War between Ukraine and Russia resumes pending problems from its past

For the third consecutive day, the Russian army yesterday tried to advance into Ukrainian territory and take the capital, Kiev, while both accused each other of not wanting to negotiate a truce.

This invasion launched by Russia early Thursday morning has already left (until yesterday) around 200 dead, while the US and the European Union (EU) raise sanctions on the Eurasian giant and its president, Vladimir Putin.

On the third day, Russian forces raided Kiev, but retreated to the outskirts in the face of fierce resistance from Ukrainian troops. However, the Russian army was ordered yesterday to expand its offensive.

With torchlight marches or simple street walks, demonstrations of solidarity with Ukraine and against the Russian invasion are multiplying around the world, from Argentina to Georgia to Italy. “Russians and Ukrainians have a lot in common. So my main feeling is anger. The last thing I imagined was that the Russians would come to kill my people,” Tetiana Abramchenko, 40, who arrived in Argentina in 2014, after the Russian annexation of Crimea, cried out on the verge of tears to AFP.

But despite the current moment and the tensions experienced in recent weeks, the origin of the conflict dates back several years and has to do with the historical past of both countries.

For Carlos Espinosa, professor of International Relations and Political Science at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Russia previously maintained a kind of ambiguity in part to open up the possibility of winning with a negotiation, but when the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) decided not to budge on Ukraine’s possible entry, Putin made the decision to invade and was already prepared to do so.

Espinosa adds that Russia wants Ukraine to remain its buffer against NATO and perceives it as an integral part of “historic Russia.”

“Ukraine has indeed developed its own national project and the desire to be an independent state has been accentuated in recent years, but Russia ignores it and rather insists that it is an integral part of it, an important divergence because Russia does not recognize Ukraine as a sovereign state with its own national identity”, says Espinosa, who adds that 70% of Ukrainians are in favor of orienting their country towards the West.

Putin himself has publicly said that Ukraine has never been a state in the strict sense and believes that it is now a puppet of the West and does not want it to be part of NATO or the EU, since he indicates that this threatens its security, the argument that most Repeat to justify your decision.

“This is an attempt to forcibly change the borders in Europe, perhaps even to wipe an entire country off the map,” German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said.

The rise to power of Putin, a former KGB agent, in 1999 gave Russia leverage again in former Soviet republics such as Ukraine. Various analysts and biographers have spoken in the past of his longing to once again make Russia a hegemonic player in world politics.

Additionally, there are data that show tension between the two territories for centuries, from the time of the czars, through the Soviet Union and its fall and ending in the conflict that began in 2014, when the Ukrainian government of Viktor Yanukovych fell, who had preferred support Russian to finalize the union of his country with the EU. This, when the majority of the population, especially in the cities, wanted the rapprochement. This eventually led to protests that led to his ouster, but pro-Moscow and Russian-speaking areas eventually defied Kiev. In this process, the Crimean peninsula unilaterally decided to become independent, although the decision has never been recognized by Kiev.

That same 2014, Russia decided to annex Crimea and since then has supported the separatist rebels located in eastern Ukraine, in the Donbas region. But this month Putin went a step further and recognized the self-proclaimed people’s republics of Donetsk and Lugansk – which occupy part of that region – and their military support to “keep the peace”.

Santiago Pérez, international affairs analyst and professor at the Universidad Técnica Particular de Loja, recalls that after the famous Maidan revolt against Yanukovych, Russia took advantage of the chaos to be able to recover Crimea, which had been given to Ukraine in 1954 for the 300th anniversary of its accession to Russia.

“Russian-Ukrainian relations have been historical, they have many ethnic, religious, cultural backgrounds… (besides) in 1922 both became founders of the Soviet Union,” says Pérez, who lived in Russia for several years, and also points out that in the early 1930s, being part of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin’s policy of forced collectivization ended up starving millions of Ukrainians.

He adds that another important point is that after the fall of the Soviet Union, in 1991, Ukraine had the third largest nuclear arsenal in the world, but it made an agreement with the Russians and the Americans and the British to cede it to Russia as long as it respects its borders and independence (Budapest Memorandum of 1994).

In the end, it could be said that this “hybrid war”, which has mixed themes of propaganda, cyber attacks and now an invasion, has not been conventional and has been brewing since the 2014 social unrest in Ukraine and that, based on the current results, it seems It has had a thorough preparation.

“What Putin wanted is Ukraine’s submission and he will apparently continue his offensive to the end,” French diplomat Jean-Yves Le Drian told AFP.

Espinosa, also a history professor, believes that NATO is not going to get directly involved and it is most likely that the Russian army will occupy Kiev and the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, who is not going to negotiate a peace tailored to Moscow, would end up changed by a puppet government.

“But since that government is not going to have legitimacy, the Russian occupation is going to have to be maintained indefinitely and that is going to have a very high cost for Russia… but it has already decided to assume it,” says Espinosa, who adds that they are going to increase strong sanctions, but Russia has learned to live with sanctions.

Either way if Russia “gobbles up” Ukraine, NATO and Russia will come face to face with their guns, on a border from the Baltic states and Poland to Bulgaria and Romania. The United States and NATO announced the dispatch of thousands of soldiers to their allies in Eastern Europe, all from the mantle of the former Soviet Union. (I)