Russian invasion of Ukraine: are the reasons not limited to NATO?;

The idea of invading Ukraine with the powerful Russian army existed in one way or another and was in fact an expected move by the Kremlin. This is what some analysts believe, such as Ukrainian anthropology PhD Volodymyr Artiukh, who argues that the signs of Russia's invasion of Ukraine had already appeared by the spring of 2021.

Speaking to Jacobin and assistant professor of sociology Jana Tsoneva, Dr. Volodymyr Artiukh, who specializes in labor and migration in the post-Soviet space, assesses the real reasons for the invasion, considering Russian explanations of NATO expansion to be partly bogus.

In particular, when the invasion took place on 24 February, Volodymyr Artiukh was among those who had written that he had seen it coming as the process leading to war was already visible from April 2021, when the first Putin-Biden meeting took place, after Russia had gathered troops on the border with Ukraine.

«At that time everyone expected a war at that point. Instead, Putin and Biden started talking about strategic stability, and Putin made some claims about Ukraine, especially about the Minsk agreements. Supposedly, troops were withdrawn from the border after this meeting, but everyone knew that a significant number remained. However, immediately afterwards Putin spoke about the red lines, the asymmetric response if the lines were crossed,» the doctoral student argues, recalling that Putin then wrote an article, which was essentially an ultimatum to Zelensky.

«This article was a draft of his speech on the declaration of war that we saw in two parts on February 22 and February 24. It was probably recorded in one go. So, after the Putin-Miden meeting in 2021, the military infrastructure and a significant number of weapons remained on the border. There was a spike in September and October with a large-scale military exercise when the number of troops exceeded those now active in Ukraine, and these exercises were explicitly about taking over Ukraine. They did it as an exercise.

At the same time, the breakaway regions of Donbass were incorporated into Russia. More than half a million inhabitants acquired Russian citizenship. The leaders of these republics became members of the Russian ruling party.

Therefore, Artiukh underlines that only pious thinkers assumed that Putin would want to continue the Minsk process. «By then it was clear that even if Putin followed Minsk, it would mean war by other means, because the process implies that Ukraine is reclaiming these territories, but they were de facto already incorporated into Russia. They had their own army and so on, but being constitutionally integrated into Ukraine, they would have a free hand in the rest of the territory where they would clash with the Ukrainian nationalists.

In Ukraine, there would have been an internal uprising against such an implementation of the Minsk agreements anyway. So the Minsk process was another name for the dismemberment of Ukraine and slow-motion war.».

The real reasons and NATO

Volodymyr Artiukh analyses how important or not the debate on Ukraine's NATO membership was really important. As US President Joe Biden says, during recent diplomatic talks before the war, he was willing to entertain the possibility of a moratorium on the country's NATO membership. «He stressed that NATO would not get involved in the conflict between Ukraine and Russia,» he says, and «among other powerful Western powers such as France and Germany, no one seriously considered Ukraine's membership.».

So for the Ukrainian scientist, Putin used the expansion of NATO as a fig leaf. «Take, for example, the ultimatum issued by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in December on reverting NATO's borders to the pre-1997 period. The call to literally decide the next day meant that no one could see it as a good faith negotiation.

I think the idea of going to war in Ukraine, one way or another, was already there and they needed the war itself as a negotiating mechanism. They wanted to use the war as a way of getting information from the West, like, what is the highest level of escalation that the West can afford? How far can we - Russia - go? What can we do in our own backyard and how far can they go in response?;

Volodymyr Artiukh underlines that this can be explained by the way Russian foreign policy works, arguing that Russians think ahead. «If you listen to Russian officials and read their ideological manifestos, if you read people who interpret Russian foreign policy decision-makers in the Kremlin, they see these apocalyptic facts coming. They see the world changing to the core. They see that we are living in the new world and Russia has to find its place, otherwise it will be eaten by these bullies, China or the US.

They think along the lines of “we must act now, it's now or never, there is a time and it will be glorious or we will perish”. They also hope to join with China in a kind of alliance. And they should already be marking their territory. The logic is: «There are seven bad years ahead, but then we will have the hundred years of our empire.» That's the framework of their thinking, if you read carefully what the Russians are saying.

The reasons for the Russian invasion are also rooted in Putin's own personality. «The expansion of NATO to the border was a defeat for the Russians. Most of NATO's expansion took place under Putin, except for the first round. Of course, he talks about Russia's interests in geopolitical terms, but he also sees it as a personal defeat, a question of his legitimacy, not only in the eyes of average Russians, but also in the eyes of the Russian elite.» The broader problem was that the West failed to enroll Russia in a more comprehensive security agreement and in all bilateral and multilateral agreements. So, for Putin, it was partly this defeat that needs to be rectified now, the Ukrainian anthropology PhD argues.

Lavrov's ultimatum said that NATO was going to Ukraine and was going to place weapons there. However, according to Artiukh, this move was not intended to solve this thirty-year-old Russia-West problem of NATO expansion. «So, the war in Ukraine is not a direct consequence of NATO expansion. It is Russia's pre-emptive step to change, to break this structure of power relations in which Russia existed. It was not reactionary in the sense of an immediate threat, it was a predatory attack at a time when, according to the Kremlin, the enemy was at its weakest point. Lavrofa's diplomatic spectacle with the ultimatum was a distraction,» the Ukrainian analyst stresses.

Moreover, Artiukh finds ridiculous the idea that Putin wants to restore the Soviet Union, while promising the «decommunization» of Ukraine. For him, communism means destroying that «empire of positive action» that was the USSR. «He wants to destroy the economic and national units that the USSR created throughout its history.

He essentially wants to rebuild the Russian empire with an imperial centre. Not necessarily within the boundaries of the old one, but with a similar power structure of an imperial centre based on an oppressive mechanism without any hegemonic ideology that mobilises people from below. Hegemonic leadership implies concessions to the partners of the hegemonic power bloc, as the Soviet Union did, making some concessions to nationalities.

Putin is not interested in hegemony. He is interested in building this «vertical power» that begins and ends with the Kremlin. This is very different from the Soviet Union. Just look at how Putin talks to his Security Council, as with students who failed their homework. Compared to that, the Communist Party was a shining example of direct democracy.».