Did the 2014 Maidan make Putin’s invasion inevitable

People ask me whether Russia would have started a war if it realized that it was losing ground in Ukraine.

I evaluate Euromaidan in the context of all those movements that began with the Arab Spring and ended with protests in Belarus and Kazakhstan. It was a decade of revolution. Most of these revolutions have failed. Some statistics show that this was the least successful period in terms of revolutions. In that context, Euromaidan was one of the few exceptions when the revolution won.

A victorious revolution. Why do I say "won"? Because of the tragic events that followed. People ask me whether Russia would have started a war if it had realized that it was losing ground in Ukraine. I answer that Russia had plans for a large-scale military aggression against Ukraine long before the Maidan.

According to my sources and the sources of my colleagues who know about this, these plans were determined at the end of 2008. The only thing they didn't expect was that it would happen in this way, in the way of the Maidan, because the expectation was that there would be, as they said, massive unrest in Ukraine in 2015. Yanukovych would run for president again, and it was clear he would resort to manipulation. At that time, it was believed that this was the best time for Russia to invade Ukraine to bring order to the country and save it from chaos. Therefore, we cannot say that Russia immediately "punished" Ukrainians for the revolution. It had a plan. This is, in fact, what happened in 2014.

Putin's plan consisted of three parts.

The first part was that the so-called “Novorossiya,” the Russian-speaking part, would be annexed to Russia along the line, relatively speaking, of Kharkiv-Uman. Russia would annex the south and east of this line as Novorossiya. Putin was not interested in western Ukraine. He is still not interested. This is a toxic territory, so let it go wherever he wants, even to the devil. There will be a kind of Ukrainian version of Belarus – Malorossiya from that small Ukrainian territory. Agrarian, without large industry, and entirely under the influence of Russia. A puppet state under the leadership of the Kremlin. Kyiv will have its own president, a president with a more human face than Yanukovych, but will be much more loyal and manageable than Yanukovych himself.

One of the options was that Western Ukraine would go to Poland. And Radoslaw Sikorski, the former Polish foreign minister, admitted this in an interview. After that, he kept silent when he realized he had given away a secret. But Putin directly offered Poland to take Lviv. Please note that this is very similar to the partitions of Poland in the 18th century, and then the partitions of Poland by the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact. The rhetoric is very similar.

You may recall that on the eve of the Orange Revolution, the Russians launched fakes, which, as it turned out, were backed by the late former Kremlin political strategist Gleb Pavlovsky. At the time, they spread these fakes about three types of Ukrainians. This was clearly aimed at dismemberment. This technology was launched inside the country. That is, this division of Ukraine has been practiced for decades. I want to say that this is the idea of the Russian opposition government that came out of the protest against the communists. This is Yeltsin's environment. We remember that Putin began his career in this very environment as a former student of Sobchak, one of the nonleading leaders of the Russian opposition, and later the mayor of St.Petersburg, and it was there that Putin appeared. So, the idea was to let Ukraine break away and become independent, but under the right conditions. They believed that Ukraine was a fictitious nation, it would never be able to build its own state, and when the collapse happened, Ukraine would return. So, the whole idea was to get Ukraine back one way or another.

It was clear that time was passing and Ukraine was not returning. So they did it all in different ways, just to weaken it. In 2004, as we now know (in particular, Mykhailo Zygar's book shows this well), the Kremlin invested vast amounts of money to put Yanukovych in office and to pull Ukraine back into Russia's orbit. Despite this considerable amount of money, despite the efforts of Pavlovsky, to quote a liberal and other liberals, it did not work, and Putin had the impression that this was not just a coincidence. It must be a Western subversive operation. Putin himself had never seen mass demonstrations. He believed that something must inspire mass demonstrations because they are unnatural. And this is how he treated Ukraine.

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From what those who know Putin say, Putin's most dramatic turn toward Ukraine actually occurred in 2001, when he visited Ukraine for the first time. First Kyiv, then Crimea. Putin had never been to Ukraine and was very excited about Kyiv. He had no idea that something like this existed. When he came to Crimea to attend the opening of the Church of Vladimir the Great in honor of the Baptism of Rus, he felt like a new Vladimir. Something happened in Putin's mind that made him realize that this beauty had to be returned.

I want to remind you that around 2002, there was another liberal project, the so-called Ladoga Project. This project aimed to come up with the idea that the state of Russia did not begin in Kyiv, but in Ladoga, in Novgorod. Where Rurik and his brothers allegedly landed. And a whole event was specially prepared in Ladoga. Putin went there on his yacht. Like a Varangian – he copied Viktor Vasnetsov's painting The Varangians. He came there to show that a new cultural capital should be created here, one that could compete with Kyiv. To show that Russia has greater rights to Russia than Ukraine. Putin came and spent one or two days there. He visited the excavations and the monastery. And then he said: no, this is not Kyiv at all, we need Kyiv.

In other words, Putin's sharp turn toward Ukraine occurred somewhere in the early 2000s. The first offensive of this turn was the Tuzla Island conflict. We must pay tribute to Leonid Kuchma's behavior at that time; how it would have ended was not known. Tuzla showed that Ukrainians are ready to fight for their territories. What did the Russians conclude? The Russians concluded that it was necessary to go the other way, through Kyiv, by changing the government there and installing a more loyal one.

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Read the original article on The New Voice of Ukraine