Piers Paul Read: Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and the Invasion of Ukraine

Most people in Britain regard Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, the President of the Russian Federation, as an evil man.  In Russia which he has now ruled for more than twenty years critical journalists have been assassinated, opposition politicians imprisoned, defecting Russian agents poisoned - and in 2022 he invaded Ukraine. It is only the last, the invasion of Ukraine, that he himself has acknowledged was done at his command. Was that decision, as many seem to believe, a first step in the reconquest of the territory that formed part of the Soviet Union? Will the Baltic states be next? Or was the invasion in his view a pre-emptive strike against an existential threat to the Russian nation? Is it possible that the present conflict in Ukraine might have been avoided if the chancelleries and intelligence services of the Western powers had made a more thorough study of their enemy, not judging him as they would any other European head of state when, as the Russian poet Pushkin wrote, ‘Russia never had anything in common with the rest of Europe’?

This remark by Pushkin is quoted by the Hungarian historian, Tibor Szamuely, in his book The Russian Tradition published in England in 1974. Szamuely knew Russia well. He was born in Moscow, studied in Russia, Hungary and England. His father disappeared in Stalin’s purges. He served in the Soviet army; was imprisoned in a labour camp, and in 1964 settled in Britain, teaching history at Reading University. His hypothesis in The Russian Tradition is that to understand Russia one must look not west to the developing democracies, but south and east where ‘despotism was the only form of government capable of holding together and administering large territorial entities’. ‘From the point of view of Russia’s history,’ wrote Szamuely, ‘the decisive feature of her geographical environment has been the absence of natural frontiers. This has led on the one hand to the expansion of the Russian people over one-sixth of the world’s land surface, and on the other to a history of armed struggle against invaders that for length, intensity and ferocity has no parallel in the annals of any other nation.’ The Russians’ role models were therefore not England of the Magna Carta or neighbouring Poland with its elective monarchy, but the Mongols who ‘though ignorant of algebra, Aristotle and the finer things of life, were able to give Russia something of more lasting importance: a political and administrative system, a concept of society, quite unlike anything that was to be learned in the West’.

A second point made by Szamuely is that, despite the rule of a series of despots – Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Catherine the Great – and the enslavement until 1861 of 90% of the population, ‘the Russian people regarded their national state and their social system with a feeling of pious reverence and blind faith that went beyond simple patriotism…’ This was partly because of their religious beliefs. Kievan Rus had been converted to Christianity not from Rome but Byzantium; and after the fall of Constantinople to the Muslim Turks, the Patriarch of Moscow had assumed the role of head of the Orthodox Church. The depravity of Renaissance popes, the unscrupulousness of the Venetian Republic, and the deviousness of the Jesuits, confirmed the Russians in their belief that Latin Christianity and so the western European nations were incorrigibly decadent and corrupt: this view is found in the novels of both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and among some Russians today. Russia, by contrast, ‘was a society based on equality and justice. More than just a country to be loved and defended, Russia was a state of mind, a secular ideal, a sacred idea, an object of almost religious belief – unfathomable by the yardstick of rationality’.

‘The Russians’ insufferable self-righteousness,’ wrote Szamuely, ‘struck foreigners as absurd, given the abject condition of most of its population and the cruel despotism of its rulers; but because of Russia’s vulnerability to outside aggressors, it was accepted that only a despotic form of government could ensure the survival of their nation. Their enemies changed – in the south, from the Tartars to the Turks, and in the west from the Swedes and Poles to the French and Germans. Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812 and occupied Moscow. In 1850 Britain and France attacked Russia in Crimea in support of Russia’s perennial enemy, the Muslim Turks. During the Russian Civil War which followed the Bolshevik Revolution, the British and French sent Military Missions – troops, tanks and airplanes - to support the White armies in southern Russia. The Germans invaded Russia in 1941 (Operation Barbarossa) with contingents of Italians, Spaniards and Romanians. Latvians, Estonians and Ukrainians participated in the atrocities that came in the wake of the German conquests. By the end of the war, Germans were a minority in the Waffen SS.

