Putin's Doctrine: Why did the Russian president decide to invade Ukraine now? : Foreign Affairs

Translation Introduction:

As his invasion of Ukraine begins, everyone is wondering about the political and military doctrine behind Russian President Putin's actions. In this article, we learn about Putin's view of the world and Russia's return to its position as formulated by "Angela Stent, a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former official in the US National Intelligence for Russia and Eurasia, in her analysis published by the American magazine "Foreign Affairs".

The war that has just begun between Russia and Ukraine is the culmination of 30 years of back and forth. And the matter is beyond Ukraine itself and its possibility of joining NATO. It is about the future of the European system that was formed after the collapse of the Soviet Union, where the United States and its allies during the 1990s designed the European security architecture without Russia having a clear role or commitment. Since Vladimir Putin assumed the presidency of Russia and his country has challenged this system, the man has repeatedly complained about the global system's ignoring of Russian security concerns. Georgia), which sought to get out of Russia's orbit, in order to prevent the entire direction of those countries from being changed towards the West.

Putin is now taking this approach one step further, undertaking a much broader invasion of Ukraine than the mere annexation of Crimea and the intervention in the Donbas region carried out by Russia in 2014, an invasion that would undermine the current regional order and possibly force Russia’s presence again toward what Putin considers. The status it deserves” of his country on the European continent and on the world scene. Putin now sees the time to act, as the United States is weak and divided, less able to pursue a coherent foreign policy, and his two decades in office have made him underestimate the question of the remaining power of the United States. Today, Putin is facing the fifth American president since he took over the presidency of Russia, and he has come to see Washington after all these years as an unreliable interlocutor.

Putin is acting on an interlocking set of principles for his country's foreign policy that tell us that Moscow will be a troublemaker in the coming years, and we call it the “Putin Doctrine.” At the heart of this doctrine lies the compulsion of the West to treat Russia as if it were the Soviet Union, i.e. a power that was respected and prestige, and had special rights in its immediate neighbourhood, and had an audible voice in every important international issue. This doctrine is based on the fact that only a few countries have the right to possess such power, besides full sovereignty over their own territory, and that the rest should submit to the whims of those few elites of the great powers. This doctrine implies the need to defend authoritarian regimes and undermine democracies, and is linked to Putin's ultimate goal: reversing the collapse of the Soviet Union, unraveling the Atlantic alliance, and negotiating anew the geographical settlement that ended the Cold War.

A storm from the past

Russia, in Putin's view, has the full right to have a seat at the table in all major international decisions. Having gone through what Putin sees as the humiliation of the 1990s, when Russia at its weakest was forced to accept an agenda set by the United States and its European allies, Putin appears to have got his way today. Russia succeeded in rebuilding its army after the 2008 war with Georgia, so that it has now become the most prominent military force in the region, with the ability to extend the arms of its power globally, and Moscow's ability to threaten its neighbors allows it to force the West to sit at the negotiating table with it, This has been clearly demonstrated in the past weeks. Although Moscow was expelled from the Group of Eight (G8) after its annexation of Crimea, its veto power in the United Nations Security Council, in addition to its role as a geographic, nuclear and energy superpower, ensures that the rest of the world is committed to taking its opinion into account. .

Putin believes that Russia is fully entitled to use force if it believes that its security is threatened, as Russia's interests are as legitimate as those of the West, and Putin asserts that the United States and Europe have ignored his country's interests in this regard. The US and Europe rejected the Kremlin's narrative of grievance, which is based on the dissolution of the Soviet Union, especially Ukraine's secession from Russia. When Putin described the Soviet collapse as the "great geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century", he was lamenting the 25 million Russians who found themselves outside Russia, especially the fact that 12 million Russians found themselves in the nascent Ukrainian state. As Putin wrote in an article published last summer entitled “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” “people found themselves (in 1991) outside their state overnight, this time clearly separated from their historical motherland.” This article was distributed to soldiers Russians recently.

This narrative of Russia's defeat at the hands of the West is linked to a particular obsession of Putin: the idea that NATO, not content with including post-Soviet states and providing them with aid, might threaten Russia itself. The Kremlin insists that this obsession is based on real fears, as Russia was repeatedly invaded by the West, as it was invaded in the twentieth century by the anti-Bolshevik coalition forces, which included soldiers from the United States, during its civil war between 1917-1922, and Germany invaded twice This resulted in the deaths of 26 million Soviet citizens in World War II. Putin explicitly linked this history with Russia's current concerns about NATO expansion near its borders, and the resulting demands to ensure its security.

Today, Russia is a nuclear superpower brandishing new "supersonic" missiles, and no country has any intention of invading Russia, while its neighbors to the west have a different narrative, asserting their conquest by Russia for centuries. In turn, the United States will never attack Russia, despite Putin accusing it of seeking "a delicious piece of our cake." However, Russia's historical self-perception of its own fragility finds a heeding ear in its own population, as the government-controlled media is rife with allegations that Ukraine may be a base for NATO aggression against the country. Indeed, in his article last year, Putin reported that the transformation of Ukraine into a "launch base for Russia" was well underway.

Putin also believes that Russia has a full right to a circle of special privileges in the former Soviet space, which means that its neighbors should not join any alliance it considers hostile, especially NATO and the European Union. Putin made this requirement clear in the two treaties proposed by the Kremlin on December 17, as the two treaties require Ukraine and former Soviet states - as well as Sweden and Finland - to adhere to permanent neutrality, and avoid seeking NATO membership. NATO will also have to retreat to its military status in 1997, that is, before its first expansion, by withdrawing all its forces and equipment from Central and Eastern Europe, reducing the Alliance's presence to what it was before the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Russia will also have a veto over the foreign policy options of its non-NATO neighbors, and this will ensure the survival of governments loyal to it in those countries, the most important of which is Ukraine.

