A common thread in nearly all of Putin’s foreign ventures has been a determination to support authoritarian rulers – those who maintain their grip on power through the use of force against a dissatisfied population. In 2014, he tried with all his might to prevent the overthrow of the dictatorial, pro-Moscow Ukrainian leader Viktor Yanukovych when a groundswell of popular discontent made his position untenable. In that case, Putin failed; but he did much better in Syria, where his resolute intervention rescued the murderous Bashar al-Assad from the vengeance of a population revolted by his record of oppression. In Belarus, too, Putin’s unwavering support has become the crutch on which the unpopular president, Alexander Lukashenko, has come to rely. In 2021, Lukashenko violated all international norms to detain a Western airliner overflying Belarus in order to arrest one of his many vocal critics. The Kremlin was alone in the international community in coming to his rescue, emboldening the Belarusian leadership to continue its crackdown on domestic dissent.
It is not hard to understand why Putin is doing this. He supports endangered dictators because he knows that he himself is in the same category, haunted by fears that he too might be overthrown by the Russian people. Putin was concerned by the so-called ‘colour revolutions’ in Ukraine and Georgia, where popular uprisings ousted repressive regimes and replaced them with democratically elected governments. His alarm deepened in 2011, when the Middle East was rocked by the events of the Arab Spring, in which the leaders of Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Libya were all toppled. While the West greeted the uprisings as a victory for democracy, Putin viewed them as ominous harbingers of chaos and destabilisation, which he believed were covertly stoked by the CIA. Later the same year, the threat came closer to home as hundreds of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of Moscow and St Petersburg, protesting about the rigging of parliamentary elections. The aforementioned demonstrations were briefly dubbed the ‘snow revolution’, a worrying augury that Russia was not immune to the bacillus of revolt. Putin’s response was to blame Washington. He accused Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, of fomenting unrest in Russia as a prelude to a Western-sponsored coup, aimed at bringing about a regime change similar to those in Georgia and Ukraine.
Putin’s stock reply to criticism of his aggressive foreign ventures is to protest that the West is doing worse. He is quick to highlight alleged Western transgressions, including interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states, the attempted ‘imposition of democracy’ and military intervention. But at the same time, the Kremlin claims for itself the right to a ‘sphere of privileged interests’ in the former Soviet territories and a ‘right to defend our compatriots wherever they live’. A 2017 report for the Foreign Relations Committee of the US Senate, titled ‘Putin’s Asymmetrical Assault on Democracy’, pointed out the inherent contradiction between the two positions:
If Putin can demonstrate to the Russian people that liberal democracy is a dysfunctional and dying form of government, then their own system of ‘sovereign democracy’ – authoritarianism secured by corruption, apathy, and an iron fist – does not look so bad after all. As the National Intelligence Council put it, Putin’s ‘amalgam of authoritarianism, corruption, and nationalism represents an alternative to Western liberalism … [which] is synonymous with disorder and moral decay, and pro-democracy movements are “Western plots” to weaken traditional bulwarks of order and the Russian state.’
If the West had paid more attention to Putin’s public pronouncements in recent years, the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine might not have come as such a surprise. In July 2021, he published a long treatise, setting out Russia’s claims on the country. The essay’s title, ‘On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians’, was an indication that he has little time for an independent Ukrainian state.
Russians and Ukrainians are one people and the wall that has emerged in recent years between Russia and Ukraine, between the parts of what is essentially the same historical and spiritual space, is a great misfortune and tragedy. These are … the result of deliberate efforts by those forces that have always sought to undermine our unity. The formula they apply is – divide and rule. Hence the attempts to sow discord among people, to pit the parts of a single people against one another.
In his essay, Putin names the malevolent ‘forces’ who he claims are bent on sowing division between Moscow and Kiev. Historically, he says, they have included Ukrainian nationalists who sought alliances with Poland or Germany in order to sabotage the ‘brotherly’ bonds with Russia. In the Second World War, some Ukrainian leaders were willing to collaborate with the Nazis in the struggle against Soviet domination, and Putin draws a direct – and defamatory – comparison between them and the modern Ukrainian independence movement:
The Nazis, abetted by collaborators from the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, did not need Ukraine, except as a living space and slaves for Aryan overlords. Nor were the interests of the Ukrainian people thought of in February 2014. Public discontent was cynically exploited by Western countries who directly interfered in Ukraine’s internal affairs and supported a coup. Radical nationalist groups served as its battering ram. Their slogans, ideology, and blatant aggressive Russophobia have become defining elements of state policy in Ukraine.
Putin equates the democratically elected government of today’s Ukraine with the Nazi collaborators of 80 years ago, casting the Western democracies in the role of Hitlerite aggressors:
The leaders of modern Ukraine and their external ‘patrons’ prefer to overlook these facts. And we know why: if they bring about the weakening of Russia, our ill-wishers are happy with that. Ukraine is being turned into a springboard against Russia … comparable in its consequences to the use of weapons of mass destruction against us … under the protection and control of the Western powers. We are witnessing direct external control and the deployment of NATO infrastructure.
He then hints that he is ready to re-take the lands he believes should belong to Russia, advancing a number of spurious claims to prove that Moscow would be justified in doing so.
In 1954, the Crimean Region of the RSFSR was given to the Ukrainian SSR, in gross violation of legal norms that were in force at the time … The right for republics to freely secede from the Soviet Union was the most dangerous time bomb planted in the foundation of our statehood and it exploded … in 1991, when all those territories and people found themselves abroad overnight, taken away from their historical motherland … It is crystal clear that Russia was blatantly robbed.
Having established the narrative of historical injustices and interfering foreign enemies ‘robbing’ Russia of her rightful territory, Putin lays out the pretexts on which he might take it back. Just as Hitler alleged mistreatment of ethnic Germans in the Sudetenland as a reason for its annexation, Putin cites tales of oppressed Russians in eastern Ukraine, bullied, abused and demanding the Motherland come to their rescue.
[They] have peacefully made their case. Yet, all of them, including children, have been labelled as separatists and terrorists. They have been threatened with ethnic cleansing and the use of military force … after the riots that swept through Ukrainian cities, after the horror and tragedy of Ukrainian neo-Nazis burning people alive. Russia has done everything to stop the fratricide … but Ukraine’s representatives, assisted by Western partners, depict themselves as ‘victims of external aggression’ and peddle Russophobia. They arrange bloody provocations in Donbas, pandering to their external patrons and masters.