#readwise # Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine  ## Metadata - Author: [[economist.com]] - Full Title: Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine - URL: https://www.economist.com/briefing/2022/02/26/russias-invasion-of-ukraine ## Highlights - it was early on Thursday, February 24th, as dawn broke over Ukraine, that **Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, took to television to declare war on Ukraine in the form of a “special military operation” to “denazify” the country**. Within minutes explosions were heard near Kyiv’s main airport, as well as in many other cities. Video footage taken in Ukraine showed cruise missiles slicing through the air and slamming into buildings. **Mr Putin had launched what is sure to be Europe’s most intense war in a generation—possibly its largest since the second world war. It will shake his regime to its foundations, debilitate Russia’s economy and fracture Russian society. It will shatter existing assumptions about European security. It could well send shock waves through the global economy.** - **The speech** with which Mr Putin announced the war’s first shots **was blood-curdling**. **He put his aggression into the context of the West having “tried to finish us off, to destroy us completely,” after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The countries of NATO were “supporting Nazis and nationalists in Ukraine who will never forgive the people of Crimea their choice of joining with Russia.” No quarter could be given to them. And Russia “is one of the greatest nuclear powers in the world and has certain advantages in the newest weapons. Nobody should be in any doubt that any direct aggression against our country will lead to crushing and most horrible consequences for any potential aggressor.”** - A speech he gave on Monday February 21st clarified things. Mr Putin was recognising the pro-Russian “republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk in the two Ukrainian oblasts, or administrative divisions, of which those cities are the eponyms; he was also recognising their claim to the rest of the two oblasts. In doing so he triggered a first round of sanctions from Western nations and a state of emergency in Ukraine. But it was the vehemence with which he did so that shocked critically-minded Russians into reassessing their prior belief that a war which they saw as very unlikely to serve Russia’s long-term interests was, for that reason, a very unlikely war. The first part of the analysis stood; the second was thrown into doubt. That was in part because of the insight the performance offered into Mr Putin’s sense of his own position. **He came across as isolated, aggrieved and aggressive. In the past his talk of restoring the unity of a Slavic, Orthodox Russian homeland brought low by the collapse of the Soviet Union, could be treated as cover for the regime’s theft, authoritarianism and failure to deliver on its people’s aspirations. Now it looked like a fierce focus. The president presented himself not so much as an elected president but as an emperor looking for a place alongside Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Catherine the Great and Stalin, the giants in the pantheon of transformative Russian rulers and gatherers-in of Russian lands.** - The separatist “republics” which the speech was in principle about were created during the crisis which followed what is now known as Ukraine’s “Revolution of Dignity” in 2014. In November 2013 Ukraine’s parliament had been preparing to sign an “association agreement” with the EU which would have moved the country a lot closer to the union. At Mr Putin’s bidding, and with financial inducements, then-president Viktor Yanukovych, a crooked thug from Donbas, scuppered the deal. People protesting his actions were bludgeoned by the security forces in Kyiv’s Independence Square, known as Maidan. Far more protesters then took their place on Maidan, occupying it for months. The following February violence broke out; in three days 130 people were killed, most of them protesters. Mr Yanukovych fled the country. Needing to impose himself, Mr Putin moved to annex Crimea, a peninsula in the Black Sea that many Russians considered Russian rather than Ukrainian. Irregular forces in Donbas supported by Mr Putin started the movements which would become the pro-Russian “republics” in Donetsk and Luhansk. - **Mr Putin’s** new **vision**, as outlined in that February 21st speech, goes far beyond supporting the purported rights of the separatists to split their oblasts off from Ukraine. It **rejects the very idea of Ukraine as a nation state, casting it instead as “an inalienable part of our history, culture and spiritual space” sundered from Russia by the Bolsheviks at the time of the revolution and then bolstered with territory seized from Hungary, Poland and Romania under Stalin. Mr Putin asserted a Russian claim not just to Donbas, but to a gamut of “historic Russian lands” which includes the Black Sea coast all the way to Odessa.