I give this resumé to show that, from a Russian perspective, although the Tsarist empire expanded when the Baltic states passed from Swedish to Russian rule after the Great Baltic War of 1710, and with the partition of Poland between Russia, Prussia and Austria in 1795, it only waged war against west European powers in alliance with other west European powers – with Austria and Britain against Napoleon: with Britain, France and Italy against Austria and Germany in World War I; and later with Britain and the United States against Germany in World War II. If Russian troops were to be found in Paris in 1812, it was not as conquerors but as members of the alliance that had defeated Napoleon. So too their presence in Berlin in 1945, and the capitals of the East European nations that had been either conquered by or allied with the Germans: and if Stalin imposed Communist governments in these liberated nations, creating a tyranny of another kind, it was as much to secure a ‘buffer zone’ of nations under his control as to promote world revolution.

Indeed, to rally the Russian people in their resistance to the German invader, Stalin had called not on the people’s socialistic fervour but their age-old faith in Holy Russia. And the Russian people had responded. The statistics show what Szamuely meant when he wrote that Russia’s struggle against invaders ‘for length, intensity and ferocity has no parallel in the annals of any other nation.’ 27 million Soviet citizens died during World War II - 11.4% of the country’s population. Of these, 19 million were civilians, 8.7 million in the armed forces. Of that 8.7 million, 1.3 million were Ukrainians’. More Ukrainians and Poles were killed as a proportion of their population, but it was the Red Army that suffered the greatest losses in the defeat of the German army. The British, by contrast, lost 0.94% of their population, and the Americans 0.32%. The celluloid annals of the conflict aired time and again on British television largely depict the defeat of Hitler as the result of the heroic accomplishments of the Anglo-Saxon nations – The Dam Busters, In Which We Serve, Sink the Bismark. The ideological rivalry of the Cold War led us to downplay if not wholly ignore the debt owed to the Russians for the defeat of Germany and the extirpation of the malign ideology of National Socialism.

The Cold War cost few lives. It sustained what the US President Eisenhower called ‘the miliary industrial complex’ in the United States and intelligence services which, while they did little to affect the course of history, provided often fanciful material for popular fiction. For fear that the Soviets might advance beyond the territory they had taken in the war, the United States and a number of west European nations formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation - NATO. The Soviet Union combined with its satellite nations in eastern Europe to form its own a military alliance, the Warsaw Pact. With the advent of the atomic and hydrogen bombs, a ‘mutually assured destruction’ ensured decades of peace in Europe, allowing the re-drawing of borders and vast transfers of peoples that followed the war to go ahead without any further conflict. The kind of revanchism that had led to World War II was now impossible.

There were protests in eastern Europe against the Communist system that had been forced upon them - in East Berlin in 1953, in Budapest in 1956, in Prague in 1968 – which were crushed by Soviet tanks. In Poland a trades union, Solidarity, established a measure of independence from the Communist government; and in November, 1989, a long series of demonstrations against the Communist regime in East Berlin made a breach in that all too visible barrier between the Communist East and the capitalist West, the Berlin Wall. No measures were taken to stop them passing through to West Berlin and beyond. The reformist President of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, refused to endorse the use of force. The Volkspolizei stood down. The Soviet troops remained in their barracks. It was the end of Soviet hegemony in eastern Europe. One after another, the people of the Soviet Union’s satellite states ousted their Communist governments and established democracy – a second and this time genuine liberation.

Two years later, the Soviet Union itself ceased to exist. The non-Slav populations of republics on the periphery of the union – Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Georgia – demanded independence. Gorbachev dithered. An attempted coup by hard-line Communists failed. Boris Yeltsin, the flamboyant alcoholic whose drinking had seen him dropped from the politburo and appointed to the powerless role of President of the Russian Federation, proclaimed the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The leaders of Byelorussia and Ukraine concurred. The Communist Party was abolished. The rug was pulled from beneath the feet of Gorbachev, its General Secretary. Sovereignty now lay with the individual republics which under their existing leaders, the Communist bosses, eagerly proclaimed their independence.

