Putin’s march of folly

Throughout his Valdai appearance, Putin struggled to hide the fact that what he really cares about is avoiding a “strategic defeat” in Ukraine. In fact, Russia has already suffered a strategic defeat, inflicted not by the West or even by Ukraine, but by Putin himself. For the past two decades, his own myopic, destructive policies have forced Ukraine to turn toward the West for support and solidarity.

One of Putin’s first blunders came after Ukraine’s 2004 presidential election, when his ham-fisted attempt to choose the winner ended up provoking the Orange Revolution, which swept the moderate former central banker Viktor Yushchenko into the Ukrainian presidency. Putin has been trying to exert influence over the country ever since.

But the pattern is clear: time after time, the Kremlin’s heavy-handed efforts have backfired, leaving Ukrainians even more determined to align themselves with the West. Contrary to what some Western commentators and Kremlin propagandists claim, this was never a case of the West expanding eastward as part of some malevolent plot. It was the Ukrainians who were making the strategic moves, which reflected Putin’s efforts to curtail their sovereignty.

In 2008, proposals to extend NATO membership to Ukraine clearly lacked the necessary support, as both France and Germany opposed the idea at the time. Ukraine took the hint and in 2010 reaffirmed its neutral status as a means of keeping Putin at bay.

But the situation changed again in 2013, after Putin pressured Ukraine’s pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, to reject an Association Agreement with the European Union. Closer trade ties with Europe would have boosted Ukraine’s economy and curtailed corruption by requiring it to adapt EU legal norms; but Yanukovych, in exchange for a €15 billion bailout by Russia and lower gas prices, acquiesced to Putin’s demands and abandoned the agreement. In response, Ukrainians took to the streets in what would become the Euromaidan uprising, and Yanukovych soon fled for Russia in the dead of night.

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Putin’s response made his intentions all too clear. He deployed Russian special forces — “little green men” whose uniforms bore no identifying insignias — in Crimea, a part of Ukraine since 1954, and then illegally annexed it. Left with no other choice, Ukraine responded by ditching neutrality, seeking NATO membership, and moving forward with the EU agreement. Moreover, NATO, itself feeling threatened by Putin’s brazen land grab, stationed forces in its Eastern European member states for the first time.

These were perfectly understandable responses to Putin’s acts of aggression. Again, the West was not trying to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia; Putin was doing it to himself. By the early 2020s, with Ukraine moving even closer toward the West, he recognised the grim consequences of his blunders and decided to put an end to the issue. His goal in launching a full-scale invasion was either to transform Ukraine into a Belarus-like satrapy or eliminate it as a nation-state altogether.

It soon became obvious that Putin had miscalculated yet again. He believed that a quick “special military operation” would be enough to topple Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s administration and install a Kremlin-friendly regime in Kyiv. Instead, his forces encountered a determined nation that they were not prepared to fight.

Almost three years later, Russia controls only around 10% more of Ukraine’s territory than it did in 2014, when it grabbed 7%. It is a pathetic result, especially considering that the occupied areas have largely been destroyed, with probably only half of their pre-2014 population remaining.

Putin’s aim is still to take full control of Ukraine and recreate the Russian Empire. But this effort will fail. Although Bolshevik forces re-established control of Ukraine after the Russian Civil War in the early 1920s, even Lenin understood that Ukraine was and must remain a separate political entity. And while Putin has rejected Lenin’s belief as a grave error, it was Stalin who made Ukraine a separate member of the United Nations.

With Putin continuing his war of aggression, the casualties will probably continue to mount to around 10,000 per week. But the only certain outcome of his misadventure will be the hatred that Ukrainians now bear toward Russia. This will have long-lasting consequences, and it already represents a major strategic defeat for Russia. Responsibility for the situation starts and ends with Putin. The West could never have achieved what Putin has: Ukraine’s total alienation from Russia.