1 Year Of War: Why Putin Didn’t Invade Ukraine Because Of “NATO Expansion”
On 1 December 1991, a referendum in Ukraine showed that 90% of the voters were in favour of the secession of the country from the Soviet Union. This sparkled a series of independence declarations in the communist giant, Ukraine included, and the subsequent formation of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). For then President Mikhail Gorbachev, who tried to sustain an unbearable and destined to fail groundwork until the very last minute, the Soviet Union entered in collapse. On a remarkable 25 December 1991 Christmas night, Gorbachev gave a speech directly from the Kremlin and broadcasted it all over the world. In his speech, he resigned from his position of President of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. He addressed the world with this statement: “We are open to the world, we are no longer interfering in other countries’ affairs”.
Gorbachev speech made a remembrance of the Glasnost and Perestroika policies, which made considerable opening towards a democratic socialism form in the late years of the USSR. The rise of Boris Yeltsin to power in Russia approached the long-standing Cold War rival United States to far better relations alongside Western powers. One thing, exceptionally, was met with disregard by Yeltsin: the expansion of NATO.
Since the end of the Cold War, the USA tried to approach as many European countries of the former East Side of the “Iron Curtain” as possible to better relations and cooperation. This was a major turn in East-West relations when Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000. A vociferous nationalist and an idoneous far-right populist, Putin have been trying to restore the Russian influence zone of the old Soviet Union, not because he believes in communism, but because he believes in an other form of authoritarianism. In a speech for a Russian nationalist documentary film last year, he described the collapse of the USSR as the “disintegration of historical Russia under the name of the Soviet Union”. Putin never accepted the fact that some of the former Soviet republics existed even before the establishment of the communist giant. And this includes Ukraine, which he falselly claims was created by Vladimir Lenin.
Prior to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Putin considered the claims that he would invade its neighbor as “fear-mongering”. Now that the act was in fact consumed, he has even denied the right of Ukraine to exist. At first, he claimed the “special military operation” carried by Russia in the country aimed to protect the people and the separatists of the Donbas region and demilitarize Ukraine, which he blamed for the tensions against his country because of the NATO Membership Action Plan request made by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Then, he insisted that Russia was aiming to “denazify” Ukraine, using examples of neonazi groups such as the Azov Batallion, which was integrated to the National Guard in 2014. When he ran out from all the excuses for the invasion, his Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sergey Lavrov, finally admited that the main target of the invasion was to overthrow the Ukrainian government.
Nevertheless, Putin blamed NATO expansion on the last years to the East as if this was the main cause of the turmoil between East and West. But Putin is miles away from being right. The main reason for the invasion of Ukraine is that Putin can’t handle democratic regimes.
The early 2000’s so-called “Colour Revolutions” in post-soviet Eurasia region helps us to understand why Putin’s ambitions have been so derogatory towards former communist republics. Ukraine, Georgia, the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and Kyrgyzstan are examples of countries that went through dramatic regime changes after pro-democracy demonstrations. Russia and China, however, saw these movements as “machinations by the United States and other Western powers”.
Today, the 24 February 2023, marks the first year’s anniversary of this bloody war. However, the conflict against Ukraine did not start last year, and Putin’s ambitions and imperialist expansion through the region are not exclusive to Ukraine. Since Putin took office as president in 2000 for the first time, Russia has been constantly involved in several wars designed as annexeation or proxy wars. From the very first day Putin began its term, Russia was already involved in the Second Chechen War, which lasted until 2009, with Moscow’s government regaining control over Chechnya’s territory. Such victory against the separatists was possible through the cooperation between Moscow and the irredentist Chechen Republic’s current president, Razman Kadyrov, and his father, Akhmad. Known as a brutal and inhuman politician, Akhmad Kadyrov fought alongside the separatists in the First Chechen War (1994–1996), which awarded de facto independence to the region at the time, but then in 1999 he switched sides to fight with Russian government against his former compatriots. After his assassination in 2004, his son Razman continued his policies of brutality and human rights violations, using kidnapping, mass killings and tortures as a means of regaining control for Russia over Chechnya. The war resulted in at least 30,000 civilian deaths, according to the Amnesty International.
In 2008, it was Russia’s neighbor Georgia’s time to feel the wrath of the bear. As tensions between the Caucasus country and Russia began to deteriorate, the self-proclamed republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia declared independence with the help of a Russian invasion to secure their self-determination. The 5-day war was responsible for at least 600 civilian casualties and up to 162,000 people displaced.