Putin was not in Russia during these momentous events: he was in Dresden in East Germany, a Lieutenant Colonel in the State Security Service of the Soviet Union, the KGB. The KGB has no precise equivalents in the western democracies – MI5 or MI6, the CIA, BND or DSG. It was the descendant of the Cheka, the semi-militarised elite force founded by the Polish aristocrat Felix Dzerzhinsky during the Bolshevik Revolution – a ruthless, sometimes heroic, often cruel vanguard in the Communist drive to change the world, responsible under different names - CHEKA, OGPU, NKVD - for many atrocities under Lenin and Stalin, but settling after the Krushchev era as the secret service of the Soviet state.

After the failed coup of Communist die-hards in August 1991, Vladimir Putin left the KGB to enter politics in his native Leningrad, now returned to its historic name, St. Petersburg. Patronised by his former professor, Anatoly Sobchak, then the city’s mayor, Putin held a number of positions in the city government and came to the attention of Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin appointed Putin to various posts in the Russian government, including, briefly, director of the KGB. In August, 1999, he was made a deputy-prime minister, then prime minister, and finally Yeltsin’s choice to replace him when he unexpectedly announced his resignation as President on 31 December, 1999. It was said that Putin was the favoured candidate of the oligarchs who formed part of Yeltsin’s ‘family’ such as Boris Berezovsky; but it may be that Yeltsin who had seen how under his rule Russia had been ill-governed and humiliated by the Western powers, decided that he should bequeath to his people a leader who was made of sterner stuff.

Putin was unknown to the general public in Russia, but he won an initial election in March 2000 by a small margin, and a second in 2004 with a convincing majority. The standard of living rose under his rule. He proved not to be a pawn of the oligarchs, but called them to order - saying they could keep their dubiously acquired fortunes if they paid their taxes and did not interfere in politics – a warning Mikhail Khodorkovsky ignored and suffered expropriation and imprisonment as a result.

But if Putin was able to restore stability in Russia itself, states on its southern and eastern borders – Chechnya and later Georgia - proved problematic. And there was Ukraine. ‘When Ukraine’s parliament declared the republic’s independence on 24 April (1991)’ wrote the former Moscow correspondent of the Sunday Times Peter Conradi in Who Lost Russia? ‘Yeltsin’s press secretary warned that Russia might retaliate by laying claim to some of its territory – citing Crimea and the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine…’ The year before, the dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn living in exile in Vermont ‘had warned … against attempts to destroy the country’s Slavic core…. He was especially critical of those trying to hack off Ukraine, which he considered inseparable from Russia, particularly Crimea and other parts of the south and the east that had not been part of “old Ukraine”’. Certainly, 98% of Ukrainians had voted for independence, but that was independence from the Soviet Union, not necessarily involving separation from Russia. As the then Soviet leader Michael Gorbachev had pointed out to the US President George Bush, Ukraine as a nation ‘had come into existence only because the Bolsheviks had at one point gerrymandered it to ensure their own way. They had added Kharkov and Donbass, and Krushchev later passed the Crimea from Russia to Ukraine as a fraternal gesture’.

We are told of this exchange by M.E. Sarotte, the Kravis Professor of Historical Studies at John Hopkins University in her book Not One Inch published in 2021 - the title being the words used by George Bush’s Secretary of State, James Baker, when assuring Mikhail Gorbachev that if Russia raised no objection to the reunification of Germany after the collapse of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), the United States would guarantee that the NATO alliance would move not one inch to the east. Gorbachev agreed to the withdrawal of the formidable Russian military forces that remained in Eastern Europe. The Warsaw pact was dissolved. NATO was not dissolved, and Baker’s assurance proved false. One after another, the former Soviet satellite states were admitted to NATO – a legitimate exercise, it was said, of their newly established sovereignty, but also a result of lobbying by arms manufacturers in the United States: ‘between 1996 and 1998 alone,’ we are told by Conradi, ‘American’s six biggest military contractors spent $51 million lobbying Congress and public opinion’. Both Gorbachev and later Yeltsin protested against the expansion of NATO but ‘following the break-up of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the economy, Russia had been reduced to a supplicant’. To the Russians, ‘NATO enlargement looked like a brazen attempt by the West to exploit its weakness to take over countries formerly part of Moscow’s sphere of influence’ but as yet they were powerless to do anything about it. In 1989, Russian forces had been stationed within 150 miles of Hamburg; now NATO forces were stationed 150 miles from of St. Petersburg.

