Writing in the National Interest five years later, Putin added: "the major historic achievement of Yalta and other decisions of that time is the agreement to create a mechanism that would allow the leading powers to remain within the framework of diplomacy in resolving their differences". In other words, accepting great power spheres of influence helps to avoid war. Because the US and Europe would not accept that Russia had a droit de regard over the post-Soviet space, Russia, in Putin's telling, was forced to embark on its "special military operation" in Ukraine.
At the Munich Security Conference in 2017, Sergei Lavrov announced the need for a "post-West order". However, his definition was vague and his main point was that this should be an order where NATO, a relic of the Cold War, no longer exists. If Putin and his colleagues really favor a Yalta-type system, then that would be one with rules. After all, for much of the Cold War, neither of the main protagonists interfered in each other's sphere of influence. But with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Putin's hints that his ambitions to "gather in" Russia's traditional lands do not stop at Ukraine, it appears that his vision of a future world order goes beyond Yalta to one in which there are few rules of the game. It is a Hobbesian world order in which Russia could seize as much territory as it could until it was stopped, a bellum omnium contra omnes.
Putin's talk about world order represents an important part of his grievance narrative about the United States and its allies, complaining that after 1991 the West created an order that ignored Russia's interests. But in fact, Russia has also been a beneficiary of the post-Cold War order. Its globalized economy experienced high rates of growth in Putin's early years, it became a key player in the G20 and managed to restore its great power status. The war with Ukraine has now undermined that status and Russia will emerge from its deglobalized, unmodernized, autarkic and isolated from the West, although not from the rest of the world. The Post-Cold War period that began in 1992 is now over but what will replace it will not necessarily be more advantageous for Russian interests.
What were Putin's intentions in the run-up to the war?
Early on in his tenure, Putin proclaimed, "anyone who doesn't regret the passing of the Soviet Union has no heart. Anyone who wants it restored has no brains". But in the 22 years since he took office, Putin has clearly revised his ideas. He no longer views the Soviet collapse as a completed process and believes that it can be reversed. He is not interested in reviving the USSR; rather he wants to create his version of the Russian empire. Defensive expansionism has been at the core of Russian foreign policy at least since the era of Catherine the Great, who famously proclaimed: "That which stops growing begins to rot. I must expand my borders to keep my empire safe". Putin's Russia defined its defense perimeter not as the borders of the Russian Federation but as the post-Soviet space. And Ukraine was the key to reversing the Soviet collapse.
In his July 2021 treatise "On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians", Putin denied that there is a separate Ukrainian nation or identity, blamed the West for artificially trying to create one, and equated all Ukrainian "nationalists" with Nazis. The original sin was Lenin and the Bolsheviks' creation of a separate Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1922, instead of creating the USSR with no ethnic republics. In so doing "Russia was robbed." When the Soviet Union collapsed, Ukraine wrongfully, in Putin's view, declared itself an independent state. Putin concluded his essay with this warning: "I am confident that the true sovereignty of Ukraine is possible only in partnership with Russia". Putin apparently believes as he told George W. Bush in 2008 that "Ukraine isn't a real country". He signaled quite clearly that he wanted to subordinate Ukraine to Russia and prevent it from joining either the European Union or NATO-although neither of these was on offer in February 2022.
Add new comment