Why does Putin risk the war? The Reason Must Take Much in the Past

There are questions about the number of troops and questions about diplomacy. There are questions about the Ukrainian Army, its weapons and its soldiers. The question about Germany and France is how will they react? There are questions about America and how it became a central player in a conflict that did not provoke it.

But of all the questions being asked again about the possible Russian invasion of Ukraine, what gets the least satisfying answers is why?

Why would Russian President Vladimir Putin attack a neighbouring country that did not provoke him? Why would he risk the blood of his soldiers? Why would it jeopardise sanctions, and possibly an economic crisis?

And if he's not really willing to risk those things, then why are you playing this game, ask author Anne Applebaum in an essay published in the “The Atlantic”.

It takes a little bit of history to explain, but not the half-mitological, fake story Putin used in the past to emphasize that Ukraine is not a state or that its existence is accidental or that its sense of nationality is not real.

Nor do we need to know so much about the recent history of Ukraine or its 70 years as the Soviet republic, although the fact that Soviet ties of the Russian president, particularly his years as a KGB officer, are of great importance.

The key to history is Putin's connection to the BRSS

In fact, many of his tactics using Russian-backed “separatists” to carry out his struggle in eastern Ukraine, creating a puppet government in Crime, are actually the old KGB tactics known to the Soviet past. False political groups played a role in the domination of the KGB over Central Europe after World War II; false separatists played a role in Ukraine's Bolshevik invasion in 1918.

Putin's connection to the old USSR is important in another way. Although he is sometimes wrongly described as a Russian nationalist, he is in fact an imperial nostalgic. The Soviet Union was a Russian-speaking empire and seems to sometimes dream of re-creating a somewhat smaller Russian-speaking empire within the borders of the old Soviet Union.

As the Russians rose to optimism in the 1980s, Putin saw the Soviet Union fall from the KGB office in Dresden.

But the most important impact on Putin's outlook has nothing to do with his training in the KGB or his desire to rebuild the USSR. Putin and the people around him were much more shaped by their rise in power. This story, told several times by writers Fiona Hill, Karen Dawisha and eventually Catherine Belton, begins in the 1980s.

Later years of that decade were a moment of optimism and emotion for many Russians. Voice policy and opening meant that people could tell the truth for the first time in many decades. Many felt the real possibility of change and thought it could be a change for the better.

Putin lost that moment of joy. Instead, he was sent to the KGB office in Dresden, East Germany, where he experienced the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 as a personal tragedy.

As world television broadcast news of the end of the Cold War, Putin and his KGB fighters in a failed Soviet satellite state were furiously burning all their files, calling on Moscow that no one answered them for fear of their life and career. For KGB operatives, this was not a time of joy, but a lesson in the nature of movement on the street and the power of democratic rhetoric, antiauthoristic rhetoric, anti-totorial rhetoric.

Putin later concluded how dangerous protests and democracy are

Putin, as his role model, Yuri Andropov, who was the Soviet ambassador to Hungary during the 1956 revolution there, concluded from that period that spontaneousity was dangerous. Protest is dangerous. Talking about democracy and political changes is dangerous.

To prevent their spread, Russian rulers must carefully control the lives of the nation. Markets cannot really be open; elections cannot be unpredictable; the dispute should be “managed” carefully through legal pressure, public propaganda; and, if necessary, targeted violence.

But while Putin lost the euphoria of the 1980s, he certainly took a full share in the origin of greed that invaded Russia in the 1990s. After overcoming the trauma of the Berlin Wall, Putin returned to the Soviet Union and joined his former colleagues in the massive robbery of the Soviet State.

The Fight for Power After Mass Robbery

With the help of Russian organised crime as well as the commercial international offshore money laundering industry, several former Soviet officials stole property, took money from the country, hid it abroad, then returned the money and used it to buy property.

Wealth gathered and followed a struggle for power. Some of the original oligarchs ended up in prison or exile. Finally, Putin became the main billionaire among all other billionaires, or at least the one who controls the secret police.

This position makes Putin very strong and very weak, a paradox that many Americans and Europeans have difficulty understanding. He's, of course, strong because he controls a lot of Russian society and economy.

Try to imagine an American president who controls not only the executive branch, including the FBI, CIA and NSA, but also Congress and the judiciary, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Dallas Morning News and all other major newspapers. Company, including Exxon, Apple, Google and General Motors.

At the same time, Putin has unlimited power, but also an extremely uncertain position

Putin's control has no legal restrictions. He and the people around him act without consideration and balance, without ethical rules, without any transparency. They determine who can be an election candidate and who is allowed to speak in public. They can make daily decisions by sending troops to the Ukrainian border, for example, and no one will consult or accept any advice.

When Putin considers an invasion, he should not take into account the interests of Russian companies or consumers who may suffer economic sanctions. There is no need to consider the families of Russian soldiers who may die in conflict who do not want to. They have no choice, they have no vote.

At the same time, however, Putin's position is extremely uncertain. Despite full money and control over the information space and full dominance of political space, Putin must know that he is an illegal leader. He never won fair elections and never campaigned in a race he could lose.

Putin well knows what kind of system he created

He knows that the political system he helped in creation is deeply unjust, that his regime not only governs the state but also owns it by making economic and foreign policy decisions designed to benefit companies from which he and his close circle benefit personally. He knows that state institutions do not exist to serve the Russian people, but to steal them.

He knows that this system works very well for some rich people, but very bad for everyone else. In other words, he knows that one day they can come to pro-democracy activists like the one he saw in Dresden.

