On the fourth anniversary of Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky warns that Vladimir Putin has “already started” a third World War. He’s right: the Kremlin is waging war against the West as a whole. Its ambitions are grandiose in scale and monstrous in their potential.
The Ukrainian President is understandably concerned that we and other allies still do not understand this.
After four years of the worst land war in Europe since 1945, there is a danger that Europe becomes accustomed to the conflict. Where once there was shock at Russian troops and drones murdering civilians without hesitation, now these crimes are so routine that they barely merit a mention in the evening headlines.
If the war is relegated in the public consciousness to a mere brushfire, a nonetheless awful but supposedly localised conflict as wracked many nations in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse, then that fantastical underestimate would endanger both Ukraine and us.
We would lack the sense of urgency required to ramp up defence spending and production. We would skimp on aid for Ukraine’s survival and on the measures to protect our own countries. And Russia would be the sole beneficiary of this unforced error, which it would gladly take advantage of. That is what Zelensky’s warning is intended to prevent.
The cruel irony of his concern is that had he not stood his ground, had his country not held out against the odds and at such cost, then his message today would surely be universally accepted. Ukraine’s torment is taken for granted precisely because the determination and skill of its soldiers and its people have been so successful in holding back its invader.
Putin’s goals were open and clear long before he sought to put them into practice in Ukraine. From 2001 onwards, he spoke of the importance of the “Russkiy Mir”, the Russian world, which “extends far from Russia’s geographical borders and even far from the borders of the Russian ethnicity”.
In 2005, Putin lamented the collapse of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century, and a “tragedy”. Those events – in reality, the liberation of many millions from Moscow’s tyranny – were to him an insult to Russia’s dignity and status. Implicitly, he wished to reverse it.
Put those two factors together, and his mission was clear: the re-establishment of Russia as an imperial power, by regaining the territories he believed to be its by right and unifying the “Russkiy Mir”. To do so requires confounding any and all opponents, military or philosophical, of such a crusade.
That didn’t start with Ukraine. Putin’s dominance spread from Chechnya to Georgia before it moved westward in 2014. Nor did it start with open invasion: espionage, subversion, assassination and corruption were all deployed well before a single tank left base.
From poisoning Ukrainian reformist Viktor Yushchenko in 2004 to invading Georgia in 2008, Russia’s actions match this long imperialist campaign better than any other theory. Plus, Putin kept on saying out loud what he was up to.
The Russkiy Mir runs through Putin’s actions like a thread. To someone who believes vast swathes of Ukraine are Russian, Ukraine itself cannot validly exist. Indeed, Putin himself said as much in 2008, at a Nato summit, and declared in 2014 that Russians and Ukrainians are “one people”. Russia is so committed to the idea that Ukrainians are Russians that it is willing to slaughter them to insist upon the point.
Putin’s words reveal his ambitions, and his actions keep verifying them. He wants to rule the entirety of what he believes to be his rightful “world”, including not only Ukraine but the Baltic states, Finland and arguably the full extent of the “near abroad” nations which were once hostages in the Warsaw Pact.
He is willing to subvert, invade and kill to make that vision a reality.
He believes the West as a whole is an opponent of this goal, and its ideas are antithetical to the survival and unity of Russia itself. For him to succeed, and his monstrous creation to survive, those opponents must be disrupted and defeated, at least until his new, greater Russia is mighty enough to deter resistance by sheer intimidation.
Again, we can test this theory against his actions. Well beyond the battlefront, Russian operations have spread assassination, poison, terrorism, sabotage and disinformation into the infrastructure and streets of the West. Our own country has suffered a radiological attack on the streets of London, chemical warfare on the streets of Salisbury, and sabotage fire bombings. The same is seen in Germany, Czechia and elsewhere.
Zelensky’s point is that war is not something that requires an opt-in from both sides. We may not want war with Russia, but if Russia wants to wage war on us then our preference does not matter a damn.
Ever since his rise to power, Putin has consistently said that he wants to build something evil, that he will do so by force, and that he views us as an obstacle to that goal. For decades, his actions have followed through on those words. Zelensky is right: war is upon us, whether we wish it or not.
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