Putin is an Imperialist Who Must Be Stopped Now or He Will Become More Dangerous

 

I would like to expand on my recent comments on the need to stand up to Putin to prevent future aggression, and the death and suffering it causes. 

 

Specifically, I would like to address the calls from well-meaning people for a diplomatic solution.

 

Many people understandably want an end to the killing in Ukraine.  I certainly do. 

 

So why not sit down and talk?  As I’ve said before, we tried that after 2014 and it didn’t work.  We ended up with a full-scale invasion a year ago. 

 

More fundamentally, it is important to consider what there is to negotiate over. 

 

To start with, what is the nature of the disagreement? 

 

In other words, assuming you could get Putin or his representative to a negotiating table, what are the opposing positions and the potential middle ground? 

 

Vladimir Putin has continued to repeat his original stated war aims, “demilitarization and denazification.” 

 

Denazification in the context Putin uses it clearly means regime change. 

 

It’s pretty clear that Putin thought he could take out the current elected government and install a puppet regime. 

 

President Biden publicly released the intelligence we had to that effect before the war began, which I think was a smart move. 

 

Demilitarization means that Ukraine has to give up its right to defend itself, allowing Russia a free hand to intervene with force if Ukraine ever again tries to assert its right to act independently of Russia. 

 

Obviously President Zelenskyy cannot ever agree to meet those two demands.  No president of a sovereign country could.

 

Of course, in Putin’s mind, Ukraine is not a sovereign country.  That’s the problem.

 

Putin repeats a false version of history that says Ukraine is an artificially created country and rightfully part of Russia. 

 

Ukraine has a long history of independence before it was ever conquered by Russia, in fact long before Russia even existed.  But, for decades, Putin has pushed a warped, imperialistic view of history that is all too common among Russians. 

 

When Putin repeatedly invokes Peter the Great, we should be concerned.

 

Remember, Peter the Great was a Russian expansionist emperor who conquered lands like Finland and the Baltics from Sweden.

 

It may be comforting to buy into Putin’s propaganda that he is feels concern for the people in parts of Ukraine where they speak Russian and that perhaps those people want to be Russian. 

 

That makes his motives seem like they might have some justification.

 

It also lulls us into the belief that Putin will be appeased once he cleaves off a chunk of eastern Ukraine.

 

There is absolutely no reason to believe that, nor has Putin actually said that.

 

The Russian Federation in its current borders has subsumed many non-Russian ethnicities and languages from past imperial conquests.  Not speaking Russian never stopped them before.

 

In 1939, the Soviet Union attacked Finland in the Winter War despite its language and culture being very, very different from Russia. 

 

It was a nakedly imperial quest to reconquer lost territory of the Russian Empire.  Finland fought back and kept its independence, but Russia kept a big chunk of Karelia. 

 

This is an area that spoke a dialect of Finnish and was not historically Russian in any deep cultural or linguistic sense.  Sadly today, in that region, Karelians maintaining their native language and culture represent a tiny minority of the population.  Over the years, it has been thoroughly russified. 

 

In Ukraine, mass graves and reports of widespread rape from areas liberated from Russian occupation should suffice to dispel the myth that Ukrainians welcome occupation, or that Russians see Ukrainians as brothers. 

 

The fact that many people in eastern Ukraine speak Russian never made them Russian, just as English-speaking Irish citizens do not long to be governed by London. 

 

Eastern Ukraine was subject to a policy of russification under the Russian Empire and then under the Soviet Union, when many Russian workers were imported to the area.

 

But, it should be clear to everyone now that the Ukrainian national identity cannot be easily suppressed, regardless of the language they speak at home.

 

Still, that does not stop Russians from trying. 

 

Thousands of Ukrainian children from Russian occupied areas in eastern Ukraine have been forcibly deported to Russia and adopted into Russian families. 

 

Members of the Putin regime talk openly about how these children came with pro-Ukrainian attitudes but have now been brainwashed to adopt pro-Russian sentiments. 

 

This alone meets the definition of genocide.

 

In Putin’s 2007 Munich Security Conference speech, his critique of the United States included the assertion that we seek a unipolar world where we impose our values on others, and called for a multipolar world. In other words, one with different spheres of influence. 

 

When Putin talks about countries like Ukraine and other formerly Russian dominated countries, it is clear that he sees them as either in his sphere of influence, or someone else’s. 

 

Putin cannot accept that Ukrainians might want to leave behind the corrupt, Russian dominated post-Soviet system where oligarchs get rich and the average person’s economic and political freedom are limited. 

 

Putin talks about “NATO expansion” into the Baltics as though NATO is a rival empire.

 

In reality, the Baltic countries begged to join NATO.  And, they were admitted at a time of naive optimism in the West that Russia was becoming a peaceful democracy. 

 

The Baltic countries are actually a useful case study to understand how many Russians think about their former imperial subject countries. This month, Estonia and Lithuania celebrate the 106^th anniversary of the birth of their republics in their current independent form.

 

It is important to understand that the Baltic countries are historically western in their culture and outlook. 

