine and never had been, just as with Belarus. According to the Tsarists, Ukrainians had always been Russians and had no history of their own. The Ukrainian and Belorussian languages were banned. Ukrainian nationalism was a threat to the underlying myths of Russia and threatened the czars’ attempts at creating an “All-Russian People.”
Putin is emulating their rule and presents himself as a tsar-like figure. He’s built a massive, opulent palace for himself, with gold-plated double-headed eagles, a clear Imperial Russian symbol, everywhere—even in his personal strip club. Similarly, the Russian Orthodox Church helps him pacify the population and supports whatever myths Kremlin wants to glorify. He wanted to go down in the history books as a grand unifier of Russian lands—if not under the same government, then definitely as the hegemon of the Russian world.
Putin wants it both ways, to take credit for the Soviet legacy and, at the same time, be viewed in the same light as the emperors and czars of old. Therefore, he’s had to bring back and reaffirm the old, imperial myths and values—and to do that, he has to get Kyiv under his thumb. After all, it was the restored Kievan Rus that became Russia, the “Third Rome.” Ukraine going its own way, claiming Kievan Rus as its legacy, moving away from Moscow, getting autocephaly for its own orthodox church—all this runs contrary to Russian state mythology.
These imperial myths are what define Russia, what it even means to be a Russian. Without them, Russia just stops being Russia in the eyes of many. Putin is convinced that if this social glue is disrupted, then Russia will just split up in pieces again—and if he allows that to happen, then his legacy is ruined. For him, there can be no separate Ukrainian language, culture, or history.
That is where his mind is at, stuck in the 18th and 19th centuries.
I guess its worth mentioning that Ukraine was never “neutral” to begin with. Since the fall of the union Ukraine had been in the Russian sphere of influence and they were neutral only to the extent where it wouldn’t undermine Russian control over Ukraine. That’s why the EU accession agreement started this, because it undermined Russian power and Russia was not okay with losing that power. Russia never wanted neutral buffer states, Russia wanted countries that they could control.
Putin feared the EU because it was expanding far faster than NATO. EU expansion offered valuable trade links to former soviet countries and in turn required they implement anti-corruption legislation, and in the words of NATO secretary general Robertson above “changed every aspect of society”. That’s what Putin was afraid of.
Look at what happened to Georgia.
Old soviet regime runs economy into the ground. In 2003 pro-democracy NGOs help organise a peaceful student protests that culminates in the Rose Revolution. Autocratic government out, democratic government elected for first time, immediately start plans to align with EU to recover the economy.
2006 signs joint statement with EU on economic cooperation. Also opens pipeline cutting out Iran and Russia and delivering Azerbaijan oil directly to EU friendly Turkey.
So in 2008 Russia invades Georgia’s Tskhinvali and Abkhazia regions in an attempt to destabilise the country. This fails.
2013 Georgia signs deeper level of EU cooperation. Ukraine parliament makes legal guarantees it’ll start to align with EU.
Putin was out of time, his Caucasus route to the middle East was closing forever, economic influence via the black sea was closing off, so he grabbed Crimea. It was the EU not NATO that surrounded him.
Yeah like with rapists, I don’t really care for their reasoning. NATO is a military alliance, EU isn’t, so even if we assume that worrying about nearby military alliances is a “justified” reason to, idk, invade your neighbouring country, it still isn’t a justification, as EU is not a military alliance.
In terms of Moscow’s loss of control, the EU was proving far more effective than NATO. Like the NATO secretary general said, the EU spread represented the start of the crisis, but it was Russia’s fault. Because they’re belligerent assholes…
The whole Ukraine crisis started with the offer of an EU accession agreement to Ukraine in 2014
I think the crisis technically started with a military invasion. If not that, then we could go back and forth on this to the founding of NATO and before.
Literally leasing a very important port city (Sevastopol) to the Russian navy counts for nothing?
That’s so much more cooperation than talking with NATO or “aiming to get closer ties with the EU”.
Not to say that Russia had tons of trade deals with the EU, so does Morocco and everyone who wants something in that region.
