Russia’s Road to War With Ukraine: Invasion Amidst the Ashes of Empires - Hardcover

Puri, Samir

 
9781785907708: Russia’s Road to War With Ukraine: Invasion Amidst the Ashes of Empires
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1785907700 ISBN 13: 9781785907708
Verlag: Biteback Publishing, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

When Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022, many in the West were left stunned at his act of brutal imperialism. To those who had been paying attention, however, the warning signs of the bloodshed and slaughter to come had been there for years.

Tracing the relationship between the two countries from the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 to Putin’s invasion in 2022, what emerges from this gripping and accessible book is a portrait of a nation caught in a geopolitical tug of war between Russia and the West. While Russia is identified as the sole aggressor, we see how Western bodies such as the EU and NATO unrealistically raised Ukraine’s expectations of membership before dashing them, leaving Ukraine without formal allies and fatally exposed to Russian aggression.

As a former international observer, Samir Puri was present for several of the major events covered in this book. He uses this experience to ask honestly: how did we get here? Why does Vladimir Putin view Ukraine as the natural property of Russia? Did the West handle its dealings with these countries prudently? Or did it inflame the tensions left amidst the ruins of the Soviet Union? Were there any missed opportunities to avert the war? And how might this conflict end?

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Dr Samir Puri has had a ringside seat to several major events covered in this book. He served as an international observer at five Ukrainian elections, including the Orange Revolution in 2004. Soon after the first Donbas war began in 2014, he spent a year in east Ukraine working along both sides of the front line as part of an international ceasefire monitoring mission. During Russia’s latest invasion of Ukraine, his analysis of the war has been featured by the BBC, Al Jazeera, Bloomberg, CNN, the Wall Street Journal and other media outlets. He is a visiting lecturer in war studies at King’s College London and his previous book was The Great Imperial Hangover: How Empires Have Shaped the World.

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Just putting ourselves in coffins and waiting for foreign soldiers to come is not something we are prepared to do.’ President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine was in full oratorical flight in Munich as he addressed Western dignitaries. It was 19 February 2022, an audacious date for Zelensky to have stepped out of his capital city, Kyiv, since war clouds were thickening over Ukraine and the storm could break at any moment. ‘We will defend our beautiful land, with or without the support of partners.’ Support is precisely what he was there to ask for, and why he had risked the trip: ‘This is your contribution to the security of Europe and the world. Where Ukraine has been a reliable shield for eight years.’

Eight years was the time during which Ukraine had battled Russia’s proxy forces in the eastern Donbas region, but this time things looked truly bleak. To the north, east and south of Ukraine, Russia’s legions were poised to invade. The American and British governments now broadcast regular warnings about an imminent major Russian attack, but these countries also ruled out sending their own soldiers to fight alongside the Ukrainians. While Ukraine had friends aplenty, it had no treaty allies whose armies were obliged to defend it. Ukraine’s bid to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization military alliance had stalled many years beforehand, leaving it bereft of NATO’s collective defence guarantee.

Sitting at his desk some 850 kilometres from Kyiv in the Kremlin, President Vladimir Putin finally revealed his hand in a televised evening address on 21 February. Having denied for months that Russia would commit to battle the troops it had amassed around Ukraine, he now said the opposite. Flanked by a flag depicting Russia’s imperial motif of a two-headed eagle, he claimed that ‘the situation in Donbas has reached a critical, acute stage’, wilfully ignoring the fact that Russia had transformed the Donbas into a war zone in the first place in 2014.

Putin continued, ‘I consider it necessary to take a long overdue decision and to immediately recognise the independence and sovereignty of the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Luhansk People’s Republic,’ naming the Donbas proxy statelets propped up by Russia. But there were far bigger issues at stake: ‘I would like to emphasise again that Ukraine is not just a neighbouring country for us. It is an inalienable part of our own history, culture and spiritual space.’ The temerity, Putin conveyed – how could these Ukrainians, whom he called ‘comrades’ and ‘relatives’, ever have contemplated forging their own independent path away from Russia?

The tale of these Presidents, Zelensky and Putin, encapsulates some of the deeper matters at hand. ‘Volodymyr’ is the Ukrainian equivalent of the Russian name ‘Vladimir’, and both names mean ‘ruler of the world’ (as derived from volodity myrom). While the Ukrainian and Russian languages are separate east Slavic languages, they are in part mutually intelligible (only in part, however: one should say dyakuyu to thank Ukrainians and spasibo to thank Russians, for instance, and pronounce the softer Kyiv in Ukrainian rather than the harder Kiev in Russian). Just as the Ukrainian and Russian languages share a lineage but are distinct in their evolution, Zelensky and Putin were both born in the Soviet Union but could not be further apart in what they now represent.

The almost seventy-year-old Putin seemed enraptured by an apocalyptic nostalgia for the Soviet and the Tsarist incarnations of Russian empire. His prior career as a KGB intelligence officer was deeply scarred by the end of the Soviet Union. Now entering his third decade of dominating Russian politics, Putin retained an iron grip at home and a fixation on restoring Russia’s old spheres of influence abroad. Conversely, Zelensky was just eleven years old when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. The now 44-year-old Zelensky had transcended his past career as a light-hearted television actor to become a modernising national leader, fully intent on speeding up his country’s own transcendence from its Soviet past.

For several tense days in February 2022, prior to Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine, Zelensky and Putin duelled with words.

In response to Putin’s televised address, Zelensky appealed to the people of Russia. ‘We are separated by more than 2,000 kilometres of mutual borders, along which 200,000 of your soldiers and 1,000 armoured vehicles are standing,’ he said, before imploring, ‘You are told we hate Russian culture. How can one hate a culture? Neighbours always enrich each other culturally; however, that doesn’t make them a single whole, it doesn’t dissolve us into you. We are different, but that is not a reason to be enemies.’ Alas, the Putin regime’s strict media controls meant there was scant chance of ordinary Russians hearing Zelensky’s plea. In an early morning televised address on 24 February – a day that will live on in infamy – Putin announced a ‘special military operation’ was now under way to ‘demilitarise’ Ukraine. ‘We have been left no other option to protect Russia and our people, but for the one that we will be forced to use today.’ This was Putin’s pretext for Russia to attack Ukraine: ‘The situation requires us to take decisive and immediate action. The People’s Republics of Donbas turned to Russia with a request for help.’ Although there were some people in the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics who wanted to join Russia, others in areas of the Donbas still under Ukrainian government control did not. It was an entirely self-generated reason created by Putin to explain his invasion.

The spectacle that now unfolded, of tens of thousands of Russian troops shooting their way into a neighbouring country that had done nothing to provoke them, shocked the world. Within just two days, a spearhead of Russia’s advance forces had reached Kyiv’s outskirts, using Belarusian territory to shorten their advance to Ukraine’s capital.

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Verlag
Biteback Publishing
Erscheinungsdatum
2023
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1785907700
ISBN 13 
9781785907708
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
304
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Buchpark GmbH
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