Feb. 24 was the day Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale military assault on neighboring Ukraine, and many lives have already been lost. In recent weeks, the U.S. and UK administrations had been warning that an attack was imminent, but was this situation avoidable?
“We see that the forces that carried out a coup in Ukraine in 2014 seized power and are holding it through sham electoral procedures,” he said.
After Ukraine gained independence from Russia in 1991, it took six years before the partition treaty was signed and negotiations for dividing military assets between them were completed. Russia’s Black Sea Fleet was allowed to operate from part of the then-Ukrainian-owned port under a lease deal that was supposed to last until 2017, when it was to have been renegotiated.
He asked whether the West had considered the implications of such an action.
“Are we supposed to go to war with the NATO bloc?” Putin said. “Has anyone given that any thought? Apparently not.”
They’re certainly giving it plenty of thought now.
Putin told the Russian people in his pre-invasion speech, “What I think is important to emphasize further is that the leading NATO countries, in order to achieve their own goals, support extreme nationalists and neo-Nazis in Ukraine, who, in turn, will never forgive the Crimean and Sevastopol residents for choosing reunification with Russia.”
None of this will comfort those caught up in the Ukrainian conflict, but it’s important to know how this juncture has been reached.
There are many parallels with the five-day, 2008 Russian invasion of Georgia, which is also situated on the Black Sea, after Russia claimed that the former Soviet republic was seeking to become a NATO member.
This time also, Putin has told his nation and the world that “our plans do not include the occupation of Ukrainian territories,” although he was almost certainly omitting its two breakaway regions mentioned above, as well as Crimea.
Just why he decided to invade at this time was made clearer when he told his fellow Russians: “Now, they [Ukrainians] also claim to acquire nuclear weapons. We will not allow this to happen.”
“Today, we have neither weapons nor security,” he told attendees in Germany.
In response, Putin told his people, “This is a real threat not just to our interests, but to the very existence of our state, its sovereignty—this is the very red line that has been talked about many times. They crossed it.”
Zelensky traveled to Munich to gain support for his beleaguered nation. But by threatening to give Ukraine nuclear strike capability once again—and this time under the aegis of NATO—he probably sealed its fate. If so, it was a diplomatic disaster of the greatest magnitude.
To understand the extreme reaction in Moscow to his threatening announcement, think back to 1963 and the horror felt in the United States when the Soviet Union tried to place medium and long-range nuclear missiles in Cuba. President John F. Kennedy received huge praise for peacefully resolving what became known as the Cuban Missile Crisis, while Putin has chosen an invasion.
However, English historian Paul Johnson noted that part of the deal that JFK made with Khrushchev was “to allow the continuation of a communist regime in Cuba in open military alliance with Soviet Russia,” which made it “an American defeat,” according to Johnson.
“The worst it had so far suffered in the Cold War,” he said.
It was an unnecessary concession, as then-Secretary of State Dean Rusk admitted.
“So long as we had the thumbscrews on Khrushchev, we should have given it another turn every day,” Rusk said.
But instead, over the ensuing years, JFK’s compromise has resulted in an incalculably high number of deaths as Moscow used its new satellite in Havana to export Marxist revolutions across South America, Central America, and Africa with impunity. Why else were Cuban forces fighting wars as far away as Algeria, Angola, Mozambique, Benin, Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, and Mali?
Putin is only too aware of this and the similar dangers his administration might face if Ukraine joins NATO—and not just of having nukes on his border. The ex-KGB man may also fear that NATO might use its new satellite nation as a base to sow revolutionary discontent across Russia.
Rather than pressing so hard for Ukraine to join NATO, the situation might have been avoided if Western powers had recognized Russia’s historic claim to Crimea and kept Ukraine as a nuclear-free zone.
NATO has thus far resisted calls to commit combat forces, as the alliance knows that such an escalation would only lead to more bloodshed, even at a conventional level. There are also no guarantees that it wouldn’t escalate to the unthinkable.