Why is the war in Ukraine happening?
"I read the news and there are details about battles, weapon transfers, human interest stories, etc. But I want to know the big picture. Why is this happening?"
Since my academic scholarship is about the media and American foreign relations, friends and family often ask me questions (or sometimes just complain to me) about the state of the media. They regularly say, “I just don’t know who to trust” or “I don’t know where to go to get good information.”
This is unfortunate, if understandable. The truth is that we’re living through a golden age of good information and thoughtful analysis. However, admittedly, it can be hard to find. You have to know where to look. Because, in addition to all the good stuff out there, there’s also a lot of poorly contextualized information, overly ideological analyses, and just plain old bad takes too…to say nothing of all the grifters and the hacks.
It can be difficult and time-consuming to separate the wheat from the chaff. And most people don’t know where to start, given how much the media environment has changed in recent years.
This Substack is my effort to help people sift the wheat from the chaff. This is the first post in what I hope will be a series where I try to answer questions that friends and family have asked me as they try to navigate the confusion and cacophony of our current media environment.
“Why is the war in Ukraine happening?” a friend asks.
"I read the news and there are details about battles, weapon transfers, human interest stories, etc. But I want to know more about the big picture. Why is this happening?"
The short answer is that Vladimir Putin decided that Russia should invade Ukraine.
Unlike most other countries, the Russian President has consolidated power so tightly in his circle of close advisors and longtime friends, all of whom owe their positions to Putin, that there are no effective checks on his decision-making power. In contrast, the American President needs Congress to approve a declaration of war or an Authorization for Use of Military Force, and the paramount leader of the People’s Republic of China is constrained by the Chinese Politburo. In most other countries, particularly nuclear powers, political and military power is more diffuse and, perhaps more importantly, it alternates more frequently. President Putin has been in power as President or Prime Minister for over two decades. In Russia today Putin calls all the shots.
Vladimir Putin wanted to invade Ukraine and so he did. Because he could.
But that then raises a different question: Why did Putin want to invade Ukraine?
Fortunately for us, this question is very easy to answer. Putin has told us. And on more than one occasion. Last July, Putin published an extremely long essay entitled ”On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians“ (linked here in the English translation on the Kremlin website), in which he argued that “Russians and Ukrainians are one people.” They were only separated because of some poor political decisions a century ago, from Putin’s point of view. In the early years of the Soviet Union, Lenin’s policy on nationalism resulted in a separation of Ukraine and Russia into different political units—a fatal mistake from Putin’s perspective.
He ends that meandering historical essay with the assertion, “I am confident that true sovereignty of Ukraine is possible only in partnership with Russia.” It is something that Putin has said repeatedly over the years: “Ukraine is not a real country.” This is a direct repudiation of how most of the world sees Ukraine. In the debate at the United Nations, only five countries voted not to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (Russia, Belarus, Eritrea, North Korea, and Syria). Most of the world considers that Ukraine is, in fact, a real country.
On February 21, 2022, in the lead-up to the invasion, Putin gave another speech in which he recognized the independence and sovereignty of the Donetsk People's Republic and the Lugansk People's Republic. In it, he restated his earlier message, “Ukraine is not just a neighbouring country for us. It is an inalienable part of our own history, culture and spiritual space.” Ukraine is linked to Russia by its shared religion, language, and ethnicity: Ukraine is part of the Russkiy Mir (Russian World). On a very basic level, for Putin, Ukraine belongs with Russia. “[T]he people living in the south-west of what has historically been Russian land have called themselves Russians and Orthodox Christians.” In that speech delivered on the eve of the invasion, Putin went on to sketch his personal interpretation of the history of Ukraine up to the present day, focusing on NATO’s expansion eastward, Western hypocrisy, the presence of radical nationalists and even neo-Nazis in Ukraine, and the potential that nuclear weapons could be brought into Ukraine.
From Putin’s perspective, Ukraine’s independence was a temporary setback for Russian unity in a bad moment when Russia was weak, one which NATO only took advantage of. In its eastern expansion, NATO (and the United States in particular) has broken promises and engaged in rank hypocrisy. According to Putin, the first President Bush promised that NATO would not expand eastward after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but by 2008, the second President Bush was promising that Ukraine (and Georgia) would eventually enter NATO. This was a step too far for Russia because it would bring the military alliance not just up to Russia’s doorstep but into the historic heartland of Russian civilization. Kiev (in Russian; “Kyiv” is the Ukrainian transliteration) was where the first Russian ruler converted to Orthodoxy in 988.
