What does Russia really want?

The question of ‘why’ Russia invaded Ukraine has been forgotten amid war’s fog. Greed and malice partially explains it. History, geopolitics and culture reveals more.

A country which has more land than anyone else on Earth is not grabbing territory for territory’s sake. Logically, Russia should be giving away land to anyone who might manage it better. But that’s not how Putin thinks. He is pursuing a dogged policy of annexations – first in Georgia, then in the Crimea, and now of four further Ukrainian districts.

Equally, a country which owns the world’s biggest stockpile of nuclear weapons can hardly be genuinely threatened by a non-nuclear neighbour. Logically, Russia’s neighbours have more to fear than Russia has. But that’s not how Putin feels.

Putin’s declared aims include the wish to ‘re-unite’ Russia with Ukraine, and the ‘duty to protect’ Ukraine’s Russian minority from nationalists, fascists and neo-Nazis. The first aim ignores the Ukrainians’ own wishes, and the second has many baleful precedents. In 1938, Neville Chamberlain fell for the notion that Czechoslovakia’s German minority was suffering discrimination; he soon discovered, despite Berlin’s assurances, that the Third Reich was preparing to destroy Czechoslovakia. In 1939, word was put about that Germans were repressed in Poland. We now see a cynical prelude to the invasion of Poland and to Germany’s bid for Lebensraum. Specious pretexts conceal ulterior motives.

