The empire strikes back

Russia's Vladimir Putin has deep, bitter regrets about diminished influence over the former Soviet Union.

- DR COLIN ROBINSON

'Putin's grand plan" (Listener, February 4) suggested one of the main reasons for the unprovoked Russian invasion of Ukraine was a historical instinct to seek warm-water ports.

I have found little or no evidence in the most authoritative commentaries about President Vladimir Putin invading Ukraine last year that it had anything to do with warm-water ports.

Renewed speculation about a Russian/ Soviet wish to seek warm-water ports principally dates to US national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who argued in 1979 that that was the main reason the Soviets had invaded Afghanistan. As an article in Naval War College Review in 1993 and a National Security Archive briefing book of 2019 both demonstrated, there was no truth in this. The key reasons for the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan were the incompetence of their Afghan rulers and fears of declining Soviet influence there.

So, why did Putin take his country to war in Ukraine? The reasons announced when the invasion began included to protect the Donbass people in the east of Ukraine, who had been subjected to eight years of bullying and genocide by Ukraine, and to "demilitarise and deNazify Ukraine". These have little basis and make less sense, except to a Russian domestic audience.

A better place to start is the enormous regret and resentment many officials in Russia felt for the collapse of the Soviet Union as an empire in 1991-92 at the end of the Cold War. It had been earth-shattering, curtailing in a moment the historical slow expansion of Russian influence and the building of an empire. Putin told the foreign consular corps in St Petersburg in 1992 that Russia had lost too much; it had been too humiliated. Russia should remain dominant in the former Soviet republics.