If I had to guess if say Putin saw NATO expansion as a problem but rather slow and so not urgent. Whereas EU expansion could actually be a worse because of how quickly it spreads. Not least because countries seeking deeper trade ties with the EU are basically committing themselves to anti-corruption reforms and thereby slipping from his grasp long long before any serious talk of NATO is happening (see: Georgia, or my long summary elsewhere in these threads)…
That’s a very interesting take I haven’t heard of before. My understanding was that a primary reason Russia invaded Crimea was due to the oil reserves there that Russia wanted. I guess it extends beyond that.
Russia doesn’t need the Crimean oil reserves, it’s more than they wanted Ukraine to not have it. Even then, energy security wasn’t as much a motivator as was securing access to Sevastopol, a critical warm water port and the only place capable of housing the black sea fleet. Although control of that port, in turn, is largely to do with projecting energy control over a wider region.
Russia was leasing Sevastopol from Ukraine (til 2042). It had become increasingly important to Russia’s other objectives being a staging location for supporting the incursion into Georgia, and also Russia’s involvement in Syria. Both of which are key to Russia’s broader goal of region control and energy security (not Ukraine per se).
It may be that Russia was far more sensitive to EU membership than NATO because EU membership travelled much faster and was already outflanking them (see map at bottom)
In the early 2000’s, increasing ineffectiveness of the old Soviet style leadership in Georgia was bankrupting the country and making corruption rife. This was increasingly apparent to international businesses there and a student population that enjoyed (somewhat miraculously) the relatively free press in the form of TV stations critical of the regime and its corruption.
Subsequently, foreign NGO presence helped organise and contribute to the peaceful 2003 Rose Revolution which saw the older soviet influence brushed away in favour of new democratic parties. (Put your favourite conspiracy / neocon / deepstate analysis hat on, a major financier of the NGOs was George Soros)
Russia’s desire to maintain a foothold within Georgia subsequently provoked the 2008 Russia Georgian War over Georgia’s northern ‘South Ossetia’ region. Not only because Georgia is the gateway to projecting power into the Middle East, but more immediately because in 2006 Georgia opened the Baku-Ceyhan oil pipeline which cut Iran and Russia out of the picture and connected Azerbaijan oil fields up directly with EU friendly Turkey.
Russia failed to make anyway headway with their support of South Ossetia. Then in 2013, Georgia and the EU took the next step in closer alignment, an Association Agreement. With Russia’s efforts to expand influence into the Caucasus region curtailed and weakening in power to project strength over energy producing regions, Putin saw the need to permanently secure Sevastopol as becoming critical.
The Ukrainian parliament had begun legal alignment with the EU the same year.
Hence in 2014, Russia took Crimea.
(If you look at the map of EU plus Georgia, you can see how close EU alignment could be seen to have ‘provoked’ Russia to act. Though very much only in the sense that they are anti democratic and imperialist)
While Russia is the belligerent actor and it is their fault, pre-2014 Ukraine was hardly “neutral”, having mulled both NATO and EU ascension discussions. The latter being the actual provocation rather than the former. (This isn’t at all to say any of this is Ukraine’s “fault”, only to point out they were not “neutral”)
In early 2013 the Ukrainian parliament agreed to make legal steps towards EU ascension (source 2014 pro Russia unrest in Ukraine)
Which is what Lord Robertson, the former Secretary General of Nato, has stated was the start of the crisis:
"One theory, propounded by realists such as the academic John Mearsheimer, is that Nato expansion in eastern Europe was the reason that Putin invaded Ukraine. Robertson dismissed the idea. “I met Putin nine times during my time at Nato. He never mentioned Nato enlargement once.” What Robertson said next was interesting: “He’s not bothered about Nato, or Nato enlargement. He’s bothered by the European Union. The whole Ukraine crisis started with the offer of an EU accession agreement to Ukraine in 2014.”
Putin fears countries on Russia’s border being “fundamentally and permanently” changed by EU accession. “Every aspect [of society is affected] – they woke up very late to it… I don’t think they ever fully understood the EU,” Robertson said, adding the caveat that the EU was not at fault because accession was what Ukraine, as a sovereign nation, wanted." [end quote]
Source: https://www.newstatesman.com/encounter/2024/05/george-robertson-nato-why-russia-fears-european-union
Putin has modeled his rule after the Csarist monarchy of the Russian Empire. He notably despises communism and blames it for the collapse of the USSR. He calls himself “president” but many within the state Duma believe the title to be an embarrassing western descriptor and would prefer to bestow on him the title of “pravitel” or “ruler”.
