It’s been three months since Russia decided to bludgeon Ukraine into submission. To date, despite daily doses of “information” coming out of Moscow, the Russian government has left the world to speculate as to why and to what end. And to struggle with language: how does one even find words adequate to describe what Russia, with intricate deliberation, has chosen to inflict on its neighbor?
Speculation in the West — in the traditional conflict-stoking form of, Who is to blame for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine? — comes in two flavors, geopolitical and personal. The common geopolitical argument blames the West. It justifies Russia’s going to war on grounds that, by expanding NATO, the West had ignored Russia’s legitimate national security interests. Essentially, Russia had no choice.
The Geopolitical
The blame-it-on-NATO argument is feeble. Moscow has always known that the nature and purpose of NATO posed no credible security threat to Russia, and that Ukraine’s chances of NATO membership were zero precisely because of concerns — especially in France and Germany — about the resulting unnecessary and counterproductive creation of friction with Russia.
Even if NATO expansion were a viable reason, war was not Russia’s only choice given that, in military terms, the facts on the ground in Ukraine in early 2022 remained what they’d always been. The fact that Ukraine’s military was getting Western training doesn’t change that; no one was preparing Ukraine’s military — which had surrendered its nuclear weapons, it bears recalling — to invade a nuclear-armed Russia.
But it’s Russian perceptions of a threat that matter, apologists claim. Though not unimportant, perceptions must be tethered to reality to deserve credence. They don’t legitimize a resort to force in the first instance; a regional security conference to address Russia’s concerns would have appealed to Western leaders. That Russia chose to start with bombs tells us that narrative, not fear, is at the heart of its motive.
The Personal
That narrative starts with (near as we can tell) a single decision-maker in Moscow: Putin. He commands and millions obey, be it under compulsion as soldiers or, in the case of Russia’s legislators and the public, in broad agreement with his decision to launch a war. There is, then, only one person’s thinking to be explored for an understanding of what drove Russia to its murderous enterprise.
It is that one person who decided, Let’s invade Ukraine. He will have explained to himself what, in his mind, is a legitimate justification, starting with the contention that, because Ukraine isn’t a real country separate and apart from Russia, and because the people who live there are kin, Russia has the right to decide who governs Ukraine and how. And to slice and dice it if it makes the wrong choice.
Since that day in February, commentators in the West have expressed surprise. In light of the West’s robust diplomatic and economic response, they’ve even been bold enough to claim that Putin had made a strategic mistake, scored an own goal, and brought about the very result that he had been working hard for decades to prevent, which is the unification of what had to that point been an increasingly fractured West.
They surmise that, because he is said to have isolated himself from anyone who might have dissuaded him from going to war in Ukraine, he has no access to real information, be it about Ukraine’s ability to defend itself, Russia’s own military competence, or the West’s readiness to accept the economic consequences that come with the imposition of wide-ranging sanctions. That’s a guess at best.
Some even argue that the Putin who has led Russia to war is not the same Putin who has governed there for two decades. This is selective memory. Putin has shown consistently that he’s not squeamish about creating corpses. He has not hesitated to send assassins to other countries or to carpet-bomb in order to send a message to adversaries real and imagined. He also has done away with democracy in Russia.
It’s true that the primacy of its own economic interests caused the West to disregard Putin’s serial killings and, more generally, the creeping authoritarianism that has entrenched him in the Kremlin for the rest of his earthly existence. But that tells us more about Western values and priorities; it says nothing about Putin and his (by all indications, effective) methods, consistently applied over decades.
The arguments of Putin explainers presuppose — mistakenly, in my view — that he cares about anything other than the deep personal grudge he bears the West. What he wants most is for the world to take notice of his resentment, always couched in the Mob-boss lingo of disrespect for Russia. What we don’t know is whether he really does expect the West to acknowledge and cater to it.
More likely he doesn’t care. In what has become a grudge match with Zelensky, Putin will pursue his war indefinitely because there is no one to stop him. Most Russians stand behind him. His military continues to obey his orders. His country of 144 million can continue to provide far more cannon fodder than Ukraine with its 100 million fewer people. And no one is bombing Russia.
Effectively, Putin and Russia win, regardless. Even if the initial objective (said to be a lightning-quick seizure of Kyiv and installation of a government chosen by Moscow) has not been met, Russia has seized parts of Ukraine; no Russian government will ever give them back even after Putin has left the scene and irrespective of what the West does. As the West will not use force, a permanent stalemate awaits.
Russians will endure whatever economic and diplomatic consequences their war in Ukraine brings them, which will feed their (and Putin’s) schizophrenic narrative about Russian exceptionalism and grievance over Western contempt for Russia. In fact, the evidence suggests that, with his decision to invade Ukraine, Putin has achieved what he has really wanted: perpetuation of Russia’s isolation from the West.