This is Putin’s understanding of history. While many Russian-speakers in the east and south of Ukraine might agree with him, to say nothing of the vast majority of Russians in Russia itself, the majority of Ukrainians would disagree with this interpretion of history.
Ukrainian nationalists including current president Volodymyr Zelenskyy (who is himself a Russian-speaking Ukrainian from the east of the country), would point out that Ukraine has its own long history, much of it separate from Russia. The Ukrainian language and culture and its political and cultural development are not the same as Russia’s. As Zelenskyy put it in a speech he gave in Russian directed directly at Russian citizens in a failed last-ditch effort to avoid war, “we are not part of one whole. You cannot swallow us up. We are different. But this difference is not a reason for enmity. We want to determine our own course and build our own history: peacefully, calmly, and honestly.”
In essence, at the heart of the current war in Ukraine is a conflict between an revanchist imperial power (Russia) and a nationalist movement of a people that used to be part of that empire (Ukraine). The imperial power cannot concede that a separate nation has emerged from it and begun to chart its own course. There are two different understandings of history and two different understandings of Ukrainian identity.
The only other comparable situation in the world right now is Serbia’s relationship with Kosovo. The founding moment of the Serbian nation, the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, occurred in an area of the Balkans where Kosovar Albanians are now a majority. Kosovo has declared independence, but it has not been universally recognized. Serbia struggles to accept that Kosovo could be a separate country, even if Serbs are no longer a majority there.
Of course, Serbia doesn’t extend over 11 time zones or have nuclear weapons…
The way in which the different countries’ medias have covered the events of the past decade have only compounded the conflict. Ukrainians and Russians live in different information universes.
If you get your media from Russian sources, you believe that the 2013-14 Euromaidan protests and revolution that resulted in the removal of pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych, was all part of one big plot cooked up by American intelligence agencies. If you get your media from Ukrainian or Western sources, then you believe it was a spontaneous uprising of the Ukrainian people. If you get your media from Russian sourcs, the resulting unrest in the eastern and southern parts of Ukraine against the new government was spontaneous. If you get your media from Ukrainian or Western sources, you believe that the “little green men” (the soldiers with no insignia who took over Crimea in 2014) were Russian soldiers and the resulting referendum in Crimea was flawed. There is a similar division in outlook over whether the People’s Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk/Luhansk in the east were spontaneous rebellions by Russian-speaking Ukrainians (the Russian view) or largely instigated by undercover Russian soldiers (the Ukrainian and Western view).
When Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine a month ago, he framed it as Russian protection for separatists in the east of Ukraine who were being unfairly persecuted by Ukrainian nationalists and neo-Nazis, subject to “genocide.” Of course, the Russian military build-up did not just occur in the east near Donetsk and Lugansk/Luhansk. No, the build-up was on three sides of Ukraine: the north, east, and south. This was revealed by the United States in an unusual tactic: mass declassification of intelligence to disprove Russian propaganda.
Putin’s war aims included taking the Ukrainian capital, decapitating the government, and installing a Russia-friendly ruler. Putin sees himself as a world-historical Russian ruler whose mission is to reassemble the separated parts of the Russian World. Putin’s Russian World would follow traditional values, anchored in Russian language and culture, and the Russian Orthodox Church, and would culminate in the restoration of Russia to its rightful place as one of the world’s great powers.
In his planning for the invasion of Ukraine, Putin made a series of miscalculations. Most notably, he underestimated Ukrainian national identity, its military prowess, and the extent of Western sanctions. A month in, the invasion of Ukraine has settled into a war of attrition, a bloody and horrific stalemate whose end is nowhere near in site.
Further Reading
In 2019, two journalists from the Financial Times interviewed Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin. They raise several important points that are deeply relevant to the current war.
For an interesting outside perspective on Putin’s thinking, here is a Der Spiegel with Ivan Krastev, a noted political scentist: “Putin Lives in Historic Analogies and Metaphors.”
Back in January before the invasion began, Serhii Plokhy, perhaps the greatest living historian of Ukraine, wrote an analysis of the buildup for war for the Financial Times and its historical background.
If you’re interested in Putin’s recurring allegation that the United States promised at the end of the Cold War that NATO would expand “not one inch” to the east, then check out Mary Elise Sarotte’s new book Not One Inch. After a long fight to declassify relevant files, she obtained access that no other historian has ever managed to obtain.
If you want the short version, Sarotte appears on NPR’s Fresh Air last week and hit many of the main points from the book.