I was dead wrong. Biden did not make a secret deal with Putin to keep Ukraine out of NATO. The Russians invaded yesterday.
Let's take a walk through time...we may want to try to understand what is going on through a search for historic precedents.
Focusing on Russian history, we may want to start with the expansion of Russia from a Grand Duchy to an Empire over a period of about 700 years, and see this invasion as a modern version of this imperial imperative.
We could also interpret the invasion from a more recent perspective, and see this as the third of three national suppressions including Hungary in 1956, and Czechoslovakia in 1968, where the Russians felt compelled to reign in their vassal states by taking military action.
Reference to more recent events would conjure up memories of the Georgian-Russian War from 2008, and the occupation and annexation of Crimea in 2014, when the Russians took advantage of a distracted and/or disinterested world to take back territory.
Finally, there is the Russian suppression and reincorporation of Chechnya into Russia in 1999-2000. Chechnya had gained its de facto independence following a war with Russia in 1994-96. The later war to bring them back into Russia killed up to 50,000 people.
There are many ways to interpret what has happened here - economic imperatives; a drive to restore Great Power Status; the need to deflect from internal troubles. I think that the historic precedents are key to understanding the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Those precedents speak to a centuries-long and relentless determination on the part of the Russian leadership - of every ideological stripe - to control the peoples on their borders. There appears to be no question that Putin sees the world the same way, considering Ukraine to be nothing more than a break-away part of Russia which he is determined to return to the fold. He has as much as said so.
How will this turn out?
Well, no one knows, but it is certain that the days of empire are over, at least those empires established by force of arms and maintained through the use of soldiers and not financiers. Putin's perspective is at least three decades out of date, and his perspective is certain to have many detractors, including people in his own country.
Regarding those people, the war may be taking place now in order for Putin to deflect from the obvious failure of Putin's government to bring to the Russians the type of economic and social success that is being enjoyed by many of their former vassal states. By way of comparison, the Russians have almost five times the population of their former vassal Poland, but barely twice the GDP of that country. As noted in a previous post, Russia should be the wealthiest country on Earth. They are nowhere close to this. Does Putin see writing on the wall?
Other countries that tried the path of war to defect from economic stagnation and internal troubles include Argentina that launched the Falkland's War in 1980, and the Austrian Empire which gleefully vaulted into WW1 in 1914. Both countries saw the end of the respective regimes as a result of their involvement in those wars.
We know what Ukrainians and the West think about this new war. It may be that we should be paying closer attention to the Russians themselves. Behind the propaganda, a storm may be brewing.
