Now, it was one thing to include former Soviet allies from Central Europe in NATO, but Ukraine was another matter entirely. In the eyes of Russian nationalists, the two countries shared a centuries-long set of cultural, linguistic, ethnic, and religious ties with Ukrainians, not to mention a 1,426-mile-long border, a point Putin made in a 7,000-word essay he wrote in July 2021, tellingly titled "On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians."
Putin, who never regarded Ukraine as an authentic state, saw the Ukrainians' overwhelming December 1991 vote in favor of independence as a deep injustice. The Russian newspaper Kommersant reported that he told George W. Bush at a NATO-Russia Council meeting held during that 2008 Bucharest summit, "Ukraine is not even a state. What is Ukraine? A part of its territory is Eastern Europe, another part [Ukraine east of the Dnipro River], and a significant one, is a donation from us." He later added ominously that, if Ukraine entered NATO, it would lose Crimea, its sole Russian-majority province, and the Donbas, its Russophone east. In his 2016 book, All the Kremlin's Men, Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar confirmed that Putin had indeed threatened to destroy Ukraine, were it to join NATO.
Those who blame NATO for the present war point to just such evidence. And it can't be denied that NATO expansion created tension between Russia and the West, as well as Russia and Ukraine. But the alliance's Bucharest promise that Ukraine would become a member someday didn't make Putin's war any less surprising.
Here's why: between then 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 U.S., 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).
It's Democracy, Stupid
A rival explanation for Putin's war is that it stemmed from his fear of liberal democracy. Under his rule, Russia had become steadily more authoritarian until the state was embodied in a single person: him. Putin's greatest fear, so this explanation goes, was the specter of Russians thronging the streets demanding more freedom -- and so, his departure. For that reason, he curbed the media, exiled opposition figures, allegedly had others like Anna Politkovskaya and Boris Nemtsov killed, and jailed Alexei Navalny, Russia's most prominent dissident and the person most likely to lead a grassroots rebellion against him.
According to this account, Putin can't imagine Russians turning against him spontaneously, since he played such a crucial role in putting the 1990s -- a decade of economic collapse, fire sales of state property to sleazy "oligarchs," rising poverty, and potential civil war -- behind them. Instead, he built a strong state, imposed order, crushed the Chechens' attempted secession, paid off Russia's massive debt early, rebuilt the army, revved up the economy, and left the country standing tall as a great power once again.
So, if Russians do protest en masse (as they did from 2011 to 2013 against rigged elections), it must be thanks to instigation from abroad, as was supposedly true in adjoining countries like Georgia during its 2003 Rose Revolution, Kyrgyzstan during its 2005 Tulip Revolution, and Ukraine during its Orange Revolution that same year. Putin, this narrative continues, hated the "color revolutions" because they created turmoil in regions he deemed Russia's sphere of influence or in which, as former president Dmitry Medvedev put it, the country has "privileged interests."
But his real beef against citizen rebellions in Russia's neighborhood, according to this explanation of what sparked the invasion, is that they might inspire insurrection in Russia. And when it came to that, he especially feared such events in Ukraine. In 2014, after all, its "revolution of dignity" culminated in the ouster of a Russian-friendly president, Viktor Yanukovych. For Putin, in other words, that revolt hit too close to home. He reacted by annexing Crimea (after a referendum that violated Ukraine's constitution), while working to foster two separatist "republics" across the border in Ukraine's Donbas region. A little more than a month before his invasion at a meeting of the Russia-led Collective Treaty Organization, he warned that "we will not allow the realization of so-called color-revolution scenarios" and promptly dispatched 2,500 troops to Kazakhstan following a revolt there.
As for Ukraine, while it may be an imperfect democracy, it was certainly making progress. Its elections were cleaner than Russia's and its media far freer, as political parties competed, governments were voted in and out of power, and civic groups multiplied. All of this, so goes the argument, Putin found intolerable, fearing that such democratic ideas and aspirations would eventually make their way to Russia.
As it happens, though, none of this explains the timing of his invasion.
After all, Ukraine had been moving toward political plurality for years, however slowly and unevenly, and however far it still had to go. So, what was happening in 2021 that could have taken his fear to new heights? The answer: nothing, really. Those who claim that NATO was irrelevant to the invasion often insist that the deed sprang from Putin's ingrained authoritarianism, dating back to his days in Russia's secret police, the KGB, his love of unchecked power, and his dread of uppity citizens inclined to rebellion.
The problem: 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.
According to yet another explanation, he attacked Ukraine simply because he's an imperialist through and through, yearns to go down in history as Putin the Great (like Russian tzars Peter the Great and Catherine the Great), and has been transfixed by far-right thinkers, above all the exile Ivan Ilyin, whose remains he arranged to have returned to Russia for reburial.
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. His 1999-2009 war in Chechnya, though brutal, was waged within Russia and there was no prospect of outside intervention to help the Chechens. His brief military foray into Georgia in 2008, his landgrab in Ukraine in 2014, his intervention in Syria in 2015 -- none were comparable in their size or audacity.
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