Are you intrigued by the complex geopolitical dynamics unfolding in Eastern Europe? The Russia refusal to stop Ukraine war   has sparked global debate and speculation but the roots of the conflict trace back centuries, intertwining the legacies of empires and revolutions. there exist some interesting facts that illuminate the underlying dynamics of this protracted fighting.

From historical precedents to contemporary power struggles, our exploration will captivate your attention and stimulate your interest in understanding the intricacies of this complex situation.

Ukrainian officials reported that the Russian government deployed 100,000 troops near the Ukrainian border in 2021. On February 21, 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that Russia recognized the independence of the separatist Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics (DPR and LPR).

Three days later, Putin launched a military attack on Ukraine, reportedly to protect residents of the Donbas region from the Ukrainian government.

The incursion resulted in Russian forces attacking Ukraine’s major cities and infrastructure. Since then, Russia has refused to stop the war.

Here are some interesting facts about the war between Russia and Ukraine

 

Ukrainian and Russian History

The history between Ukraine and Russia goes back a thousand years, and both sides could call it a common or complex heritage.

Over the last century, Ukraine, known as Europe’s bread basket, was one of the most populous and powerful republics in the former Soviet Union and an agricultural powerhouse.

l it declared     independence in 1991, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.

 

But Russia has kept a close eye on its western neighbors, while Ukrainians have found their independence at times mired in chaos, punctuated by protests and government corruption

 

 

Ukraine aligns with Western countries

The  opinion poll (November 6-15, 2021) by the sociological group “Rating” of the International Republican Institute shows that Ukrainians, if given a choice, would prefer a political and economic alliance with the Western countries.

If there were an immediate referendum on NATO membership, 54% said they would vote to join the alliance, 28% would vote against it and the remainder would not vote or were unsure.

Ukrainians appear to have similar preferences in the economic sphere.

If Ukraine can only join one international economic union, 58% prefer joining the EU, while only 21% choose a customs union with Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has made it clear that Ukraine aligns with Western countries, especially Ukraine’s membership of NATO, is unacceptable to Russia.

To some extent, the Russian public seems to agree. The CNN/Savanta ComRes poll found that twice as many Russians think it would be reasonable to use force to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO (50%) than think it would be wrong (25%). Another quarter of Russians are unsure (25%).

 

 

   Russia rejects Ukraine’s bid to join NATO

Russia’s main demand is to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO, a military alliance of 29 European and two North American countries dedicated to maintaining peace and security in the North Atlantic region.

Ukraine is one of the few countries in Eastern Europe that is not a member of the alliance.

The Kremlin generally views NATO expansion as a “fundamental problem,” according to a translation of a Jan. 28, 2022, phone call between Putin and French President Emmanuel Macron.

It is worth noting, however, that William Pomeranz, acting director of the Kennan Institute at the Wilson Center, a nonpartisan policy forum on global issues, said NATO has “no current intention” to admit Ukraine to the organization.

“I think NATO, and the invitation for Ukraine to join NATO at some point in the future, is just an excuse to possibly invade Ukraine,” he said, referring to Russia.

“Ukraine is not a member of NATO, it does not have any NATO guarantees, so there is no indication that Ukraine will become a member of NATO anytime soon.”

Specifically, Putin rejects Ukraine’s bid to join NATO “not because he has some principled disagreement on the rule of law or otherwise, but because he has a might-makes-right model,” said Bradley Bowman, the center’s senior director.

The Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Military and Political Power is a nonpartisan research organization focused on national security and foreign policy.

“He believed, ‘Hey, Ukraine, I’m more powerful than you, because I’m more powerful than you, Ukraine, and I can tell you what to do and who to engage with,'” Bowman said.

 

 

Russia’s Hidden Expansion Agenda to Revitalize the Soviet Union

In addition to concerns about NATO and other demands related to weapons and transparency, Russia has a hidden expansionary agenda to revitalize the Soviet Union.

Russia’s expansionary nature also plays a role in Ukraine. Some Russians, including Putin, remain angry about the collapse of the Soviet Union and believe Russia has sovereignty over the former Soviet republic.

“The Russian Federation’s imperialist policies require complex activities and sophisticated deterrence and defense from us and all our allies,” U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said at a press conference on February 18, 2022.

The demands of the Russian government are inseparable from those of its authoritarian leaders.

While analysts were quick to say they couldn’t read Putin’s mind — something Biden himself admitted in a speech on February 18, 2022 — they noted Putin’s lofty ambitions.

Especially those that Ambition related to his nostalgia for the territorial integrity of the Soviet Union, which his actions demonstrated.

“We know that Putin viewed the collapse of the Soviet Union as a disaster,” Bowman said. “We know that he is dissatisfied with the success of NATO.

We know that he sincerely condemns the expansion of NATO.

We know that he cares about history that he is getting older, that he cares about his image in the history books, that he considers himself a new The Tsar wanted to rebuild the Soviet Union as much as possible”.

 

 

Putin’s history of invading and occupying countries close to NATO membership

 

Putin has a history of invading and occupying countries close to being members of NATO.

