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The conflict in Ukraine is the result of Western not Russian foreign policy
With the conflict in Ukraine marking its third anniversary, and with no sign of it abating anytime soon, it is worth going deep into its causes and the trajectory of events leading up to it. This to push back against a narrative shaped by Western ideologues so shallow that it has been embarrassing to behold.
Ever since the coup in Kiev in early 2014 — a coup materially and politically supported by Washington and its European allies — succeeded in toppling the democratically-elected government of Viktor Yanukovych, there was a grim inevitability with regard to what unfolded on February 24 2022.
From the Kremlin’s perspective, Russia’s military campaign amounted to a long overdue counter against Western aggression in the form of the eastward expansion of NATO, to the point where it had begun to pose an unacceptable threat to the country’s security.
Putin and the Kremlin had over many years been nothing if not relentless in sounding warnings in this regard. Those warnings, however, fell on the deaf ears of those resolute in their belief in the supposed verities of Western hegemony in the wake of the collapse of Soviet Communism in the early 1990s.
In the last analysis, empires are entities that create their own reality when secure in their power. However when that power wanes and weakens, as it must, what the proponents of empire consider reality is revealed to be the product of magical thinking. It was precisely this shifting dynamic which produced the shock-horror in London, Brussels and Washington in response to Putin’s decision to embark on a military solution to what had become a zero sum game.
Centrifugal tensions
Author and historian Richard Sakwa provides a forensic exploration of the history of Ukraine and the tension between two competing national identities that underpinned its society prior to 2014. Sakwa describes this as a struggle between a ‘monist’ Ukrainian notion of statehood and a ‘pluralist’ one, writing that at “the heart of the monist model…is a restitutive understanding of…
