On 24 February 2022, President Putin launched the biggest war in Europe since 1945. Since then, hundreds of thousands of Russian and Ukrainian troops, and tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians, have been killed or permanently disabled.
But why did Russia invade its peaceful neighbour in the first place?
It’s hard to assess statements by the Russian leadership because misleading people about what you are doing, or ‘maskirovka’, is part of Russia’s military tactics. But before looking at the real origins of the war, let’s debunk a few of Putin’s claims in turn:
‘Ukraine is a hostile country’: Ukraine was never hostile to Russia before Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014. Ukrainian Russian speakers lived in peace and stability before Russia invaded. Since then, they have faced ten years of conflict. At no point before 2014 did Ukraine pose any military threat to Russia.
‘Russia is responding to a Nazi threat’: This repeats the propaganda playbook from 2014 – when Russia claimed a ‘fascist’ threat from Ukraine to justify its first invasion – and 1961, when builders of the Berlin Wall, designed to stop East Germans escaping, labelled it an ‘anti-fascist protection wall’.
‘Russia is responding to the threat of Ukrainian NATO membership’: Ukraine applied to join NATO in 2008. But at the Bucharest Summit in April 2008, NATO froze Ukraine’s application. The main change since then has been that Russia’s aggression has highlighted Moscow’s neocolonialist agenda. Result: Finland (neutral since World War II) and Sweden (neutral for two centuries) joined NATO in 2023 and 2024 respectively.
‘It’s something to do with the EU’: Shamefully, some Western politicians parrot Moscow’s line that the EU ‘provoked’ Russia’s invasion. In fact, for decades after Ukraine signed a Partnership and Cooperation Agreement with the EU in 1994, Moscow never objected. Even pro-Russian Ukrainian President Yanukovych, elected in 2010, continued to negotiate an Association Agreement with the EU, right up to autumn 2013.
I visited Moscow as British ambassador to Kyiv, in 2009. I called on the head of the Ukraine department in Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and asked if Russia minded Ukraine getting closer to the EU. “Not at all,” he said. “Of course, we’d rather they joined our customs union, but it’s up to them.”
The real origins of the war
The reasons for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine lie in Moscow. Putin was relaxed about Ukraine until, in 2011–13, the so-called Bolotnaya pro-democracy protests erupted in major Russian cities. The unrest convinced Putin that democracy, if left unchecked in Ukraine or elsewhere in the former Soviet Union, could sweep him away – to face an uncertain future. The incarceration and killing of opposition activist Alexei Navalny shows Putin’s terror of free speech and accusations of corruption.
That personal agenda, not any nonsense about fascism in Ukraine or threats from the EU or NATO, led to a U-turn in Russian policy when in 2013 Putin suddenly stopped Yanukovych – his own protégé – from signing the Association Agreement with the EU. Following protests in Ukraine and the fall of Yanukovych in 2014, Russia invaded Crimea and eastern Ukraine. In 2022, Moscow launched its full-scale invasion, leading to the bloodbath that continues.
Russia–Ukraine history
Nationalists love to say that ‘X territory is the ancient home of our people’. Putin has mangled history as far back as the 9th century to attempt to justify his invasion. But the key date is 1991.
On 1 December 1991, Ukraine held a referendum on independence from the Soviet Union. 84 per cent of the electorate took part, of whom 92.3 per cent voted for independence. Both Luhansk and Donetsk, the two regions partly occupied by Russia since 2014, voted 83.9 per cent in favour of Ukrainian independence. In Crimea, the figure was 54.2 per cent.
One week later, on 8 December 1991, the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus signed the Belovezh Accords, declaring that the Soviet Union had ceased to exist. On 21 December, 11 of the 12 remaining Soviet republics – all except Georgia, and the Baltic states, whose independence the Soviet Union had recognised months earlier – signed the Alma-Ata Protocol, reiterating the end of the Soviet Union and the creation of a Confederation of Independent States. On 25 December, Soviet President Gorbachev resigned. The flag of the Soviet Union was lowered at the Kremlin and the flag of Russia was hoisted.
Russia–Ukraine: Treaties and loose ends
The Belovezh Accords left plenty of loose ends. They included the presence in Ukraine of a massive stockpile of leftover Soviet weapons. The former Soviet republics also shared a currency.
In July 1993, Russia withdrew the Soviet rouble and introduced a new, Russian rouble. This forced other republics of the former Soviet Union to introduce their own currencies and become economically sovereign. Russia thus drove a nail into the coffin of the Soviet Union.
In December 1994, Russia, the US and the UK signed the Budapest Memorandum. In exchange for Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan’s giving up nuclear weapons, signatories promised to respect those countries’ independence and sovereignty within existing borders, to refrain from the threat or the use of force against them, and to resist using economic pressure to influence their policies. Russia, the US and UK did not, however, commit themselves to defending the three countries.
In May 1997, Ukraine and Russia signed the Treaty on Friendship, Co-operation and Partnership, also known as the Big Treaty. Both sides promised to respect the inviolability of existing borders, to respect territorial integrity, and not to invade the other’s country. Russia abrogated both treaties in March 2014 – after invading Crimea.
Leigh Turner served at the British Embassy in Moscow from 1992-5 as First Secretary (Economic) and in Kyiv, as British Ambassador, from 2008-12.
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Image credit: European Union, 2022 (Photographer: Ramin Mazur) via Flickr