Andreas Kappeler analyzed Putin's text, which clearly declares a strong inclination for Ukraine to be merged into Russia, in Revisionismus und Drohungen Osteuropa 71:7 (2021). As Kappeler notes, the first part of the paper is about the history of Russia and Ukraine. And while that part makes some contentious and dubious claims, it does have "an academic character" indicating that it was "clearly prepared by one or more professional historians."
Then there is a second part, starting with the paragraph beginning, "Of course, inside the USSR" and continuing to the end, which seems to stem more directly from Putin, with a change of tone clearly notable in the English version. "He repeats well-known theses, sharpens them, and does not shy away from threats to Ukraine and the West. His reasoning here is capricious, in part contradictory and emotional." (All translations from Keppler's article are mine.)
A couple of Putin's arguments are especially important in the current situation. He repeats a previous justification for annexing Crimea, which had been part of Russia but was added to the territory of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1954, "in gross violation of legal norms that were in force at the time." He argues that when Ukraine became independent in 1991, it should have been recognized only in its pre-1954 borders, i.e., with Crimea staying in Russia.
That's not what both countries approved in 1991, of course. And it wasn't what the United Nations approved when it recognized Ukraine as an independent sovereign nation. Ukraine's claim to Crimea as its legitimate territory is really not in question as a matter of international law.
While Putin uses events from the Soviet period like the Great Patriotic War (the Soviet and Russian term for the Second World War) as part of his version of Russian nationalism, he also makes an anti-Soviet argument that casts Russia as the victim while not wanting to accept any criticism of Russia relating to anything bad that might have happened during the Soviet period:
The Bolsheviks treated the Russian people as inexhaustible material for their social experiments. They dreamt of a world revolution that would wipe out national states. That is why they were so generous in drawing borders and bestowing territorial gifts. It is no longer important what exactly the idea of the Bolshevik leaders who were chopping the country into pieces was. We can disagree about minor details, background and logics behind certain decisions. One fact is crystal clear: Russia was robbed, indeed.And he also uses a hair-raising ethno-nationalist argument:
... The leaders of modern Ukraine and their external ”patrons“ prefer to overlook these facts. They do not miss a chance, however, both inside the country and abroad, to condemn ”the crimes of the Soviet regime,“ listing among them events with which neither the CPSU, nor the USSR, let alone modern Russia, have anything to do. At the same time, the Bolsheviks' efforts to detach from Russia its historical territories are not considered a crime. And we know why: if they brought about the weakening of Russia, our ill-wishe[r]s are happy with that. [my emphasis]
But the fact is that the situation in Ukraine today is completely different because it involves a forced change of identity. And the most despicable thing is that the Russians in Ukraine are being forced not only to deny their roots, generations of their ancestors but also to believe that Russia is their enemy. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the path of forced assimilation, the formation of an ethnically pure Ukrainian state, aggressive towards Russia, is comparable in its consequences to the use of weapons of mass destruction against us. As a result of such a harsh and artificial division of Russians and Ukrainians, the Russian people in all may decrease by hundreds of thousands or even millions. [my emphasis]The "forced change of identity" line is a version of the far-right Great Replacement theory also used in Europe and the US to justify xenophobia and anti-immigrant violence.
That article is an articulation of the explicitly anti-Soviet, Russian-nationalist part of Putin's ideological position at the moment. So Kappeler is obviously justified in concluding his essay, "When Putin feels himself to be surrounded and cornered, that is as dangerous as his ethno-imperial nationalism, which exploits Russians in Ukraine and the Baltic states. His threats are to be taken seriously."
But taking threats seriously is not the same as leaping to conclusions about Russia's capabilities and intentions in Ukraine at this particular moment.
A section of Putin's article talks about how much Ukraine benefitted from its economic union with the Soviet Union and a rosy picture of how things could be like that again. But that is also simultaneously a recognition that absorbing all of Ukraine into Russia would be a huge new economic and military challenge for a petrostate like Russia whose GDP has recently been comparable to that of Italy. Particularly in the face of the economic sanctions that Putin knows would follow from such a move.
It seems obvious that the US and NATO are not going to give a binding, formal promise to Russia to never, ever allow Ukraine to join NATO. And the Russians surely realize that. As we know from US experience in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, and as Russia knows from its experience in places like Afghanistan and Syria, countries can and do make arrogant and irrational decisions that can wind up hurting them more than helping them. That's why we need good intelligence and a competent and well-staffed State Department to manage situations like the current one over Ukraine is a practical way that decreases rather than escalates the risk of war.
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This 2019 paper from the Carnegie Endowment by Julia Gurganus and Eugene Rumer, Russia’s Global Ambitions in Perspective, gives a background sketch of major Russia foreign policy perspective since the early 19th century. History is important, but doesn't dictate specific decisions in a present-day context.
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