It was why the sanctions that the Biden White House promised to roll out in the coming days would be milder than those it warned of if Russia invades more of Ukraine’s territory. Russia was no longer falsely denying that it had troops in the disputed territories. The only difference was that it was now being done in the open. Others, like the senior Biden administration official who briefed reporters on a background call on Monday, emphasized that these developments were new but not that new: the Russian military has been present in this region for eight years now. Some, like Barack Obama’s ambassador to Moscow, Michael McFaul, say Ukraine has just been invaded. It belied the idea that Putin’s beef was with NATO and showed, once again, that the issue was the terms of the U.S.S.R.’s surrender in 1991, which he has long been determined to renegotiate-or change by force.ĭepending on whom you ask, we have either just witnessed the opening salvo of World War III-or this is welcome news for Ukraine. It was also jarring to hear Putin say this all out loud, despite the fact that he has expressed variations of this sentiment in various forms over the years. And though Putin claimed that this was “wholly and completely proven by archival documents,” it was mostly lies. In a primetime address to the Russian nation, Putin said, without any hedging, that Ukraine is not a real country but rather a fictitious entity created by Vladimir Lenin, which received its independence from the Soviet Union for no good reason, and which amounted to a lopping off of a key, historically significant part of Russia. Perhaps even more terrifying was the speech Putin gave before he officially acknowledged the republics’ independence. And now that Putin has sent in “peacekeepers”, the breakaway Donbas region is going the way of Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Transnistria: cardboard entities created by Moscow to paralyze non-compliant former Soviet republics. The edict, which says that Russia will respect and militarily defend the territorial integrity of the LPR and DPR, is now in effect for ten years, after which point it will automatically renew itself. After surrounding Ukraine on three sides with 150,000 Russian troops and playing diplomatic cat-and-mouse with the West for two months, and after three days of non-stop false flag attacks meant to justify Russian intervention, Putin officially recognized the independence of the two breakaway republics that he himself had broken away from Ukraine. Ever since, the two separatist republics, the LPR and DPR, have existed in a militarized limbo, cut off from Ukraine but not part of Russia and not recognized as real countries by anyone in the world. The conflict eventually led to separatists (with help from the FSB) accidentally shooting down Malaysian Airlines flight 17 and killing all 298 civilians on board. At the same time, “volunteers” and Russian military personnel ostensibly on vacation from active duty started showing up in the Russian-speaking east of Ukraine, seizing government buildings and starting a separatist war. He sent “little green men”-Russian soldiers without any identifying insignia-into Crimea, whipped up some astroturf pro-Russia protests, held a quick and dirty “referendum,” and annexed the peninsula. Almost immediately after that day, Putin launched his first invasion of Ukraine.
He would forever after call what happened an “anti-government coup.” He saw it as a repeat of the Orange Revolution of 2004, another successful regime change in Kyiv, which, in his view, could only have been orchestrated by the C.I.A. (Not all these dreams would pan out, as corruption and political squabbling continued and even deepened.)įor Putin, Februwas a much darker day. The old, corrupt, pro-Moscow regime was out and a new era of hope, good governance, and Westernization seemed to have dawned. For Ukrainians, it was a day of celebration: what they called “the Revolution of Dignity” had triumphed. It also marked the day, exactly eight years ago, that Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych fled Ukraine (with Putin’s help) after ordering his troops to open fire on the protestors in Kyiv’s Maidan, killing over 100 people. Shortly after midnight in Moscow, on February 22, 2022-02/22/22-he sent troops (“peacekeepers,” in the Kremlin parlance) into the Donbas region of Ukraine after recognizing the independence of the two breakaway “people’s republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk. Who would’ve thought that Vladimir Putin was so into numerology and anniversaries.