Putin's goal to create new USSR

by Tom Maertens

Putin has upped the ante on Ukraine, deploying what could become an invasion force on its border, accompanied by assertions that Ukraine is inseparable from Mother Russia.

This looks like testing the waters. He sent “little green men” — Russians in unmarked green uniforms — into Crimea while denying they were Russian to see if the West would respond militarily.

When it didn’t, he dropped the mask and admitted the obvious by annexing Crimea, using a fake referendum as pretext.

Putin famously termed the collapse of the Soviet empire “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” It’s no surprise then that he appears intent on reconstituting the former USSR, including Ukraine.

He’s dominated Belarus, which has become a client state, occupied Crimea and parts of Moldova (Transnistria), Georgia (Abkhazia and South Ossetia), and manufactured and supported the Luhansk and Donestsk “People’s Republics” in SE Ukraine. Russian operations in Nagorno-Karabakh (central to the Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict) are also poorly disguised Russian expeditionary forces.

More recently, Russia has sent “peacekeeping forces” to Kazakhstan.

Expansionism is part of the Russian DNA: very few territories bordering Russia have escaped Russian invasion.

In the last century, Russia occupied Bessarabia, Northern Bukovina, Karelia, half of Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Konigsberg/Kaliningrad, East Germany, Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

It is this history that accounts for the clamor by East and Central European countries to join NATO, with its Article V mutual defense commitment, following the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the USSR.

Two rounds of enlargement in 1999 and 2004 added former Soviet bloc countries from Bulgaria to the Baltic states, eventually increasing the alliance to 30 member states.

Putin looks to be generating a foreign “crisis” to stir up patriotic sentiment and distract attention from Russia’s coronavirus pandemic and his crackdown on the democratic opposition.

In the summer of 2021, polling by the Levada Center indicated that 48% of Russians 18 to 24 years old wanted to emigrate permanently, a desire shared by almost a third of those 25 to 39.

Under the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 which returned nuclear weapons of the former Soviet Union to Russia, Moscow agreed to respect the independence and sovereignty of Ukraine (along with Belarus and Kazakhstan) within existing borders, to refrain from using economic pressure, or to threaten the use of force against the three countries. Ukraine gave up 1,900 nuclear warheads and 200+ ICBMs.

After Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, the U.S., Canada, the UK, and other countries, accused Russia of violating its commitment to Ukraine under the Budapest Memorandum.

Putin replied by claiming that Ukraine had undergone a revolution and that Russia had no obligations to the “new state” that was formed.

This illustrates the reality described by Christopher Bort, writing for the Carnegie Endowment, in “Why The Kremlin Lies.”

Russia lies, he wrote, to deflect blame for outrages in which its role has been exposed, such as the shootdown of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 in July 2014, the poisoning of former Russian military intelligence officer Sergei Skripal in the UK in March 2018, and the assassination attempt on opposition leader Alexei Navalny in August 2020.”

In addition, Putin likely approved a series of high-profile murders of Russian exiles in the West, and has conducted cyberwarfare against the U.S. and several other countries.

Currently, Russia is fabricating justifications to invade Ukraine, such as accusing them of “genocide” and claiming that U.S. military contractors are deploying chemical weapons to Eastern Ukraine.

Russian officials assert that the 100,000-200,000 Russian troops mobilized on Ukraine’s borders pose no threat to Ukraine, but NATO, which has never conducted a military operation on Russian territory, is threatening them.

The United States has committed over $2.5 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since 2014, including $450 million in 2021 alone for equipment that U.S. officials describe as defensive.

NATO, particularly France and Germany, are reluctant to supply weapons to Ukraine lest it endanger their economic ties to Russia, but Poland and the Baltics, more recent victims of Russian occupation, are warier, and even traditional neutrals such as Sweden and Finland are talking about joining the alliance.

Putin’s future moves will likely depend on what he believes he can get away with. He probably interprets the fact that Biden dropped U.S. opposition to the Russian-German Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline, at Germany’s request, as a positive sign for him.

That pipeline will deprive Ukraine of transit fees on gas to Western Europe via existing pipelines, however, and give Russia more leverage than ever over Europe’s energy supplies.

Tom Maertens worked on Soviet/Russia issues for many years, including from the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, the U.S. Consulate General in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), the U.S. Senate and the White House.