Divide and conquer

So far, no Western government has shown its willingness to accept these exceptional demands, as the United States and Europe adopt the principle of the freedom of nations to determine their internal political systems, and the linkages of their foreign policies, around the world. As for the Soviet Union, in the period between 1945-1989, it deprived Central and Eastern Europe of self-determination, and exercised its authority over the internal and foreign policies of the member states of the "Warsaw Pact" through the local communist parties, the secret police and the Red Army. When one country deviated from the Soviet model—Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968—their leaders were forcibly removed, and then the Warsaw Pact represented an alliance with a unique record: it only invaded its members.

The Kremlin's modern interpretation of sovereignty is strikingly similar to the Soviet interpretation of, as George Orwell said, that some states are more sovereign than others. Putin has said that only a few great powers - Russia, China, India and the United States - are fully sovereign, and freely choose which alliances to join, and that smaller countries such as Ukraine and Georgia are not fully sovereign, so they should respect Russia's strict limitations, just as the countries of Central and South America, according to Putin, are their largest neighbor in the North. Russia does not seek alliances in the Western sense of the word, but rather searches for mutual and instrumental partnerships that are useful for itself and its partners together, such as its partnership with China, so that it does not limit Russia's freedom of action or pass judgment on its internal political affairs.

Such authoritarian partnerships are a component of the Putin creed, and the president presents his country as a supporter of the status quo, an advocate of conservative values, and a global player who respects well-established leaders, especially autocrats. As recent events in Belarus and Kazakhstan have shown, it is Russia that is the power that beleaguered autocrats turn to for support. Russia has defended autocrats from its neighbors and from those who are geographically far from it, such as Cuba, Libya, Syria and Venezuela. As for the West, according to the Kremlin, it supports chaos and political regime change, similar to what happened during the Iraq war in 2003 and the Arab Spring in 2011. Russia has achieved great success in recent years with regard to its desire to be known by the world as the leader and supporter of the regimes of strong rulers, and a sign This is what Kremlin-backed mercenary groups have done on behalf of Russia in various parts of the world, such as in Ukraine.

Moscow's conservative meddling is not limited to what it sees as its sphere of influence. Putin believes that Russia's interests will be best served by the disintegration of the Atlantic alliance. Thus, Putin supports the skeptical groups in the European Union and the anti-American groups in the European continent, as well as interfering in elections in other countries, and generally working to widen the schism within Western societies. One of Putin's biggest goals is to get the United States to withdraw from Europe, and it is worth noting here that former US President Donald Trump's disdain for NATO, his disregard for some of the United States' major allies in Europe, in addition to his public talk of the United States withdrawing from the alliance. The administration of President Joe Biden is assiduously seeking to reform the alliance, and Putin's crisis over Ukraine has already reinforced the alliance's unity.

The weakening of the transatlantic alliance could pave the way for Putin to realize his ultimate goal: to overthrow the post-Cold War international order, the liberal, rules-based order encouraged by Europe, Japan and the United States, in favor of another international order more acceptable to Russia, as Moscow seeks something like an alliance of forces in the nineteenth century. Such a system may also turn out to be a new embodiment of the system resulting from the "Yalta Conference" (the 1945 agreement between the Soviet Union, Britain and the United States), in which Russia, the United States and China now divide the world into three-polar spheres of influence. Indeed, the growing rapprochement between Moscow and Beijing has reinforced Russia's call for a "post-Western" order.

The world order of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries established certain rules of the game. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union largely respected each other's spheres of influence. The two most dangerous crises of the era—the Berlin ultimatum launched by Soviet leader Khrushchev in 1958, and the Cuban missile crisis in 1962—were defused before a military confrontation erupted. And if the present has any indication, it indicates that the “post-Western” system for Putin will be a “Hobbesian” world (for the English thinker Thomas Hobbes, whose name is used to describe a situation in which a sharp, chaotic struggle without clear rules) and a turbulent world does not adhere to the minimum rules. In his pursuit of that new order, Putin's practical approach will be to continue stirring up trouble in the West, making him guess his true intentions, and then surprising him with Moscow's moves.

Russia's return

Given the current Ukraine crisis, it appears that Putin continues to act on his conviction that for three decades the West has ignored what the Kremlin sees as Russia's legitimate interests. Hence, he is determined to re-establish Russia's right to set limits on the sovereign choices of its neighbors and former "Warsaw Pact" allies, and to force the West to accept these limits, whether by diplomacy or by force of arms.

This does not mean that the West is helpless. The United States will have to continue the diplomatic path with Russia and seek a mutually acceptable interim settlement, without compromising the sovereignty of its allies and partners. At the same time, it should maintain coordination with the Europeans to respond to and punish Russia's unacceptable moves. But it is clear that even if the war that has just begun stops, there will be no return to the status quo before Russia mobilizes its forces in March 2021. The end result of this crisis may be the reorganization of Euro-Atlantic security for the third time since the end of the 1940s.

The first organization came through the consolidation of the "Yalta regime" in the form of two competing blocs in Europe after World War II, and the second organization came between 1989-1991, with the collapse of the communist bloc and then the Soviet Union itself, and the subsequent desire of the West to make Europe "unified" and free." Ultimately, the current crisis revolves around Russia redrawing the map of the post-Cold War world, and its quest to re-establish its influence over half of Europe, on the pretext that it guarantees its security. Regardless of the outcome of the current crisis, it is certain that as long as Putin remains in power, his doctrine will remain, and will cast a shadow over the world for a long time.