Vladimir Putin announced on Monday that he had decided to recognize two regions in eastern Ukraine as independent breakaway republics, and immediately ordered Russian troops to enter those territories for “peacekeeping.”
Putin justified the advance from a nationalist perspective, but the military action would respond more to protecting Moscow’s energy interests than to his pretensions of being Stalin’s heir.
Russia is a petrostate, and it depends on sales of oil and natural gas: they are 60% of its export earnings and 40% of its total budget expenditures. It supplies 40% of the natural gas for heating Europe, and for its gas pipeline that crosses Ukraine, it now pays some 2 billion dollars a year.
Those are reasons that Washington and its European allies understand, and that they can handle by imposing sanctions that push back the Russian president, while the price of crude oil soars. The barrel reached 100.04 dollars after the Russian invasion, which intensified fears of a large-scale conflict in Eastern Europe and shortages of key products, such as wheat and metals, amid growing demand for oil. reopening of economies after lockdowns due to the pandemic.
But beyond the economic reasons behind Putin’s order to advance on the neighboring country (the Kremlin assured that rebel leaders in eastern Ukraine asked Moscow for military help to confront the Kiev troops), Pentagon analysts fear that the hierarch is truly guided by the reflection of the old Soviet glory, and the figure of the new tsar that he has built on himself.
In domestic politics, Putin no longer has any rivals. Essentially because he is a mafia autocrat, and no one who wants to stay out of jail or the grave will dare to confront him. And he has servile allies on whom he imposes his expansionist policy, like Belarus and Kazakhstan.
But that way failed in Ukraine. The heavy hand of the Kremlin resulted in the Maidan revolution of 2014 (following which in retaliation Putin seized the Crimean peninsula, a strategic point on the Black Sea), and the country’s reorientation towards the West and democracy. A challenge that today seeks to crush with tanks, while paralyzing its rivals with the threat of nuclear war.
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