** - one of the clear messages of Mr Putin’s speech was that his enemies were all of a piece. Threatening Ukraine is not a way to bring the West to the table: it is a way to push it back from the door by expelling its Ukrainian lackeys. **Ukraine was a hostile territory run by Americans trying to take Russia down. It has to be portrayed as such because Russians can be made to hate Americans much more easily than they can Ukrainians.** - **Viktor Zolotov, a former bodyguard of Mr Putin’s who now commands hundreds of thousands of soldiers in the national guard, put Mr Putin’s position simply: “We don’t have a border with Ukraine. It is America’s border, because they are the masters there, and all these…are vassals.** - Some of Mr Zelensky’s intelligence officials thought the war which would follow might largely be confined to the existing conflict area and territory the separatists seized in 2014 but later lost, such as Slovyansk. Such a war might find more favour with Russians. That assessment differed starkly from the one offered by America and Britain. They had believed for months that Mr Putin intended something much larger. An action limited to Donbas would have given him little of value: indeed it might have thrown away a good position. While the oblasts in which the two rebel republics sit were still part of Ukraine, the separatist’s claims could be used to disrupt Ukraine’s policy. That was the point of the “Minsk accords” negotiated by Russia, Ukraine, France and Germany—the so-called Normandy group. Those accords, which brought a bout of major battles in the Donbas to an end in 2015, required that the separatists be provided with a level of autonomy and veto power that would stop the rest of Ukraine from moving towards the EU, economically, and NATO, militarily. Ukraine would be disunited, fragmented and unable to assert itself as a unitary state: just the sort of neighbour Mr Putin wants for Russia. As Bruno Tertrais of FRS, a French think-tank, puts it, **he “seeks a form of castration of Ukraine, to deprive it of its military potential”. By recognising the republics as independent Russia abandoned the route to a neutered Ukraine that the never implemented Minsk Accords had offered it on paper. Its alternative route was to insert a pro-Russian regime by force. If it did not do so, its military action would incur the heaviest sanctions the West was willing to impose without delivering the strategic realignment Mr Putin wanted; big costs for no real benefit.** - How quickly the government might fall, and whether Russian troops would need to enter Kyiv to bring it down, is hard to predict. One unknown factor is how many Ukrainians will resist—and how many will collaborate. “Meeting with Ukrainian security officials there is a widespread acknowledgment that many of their colleagues—even in some quite senior positions—are working for or sympathetic to Russia”, Jack Watling and Nick Reynolds of the Royal United Services Institute, a think-tank, wrote in a report based on interviews with Ukrainian military and intelligence officials conducted this month. They say that **last summer the FSB, Russia’s security service, created a 200-strong Ukraine team, the 9th Directorate. In December it reportedly held war-games with the special forces and airborne troops who would lead any invasion. The report also claims that Russian special forces have two companies, each of 60 to 80 men, in Kyiv and ready to strike: “Senior Ukrainian officials are clear that they expect, and have planned for, a decapitation strategy against them.”** - **The 9th Directorate has been working on lists of potential collaborators who might take on government roles—as well as people who might lead the resistance.** - **For America and Europe, Mr Putin’s war marks the decisive end to an interregnum: the apparently benign period between the end of the cold war and the return of open military competition, and confrontation, between great powers. The process began with a combative speech that Mr Putin gave at the Munich Security Conference in 2007. Now it is complete.** That has far-reaching consequences for the West in areas ranging from energy security to nuclear strategy and beyond. It also makes yet harder America’s commitment to seeing the Indo-Pacific as the area most important to its future. If the transformation to confrontation is complete, though, the conflict could still escalate. Though the target of Mr Putin’s tirade on February 21st was Ukraine, the former Soviet republics now in NATO, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, have cause for alarm over his irredentism Russia’s effective absorption of Belarus—troops that went there for exercises in February have either moved into Ukraine or stayed put—means it has a lot of firepower on the edge of the “Suwalki gap”, a strip of land which connects Poland to the Baltic states. **“If Putin succeeds in Ukraine, he might decide that he needs a land-bridge to link Kaliningrad to Belarus,” warns Stephen Hadley, who served as America’s national security adviser between 2005 and 2009. As such a land-bridge would have to go through either Lithuania or Poland, “That would mean a war between Russia and NATO.”**