In 2008, Russian troops invaded the former Soviet state of Georgia as it sought to join the alliance.

They briefly pressed the capital, Tbilisi, before retreating to separatist areas they still occupy today.

Bowman pointed to the 2014 annexation of Crimea as another example, and Putin said on February 22, 2022, that he wanted the world to recognize that the territory rightfully belonged to Russia.

He argued in a 2021 article that Ukrainians’ contested shared history and culture gave Russia the right to exert influence there.

“I think Ukraine has been a sore spot for Vladimir Putin,” Pomeranz said.

“He does not recognize Ukraine’s independence and its right to be a country, as he pointed out in his long article about Ukraine, in which he said that, basically, Ukraine and Russia are one nation within one country.

People are concerned about Ukrainian independence as well as There was a long-standing resentment over the fact that the Soviet Union let Ukraine go.

So I think he wanted to end that independence.”

Putin sees Ukraine as an important part of “Mother Russia”

 

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia has harbored great resentment toward independent Ukraine, which it still regards as an important part of “Mother Russia.”

Therefore, it considers the conquest of Ukraine essential for the restoration of so-called “historic Russia”.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has spared no effort to promote the false historical narrative that Ukrainians and Russians constitute “one country.”

Putin is keen to reorganize the former Soviet states and reverse what he calls “the greatest geopolitical disaster of the twentieth century.”

His ultimate goal is to “correct the mistakes of the Soviet Union’s collapse in the Cold War thirty years ago.”

Putin want to restructure the entire European security architecture

Putin wants to rebuild the entire European security architecture, which will come at huge cost to the West.

His recent articles and speeches on the subject have reportedly become required reading for the Russian military.

They seek to justify Putin’s invasion of Ukraine by erasing Ukrainian history and denying the right to exist of unique Ukrainian culture and language.

 

 

Putin sees Ukraine as Russian

 

Ukraine, once part of the Soviet Union, later declared itself an independent state and cemented that decision in a referendum held in December 1991, days before the Soviet Union collapsed.

The country has remained independent since then. But Putin still refers to Ukraine as Russia and denies it is a country in its own right.

In 2008, he told then-President George W. Bush that Ukraine was not even a country.

Putin spoke to former Fox News host Tucker Carlson in an interview released on February 8, 2024, in which he stated that Russia had historic claims to Ukraine.

Stephen Hall, an expert on Russian politics at the University of Bath in the United Kingdom, said many Russians still hold this view, and “it’s not just the Kremlin.”

 

Hall said Russia considers the Ukrainian capital Kiev the “mother of Russian cities” and that for Putin he cannot have such a status outside his own country.

Hall added that Russia needs to claim sovereignty over Ukraine to support its argument as a great power that has existed for thousands of years.

Without it, “Russia cannot claim to have a history of more than a thousand years, because Kiev existed 1,200 years ago, when Moscow was a forest,” he said.

Putin blames West

 

Taylor said the invasion of Ukraine reflected Putin’s “long-simmering dissatisfaction.”

For Putin, “Russia has the right to rule Ukraine. Russians and Ukrainians are one country and one people. When the Soviet Union collapsed.

They were illegally and artificially separated,” he said, accusing the West of trying to separate Ukraine from Russia’s natural friendship. Pull it out,” Taylor said.

At the outset of the invasion, Putin blamed NATO’s expansion into Eastern Europe for forcing his action, echoing criticism he has made for years.

Hall said the idea of ​​NATO threatening Russia by expanding toward its borders “is very much part of the Russian propaganda narrative.”

He also pointed out that NATO does not simply expand, but countries apply to join, usually due to perceived external threats. In Eastern Europe, this threat often comes from Russia.

For example, Lithuania’s prime minister told Insider in February that Lithuania joined NATO “because of Putin.”

But Putin dismissed that excuse and began playing the “blame game,” she said.

 

 

The NATO excuse

 

Hall said Putin is using the NATO excuse line to try to convince an international audience that may already have strong doubts about the Western military alliance.

If Russia could engage with a small number of people who think this way, “that would create an electoral voice for Russia to use to try to block Western engagement,” he said.

Hall added that even if NATO is expanding, “it doesn’t justify what Russia is doing in Ukraine.”

Ukraine’s ties with NATO deepened in 2014 when pro-Russian forces invaded eastern Ukraine, sparking a conflict that lasted until an invasion in 2022.

But Taylor said he believed there was no “consistent explanation” of how NATO’s alleged expansion led to the war.

Taylor noted that before Finland joined NATO earlier this year, no new countries had joined the alliance since 2004, and even then there were only “fairly small ones” – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

He also said that NATO has not increased its troops in the region, “so the joining of these countries does not mean the establishment of this military force on Russia’s doorstep.”

In fact, Taylor said the United States was reducing the size of its armed forces in Europe until pro-Russian forces occupied parts of Ukraine in 2014.

Even so, Putin used this NATO excuse to varying degrees throughout the invasion.

In a recent interview with Carlson, Putin first ignored multiple questions about the alliance and instead addressed the history of Russia and Ukraine.

But when he later discussed NATO, he again blamed the idea of ​​NATO expansion eastward.