Putin's awareness that his legitimacy is suspicious was publicly exposed in 2011, shortly after his <x0-election” manipulated in a third constitutionally controversial mandate. At that time, major protests took place not only in Moscow and St Petersburg but also in several dozen other cities, protesting the elite's election fraud and corruption.

Protesters scoffed at the Kremlin as a regime of frauds and thieves, a slogan popularized by Democrat activist Alexei Navajo. Later, Putin's regime will poison Navajo, almost killing him. This dissident is now in a Russian prison. But Putin wasn't just mad at Navajo. He also blamed the US, the West, foreigners trying to destroy Russia.

The Obama administration, Putin said, organised protesters; Secretary of State Hillary Clinton “gave the signal” to launch the protest. He won the elections, Putin said with great fear, and tears seemed to stare, despite the “political approvals aimed at minimising Russian citizenship and usurping power”.

Putin's biggest threat is democracy

In other words, in his head, he did not fight only against Russian protesters; he fought against world democracies allied with enemies of the state. It doesn't matter if he really believed protesters in Moscow were literally taking orders from Hillary Clinton.

He certainly understood the power of democratic language, the ideas that led the Russians to seek a fair political system, not Putin-controlled cleptocracy and his gang, and he knew where they came from. Over the next decade, it will fight democracy in Germany, France, Italy and Spain, where it will support extremist groups and movements in hopes of undermining European democracy.

Russian state-controlled media backed Brex's campaign, arguing it would weaken Western democratic solidarity, which is a fact. Russian oligarchs are investing in key industries across Europe and the world with the aim of gaining political trends, especially in smaller countries like Hungary and Serbia. And, of course, Russian deinformation experts will interfere with the 2016 U.S. elections.

Ukraine is a very important symbol

All of this is an bypassing way to explain Ukraine's extraordinary importance to Putin. Of course, Ukraine is important as a symbol of the lost Soviet empire. Ukraine was the second most populated and wealthy Soviet republic and with deeper cultural ties with Russia.

But modern, post-Soviet Ukraine is also important because it has tried to join the world of prosperous Western democracies. Ukraine has made not one, but two pro-democratic, anti-Oligarchic and anti-corruption revolutions in the past two decades.

The last one, in 2014, was especially frightening to the Kremlin. Ukrainian youth chanted anti-corruption slogans, as does the Russian opposition, and waved the European Union flags. These protesters were inspired by the same ideals Putin hates in his country and wants to cancel abroad.

Paramedics with golden boots, fountains, statues in the yard...

After Ukraine's deeply corrupt, pro-rus president left the country in February 2014, Ukrainian television began to feature scenes from his palace, along with gold faucets, fountains and statues in the courtyard, which is exactly where Putin lives in Russia.

In fact, we know he lives in such a palace, because one of the videos produced by Navajo has already shown us what's in him, along with a private hockey track on ice and a nergy bar.

A movie on Putin Palace worth a billion dollars

Putin's subsequent invasion of Crime punished Ukrainians for trying to escape the kleptocratic system in which he wanted to keep them. This showed Putin's subjects that they too would pay a high price for a democratic revolution. The invasion also violated the written and unwritten rules and agreements in Europe, showing Putin's contempt for Western quo status.

After this <x0... successful”, Putin launched a much wider attack on a series of coup attempts in Odessa, Kharkov and several other cities in the predominantly Russian-speaking area. This time the strategy failed, after Putin wrongly understood Ukraine, imagining that Russian-speaking Ukrainians would share his Soviet imperial imagination.

It's a long road from Donbas to France or Holland, but it's all part of the same story.

That didn't happen. In Donjeck alone, a town in eastern Ukraine where Putin could move troops and heavy weapons across the border, a local coup succeeded. But even there he didn't create an attractive Ukraine “alternative”. Instead, Donbas, the mining region surrounding Donjeck, remains an area of chaos and lawlessness.

It's a long road from Donbas in France or Holland, where right-wing politicians roam in the European Parliament and take Russian money to go to the “actual collection” in Crime. It is an even longer route to small American cities, where voters eagerly click pro-Trump posts written in St Petersburg in 2016.

But it's all part of the same story, it's all an ideological response to Putin's trauma and his generation of KGB officers who suffered in 1989. Instead of democracy, they promote autism; instead of unity, they constantly try to create divisions; instead of open societies, they promote xenophobia. Instead of letting people hope for something better, they promote nihilism and cynicism.

For the same reason, Putin is preparing to attack Ukraine again or at least pretend to attack Ukraine again. He wants to destabilise and intimidate Ukraine. He wants Ukrainian democracy to fail. He wants the Ukrainian economic collapse. He wants foreign investors to leave.

What does Putin really want? The Death of Democracy Worldwide

He wants his neighbours in Belarus, Kazakhstan, and even Poland and Hungary to question whether democracy will ever be sustainable, in their countries' long term. Furthermore abroad, it wants to burden Western and democratic institutions, particularly the European Union and NATO, so heavily that they are dissolved.

He wants to keep the dictators in power wherever he can, in Syria, Venezuela and Iran. He wants to undermine America, reduce American influence, remove the power of democratic rhetoric that so many people in his part of the world still associate with America. He wants America to fail.

These are great goals and may not be achieved. But Putin's beloved Soviet Union also had great and elusive goals. Lenin, Stalin, and their descendants wanted to start an international revolution to subdue the entire world under the Soviet dictatorship of the proletariat.

After all, they failed, but they did much damage in their efforts to do so. Putin will also fail, but he can do much damage by trying. And not just Ukraine.