It was in this way that in the minds of Russians the question of Ukraine became inextricably linked to that of the expansion of NATO. We have seen how the Soviet occupation of the East European nations came after the Red Army’s defeat of the Wehrmacht in 1945. We have also seen how the liberation of these nations from the Germans was followed by the imposition of a political system not of their choice. Protests against this imposition had been crushed by Soviet tanks. While it was unlikely that the tanks would return while Russia was weak, it was surely reasonable for those nations to join an alliance that would protect them if Russia were once again to become strong.

A contrary view – that NATO was not merely a defensive alliance but an instrument to impose the hegemony of the United States – was given substance by developments in the Balkans. Soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union came the disintegration of Yugoslavia. The different provinces of this South Slav Union dominated by Orthodox Christian Serbia declared their independence. The religious affiliations are significant: the first to break away were Catholic Slovenia and Croatia, both hastily recognised by the Vatican and West Germany with no thought for what the disintegration of Yugoslavia might entail. There followed a protracted and sanguinary war between Serbia, Croatia and the Muslim Albanians living in the Serbian province of Kosovo. Kosovo had a historic significance for the Orthodox Christian Serbs and they fought to retain it; but Muslim Albanians now formed a majority and the western nations championed their claim for autonomy.

The atrocities committed by the warring parties in the Balkans in the 1990s, such as the bombardment of Sarajevo or the massacre of civilians in Srebrenica – these perpetrated by the Serbs – led to calls for the West to intervene. In a speech delivered in Chicago in 1999, the then British Prime Minister Tony Blair, outlined a theory of ‘liberal interventionism’ – viz. the right, even the duty, of liberal, democratic nations to use military force to right egregious wrongs committed by rogue nations. Ideally, said Blair, decisions as to when such interventions were justified should be made by the United Nations but it was prevented from playing that role by the power of veto in the Security Council held by nations that were not liberal democracies, Russia and China. It was therefore for the leaders of the Western democracies to decide when to intervene.

This theory of liberal interventionism was put into practice in the Balkans by the American President Bill Clinton and the British Prime Minister Tony Blair to impose their will on the Serbian President, Slobodan Milosevic. The instrument they used was NATO, ‘a watershed moment for NATO’, Professor Serotte tells us, ‘which found itself going “out of area” , meaning flying outside of its geographic area of defensive responsibility for the first time ever.’ For 21 days, between 24 March 1999 and 10 June 1999, NATO aircraft from the US airbase in Aviano in Italy bombed Belgrade and other parts of Serbia, destroying power stations, factories, hospitals, bridges, schools, barracks, historic monuments, even the Chinese Embassy. Its purpose was served. Milosevic agreed to withdraw Serb forces from Kosovo. Around 1,000 members of Serbia’s Defence Forces had been killed by the NATO bombing, and around 500 civilians. With the Serb forces leaving Kosovo went 164,000 Serb civilians and 24,000 Roma. Serbia now had the highest number of refugees and displaced persons in Europe.

The Russians had not been consulted. Boris Yeltsin, while still President, had condemned ‘responding to the use of violence with more violence’, we are told by Conradi, and ‘questioned the outside world’s right to intervene in the internal affairs of a sovereign state’ – all to no avail. It was now clear that for all their talk of a world order, the Western powers had by-passed the United Nations and ignored its Charter whose Chapter 7 forbade the use of force unless authorised by the Security Council, or in self-defence. The bombing of Yugoslavia met neither of these stipulations. Serbia was a long way from the Atlantic ocean: it had attacked no member of the Alliance. The military forces of an alliance formed to provide security in western Europe had not been mobilised to defend any member of the Alliance but had been used to impose the will of the government of the United States on what it regarded as a rogue regime.

