MOSCOW | So close and yet so far. Vladimir Putin has an obsession: to bring Ukraine back into the bosom of Moscow in the name of the greatness of Russia and to push back NATO, even if it means invading it.
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For many Russians of his generation, the one who grew up rocked by odes glorifying the USSR, the disappearance of the Soviet Union and its sphere of influence in three years (1989-1991) remains a wound.
Vladimir Putin, then a KGB officer stationed in East Germany, experienced the defeat firsthand. And, he said, was forced, like many compatriots, to make ends meet by illegal taxiing on his return to Russia.
The humiliation and destitution of part of the Russian population, which remained on the sidelines of the liberating impulse of the youth and the intelligentsia, contrasted then with the triumphalism and prosperity of the West.
Enough to convince him, according to his own formula, that the end of the USSR is “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century”, a country which has nevertheless experienced two world wars.
What also feed a desire for revenge, NATO and the EU gradually expanding to former vassals of Moscow.
For the Russian president, his historic mission is therefore to stop this invasion of his area of influence. In the name of Russian security, Ukraine becomes a red line.
“Rockets in Moscow”
In his view of things, if Russia “does not resolve this security issue, Ukraine will be in NATO in 10-15 years”, then “NATO rockets will be in Moscow”, explains Alexei Makarkin , from the Center for Political Technology.
A sign of the Kremlin’s determination, after a pro-Western revolution in 2014 in Kiev, Ukrainian Crimea was annexed and pro-Russian separatists set fire to Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine.
For Mr Putin, his neighbor is wrong to see himself as a victim of tsarist, then Soviet, and now Russian imperialism. And its two revolutions — 2005 and 2014 — that drove out pro-Russian elites are the result of Western plots.
For the master of the Kremlin, Moscow must be strong, even terrifying. Giving in is not in the nature of this black belt judoka.
“If the fight is inevitable, you have to strike first,” he said in 2015. One of his teachers, Vera Gourevitch, said that at 14, the young Vladimir, having broken the leg of a comrade, proclaimed that some “understand only force”.
Ukraine suffered from its “Orange Revolution” of 2004-2005 “gas wars” with Moscow, which destabilize it economically.
Militarily, there is of course the Crimea and the war in the East in 2014.
Ideologically, there is the negation of the Ukrainian nation.
“Stop time”
As early as 2008, according to Russian and American media, Vladimir Putin told his American counterpart, George W. Bush, that Ukraine “is not even a state”.
In December, he proclaims during his annual press conference that this country is an invention of Lenin.
A few months earlier, in an article entitled “On the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians”, he explained his neighbor’s choices by an “anti-Russian” plot by the United States and its allies.
The West would have created “a Ukrainian political system such that presidents, members of parliament and ministers change, but not the secessionist course and its animosity vis-à-vis Russia”.
Tatiana Stanovaya, who heads the Russian think tank R.Politik, notes that according to Mr. Putin’s logic, the Russian soldiers who entered the Ukrainian regions in the north and east on Thursday are waging “a war of liberation”.
Moreover, the spokesman of the Kremlin, Dmitry Peskov, said in December that “a brotherly people is not lost, there remains a brotherly people”.
In short, it is for the Russian power to restore the natural course of things in Ukraine, and beyond.
Moscow says it again and again: the West has taken advantage of Russia’s post-Soviet weakness to camp in its vicinity. And Putin demands neither more nor less that the Atlantic Alliance return to its 1997 lines and renounce the security architecture resulting from the Cold War.
In short, says Alexei Makarkin, “the driving force behind Vladimir Putin’s action is his desire to stop time.”