What does Vladimir Putin want from Ukraine?

Western leaders have held crisis talks amid rising fears of a Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Joe Biden told reporters yesterday that Nato member states were in “total unanimity” that “swift” and “unprecedented” sanctions should be imposed in the event of any incursion into Ukrainian territory.

In an article published in The Sun today, Armed Forces Minister James Heappey wrote that “a significant number of individuals that are assessed to be associated with Russian military advance-force operations” have already entered Ukraine.

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The Kremlin has denied having boots on the ground or planning any military action against the neighbouring nation. But Boris Johnson told ITV News yesterday that British intelligence suggested Moscow was planning a “lightning war” against Kiev.

What does Putin want?

Putin’s interest in Ukraine is rooted in the collapse of the Soviet Union and Ukraine’s position as an important geopolitical pinch point.

Once a member of the Soviet bloc, Ukraine declared independence in August 1991 and moved to a market economy, creating “tension between its old ties to Russia and new allegiances with Western nations”, said the i news site.

With Putin now in the “twilight of his political career”, said The New York Times (NYT), his renewed interest in bringing Ukraine back into Russia’s orbit is part of an attempt to “correct what he has long viewed as a catastrophe of the 20th century: the disintegration of the former Soviet Union”.

Asserting Moscow’s influence over the neighbouring nation and its 44m-strong population “is part of his aim of restoring what he views as Russia’s rightful place among the world’s great powers, along with the United States and China”, the paper added.

“I don’t think anyone can claim to know [Putin’s mind] in its entirety,” James Nixey, director of the Russia and Eurasia programme at the Chatham House think tank, told Metro. “But first, he is an ultra-nationalist and believes in the greater destiny of Russia… for Putin, Russia does have a special destiny, to be more than the sum of its parts.”

The Russian leader’s “mission” is to ensure that his country “is not humiliated in the way that it was in the 1990s – that it continues to be regarded, in his eyes, as a great power with a de facto veto on all matters of global affairs”, Nixey said.

But Putin’s interest in Ukraine is not simply an attempt at “resurrecting the Soviet Union”, wrote The New Yorker’s Moscow correspondent Joshua Yaffa. “Rather, Ukraine presents an opportunity for Russia, once and for all, to reassert its geopolitical relevance.”

Yaffa argued that in Putin’s mind, “only the threat of war” can “reopen a conversation that, to many in the West, has long felt like settled history: the expansion of Nato eastward, the denial of a Russian veto on questions of regional security, and the underlying sense that Russia lost the Cold War”.

Nato expansionism

Putin has long regarded Nato’s eastward expansion “as an existential threat to his country”, and has insisted that “Moscow’s military build-up is a reaction to Ukraine’s intensifying ties with the alliance”, said the NYT.

Once largely confined to western Europe, Nato has expanded to include several countries once under the control of the Soviet Union.

Ukraine is said to be an “aspiring” member of the postwar military alliance. And while no plans to admit Ukraine into Nato have been reported, the members states have refused Russian demands for “legal guarantees” ruling out the move.

“It’s only Ukraine and 30 Nato allies that decide when Ukraine is ready to join Nato,” Jens Stoltenberg, the general secretary of the military alliance, told reporters in December.

Ultimately, “if Ukraine joins Nato, or is drawn into a de-facto military alliance with it, then Putin’s project has failed”, said The New Yorker’s Yaffa. But if he can stop Ukraine from doing so, he will have “overturned what he sees as an unjust post-Cold War order”.

Putin also sees a domestic opportunity in applying pressure to Ukraine, using the conflict to “shore up domestic support by unifying Russians against an external enemy”, said The Times’ diplomatic correspondent Catherine Philp.

His renewed pressure on Ukraine has coincided with growing opposition at home, particularly among young urban Russians “frustrated with corruption and inspired by the actions of the dissident Alexei Navalny”.

Putin’s gamble

While some analysts have portrayed Putin as a “wily chess player adroitly manipulating the West”, his latest play could “backfire”, the NYT predicted.

Nato may “reinforce its military presence in member countries bordering Russia, like the Baltics”, while a full-scale invasion “would invite punishing sanctions that could diminish his support in a country weary of foreign adventures”, the paper continued.

And existing “nationalist passions” in Ukraine have been further inflamed by the aggressive Russian posturing, “with citizen militias preparing for a drawn-out guerrilla campaign in the event of a Russian occupation”.

Members of Ukraine’s Territorial Defence Forces, the military reserve component of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, have begun “preparations for war”, said The Times’ war correspondent Anthony Lloyd, reporting from Kiev. Normal Ukranians have also begun arming to defend themselves against a Russian invasion.

“I have never hunted in my life,” Mariana Zhaglo, a market researcher in the Ukrainian capital, told Loyd. But she described how she had bought a hunting gun after “listening to some soldiers discussing the best rifle to get”.

“As a mother I do not want my children to inherit Ukraine’s problems, or have these threats passed on to them,” she said. “It is better that I deal with this now.

“If it comes to it then we will fight for Kiev, we will fight to protect our city.”