There is no evidence that Yeltsin, Putin or others in the Russian government were well disposed towards Slobodan Milosevic, or approved of the atrocities perpetrated by the Serbs. However Serbia with its Slav population and Orthodox Christian religion had from its inception been an ally of Russia: it was in support of Serbia against Austria that Russia had entered World War I. It was clear to Igor Ivanov, Russia’s foreign minister between 1998 and 2004, ‘that NATO’S, air campaign, coinciding with the eastward expansion of the Alliance, was part of a broader American drive to take advantage of Russian weakness and rewrite the rules of international relations’. For the Russians, Conradi tells us, ‘Kosovo had been the last straw’. There were some in the West, particularly in the US, who had warned against humiliating a potentially powerful nation when it was down. Walter Laqueur, a respected American commentator on international affairs, wrote that ‘it was wishful thinking on the part of the West to assume that a country that had been a great power for centuries would meekly accept a lesser role – any more than Germany had seventy years earlier… To many Russians, a number of regions that were lost (such as Ukraine) are still considered to be part of Russia proper’.

But would Russia ever recover? Russian GDP remained small compared to that of the Western democracies. A transition of a large economy from one system to another – from socialism to capitalism – would have challenged a great statesman, but with Russia ruled by an emotional drunk, and a prey to self-seeking profiteers from both at home and abroad, it seemed clear that it would be economically enfeebled for many years to come. The West had encouraged the dismantling of the Communist system but there had been no offer of a Marshall Plan. ‘While the US saved an estimated $1.3 trillion from reduced military spending’, Conradi tells us, ‘US aid to Russia between 1993 and 1999 was no more than $2.50 per person – an amount equal to just one percent of the US defence budget for a single year, 1996, or a quarter of the price of a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier’.

However, there were two factors which worked in Russia’s favour. The first was the rise in the price of oil and natural gas: Russia had vast reserves of both. The second was Russia’s military potential. Soviet tanks had matched the German panzers, Soviet rockets were the first to orbit the earth, and the Kalashnikov AK-40 was a weapon favoured throughout the world. The 47% of Soviet GDP that had been spent during the Cold War may have denied Soviet citizens consumer goods, but it had created an arms and space industry that outdid any in western Europe and equalled that of the United States.

In February, 2007, Vladimir Putin attended the Security Conference that had been held in Munich since 1963 – a gathering of heads of state and international organisations to secure peace in the world. There he delivered a speech in which he charged the United States with breaking international law and using military force to ‘impose a monopolistic dominance of world affairs’. He complained about the expansion of NATO, citing the assurance by the German Secretary General of NATO in 1990 that the alliance’s forces would never be stationed outside Germany. ‘I think it is obvious that NATO expansion does not have any relation to the modernisation of the alliance itself, or with ensuring security in Europe. On the contrary, it represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended?’ He condemned the United States for its attempt to create a unipolar world by the unauthorised use of force: ‘Only the United Nations – not NATO or the European Union – could authorise the use of force around the world, and even then it should be a last resort’.

Putin’s speech was dismissed by Western politicians as a histrionic reprise of Cold War rhetoric. Less than a year later, on 17 February, 2008, Kosovo declared its independence – a re-drawing of post-war boundaries unsanctioned by the United Nations. The new nation was recognised by the United States and twenty-two of the European Union’s twenty-seven member states. Russia declared that it was a breach of international law, and was confirmed in its belief that the United States, together with its client states in western Europe, now considered itself above that law; or rather the sole arbiter of when that law should be kept and when broken. As Putin had made clear in his Munich speech, the Russians now saw ‘NATO as a powerful military block appearing near our borders, and will be perceived as a direct threat to the security of our country’.

The importance of Ukraine to the Russians had now become not simply a matter of the historical role played by Kiev in the birth of their nation, nor their right to the conquests of Prince Potemkin under Catherine the Great, but the existential threat posed to Russia if Ukraine was to join the NATO alliance. The Russian naval base of Sevastopol in Crimea which had been besieged by the British and French in 1850, was key to Russian’s access to the Black Sea, and through the Bosphorus to the Mediterranean. A former British Ambassador to Moscow, Sir Roderick Lyne, had warned that ‘Russia would exert itself mightily, risk a great deal and pay a high price to prevent Ukraine becoming, as Russians would see it, a platform for American power…’ – particularly if it meant losing the strategically important naval base of Sevastopol.