 

Like Ukraine, they experienced attempts at russification, during the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, including importing of Russian-speaking workers, threatening their unique cultures and languages.

 

After regaining their freedom from Soviet occupation in 1991, the Baltics quickly built thriving, free market democracies.

 

Given their history, it is natural that they sought to protect their way of life from Russian domination by joining the most successful defensive alliance in history. 

 

Putin and many Russians speak with resentfulness about the Baltics.  Their very existence as prosperous, Western-style free-market democracies not dependent on Russia politically or economically is clearly threatening.

 

Russian state media tries, absurdly, to convince Russians that their prosperity is due to development efforts under the Soviet occupation, or that they are about to become failed states any day now. Many Russians are convinced that their joining NATO makes them U.S. puppets, reflecting the spheres of influence worldview.

 

Again, joining NATO was their fervent wish, not some policy of expansion for expansion’s sake on the part of NATO, and their populations are some of the most pro-American anywhere in the world. 

 

Putin dismisses the wishes of his smaller neighbors as irrelevant to great power geopolitics.  He thinks they are inevitably pawns to be bartered over by big empires. 

 

Given our origin as a tiny collection of colonies seeking independence from a powerful empire, Americans ought to think differently.

 

Putin is threatened by NATO expansion not because he believes NATO countries might attack the Russian Federation. 

 

Our NATO allies bordering Russia did not host any long-term deployments of troops from other allies before Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine. 

 

Multiple NATO allies have since provided small rotational forces to our eastern flank allies intended to deter Russian aggression. 

 

Those forces have naturally grown since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February. 

 

But, frankly, they are still insufficient to repel the kind of full-scale invasion we saw in Ukraine, much less pose any kind of threat to Russian territory. 

 

Putin’s military leaders, for all their mistakes in Ukraine, are not stupid. 

 

They do not see NATO as a military threat to current Russian territory. 

 

Rather, Putin sees NATO as a threat to his dream of reconstituting the Russian Empire. 

 

President Macron of France has suggested offering Putin security guarantees.

 

That plays into Putin’s false propaganda that he faces any kind of threat from NATO.

 

When Putin talks about security guarantees, he has made clear that he means a dismantling of NATO in areas he sees as his rightful sphere of influence, enabling him to bully them.

 

Keep in mind that, when he invaded Ukraine initially in 2014, Ukraine was militarily neutral, but seeking closer economic relations with the European Union. 

 

In February 2014, months of popular protests by ordinary Ukrainians culminated in what Ukrainians call their “Revolution of Dignity.” 

 

The Ukrainian president at the time yielded to pressure from Putin and refused to sign an association agreement with the European Union after it passed overwhelmingly in the parliament. 

 

The Ukrainian parliament ultimately voted to remove the president.  He then fled to Russia but not before violent confrontations between special riot police and protestors. 

 

Putin has falsely claimed this was a U.S.-sponsored coup rather than a grassroots rejecting of his meddling in Ukraine’s sovereign affairs.

 

Russia then invaded Eastern Ukraine and Crimea. 

 

To be clear, the 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine had nothing to do with NATO, the U.S., or any military threat to Russia.

 

Rather, Ukraine’s decision to seek closer economic ties to Europe threatened Putin’s sense of entitlement to have Ukraine dominated by Russia.

 

Putin has said, “true sovereignty of Ukraine is possible only in partnership with Russia.” 

 

This reflects his notion that Ukraine can never be truly independent. 

 

In his mind, Ukraine is either in Russia’s sphere of influence, which he sees as its natural state, or it is somehow controlled by shadowy Western forces. 

 

We should not fall into the same imperialistic trap of sidelining or minimizing the wishes of Ukrainians.

 

President Biden has said, “nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine” and he must stick to that. 

 

We must also be clear-eyed about what is and is not possible to negotiate with Putin.

 

As I have said before, Putin only understands strength and weakness is provocative.

 

As Ursula von der Leyen, the EU Commission President and former German Defense Minister under Angela Merkel said,

 

“We should have listened to the voices inside our Union – in Poland, in the Baltics, and all across Central and Eastern Europe- they have been telling us for years that Putin would not stop”. 

 

President Biden should take that lesson to heart as well.

 

Estonian Prime Minister Kallas puts it this way,

 

 “History shows that appeasement only strengthens and encourages aggressors and that aggressors can be stopped only with force.  As the prime minister of Estonia, a frontline NATO country that endured half a century of Soviet occupation, I know what peace on Russia’s terms really means.

 

Russian peace would not mean the end of suffering but rather more atrocities.”

 

I wish it was possible to negotiate with Putin to put an end to Ukraine’s suffering. 

 

But, what he wants is domination of Ukraine, and that is not ours to offer.

 

We have only two options left.

 

We could sit on the sidelines and watch Ukraine get slowly crushed, which would embolden Putin and open the possibility that he would eventually attack one of our allies.

 

Or, we can support Ukraine’s victory and independence.

 

As I have said before, backing a Ukrainian victory comes with costs and risks. 

 

But, the risks and costs of not stopping Putin now will be much higher.

 

That makes repelling Russia’s invasion of its sovereign neighbor in the U.S. national interest.