Vladimir Putin rarely uses English in his speeches. So if in his speech to the recent BRICS meeting in Kazan he insisted the reason for Russia’s 2022 attack on Ukraine was that he was duped (he pronounced it ‘dooped’) by Germany and France in the 2014-5 Minsk Accords then he probably meant it.
The Accords promised autonomy for the two Russian-speaking Ukrainian provinces of Donetsk and Lugansk.
In his recent Pearls and Irritations contribution, Jon Richardson, is probably right in saying NATO expansion was not the main factor in the Russian attack. Talk of possible NATO attacks rarely appeared in Russian statements beforehand.
The May 2022 request by Finland to join NATO came later. It raised talk about Moscow’s vulnerability, and possible movement of the capital to Siberia, but no action.
Nor was the US-inspired Maidan coup of 2014 ousting the corrupt pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych a key factor. Most agree that he (if not his regime) deserved to go.
For key factors we need look no further than the self-admitted duplicity (pronounced ‘dooplicity’) of the German and French leaders involved in those Minsk agreements. Both have admitted since that the main aim was to allow time for the West (including NATO) to arm Ukraine for attacks into the Donbas territories promised autonomy.
Putin had every reason to be angry. In just a year after Minsk, Ukraine’s neo-Nazi forces had reportedly killed 8,000 in Donetsk and Lugansk. On a visit to Moscow in 2016 by chance the first article I read in Izvestia was a rebuke to Putin for failing to send in the troops to stop the slaughter (who says the Russian media are heavily censored?). The author concluded that the US would never have waited in such a situation.
Putin waited for eight years till 2022 before moving. By then the total was 18,000 killed plus the loss of two-thirds of the promised autonomous territory, the 2019 laws restricting use of Russian language and bombing destruction throughout the region.
(Putin spoke German and it is speculated that he was probably lured by Germany’s Angela Merkel into the calls for the Normandy Format and other time-wasting agreements promising obedience to the Minsk agreements as late as 2021.)
Even after the beginning of hostilities in 2022, Moscow was keen to negotiate, compromise on agreements. But they were rejected by Kiev, at the UK’s instigation.
NATO came into the picture later.
For more on this topic, P&I recommends:
Gregory Clark was the first postwar Australian diplomat trained in Chinese, with postings to Hong Kong, Moscow and the UN before retiring in protest against the Vietnam War. After PhD studies at the ANU he became Japan correspondent for The Australian. A spell in Canberra’s Prime Ministers department led to professorships at Tokyo’s Sophia University and emeritus president of Tama University, Tokyo, before becoming co-founder of the very successful English language Akita Kokusai Daigaku. He has now retired to Latin America (Peru) and Kiwi fruit growing in Boso peninsular south of Tokyo.
His works include ‘In Fear of China’ (1969) and several books in Japan on education and foreign policy.
He used to speak Chinese and Russian with fluency. He now speaks Japanese and Spanish.
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