By David K. Shipler
You can
almost picture Vladimir Putin, perpetual president of Russia, hunched over a
chess board the shape of Europe, divining strategies many steps ahead of his
fractious, ambivalent opponents. A gas pipeline here, troops and tanks there,
propaganda everywhere to set the stage for the twenty-first century’s Great
Russian Expansion.
He is a skillful player. He reads
the other side, detects its weakness, studies its patterns of resolve and
hesitation. He appears coldly rational. Yet some who watch him closely see
something beyond careful calculation. That is especially so when the issue is
Ukraine, now in his military’s crosshairs.
“Putin’s attachment to Ukraine
often takes on emotional, spiritual, and metaphysical overtones.” write
Eugene Rumer and Andrew S. Weiss at the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace. Alongside his tangible geopolitical concerns, they
believe, he is driven by the personal compulsions of historical fabulation and
ethereal bonds to a land that he denies constitutes a country. Its capital,
Kyiv, was the center of the Slavic state Rus a millennium ago. Its size places
it second only to Russia in Europe. Its historic kinship with Russia is
exaggerated by the Russian leader to justify making it the target of a sacred
claim.
This year is the thirtieth
anniversary of the collapse and breakup of the Soviet Union into fifteen
countries along the lines of its fifteen republics, including Ukraine. Imagine
the trauma—as if the United States fragmented into fifty independent nations,
with a searing loss of dignity and global standing. Putin called
the Soviet breakup “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”
Rumer and Weiss see him impelled to retake the prize of Ukraine to burnish his
legacy.
“No part of the Russian and Soviet empires has
played a bigger and more important role in Russian strategy toward Europe than
the crown jewel, Ukraine,” they note in their essay. “The country is essential
to Russian security for many reasons: its size and population; its position
between Russia and other major European powers; its role as the centerpiece of
the imperial Russian and Soviet economies; and its deep cultural, religious,
and linguistic ties to Russia, particularly Kyiv’s history as the cradle of
Russian statehood.”
Washington policymakers gave no hint of understanding any of that when they moved to fill the power vacuum left by the Soviet collapse.
