We Still Don’t Know Why Russia Invaded Ukraine
▻https://www.thenation.com/article/world/russia-invade-ukraine-war
Pourquoi la Russie a-t-elle décidé de mener une guerre contre l’#Ukraine en février 2022 précisément ? #Rajan_Menon critique les 2 explications monocausales dominantes.
1/ C’est l’OTAN.
Between then [2008] and the invasion moment, NATO never followed through on its pledge to take the next step and provide Kyiv with a “membership action plan.” By February 2022, it had, in fact, kept Ukraine waiting for 14 years without the slightest sign that its candidacy might be advancing (though Ukraine’s security ties and military training with some NATO states—the United States, Britain, and Canada, in particular—had increased).
So, the NATO-was-responsible theory, suggesting that Putin invaded in 2022 in the face of an “existential threat,” isn’t convincing (even if one believes, as I do, that NATO’s enlargement was a bad idea and Russian apprehensions reasonable).
2/ C’est la démocratie (qui de l’Ukraine pourrait s’insinuer en Russie).
None of this explains why the war broke out when it did. Russia wasn’t then being roiled by protests; Putin’s position was rock-solid; and his party, United Russia, had no true rivals. Indeed, the only others with significant followings, relatively speaking, the Communist Party and the Liberal Democracy Party (neither liberal nor democratic), were aligned with the state.
2’/ C’est une ambition impérialiste.
But why then did a Russian ruler seized by imperial dreams and a neo-fascist ideology wait more than two decades to attack Ukraine? And remember, though now commonly portrayed as a wild-eyed expansionist, Putin, though hardly a peacemaker, had never previously committed Russian forces to anything like that invasion.
Alors quoi ?
Do I have a better explanation? No, but that’s my point. To this day, perhaps the most important question of all about this war, the biggest surprise—why did it happen when it did?—remains deeply mysterious, as do Putin’s motives (or perhaps impulses).