Putin invaded Ukraine out of deep resentment, blaming it for the Soviet Union’s collapse and seeking revenge through brutal warfare.
LONDON: Just before 10.30 am on the Christian holy day of Palm Sunday last week, a 21-foot Iskander ballistic missile slammed into the eastern Ukraine city of Sumy, packed with worshippers returning home from church. Minutes later, as rescue workers rushed to help, a second Iskander scattered cluster munitions over the same area. An Iskander can deliver nearly a ton of high-explosives from up to 350 miles away, precision guided to within 10 or 20 metres from its target. Fired into a typical civilian neighbourhood its warhead, designed to destroy factories or hardened bunkers, can devastate an entire street. At least 34 innocent Ukrainian citizens were killed and hundreds more injured, including many children. Earlier this month, a similar attack using Iskanders was made on Kryvyi Rih, the home of the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, when dozens of citizens were massacred and many injured. These assaults were just two of a succession of missile attacks in recent years by Russian forces on heavily populated cities in eastern Ukraine.
According to Ukrainian military intelligence chief, Kyrylo Budanov, the missile attacks on Sumy were carried out by men of Russia’s 112th Missile Brigade, a unit which Kyiv says deliberately targets civilians. Based in Shuya, north-east of Moscow, the 112th consists of three missile divisions, with three operational launchers. According to the Telegraph, it is commanded by 47-year-old Colonel Ponomarev, who answers to the Chief of the general staff, Army General Valery Gerasimov, who inturn receives, orders from President Vladimir Putin. There is therefore a direct line of accountability between Putin and the massacres in Ukraine.
It became clear from the start of Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 that he considered Ukrainian lives to be cheap and dispensable. Take for example evidence from the Ukrainian town of Bucha. When Russian forces withdrew from the city in late March, following a failed campaign to advance to Kyiv, photographic and video evidence emerged of the mass murder of civilians and prisoners of war committed by Russian Armed Forces during the fight for and occupation of the town. Photos showed corpses of civilians lined up with their hands tied behind their backs and shot at close range. Some 458 bodies have been recovered to date, including 9 children under the age of18. Among the victims, many were found mutilated and burnt. Girls, as young as 14, were reported to have been raped by Russian soldiers. Russian authorities, of course, denied responsibility instead claiming that Ukraine faked the footage. Some Kremlin apologists even risibly suggested that the bodies were actors who, when the video cameras stopped, got up and walked home.
Bucha is just one example of the mass killing of Ukrainian civilians by Russian forces in the three years since the invasion. As of 31 March this year 12,910 civilian deaths in Ukraine were reported by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, but many believe this to be only a tiny fraction of the real number.
So why is Vladimir Putin so relaxed about the deaths of so many Ukrainian civilians? The simple answer is that he hates Ukraine and its people.
To understand why, you have to go back 34 years to the collapse of the Soviet Union, an event which in his 2005 annual State of the Nation address, President Putin called “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” Although the Soviet Union was almost certain to collapse over time, because of its inherent contradictions and inefficiencies, the actual event was brought about by the demand for freedom among some of its 15 republics, particularly Ukraine.
Prior to the collapse, there had been growing discontent about President Gorbachev’s attempts to modernise the failing Soviet Union. The climax came on 19 August 1991 when Gorbachev was on holiday in Crimea and a group of hardliners in the Politburo staged a coup in an attempt to stop him. The coup failed, but it also destroyed Gorbachev’s “New Union Treaty” which was due to be signed on his return. Ukraine’s parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, took advantage of the growing chaos in Moscow and on 24 Augusta large majority approved the “Declaration of Independence of Ukraine from the Soviet Union”. The promised referendum across Ukraine took place on 1 December 1991and resulted in an overwhelming92% of the population approving the declaration and therefore independence. Even those regions close to the Russian border and populated by Russian speakers voted in large numbers to leave the Soviet Union. The combination of the failed August Coup and the Ukrainian vote for independence dealt a mortal blow to Gorbachev’s efforts to reform the Soviet Union, and on 25 December 1991 he appeared on state television to announce its dissolution, marking the end of communist control of Russia and beyond.
In the early months of 1991, many western leaders had been concerned by the growing instability in the Soviet Union and genuinely feared the collapse of this nuclear armed state. When President George H W Bush arrived in Moscow on 30 July that year, just 19 days before the un-anticipated August Coup attempt, he confided with President Gorbachev that in his view it would not be in America’s or the world’s interest for the Soviet Union to collapse and assured Gorbachev that he would warn against independence when he later travelled to Ukraine on the next leg of his visit. True to his word, in his address to the Rada on 1 August, which later became known as the “Chicken Kiev” speech, Bush duly cautioned against Ukraine’s desire for independence, calling it “suicidal nationalism.”
Years later, Bush explained his thinking in his memoirs. “If Gorbachev’s plans for a modernised Soviet Union, were rejected”, he said, “The political disintegration of the Union might speed up and destabilise the country. I continue to worry about the subsequent violence and that we might be drawn into the conflict.”So, for different reasons, neither George Bush nor Vladimir Putin wanted the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Putin realised that once Ukraine voted to leave, there was zero chance that the Soviet Union could survive, and it was therefore clear in his mind that Ukraine was to blame for its collapse. This was something Putin neither forgot nor forgave and it became the prime rationale for his decision to invade Ukraine 30 years later.
Vladimir Putin also displayed his animosity towards Ukraine in his contempt for the Budapest Memorandum signed in Hungary on 5 December 1994. In this, Ukraine voluntarily gave up its nuclear warheads and missiles, a legacy from its Soviet Union days, in return for “assurances that the country would not be threatened by military or economic coercion by the United States, the United Kingdom, or Russia”. Putin’s decision to tear up the Memorandum and invade Ukraine has led many to question if this would have happened had Ukraine not foolishly trusted Russia and had retained its nuclear capability. Most experts conclude that he would not have invaded. The threat of nuclear retaliation by Ukraine would have unquestionably turned Putin away from any thoughts of invasion. The Budapest Memorandum example also raises another question in most people’s minds – can Vladimir Putin be trusted to keep to any agreement should one be made to end the current war?
So, ignore Putin’s phony concerns about Russia’s security should Ukraine join NATO. This was a “false flag” and never likely to happen. His claim that Ukraine is not a real country and is part of Russia is also false. After all, as Kiev was founded in the 5th century and was flourishing before Moscow even existed, it could be argued that Russia actually belongs to Ukraine, a thought unlikely to appeal to Vlad. Putin’s claim that a “special military operation” was necessary in order save Ukrainians from the Nazis is also phony. There are probably more Nazis in Russia than there are in Ukraine. No, the simple reason why Putin invaded Ukraine is that he hates the country for having caused his beloved Soviet Union to collapse – “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”
* John Dobson is a former British diplomat, who also worked in UK Prime Minister John Major’s office between 1995 and 1998. He is currently a visiting fellow at the University of Plymouth.