by Konstantinos K
Russia. A vast nation of millions of inhabitants that stretches from northeast Europe to the depths of Asia and all across to the sea of Japan. To preserve that immense and overwhelming territory that is the Russian Federation, the biggest country of the world, the notion that one must lead the Russian nation with an iron fist, although admittedly undemocratic, can be understood in terms of Realpolitik. From the early Russian warlords, the Russian Empire Tsars, the totalitarian Soviet leaders, and the authoritarian government of Putin cloaked in democracy, the country has needed decisive and strong governance to guard its national interest and oppose its western adversaries that stand in its way to achieve regional hegemony and true global power status.
Russians have existed in northeast Europe -or as geopolitical analysts tend to say the North European plain- well before the Huns advanced into Europe. When they did though, the Kievan Rus, as they were known back then, were forced to leave the flat land and steppes of Kyiv (now the capital of Ukraine) and withdraw to the Municipality of Muscovy, the future capital of the Soviet Union and modern-day Russia. Moscow constituted, henceforth, the centre of the Russian expansion that was about to follow in the east and west in a deliberate attempt to safeguard their existence from the flat plains of Moscow, which always constituted a problem for Russian leaders throughout history. We shall see through this extensive essay that the very same problems that the predecessors of Putin had, still remain very relevant today. Leaders and times may change but the geography remains. And when the time comes it will take its vengeance on those who defy it.
The land's flat and wide steppes consist more of an Achilles heel than a strategic advantage. And the problem worsens significantly in Ukraine, a pathway for troops to the heartland. From Napoleon to Hitler, the same route has been used to conquer Russia. The long supply lines and the unforgiving Russian winter had their say and both attempts had failed. However, the danger is still very real. This is, thus, why Ukraine means so much to Russia and the reason Ukrainian governments clearly hesitate to adopt pro-NATO or pro-EU policies that could provoke the Russian "bear". A NATO base in Ukraine would be destructive for Russia's plans in Eastern Europe and Ukraine could potentially suffer from even greater Russian aggression, following such a blatant pro-Western swift in terms of strategy. Ukraine's energy supplies and parts of its economy are tied to Russia, and Ukrainian policy-makers know very well that problems with the Kremlin could result in shutting down all Russian energy routes to their homeland.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union and its dissolution, the nationalist surge that followed gave birth to 12 independent republics, things changed significantly for the Russian Federation and its newborn “democracy”. Vladimir Putin has called the fall of the Soviet Union as the greatest geopolitical destruction of our age, and he is quite right in saying that. The former Soviet republics now stand as independent countries that enjoy sovereignty in the eyes of the International Community. Some of them have also turned their backs on Russia, having suffered from Soviet rule and oppression in the past. In many ex-Warsaw pact countries, the US army sustains permanent troops, such as Poland for example. It is remarkable that this is the closest American troops have been to Moscow. Such a development can only be understood fully when seen as the result of the fall of the USSR and the culmination of the post-Cold War new American world order.
Having briefly summarized certain aspects of Russian history and highlighted historically important strategic considerations from as early as the Kievan Rus all the way to modern-day Russia, I will now focus on the geopolitical aspects of the Crimean invasion of 2014. The issue of Crimea, therefore, surfaces as a crucial point in Russia's plans in countering the NATO expansion towards their borders through ex-Warsaw Pact countries. Given the importance of Ukraine as a pathway to Russia, Moscow's worries are understandable.
The Crimea Crisis:
Ukraine had always been a natural part of Russia and the Soviet Union. With the foundation of a Soviet-controlled Ukraine around the 1950s and 1960s, the Soviet leadership gave Crimea away to Soviet-influenced Ukraine, only to become officially a part of Ukraine, a completely sovereign nation by the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991. Ukraine has been trying to balance the West and Russia's influence. Putin, a competent student of history, had gone as far as to admit to President Obama in recent years that Ukraine was not really a country, given its Soviet-attached past. Russia, however, still maintained its military bases in Sevastopol, the home of the Black Sea Russian fleet. Losing the right to take advantage of that base would be a major strategic catastrophe for Russia. It was understandable that when the move to begin talks with the EU in Ukraine was made, Putin decided to seize Crimea, once and forever, securing this Sevastopol and its port.
The West's response was rather weak. They would not go to war with Russia for Crimea. They could clearly give the peninsula away whereas Russians clearly couldn't. Their only opening to the Mediterranean had to be sustained no matter what. What the Ukrainians could hope in the wake of recent Russian aggression in Eastern Europe is that the West learned its lesson from the annexation of Crimea in such a well-designed fashion.
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