Over the past few years, events leading up to, but now including the current fighting in Ukraine, have forced us to revisit our previous studies of Russian and Eastern European history and politics. This came just as we had begun to believe the Cold War was finally over, and we could move on to examine other critically important issues.
It follows from those two basic understandings that any Russian policy and its military and diplomatic acts designed to avenge some kind of great wrong that has been committed against an aggrieved Russia, and that Ukraine is not a real nation and only deserves a subsidiary place in Vladimir Putin’s imagined greater Russia, must be dismissed as dangerous delusions. Nevertheless, these delusions have been delivering consequences since 24 February 2022.
From the perspective of those nations, having finally freed themselves from decades of Soviet domination, self-interest and national sentiment led them — and eventually others such as Albania, Montenegro and Macedonia — to seek the protective embrace of Nato membership. Those accessions to Nato evinced few protests from Russian leaders, then. Moreover, there was no real drumbeat among US policymakers to enlist these nations into the alliance.
In truth, more than an interest in Nato membership, the real deal for Ukraine following the 2014 Maidan Revolution had been the hope of an eventual opportunity to gain membership, or at least formal association, with the EU, as part of its drive to modernise its economy, reform its economic and financial structures and further integrate that economy with the West.
“The Ukrainian nation exists. The results of the daily plebiscite are clear, and the earnest struggle is evident. No society should have to resist a Russian invasion in order to be recognized. It should not have taken the deaths of dozens of journalists for us to see the basic truths that they were trying to report before and during the invasion. That it took so much effort for the West to see Ukraine at all reveals the challenge that Russian nihilism poses.
This style of devastating warfare being conducted against civilians across Ukraine is more than a little redolent of the worst excesses of siege warfare down through the centuries, only this time carried out with devastating modern weapons. But such attacks have surely put paid to the idea that Russia’s core objective is in reuniting all of its brother Slavs back into their natural, inevitable commonwealth.
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