But Putin ran into a bit of a problem. Just as to be called Caesar you need to rule Rome, to be called czar you need to rule over all of Rus. For him, the cultural, historical, and religious significance of Kievan Rus was just too large to be ignored.
When it existed, the Russian Empire tried to erase the other eastern Slavic languages from their shared cultural memory. They acted as if there was no Ukraine and never had been, just as with Belarus. According to the Tsarists, Ukrainians had always been Russians and had no history of their own. The Ukrainian and Belorussian languages were banned. Ukrainian nationalism was a threat to the underlying myths of Russia and threatened the czars’ attempts at creating an “All-Russian People.”
Putin is emulating their rule and presents himself as a tsar-like figure. He’s built a massive, opulent palace for himself, with gold-plated double-headed eagles, a clear Imperial Russian symbol, everywhere—even in his personal strip club. Similarly, the Russian Orthodox Church helps him pacify the population and supports whatever myths Kremlin wants to glorify. He wanted to go down in the history books as a grand unifier of Russian lands—if not under the same government, then definitely as the hegemon of the Russian world.
Putin wants it both ways, to take credit for the Soviet legacy and, at the same time, be viewed in the same light as the emperors and czars of old. Therefore, he’s had to bring back and reaffirm the old, imperial myths and values—and to do that, he has to get Kyiv under his thumb. After all, it was the restored Kievan Rus that became Russia, the “Third Rome.” Ukraine going its own way, claiming Kievan Rus as its legacy, moving away from Moscow, getting autocephaly for its own orthodox church—all this runs contrary to Russian state mythology.
These imperial myths are what define Russia, what it even means to be a Russian. Without them, Russia just stops being Russia in the eyes of many. Putin is convinced that if this social glue is disrupted, then Russia will just split up in pieces again—and if he allows that to happen, then his legacy is ruined. For him, there can be no separate Ukrainian language, culture, or history.
That is where his mind is at, stuck in the 18th and 19th centuries.
I guess its worth mentioning that Ukraine was never “neutral” to begin with. Since the fall of the union Ukraine had been in the Russian sphere of influence and they were neutral only to the extent where it wouldn’t undermine Russian control over Ukraine. That’s why the EU accession agreement started this, because it undermined Russian power and Russia was not okay with losing that power. Russia never wanted neutral buffer states, Russia wanted countries that they could control.
EU, unlike NATO, is not a military alliance.
You’re not thinking forth dimensionally, Marty!
Putin feared the EU because it was expanding far faster than NATO. EU expansion offered valuable trade links to former soviet countries and in turn required they implement anti-corruption legislation, and in the words of NATO secretary general Robertson above “changed every aspect of society”. That’s what Putin was afraid of.
Look at what happened to Georgia.
Old soviet regime runs economy into the ground. In 2003 pro-democracy NGOs help organise a peaceful student protests that culminates in the Rose Revolution. Autocratic government out, democratic government elected for first time, immediately start plans to align with EU to recover the economy.
2006 signs joint statement with EU on economic cooperation. Also opens pipeline cutting out Iran and Russia and delivering Azerbaijan oil directly to EU friendly Turkey.
So in 2008 Russia invades Georgia’s Tskhinvali and Abkhazia regions in an attempt to destabilise the country. This fails.
2013 Georgia signs deeper level of EU cooperation. Ukraine parliament makes legal guarantees it’ll start to align with EU.
Putin was out of time, his Caucasus route to the middle East was closing forever, economic influence via the black sea was closing off, so he grabbed Crimea. It was the EU not NATO that surrounded him.
And that’s what the NATO secretary general said.
Yeah like with rapists, I don’t really care for their reasoning. NATO is a military alliance, EU isn’t, so even if we assume that worrying about nearby military alliances is a “justified” reason to, idk, invade your neighbouring country, it still isn’t a justification, as EU is not a military alliance.