1. Putin wants to recover what was lost 30 years ago, or at least significant parts of it. If this is true, one has to say that so far Putin has not been very successful. His Chechen war halted the fragmentation which had destroyed the Soviet Union and threatened to continue. But, having stopped the rot, his war against Georgia in 2008 ended with just two small gains – in South Ossetia and Abkhazia. His war against Ukraine has produced one clear gain in Crimea, one huge failure to capture Kyiv, and now the annexation of four districts which he doesn’t fully control. In sum, after two decades, he has amassed a total of 148,405 square kilometres of recovered territory – less than 3 per cent of that, which seceded in 1991. For a man credited with ‘rebuilding the Soviet empire’, his results are meagre.
2. Russia needs people, especially Slavic people. Standing at 144 million, the Russian Federation’s population is only half of the Soviet Union’s last count of 287 million (1991), and has dropped far below the US’s 329 million or the European Union’s 447 million. Moreover, a declining birth rate among women, and high excess mortality, especially among men, both exacerbated by the pandemic, means that the population – and the ethnic Russian sector in particular – is declining. Cities like Moscow or St Petersburg fear the rising influx of non-Russian Asiatics. So, the prospect of incorporating white Slavic-speakers from Ukraine is widely welcomed. Since February, the Russian authorities have already deported more than a million Ukrainian citizens, many from Mariupol, who are unlikely to see their former homes again.
3. Russia badly needs increased productivity. Historically Ukraine was more productive than Russia. ‘Muscovy’ without Ukraine was a vast, freezing chunk of tundra, looking with envy on the sunny land to the south with its fertile soil, abundant resources and western outlets. In the 20th century, Ukraine made a disproportionate contribution to the Soviet economy: Ukraine’s grain repeatedly saved Russia from famine. The hydroelectric dam at Dnieperpetrovsk was the jewel in Stalin’s Five Year Plans. The iron ore from Kryviy Rig represented 42 per cent of Soviet production, and Kryvorizstal’s furnaces were the country’s largest. Today, Russia’s economy is smaller than the UK’s, and, depending excessively on oil and gas, is highly unbalanced. Russians of Putin’s age remember the ‘good old days’, when they basked on Crimean beaches, as Ukraine’s bounty compensated for the Motherland’s poverty.
4. Russia must rapidly increase its supply of rare earth minerals. Nearly all electronic devices rely on rare earth minerals and metals, which have never been in such demand. In the past thirty years, China has both secured its own supply, and established a near-monopoly in processing expertise, while others have fallen behind. And it so happens, that two ex-Soviet republics, Ukraine and Kazakhstan possess the world’s largest rare mineral reserves. Ukraine’s geology is dominated by a long, 1000-kilometre swathe of crystalline, mineral-bearing rocks called the ‘Ukrainian Shield’. Roughly half of its key deposits lie west of the Dnieper, whilst the other half, further east, lie in recently Russian-occupied territory. One may be sure that the Russians are already carrying off whatever they find, just as they are selling stolen Ukrainian grain. Yet Russia’s long-term interest is not confined to today’s smash-and-grab raids. In many regards, in fact, Ukraine’s predicament merits comparison with Kazakhstan. Both countries share a long history of exploitation by Russia. In the 1930s, the little-known Kazakh famine may be compared in scale to the Holodomor. Both countries host vital Russian military bases such as Sevastopol and Baikonur, which after 1991 were leased. Both then struggled to reduce the ties that bind them to Russia.
5. Putin can tolerate theoretically independent neighbours, so long as they prove themselves subservient, as seen in Ukraine and Kazakhstan. Prior to 2014, he was happy enough with non-democratic Ukrainian presidents, like Yanukovych. Today, he accepts the silver-haired, Kazakh dictator, Kassim-Jomart Tokayev, who is a Moscow graduate in Mandarin and ex-Soviet diplomat. In January, he even sent Russian troops to Astana to help quell unrest. Phoney independence poses few problems. The latest noises from Central Asia, however, suggest that reciprocal toleration for Putin is growing thin. At the Samarkand meeting this September of the Shanghai Co-operation Council (SCO), several SCO leaders chided Putin publicly. Nearly all of them are anti-American, Soviet trained, or, like Xi of China, active communists. But they do recognise the principle of territorial integrity, and they do have the means to bring Putin to heel.
6. Many Russians, including Putin, share the collective, ‘Beggar-my-neighbour’ mentality that, reputedly, they inherited from their erstwhile Tatar overlords. Predatory instincts, ambushes, pre-emptive strikes, hard-nosed lying and maskirovka, ‘deception’, are standard. All free neighbours are potential enemies. All frontiers are temporary expedients. All defensive organisations are fake. All land must either be held by us, or will became a base for attacks against us. Russians are perpetual victims of foreign aggression, and see no history of Russian aggression against others. Few doubt that Russia, unlike others, has an inborn right to a buffer zone beyond its frontiers, a ‘near abroad’ that Russia controls.
7. Many Russians, like Putin, imagine their nation to be a superior, imperial people, born to command the lesser mortals, who eternally besiege them. They remember the Soviet Union, not as a wicked experiment that should never have happened, but as a noble venture, whose ideals were betrayed. ‘Soviet Russia’ led by the great Stalin held the line manfully against assorted Balts, Poles, Finns, Asiatics, Caucasians, Chechens, Kalmuks, Kazakhs, Bakhtiars and Ukrainian fascists – as is right and proper. Like Putin, they see post-Soviet Russia as a poor orphan, cheated of its birthright. They particularly resent the ‘traitors’ and ‘renegades’, who oppose them, and ‘our Slavic brothers’, who, by seeking independence, don’t behave fraternally. Such people admire the 70-year old Putin, who once staved off disaster and has since held the fort for two decades. But recently he hasn’t performed well ; he may be sick and, with his last throw, is playing ‘va banque’.
8. In the last resort, Vladimir Putin, like all mafia bosses, wants respect. On the foreign stage, he only craves the equality with US presidents that Gorbachev enjoyed, and, domestically, he only requires his underlings, real or imagined, to obey. So Kurva! Svoloch! and Razvoluha! Why do the bloody ducks not get into line?

Russophiles will protest the stereotypes and say that Putin is no typical Russian. After all, not all Russians are savages. What of Pushkin, Tchaikovsky and Sakharov? The question is the same as that posed eighty years ago by the ‘good Germans’. They undoubtedly exist; they are probably in a majority. Yet the point is: the ‘good Russians’ have been silenced, sidelined or seduced by Kremlin propaganda. They are held down by the aberrant leader of an authoritarian system, which won’t change until Russia suffers a resounding defeat.