Vladimir Putin: Failed liberal and democrat
Russian President Vladimir Putin is angry the Kiev government has for years refused a settlement to allow the breakaway Donetsk and Lugansk regions to return safely to Ukrainian sovereignty.
Picture: Alexei Nikolsky, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP
As president Vladimir Putin’s armed forces steamroll through Eastern Ukraine, what onlookers need to understand is that he views himself as a Russian patriot defending his country’s most vital interests.
From his point of view, Russia’s attack on Ukraine is a war of necessity: Nato’s refusal to halt its expansion towards Russia’s borders having left him no option except to create a buffer zone in Ukraine by force.
Often depicted as a cool, calculating rationalist, Putin is in fact highly emotional and has been deeply disappointed by what he sees as the west’s refusal to negotiate a deal to both safeguard Ukraine’s independence and Russia’s security interests.
He is angry the Kyiv government has for years refused a settlement to allow the breakaway Donetsk and Lugansk regions to return safely to Ukrainian sovereignty.
He despises the neo-Nazi desecration of Soviet war memorials in Ukraine.
He fears that Kyiv’s Russophobia and its attacks on pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine — who still have the support of a third of Ukrainian people — are eroding historic Russian-Ukrainian ties.
Born in Leningrad in 1952, Putin’s first career was as a KGB officer. No thug or spy, he was a well-educated intelligence analyst, a German speaker who served in East Germany before the 1989 collapse of the Berlin Wall.
In the Soviet system the KGB recruited the best and the brightest, the most loyal and incorruptible.
Today, surrounded by former KGB officers of his generation Putin rules Russia. These trusted advisors influence his thinking, not the oligarchs the west wants to sanction.
If ‘Putinism’ means anything, it is the assertion of state supremacy over plutocrats who exercised so much power in 1990s Russia.
At the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, Putin threw in his lot with president Boris Yeltsin’s pro-western regime.
Although Putin was, as were many of his compatriots, nostalgic for the idealism and egalitarianism of Soviet times, soon after being anointed Yeltsin’s successor he told a newspaper interviewer those with no regrets about the USSR’s passing had no heart, but those who thought it could be re-created had no brains.
Years later Putin famously described the break-up of the USSR as the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century and, in that same speech, emphasised Russia would always be a democratic state — a pledge eroded by the creeping authoritarianism of his current reign.
Putin was initially committed to a Russian-Western alliance, even suggesting Russia could join Nato.
In 2009 Moscow proposed an all-embracing pan-European security treaty that could have paved the way for Russia’s integration into Europe, politically and economically as well as militarily.
But all such hopes were dashed by Ukraine’s civil war and Russia’s consequent 2014 occupation of Crimea.
While Putin remained open to negotiations, the west chose to sanction and isolate Russia, hoping to force his withdrawal from Crimea and to end his support for the East Ukrainian separatists — whose conflict with the Kyiv government has cost the lives of 14,000 people.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine is Putin’s war, one that only he can control or contain.
If western politicians genuinely want a speedy resolution they need to understand that NATO’s expansionism makes Putin feel that he is the one who is under siege.
- Geoffrey Roberts is Emeritus Professor of History at UCC and a Member of the Royal Irish Academy. His latest book is .