In terms of Moscow’s loss of control, the EU was proving far more effective than NATO. Like the NATO secretary general said, the EU spread represented the start of the crisis, but it was Russia’s fault. Because they’re belligerent assholes…
I think the crisis technically started with a military invasion. If not that, then we could go back and forth on this to the founding of NATO and before.
Them saying that is like someone who beat their wife to death saying “it all began with her having glanced at a man who walked past.”
I think on this occasion I’ll defer to how a secretary general of NATO chooses to phrase it
Literally leasing a very important port city (Sevastopol) to the Russian navy counts for nothing?
That’s so much more cooperation than talking with NATO or “aiming to get closer ties with the EU”. Not to say that Russia had tons of trade deals with the EU, so does Morocco and everyone who wants something in that region.
If I had to guess if say Putin saw NATO expansion as a problem but rather slow and so not urgent. Whereas EU expansion could actually be a worse because of how quickly it spreads. Not least because countries seeking deeper trade ties with the EU are basically committing themselves to anti-corruption reforms and thereby slipping from his grasp long long before any serious talk of NATO is happening (see: Georgia, or my long summary elsewhere in these threads)…
Ukraine is a sovereign nation. It is allowed to make treaties with other sovereign nations.
Or do you believe the US should invade Brazil because it is part of BRICS?
I feel you’ve not read my first paragraph (or last quoted sentence) closely enough…
That’s a very interesting take I haven’t heard of before. My understanding was that a primary reason Russia invaded Crimea was due to the oil reserves there that Russia wanted. I guess it extends beyond that.
Russia doesn’t need the Crimean oil reserves, it’s more than they wanted Ukraine to not have it. Even then, energy security wasn’t as much a motivator as was securing access to Sevastopol, a critical warm water port and the only place capable of housing the black sea fleet. Although control of that port, in turn, is largely to do with projecting energy control over a wider region.
Russia was leasing Sevastopol from Ukraine (til 2042). It had become increasingly important to Russia’s other objectives being a staging location for supporting the incursion into Georgia, and also Russia’s involvement in Syria. Both of which are key to Russia’s broader goal of region control and energy security (not Ukraine per se).
It may be that Russia was far more sensitive to EU membership than NATO because EU membership travelled much faster and was already outflanking them (see map at bottom)
In the early 2000’s, increasing ineffectiveness of the old Soviet style leadership in Georgia was bankrupting the country and making corruption rife. This was increasingly apparent to international businesses there and a student population that enjoyed (somewhat miraculously) the relatively free press in the form of TV stations critical of the regime and its corruption.
Subsequently, foreign NGO presence helped organise and contribute to the peaceful 2003 Rose Revolution which saw the older soviet influence brushed away in favour of new democratic parties. (Put your favourite conspiracy / neocon / deepstate analysis hat on, a major financier of the NGOs was George Soros)
The new leadership sought to put Georgia on better economic footing and in 2006 together with the EU issued a statement on the 5 year Georgia-European Union Action Plan within the European Neighbourhood Policy which was a major snub to Russia.
Russia’s desire to maintain a foothold within Georgia subsequently provoked the 2008 Russia Georgian War over Georgia’s northern ‘South Ossetia’ region. Not only because Georgia is the gateway to projecting power into the Middle East, but more immediately because in 2006 Georgia opened the Baku-Ceyhan oil pipeline which cut Iran and Russia out of the picture and connected Azerbaijan oil fields up directly with EU friendly Turkey.
Russia failed to make anyway headway with their support of South Ossetia. Then in 2013, Georgia and the EU took the next step in closer alignment, an Association Agreement. With Russia’s efforts to expand influence into the Caucasus region curtailed and weakening in power to project strength over energy producing regions, Putin saw the need to permanently secure Sevastopol as becoming critical.
The Ukrainian parliament had begun legal alignment with the EU the same year.
Hence in 2014, Russia took Crimea.
(If you look at the map of EU plus Georgia, you can see how close EU alignment could be seen to have ‘provoked’ Russia to act. Though very much only in the sense that they are anti democratic and imperialist)