Putin shocks the world: He not only recognizes parts of eastern Ukraine as independent states. He also warns NATO against expanding. And he makes it clear that sanctions do not deter Russia.
In his office in the Kremlin, dressed in a fine suit, Kremlin boss Vladimir Putin launches a frontal attack on Ukraine during a television speech.
The country only exists thanks to Russia, thanks to the communist revolutionary leader Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who drew the borders more than 100 years ago; he is an author, architect of Ukraine, says Putin. And yet it is turning away from this history, having allowed itself to be made into the “puppet regime” of the USA, where radical nationalists and neo-fascists pursued anti-Russian policies.
“Today’s Ukraine was created entirely by Russia,” he says. During the almost hour-long speech, Putin at times sounded like he was denying the country’s right to exist, like he wanted to take over the whole of Ukraine, with a raised index finger and metal in his voice. In the end, he recognizes the “Luhansk and Donetsk People’s Republics” as independent states – and, to the horror of Ukraine and the West, sends Russian soldiers there “to keep the peace”. And he is once again shifting the borders in Europe – eight years after the annexation of the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea.
Putin is undeterred
This not only marks the end of around seven years of talks on the implementation of the peace plan negotiated in Minsk with Franco-German mediation. The decision also plunges Russia deeper into the crisis with the West. But Putin has long made it clear that he doesn’t give a damn about Western sanctions. He thinks that the US and the EU always find an excuse for punitive measures. But in the end they made the country stronger.
After the annexation of Crimea, Putin made it clear that Russia would not change its behavior as a result of pressure from the West. Then as now, the 69-year-old explains his actions with the protection of the Russian-speaking world. In his speech he speaks of a “genocide” in eastern Ukraine. A genocide against the Russians in Ukraine? After his meeting with Putin a week ago, Chancellor Olaf Scholz criticized this as a “violent” and “wrong” word.
But Moscow’s leadership insists that there is no other way because of Ukrainian crimes against the Russian-speaking population in Donbass. With the recognition, Putin is doing what not only the pro-Russian separatists are asking of him. The Russian parliament had also passed a call to Putin to recognize Luhansk and Donetsk as sovereign states.
Moscow wants to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO
It’s the same tactic Russia used to punish Georgia after a brief war in 2008. Like Ukraine now over its territories, the ex-Soviet republic then lost control over the regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Since then, they too have been eking out their existence as “countries” dependent on Russia. Russia has stationed thousands of soldiers in the “independent states”.
And as now, the step was also considered an attempt to stop a state from joining NATO by violating the territorial integrity of a state. Moscow’s calculation is that the Western military alliance will not accept any states that have open wounds in the form of unresolved territorial conflicts. Shortly before his decision on Ukraine, Putin also made it clear that he definitely wanted to prevent the country from becoming a member of NATO.
Putin sees Russians and Ukrainians as one people
Even today, Putin continues, NATO is using Ukraine for a large number of operations, and the West is arming the country militarily — thereby threatening Russia’s security. And the former intelligence chief claims there is a risk that the country, which was equipped with nuclear weapons in Soviet times, will fall back on the old knowledge and once again strive for nuclear weapons.
Putin sounds like he’s far from done with the neighboring country. He has long been suspected in the West of wanting to build a new empire 30 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He has repeatedly referred to Russians and Ukrainians as one nation, much to Kiev’s annoyance. In July, he wrote an essay on the “Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” which was greeted with horror in the West. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy categorically rejected this.
Russia wanted to “stop fratricide”
In the article, Putin complained that Ukraine is now making “Russophobia” state policy and being controlled by the West. Accordingly, the “creation of an ethnically clean Ukrainian state that is aggressively positioned against Russia is comparable in terms of its consequences to the use of a weapon of mass destruction against us”. Against this background, he said that the people in Donetsk and Luhansk had taken up arms “to protect their homes, their language, their lives”.
“Russia has done everything to stop the fratricide,” Putin wrote in the summer. This time, too, he offers himself as the protector of this unit – and criticizes a corrupt elite and super-rich oligarchs in Ukraine who use aid money for themselves but leave the people in poverty. He has long criticized the country for presenting itself as a “victim of external aggression” in order to attract Western attention and money.
As early as July, Putin traced a common history spanning several centuries. He also derives Russia’s interest in the neighbor from this. The US, on the other hand, according to Putin, is only using Ukraine as a pawn to put pressure on Russia to weaken it geopolitically. Once again, Putin’s speech is a reckoning with the West and US politics – and a threat to Ukraine if it doesn’t comply.