The tactics adopted by Russian troops in Ukraine are raising fears of a looming humanitarian catastrophe, with the increasingly indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas fueling a rising death toll and creating a wave of refugees fleeing the country for the neighboring EU. Given Putin’s past record as a destroyer of cities such as Grozny and Aleppo, these concerns are more than justified.
While unfolding events on the ground in Ukraine are already sparking international outrage and alarm, Putin’s twisted war aims and his long record of denying Ukraine’s right to exist paint an even darker picture of what may now lie ahead. Indeed, years of Kremlin propaganda have carefully set the stage for atrocities on a scale not witnessed in Europe since the days of Stalin and Hitler.
The roots of today’s war stretch all the way back to the start of Putin’s reign and reflect his unhealthy obsession with Ukraine. Putin has never made any attempt to conceal his contempt for Ukrainian independence, which he regards as an accident of history and the most painful of the many injustices brought about by the 1991 Soviet collapse.
The Russian ruler is fond of declaring that Ukrainians and Russians are “one people,” by which he means that Ukrainians are really Russians who do not deserve a state of their own. Instead, he argues, Ukraine’s entire centuries-long independence struggle is a foreign plot driven by scheming Western imperialists seeking to undermine Mother Russia. In summer 2021, Putin laid bare this conspiratorial vision of Ukrainian history in a rambling and frequently absurd essay that dismissed the entire notion of Ukrainian statehood.
Putin’s extreme animosity towards Ukraine is shaped by his imperialistic instincts. It is often suggested that Putin wishes to recreate the Soviet Union, but this is actually far from the case. In fact, he is a Russian imperialist who dreams of a revived Czarist Empire and blames the early Soviet authorities for handing over ancestral Russian lands to Ukraine and other Soviet republics.
In late 2021, Putin revealingly referred to the fall of the USSR as the demise of “historical Russia.” Likewise, his often cited but widely misunderstood 2005 quote describing the Soviet collapse as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century” was actually a lament for lost Russian greatness. “As for the Russian people, it became a genuine tragedy,” he explained. “Tens of millions of our fellow citizens and countrymen found themselves beyond the fringes of Russian territory.”
Putin’s burning resentment over the demise of the Soviet Empire and Russia’s reduced role in world affairs has helped fuel his fixation with Ukraine. The Russian ruler has been particularly enraged by Ukraine’s post-Soviet efforts to embrace democracy and pursue a path of Euro-Atlantic integration, which he regards as both a betrayal and a threat to his own authoritarian regime.
The 2004 Orange Revolution was a key turning point in Putin’s deteriorating relationship with Ukraine when his bungled intervention in the country’s presidential election backfired disastrously and helped spark a massive pro-democracy uprising which was widely cheered by the Western world. This personal humiliation left Putin increasingly bitter towards the West and determined to punish Ukraine. When Ukrainians once more took to the streets a decade later to defend the country’s fledgling democracy during the Euromaidan Revolution, Putin responded by seizing Crimea and invading eastern Ukraine.