In 2014, it was Ukraine’s turn. After a series of protests known as the “Euromaidan”, in which people were demonstrating for more democracy, transparency and mainly for the adherence of Ukraine to the Ukraine-European Union Association Agreement, the then pro-Russia president Victor Yanukovych was deposed. This sparkled a turmoil between Russia and Ukraine, leading to the subsequent Russian invasion of Crimea after a non-internationally recognized referendum for the incorporation of the region to Russia. 8 years later, Russia decided to launch a full-scale invasion of Eastern Ukraine to back separatist groups and militias.
Russia is a country that actually never experienced a full democratic regime. By the time the Soviet Union collapsed, Russians could finally live in a democracy when Boris Yeltsin took office, but this was far from becoming a reality. The flaws in Yeltsin’s regime combined with the long Putin rule over the country may put in one’s mind if Russia will ever experience free and fair elections alongside free media, free association rights and free speech. And for Vladimir Putin, when his neighbors start wanting change to become free liberal democracies, his own authoritarian regime becomes threatened. Putin believes that Russia should be the only great power to have a sphere of influence over the East Side of the former “Iron Curtain” today, even though the Cold War ended more than 30 years ago. And this means that Russia must exercise its own jurisdiction over and make political decisions for its neighbor countries. When Ukraine started signaling through president Volodymyr Zelenskyy that the country would want to join NATO and the European Union, Russia immediately mobilized troops to its Ukrainian border.
And this leads us to the first aforementioned Putin’s lie to the invasion of Ukraine: the NATO expansion.
Since its creation in 1949, NATO has become increasingly enlarged, especially after the collapse of the USSR. The group was founded by 12 initial members, and up to date it has 30 members. 11 of these members joined the alliance after Putin took office in Russia, and all of them are either former Soviet republics or former eastern European communist republics. After the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Finland and Sweden, two very near countries to Russia, decided to apply for the alliance’s membership in July 2022. In September, Ukraine officially made its application. In October, Bosnia Herzegovina and Georgia informed NATO their aspiration to join. All of these countries share two similarities: their proximity to Russia and their desire to keep their territorial integrity. They know that staying close to the Russian sphere of influence means that their democratic regimes and their territories are under constant threat. But this toxic relationship between NATO and president Putin was not like this in the past. Putin even said in 2001 after asked about NATO’s enlargement to three Baltic nations — Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia — that “we [Russia] of course are not in a position to tell people what to do. We cannot forbid people to make certain choices if they want to increase the security of their nations in a particular way.” This kind of thought has been changed by the Russian president as he hardened his regime through the years, signaling that a NATO membership, alongside joining the European Union, would mean that Moscow could lose its very political dominance over these territories.
The second big lie that Putin uses as a justification for the current invasion is the “denazification” of Ukraine. Although some neo-nazi datachments really fight alongside the Ukrainian Armed Forces, the discourse of “denazifying” the country is a nonsense, as if the whole country was composed of radical far-right Hitler worshipers when, in fact, the elected government is a democratic centrist regime with a jew as president, while its Russian neighbor is commanded by a far-right populist who massively explores propaganda and political persecution of opponents. Furthermore, Putin seems to try to use this kind of discourse to gather support from other populist and even communist countries, while he finances actual neo-nazi groups in his own country and in invaded nations to fight for him. Such groups, like the Wagner Group, the Rusich Group, the Russian Imperial Legion, the Sparta Battalion, the Vostok Brigade and the Russian National Unity, alongside other many militias, are all neo-nazi groups financed by the Russian government to fight in Ukraine and other regions (like Syria), and they are known as de facto Putin’s private armies.
Since the war began, Ukraine has made several important advances in dispelling Russian army from its territory, like the reconquer of Kherson region. But to make more advances and to prevent other mass killings such as the Bucha massacre, Western powers must continue to support politically and militarily the Ukrainian government, while trying to persuade less Western-close regimes to engage not only in the fight, but also in the condemnation at international level from the United Nations to boycotts of Russian products and assets. While some countries are still unwilling to take part on this conflict, trying to pose as neutral in a clear situation of oppression, the boundaries between far-left and far-right policies were never so thin. The proximity between Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, the president of China, can illustrate that. After a year of the bloodiest war Europe has ever seen since the Yugoslav Wars (and this will certainly get worse than these wars), China is reportedly negotiating an arms supply to Russia. Now it is time for gathering all the support necessary to back Ukraine, and this means by military action or peaceful negotiations in which the invaded country can retake through international pressure its integrity.
