Putin’s puzzle, Ukraine and us. Let’s dive deeper into Russian thinking | Company | .a week

the photograph from Bachmut, full of mud, blood and frozen figures in uniforms, at first glance looks no different from Passchendaele in 1917. Hundreds of thousands of young men sent to the meat grinder with poor equipment and insufficient supplies seem to transport us to 1905, when the Tsarist army was losing with the underappreciated Japanese, who had previously been dismissed by cocky officers as “some half-monkeys with bamboo sticks”. Photos from Buča with the mass graves of hundreds of bound and executed civilians seem to take us back to the brutality of the Soviet NKVD in Katyn in 1940. And on top of that, tens of thousands of Ukrainian children sent to Russia for adoption and re-education – here in Central and Eastern Europe we have a historical the parallel with the rampages of the Nazis and the Bolsheviks imposes itself.

The Russians themselves are constantly changing their public declamations of the causes and aims of the war, and many of their explanations would make one laugh heartily if thousands of human tragedies were not taking place in the background every day. However, Russians do not show the typical signs of insanity, so let’s leave the theories about Ukrainian Nazism or Satanism and try to delve deeper into Russian thinking. After the initial shock of the war rage, a group of Putin-Verstehers has once again formed in the West, who are trying to understand the Russian president and explain his behavior with the alleged expansionism of the West and the expansion of NATO to the East. Let’s try for a moment to accept their premise that states cannot freely decide how to ensure their security and what defense community they wish to belong to, and see how well their theories resonate with the Russian narrative.

It is clear that for months and probably years prior to February 24th, a process was going on in President Putin’s mind and soul that has resulted in the current war tumult. There is a lot of speculation in this area, so let’s stick to the facts. After an anxious Putin took refuge in a strict quarantine from the coronavirus, he decided to write an essay on the topic of Russian-Ukrainian relations. Putin does not have a historical education (he is a graduate of the law school and the KGB spy school), but history is a great hobby of his, and the essay itself testifies to the fact that he has a relatively rich overview in this area. However, he always carefully interprets individual facts in the spirit of Russian romanticism, revisionism and imperialism.

an empire without borders

There is a clear idealization of the common past of Russians and Ukrainians, with any Ukrainian national feeling considered a conspiracy of foreign forces and misguided people that will lead to the oppression of minorities. There is Russian supremacy and the idea that the Ukrainian nation does not know how to govern itself, so it has no right to exist; after all, his statehood is said to be based only on mirage and on the distortion of history. It is essentially an idea expressed in seven thousand more benign words by the Hungarian interwar politician János Esterházy in the address of the then Czechoslovakia: “We have always viewed the Czechoslovak Republic as an unviable conglomerate of human malice and stupidity, and we knew very well that this artificial and mistakenly labeled as a state an abomination has no right to exist.” In this extensive essay, which Putin undoubtedly put many hours of his own work into, from sourcing to writing, there are barely two mentions of NATO, both of which are somewhat incidental, neither forming a separate sentence. Similarly, in his lengthy “war” speech on the eve of Russia’s attack on Ukraine, Putin mentions Ukraine joining NATO once. Would Putin really not mention the issue over which, according to Western Putin-Verstehers, he decided to start the war at all in his most important speeches?

“What Havel sadly noted as our problem with Russia, Putin sees as Russian prerogative”

Last but not least, there is the annexation of four Ukrainian regions, which Russia more or less managed to conquer at the beginning of the invasion, which has absolutely nothing to do with the demand that Ukraine not join NATO. And there is also a published phone call between Putin and French President Macron, who promised Putin three days before the start of the invasion that he was starting to negotiate with President Biden about their bilateral meeting, where they could also discuss the future status of Ukraine or the revision of the Minsk agreements. Of course, that didn’t happen, because the very next day Putin recognized the independence of the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Luhansk People’s Republic (without mentioning it to the trusting Macron the day before), and in the next two days the tanks started moving towards Kiev.

At the same time, Ukraine’s entry into NATO was certainly not knocking on the door at that moment, and Putin’s successor probably would not have lived to see it either. Although Ukraine had it as a goal in its constitution, in order for it to be realistically in play, it would have to be seriously considered by the states of the alliance. As the English say: “There are two to tango”, two sides are needed to dance, and this has certainly not been the case in recent years. First, Ukraine had a disputed border, which Putin himself made disputed. Second, above all, Germany did not show the least willingness to let its Ostpolitik, which had been built up for decades, and its access to cheap Russian gas be defeated by the Ukrainians. Thirdly, many others also had a problem with Ukraine joining NATO, for example the French, who would undermine their vision of a Francocentric security architecture in Europe, or the Hungarians, who argued with the Ukrainians for a long time about their language law and blocked all Ukrainian cooperation with the EU and NATO.