Dispatch 001: Why Ukraine? Why now?
The Top Takeaways
Ukraine is the cultural birthplace of modern Russian Slavs.
Ukraine is a vital buffer state Putin wants between itself and an invasion from Western Europe.
US and NATO allies are slow to move on Ukraine because NATO countries rely on massive amounts of Russian oil.
Ukraine as the cultural birthplace of modern Russian Slavs
To Putin, it makes no historical sense for a city that is the cultural birthplace of what he sees as modern Russia, Kievan Rus, to belong to another country.
To Americans this would be as if cities like Philadelphia and Boston, crucial to the American Revolution, belonged to another country like, say, Canada.
This why Russians demeaningly refer to Ukrainians as Little Russians or confused Poles.
To read more on Kievan Rus, click here.
Ukraine as a vital buffer state
The Russian psyche is damaged from three invasions that all took the same road to Moscow: Napoleon in 1815, Germany in 1914 and Hitler in 1942.
Russia’s greatest asset is its mass. Napoleon, Germany and Hitler were defeated the same way: retreat, retreat and retreat into the depths of Russia until the Russian winter kills the enemy.
The more depth Russia has, the larger the invasion you can weather.
After WWII Stalin’s core objective was to achieve maximal strategic depth by occupying Eastern European countries like East Germany, Poland, Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltics.
When the USSR fell in 1990, so did its strategic depth. A vital first step to reasserting Russia’s dominance will be to reclaim these buffer states through soft power and corruption, as was the case in Belarus and, Ukraine (at least during the 1990s and 2000s).
When soft power and corruption fail, hard power and hybrid warfare will do like we are seeing today.
NATO’s expansion into Russia’s former buffer lands was seen as politically convenient by the West (US + European allies) but as an existential threat to Russia’s security by Putin.
Putin could tolerate smaller weaker countries like the Baltic states of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania, each no bigger than the State of Connecticut, but for Ukraine, a country larger than Texas and a population of 40 million people to join this alliance, along with its historical and cultural significance to Moscow was unbearable.
Read more here about Russia’s drive to reclaim former USSR buffer lands.
Why are the EU and US dragging their feet on sanctioning Russia?
The irony of NATO members is that is their alliance’s sole purpose is to fight their sole provider of natural gas, Russia.
The largest consumers of Russian gas are also some of NATO’s more significant military and economic powers like Germany.
For over a decade the Kremlin has used cheap gas to buy influence and drive subtle wedges between NATO and EU member states. Unlike the EU or NATO which requires multiple heads of state with competing egos and interests to be in alignment to make a decision, Russian only requires Putin.
The Kremlin is likely banking on EU, NATO and US dithering and indecisiveness to buy itself time to wrap up its offensive in Ukraine.
Read more on Russia’s gas power in the EU here.