Russia’s presence in the Mediterranean enabled it to play a role and protect its interests in Africa and the Middle East. It was allied to Bashir Assad in Syria, had a naval base on the Syrian coast at Tartus, and an air base at Hmeimim. At a time when Assad’s government was tottering in its conflict with its Islamic adversaries, Russian bombers turned the tables in its favour. While Western leaders such as David Cameron called for the ousting of Assad, appearing to believe that a liberal democracy could be conjured up from among the Islamist rebels, the Christian leaders in the region saw Assad and now Russia as the saviours of their churches from the annihilation promised by the Islamists should Assad be toppled and they come to power.

We have described the attitude of Russia to Ukraine, but what was the attitude of Ukraine towards Russia? Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, 98% of the Ukrainian electorate had voted for independence but the country was divided when it came to its future with those in the west looking to the European Union and NATO, and those in the south and east towards Russia. The country was dominated by oligarchs and bedevilled by corruption: the former EU president, Jean-Claude Junker, said that Ukraine was ineligible to join the EU because of ‘corruption at every level of society’. The country was governed by a president, a post created after independence, and a unicameral assembly, the Verkhovna Rada. The candidates who stood for election to the presidency reflected the country’s division. In the 2005 presidential election, the pro-Russian candidate, Viktor Yanukovych, defeated the pro EU candidate Viktor Yushchenko by a narrow margin. There were demonstrations by those who claimed the results had been rigged. The Supreme Court ordered a re-run of the election which was won by the pro-Western Yushchenko: this came to be known as the ‘Orange Revolution’. In the 2010 election, Yushchenko and Yanukovych were joined by a third candidate, Yulia Tymoshenko. Yushchenko’s popularity had waned. In the run-off with Tymoshenko, the pro-Russian Yanukovych won by a margin of 3%. This was the last election in which all Ukrainians took part.

Three years into Yanukovych’s presidency, his government entered into negotiations for an association agreement with the European Union. Also on offer was membership of a Eurasian Economic Union promoted by Russia. At first Yanukovych inclined towards the former but, perhaps disappointed that more money was not forthcoming from the EU or, as was later claimed, under pressure from Russia whose trade and influence would suffer if Ukraine left its economic orbit, Yanukovich changed his mind. Ukraine would not apply for association with the EU but would rather go with Russia.

To those Ukrainians favouring the EU, this decision caused outrage and that outrage led to demonstrations in Maidan Square in the centre of Kiev. The protestors grew in numbers and resisted attempts to disperse them. They pitched tents. ‘The protestors,’ wrote Conradi, ‘who ranged from pro-EU liberals to thuggish far-right nationalists, lacked a single leader but what began as a protest over a trade agreement was turning into a full-blown uprising aimed at ousting Yanukovich and reorienting Ukraine’s alliances’. Funds flowed to opposition groups from Western donors, and ‘western leaders were quick to demonstrate solidarity’. The German Foreign Minister, Guido Westerwelle; the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs, Catherine Ashton; the US assistant secretary of state, Victoria Nuland; and the US Senator John McCain all joined the protestors on Maidan Square. They said it was to show ‘solidarity’ but no pretence was made that they were not encouraging, even engineering, ‘regime change’. A telephone call was intercepted between Victoria Nuland and the US ambassador to Ukraine discussing which opposition politicians should serve in the government.

In January and February, 2014, clashes between the demonstrators and the police became violent. Over a hundred protestors and thirteen members of the riot police were killed and many more injured either by the Berkut riot police or by the ‘thuggish far-right nationalists’ described by Conradi – in fact members of well-organized paramilitary groups, the Azov Battalion and the Right Sector, both admirers of Stefan Bandera, the Ukrainian nationalist ally of the Germans during World War II, and some of Hitler. The Right Sector had stolen arms from a police station in western Ukraine and Conradi describes how ‘a protestor in battle fatigues won roars of applause when he jumped on the stage, grabbed the microphone and said; “If it is not announced by ten tomorrow that Yanukovich is gone, were going to attack with weapons”’.

