The editorial answers you | Putin’s Ukrainian Obsession

Do you have questions about our editorials? Questions about hot topics in the news? Each week, the editorial team responds to readers of The Press.

Alexandre Sirois
The Press

From the outset, let us specify that there is a major difference between the former Soviet republics which are already in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the others.

The three Baltic countries (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) which joined NATO in 2004 enjoy, under Article 5 of the Treaty, protection against any aggression.

This article assures that if one of the 29 members of the military alliance is attacked, the others (including Canada and our powerful American neighbor) will all come to its defence.

All for one and one for all, in a way.

In 2014, Barack Obama publicly declared that the three capitals of the Baltic countries, Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius, were as important “to protect as Berlin, Paris and London”.

The protection offered by Article 5 is certainly capable of cooling the ambitions of Russian President Vladimir Putin…

Having said that, to answer your question, it is important to clarify that Russia also did not like seeing the three Baltic countries joining NATO.

But at the time, “Russia simply did not have the means to oppose this membership,” recalls Ekaterina Piskunova, who teaches in the political science department of the University of Montreal and specializes in Russian foreign policy. and Russian-American relations.

The gap between the Russian power of the early 2000s and that of today is therefore part of the equation.

But the portrait would not be complete if we stopped there.

The world today is dominated by questions of identity, and this region of the globe is no exception to this heavy trend.

“From the Russian point of view, as projected by the regime and widely supported by the population, not only does Ukraine have a common history with Russia, but Ukrainians and Russians are also one people,” explains Dominique Arel, holder of the Chair in Ukrainian Studies at the University of Ottawa.

Vladimir Putin even published a long text on this subject last summer on his website, recalls the expert.

This does not mean, however, that the majority of the Ukrainian population shares the opinion of the Russian president, however.

What is indisputable, however, is that the history of Russia and that of Ukraine are linked. Kievan Russia, between the IX^and and the XIII^and century, was a territory that today would encompass parts of both countries.

There is therefore a shared historical community, but also “a linguistic community, a religious community, an economic community and a family community”, underlines Ekaterina Piskunova.

In this sense, the situation in Estonia is also quite different from that in Ukraine.

“Even if there is a certain common history between Russia and the Baltic republics, it is not the same thing in terms of identity, because the dominant culture was German. There is a common historical past that is not identity-based”, specifies Dominique Arel.

Not to mention the purely geopolitical explanation.

“We talk about the importance of the border with Ukraine, the length of this border and the difficulty of protecting it,” adds Ekaterina Piskunova, who also believes that the change in foreign policy on the part of Moscow is useful. to understand what is happening now.

Russia is more than ever at loggerheads with the West and any possible enlargement of NATO is seen by Vladimir Putin as an affront and a threat.

It remains for us to hope, despite the escalation, that diplomacy will triumph and that a major armed conflict will be avoided.