Literally within minutes of completing his television address, Putin sent “peacekeepers” into eastern Ukraine. His claim to these areas-for they will be Russian satrapies, and not “independent” in any meaningful way-is a claim to be the ultimate arbiter of former Soviet borders, including those now within NATO. This specific form of meddling in sovereign nations, too, is a Soviet tradition, as the Poles and others would remind us. In so doing, Putin has effectively partitioned Ukraine. At the end of his speech, Putin recognized the Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine, the “people’s republics” of Lugansk and Donetsk, as independent entities. The West, in this story, is motivated not to seek peace and security, but to undermine Russia, and Putin has cast himself as the beleaguered Russian prophet who must subvert the evil plans drawn against his people.īack here on Earth, however, we have a more pressing problem. In short, Putin is now embracing a Russian tradition of paranoia, an inferiority complex that sees Moscow as both a savior of other nations and a victim of great conspiracies, a drama in which Russia is both strong enough to be feared and weak enough to be threatened. He asserts that Western hostility is permanent (perhaps because it would be too painful to his ego to admit that most people in the West, if given the choice, would not think about Russia or its leaders at all). He is prepared for sanctions, which he says will come no matter what Russia does. Putin left no room for negotiation with the Biden administration. Even without any formal pretext at all.” This is nonsense, and either Putin knows it (which is likely) or he has become so detached from reality that he has come to believe it (which is not impossible). Putin then suggested that international sanctions are “blackmail”-a word used almost daily in the old Soviet press about the West-and are aimed at weakening Russia and undermining its existence as a nation. Among the Russian president’s various other quirks, the man knows how to hold a grudge. He even accused Bill Clinton of denigrating him personally when Putin asked, more than 20 years ago, about the possibility of including Russia in NATO. He accused Ukraine, for example, of developing nuclear weapons, a play right out of the old Soviet handbook, when Kremlin leaders would accuse the former West Germany of developing nuclear arms to serve their “revanchist” plans for war. Putin’s claims are hardly different from Saddam Hussein’s rewriting of Middle East history when Iraq tried to erase Kuwait from the map.įor most of the speech, Putin was drinking one shot after another straight from a bottle of pure Soviet-era moonshine. Putin’s foray into history was nothing less than a demand that only Moscow-and only the Kremlin’s supreme leader-has the right to judge what is or is not a sovereign state (as I recently discussed here). Putin, however, went even further back in history: “Ukraine never had a tradition of genuine statehood.”īy that kind of historical reasoning, few nations in Europe, or anywhere else, are safe. That is also true of what we now call the Russian Federation. It is true that Soviet leaders created the 1991 borders. “As a result of Bolshevik policy,” Putin intoned, “Soviet Ukraine arose, which even today can with good reason be called ‘Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s Ukraine.’ He is its author and architect.” Rather, he was suggesting that none of the new states that emerged from the Soviet collapse- except for Russia -were real countries. For all his Soviet nostalgia, the Russian president is right that his Soviet predecessors intentionally created a demographic nightmare when drawing the internal borders of the U.S.S.R., a subject I’ve explained at length here.īut Putin’s point wasn’t that the former subjects of the Soviet Union needed to iron out their differences. Putin began with a history lesson about how and why Ukraine even exists. Read our ongoing coverage of the Russian invasion in UkraineĮven discounting Putin’s delivery, the speech was, in many places, simply unhinged. Teenagers, of course, do not have hundreds of thousands of troops and nuclear weapons. He had the presence not of a confident president, but of a surly adolescent caught in a misadventure, rolling his eyes at the stupid adults who do not understand how cruel the world has been to him. Putin’s slumped posture and deadened affect led me to suspect that he is not as stable as we would hope. He went to war against Ukraine in 2014 now he has declared war against the international order of the past 30 years. Russian President Vladimir Putin, in a long speech full of heavy sighs and dark grievances, made clear today that he has chosen war. Sign up for Tom’s newsletter, Peacefield, here.
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