Between 19 and 20 February, the Maidan activists occupied government buildings and advanced on the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s parliament. Some fell to snipers, assumed to be members of the Berkut: however, it was not the protestors who took fright but the President, Vladimir Yanukovych, who on 21 February fled from Kiev to eastern Ukraine and then Russia.

After the flight of Yanukovych, his post was declared vacant and the Rada elected a new president and new government, both inclined to the EU and the West. To the Maidan demonstrators, the outcome of their protests was a victory for liberty and democracy: they called it the Revolution of Dignity. For those living in eastern Ukraine who remained loyal to Yanukovych it was a right-wing putsch, with threats by neo-Nazis chasing out a democratically elected president. From Russia, Yanukovych declared his deposition illegal, and his supporters in the Donbas refused to accept the new regime. Separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk proclaimed the regions’ independence from Kiev, and resisted when government forces tried to regain control. In Crimea, military personnel without insignia, later acknowledge to be Russian Special Forces, took control of military installations. With 90% of its population Russian, Crimea declared its secession from Ukraine. On 18 May, 2014, after a referendum and at the request of the Crimean parliament, it was annexed by Russia.

The emphatic re-orientation of western Ukraine that followed the Maidan revolution was welcomed in the West as a triumph for liberal democracy. The EU was criticised in some quarters for presenting Ukraine with a straight choice between the EU and Russia without taking into account the views of half its population; and it was chided by the veteran American statesman Henry Kissinger for turning a trade negotiation into a political confrontation. The Russians now held Crimea and aided the secessionists in the Donbas but the government in Kiev, backed by the NATO nations, insisted that its borders were inviolable and that the lost provinces would be recovered by force of arms.

Vladimir Putin now asked why it was acceptable for Kosovo to secede from Serbia but not Crimea from Ukraine? The only answer appeared to be that one was approved by the US, the other was not. The undisguised intervention by the Western powers in favour of regime change during the Maidan demonstration confirmed that the Americans regarded Russia as an adversary to be contained. Ukraine was not yet in NATO but it had expressed its intent to join the alliance and Western leaders had said that its membership would be welcome.

How could this existential threat to Russia be prevented? Only by a pre-emptive strike in self-defence. On 24 February, 2022, Russian tanks and troops crossed the border into Ukraine. Vladimir Putin called this ‘a special military operation’, Ukraine and her allies called it an invasion.

The invasion of Ukraine by Russia was vehemently condemned in the West. It confirmed that the leopard had not changed its spots - that Russia remained as it had been under Communism and the Tsars, a predatory enemy of liberty, democracy and the established world order. The few lone voices who said that Russia had been provoked by Ukraine’s expressed intent to join NATO did nothing to change anyone’s mind. As Jonathan Haidt wrote in The Righteous Mind, ‘Moral intuitions arise automatically and almost instantaneously, long before moral reasoning gets a chance to get started, and those first intuitions tend to drive out later reasonings’.

It has not been my intention in this essay to justify the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but to explain why Vladimir Putin and his advisers, among them the Orthodox Patriarch, Kirill and the former president, Dimitri Medvedev, thought it was necessary for the security of their nation. I also wish to suggest that the Western view of the crisis, particularly that of Britain, has been simplistic. It is may be, of course, that the reducing Russia to a minor power is considered to be in Britain’s national interest: but was it thought that Russia would accept this relegation without a fight? The fight came, and Britain has contributed arms, money and robust encouragement to Ukraine. The killing and dying has been left to others.

Piers Paul Read is the author of works of fiction, reportage, history, biography and journalism. He is best known for Alive. The Story of the Andes Survivors published in 1974, and he was awarded the Sir Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for The Junkers, the Hawthornden Prize and Somerset Maugham Award for Monk Dawson, the Thomas More Medal for Alive, and the Enid McLeod Award for The Free Frenchman.  

In the editing of this essay, the author's British spellings and punctuation have not been