Filenews 4 March 2024 - by Marc Champion
Addressing his nation on Thursday, a cheerful President Vladimir Putin mocked the very idea that he might attack Europe. Not only is this idea nonsense, he said, but it is the West that is choosing targets to strike inside Russia, albeit at the risk of nuclear Armageddon. It's tempting to turn a blind eye and move on. However, the question of what the Kremlin will do next if it wins in Ukraine is too important to ignore.
A debate is ongoing, particularly in Washington, about whether to pressure Ukraine into a negotiated settlement with Russia or help it continue its defense. If Putin has no ambitions other than those he has already conquered in Ukraine, then the interests of Europe and the US could indeed be better served by forcing Kiev to compromise, that is, by depriving it of the means to continue fighting – however brutal treason that would be.
If Putin really is just waging a limited defensive war, you could go further and ask what the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and its key collective defense clause of Article 5 need us. The same would be true of the sudden and costly rearmament effort in Europe.
Peter the Great and Catherine the Great
However, to get this calculation wrong would be catastrophic, and according to Eastern Europeans, who – unlike US House of Representatives Republicans – have spent centuries living and fighting with Russia, such an attitude would indeed be wrong. If Putin's goal in Ukraine is to restore the dominance Moscow lost with the collapse of the USSR in 1991, which he has described as the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century, then he may have possibly stopped his invasion to regroup, but it won't stop until Kiev is fully under Russian control.
After that, there would be every reason to expect a triumphant and vengeful Putin to try to regain more of the control Russia wielded, from the Balkans to the Baltic states. What he is looking for, Putin said during his speech, is nothing less than a new security architecture and international order for Eurasia.
This is the future that looms if Putin is not forced to abandon his dreams of joining the pantheon of the greatest leaders of the Russian Empire, reclaiming lands he rightfully considers Russian, alongside his idols, Peter the Great and Catherine the Great.
His denials of the "aggressive intentions" attributed to him do little to decide who is right. First, Putin as president has repeatedly demonstrated his disinformation skills, acquired during his time in the KGB. To cite just one example, he mocked the idea that he would invade Ukraine until he ordered nearly 200,000 of his troops to cross the Ukrainian border.
But the mere fact that Putin is a serial liar doesn't prove he's lying now. Nor does it reveal much that Russian TV propagandists routinely talk about retaking Poland or a nuclear attack on London. After all, what substantial evidence do we have of Putin's intentions?
One of them comes from the rest of Putin's speech, which — like many of his speeches — was filled with pledges to continue expanding the military, protect Russian "compatriots," continue the so-called special military operation in Ukraine, create a new security order, and increase birth rates to boost the population. He made clear that he considers himself at war with the West, which he accused of wanting to turn Russia into a "dying space". That, I think, he sincerely believes.
His comments, like the invasion of Ukraine itself, were a call for Russia's development as a great power, a centuries-old project that has always had rolling geographical boundaries. The more Moscow's control expanded, the bigger Russia became and the larger the buffer zone it needed to feel safe.
The Moldova objective
A second piece of evidence comes from the Kremlin's continued efforts to destabilize Moldova, a predominantly Romanian-speaking former Soviet republic that is now seeking to join the European Union. A chance to topple Moldovan President Maia Sandu, a former World Bank economist, comes in December, when presidential elections will be held there.
Russia has been working this for a long time. He tried to cut off heating and power in the country until Moldova switched to buying gas and energy from Europe. He tried the uprising, organized and financed by a fugitive, Kremlin-friendly oligarch. And, according to the Moldovan government, he attempted a coup. All these efforts have been carried out since the start of the war in Ukraine and Moscow still has enough cards to play.
These include the separatist Moldovan province of Transnistria, a predominantly Russian-speaking region where almost the entire population has received Russian passports. On Wednesday, an emergency session of the legislature of this self-proclaimed "republic" called on Moscow to "implement measures to defend Transnistria" and its 220,000 Russian citizens.
The echo of separatist calls for Russian intervention in Ukraine was as familiar as the response from Moscow: NATO is again to blame. The alliance is "literally trying to turn Moldova into a second Ukraine," said Maria Zakharova, a spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, sparking the greatest fear among ordinary Moldovan citizens — that he could be drawn into the war taking place next to his door.
Moldova is at the heart of Putin's ambiguity about what Russia is and where Europe begins. On Thursday, he described his invasion of Ukraine as a defense of the homeland and his "compatriots" in the Donbas region, as well as in Novorossiya, a region he has defined as stretching from Kharkiv in northern Ukraine to Odessa in the south. Odessa, a "Russian city", as Putin reiterated as recently as December, is no less than 64 kilometers from Moldovan Transnistria. "The entire Black Sea coast fell to Russia as a result of the Russian-Turkish wars," he said during the year-end press conference, adding rhetorically: "What does Ukraine have to do with it?"
If not Odessa, then you might think that Moldova, a Romanian-speaking country where about half the population holds EU passports, would qualify as Europe for Putin, and therefore be off his list of potential victims. But no. The former Russian Empire wrested Moldavia from the sick Ottoman Empire in 1812.
If NATO gets involved in Moldova, then, as in Ukraine, it will be because Russia will have attacked it. This is something he can only do from the air for now, unless Putin achieves his goals in Novorossiyya (New Russia) and his army reaches Odessa. At that point, new options will open up – to dominate the Black Sea and project power and influence towards Romania and the Balkans.
Now is the time
"Putin aims to secure victory in Ukraine to demonstrate geopolitical superiority over the West and reshape the European security landscape," including his goal of retreating NATO to its size in the 1990s, before eastward enlargement, Estonia's intelligence services said in its annual report for 2024. Without NATO, Moscow would be free to reassert its sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, with the full range of economic, digital (cyber) and, ultimately, military means it has already used.
The Estonians may be wrong, but I doubt that. This is exactly what they say Putin asked in writing before invading Ukraine two years ago. It is also what Soviet leaders and Russian tsars did or pursued for centuries. The best time and place to shatter this pattern – allowing Russia to adapt to a new regime as a normal, if vast and powerful, nation-state within internationally recognized borders – is now and is in Ukraine.
Performance – Editing – Text Selection (2019-2024): G.D. Pavlopoulos
