Putin’s Goals for Ukraine: The Conflict Explained
Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, which began in February and continues, is at its heart an effort to recreate the glory of the Soviet Union, which formally collapsed in 1991 after decades of over-spending on its military and the sheer failure of Marxist ideology. Within a decade, Russia would default on its debt—it was so cash-strapped that it was unable to pay state employees, fail to keep NATO from kicking Serbians (a Russian ally) out of Kosovo, watch former allies join NATO, lose a war in Chechnya, and become a bastion of corruption. Putin, a former KGB (Soviet intelligence) officer, resented the shame heaped upon Russia, and in a 1999 speech to the Duma he spoke of “strengthening the vertical chain” of power domestically, and go on to say “Russia has been a great power for centuries, and remains so. It has always has and still has legitimate zones of interest…we should not drop our guard in this respect, neither should we allow our opinion to be ignored.”
