“The underlying cause of this trouble”
President Trump has announced that he will meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska this Friday. In related news, Putin told the US he would halt his war with Ukraine in exchange for land in eastern Ukraine and global recognition of Russia’s claims to the territory. We also learned yesterday that the White House is considering inviting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to Alaska as well.
How likely is it that Ukraine would make such a land exchange? Or that Putin would honor a peace achieved in this way?
These questions point to a larger question foundational to the war and its global consequences.
Would Putin stop here?
Putin claims four eastern Ukrainian regions—Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson—as well as the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea, which he annexed in 2014. According to an analysis by the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), if Ukraine does not concede these lands, Russia’s occupation of them through military means “is neither inevitable nor imminent, as Russian forces will face serious operational obstacles in what are likely to be multi-year endeavors.”
Even if Ukraine were to concede these regions on its border with Russia, would Putin stop there?
The ISW paper states that Putin has recently claimed that “all of Ukraine” is Russia’s. To this end, the analysis reports that he remains committed to “replacing the democratically elected Ukrainian government with a pro-Russian puppet government, reducing Ukraine’s military such that Ukraine cannot defend itself from future aggression,” and “destroying the Ukrainian state, identity, and culture and subjugating the Ukrainian people.”
According to Paul D’Anieri, a leading expert on Russia-Ukraine relations, “Much of the Russian elite, including Putin, rejected Ukraine’s independence from the very moment it happened back in 1991. That is the underlying cause of this trouble.”
Here’s the larger question: Why is Putin so antagonistic toward Ukraine?
“Geography is destiny”
The Arab philosopher Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) reportedly observed, “Geography is destiny.” He could have been speaking of Russia and Ukraine.
Ukraine is part of the vast European Plain. This region is flat, with no natural features to deter an invading force. Accordingly, in the last five hundred years, Russia has been invaded across its western border by the Poles (1605), the Swedes (1707), the French under Napoleon (1812), and the Germans in both world wars (1914, 1941).
To Putin, controlling this border is vital to his nation’s security.
And there is the issue of warm-water access. Many of Russia’s ports on the Arctic freeze for several months each year. Its largest port on the Pacific Ocean is enclosed by the Sea of Japan, which is dominated by the Japanese. This halts the flow of trade into and out of Russia and prevents the Russian fleet from operating as a global power. This is why Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula in 2014 and insists on controlling it.
In the eighteenth century, Peter the Great took control of Ukraine as well as most of what we know as Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. This formed a huge protective ring around Moscow. The fall of the USSR in 1991 cost Russia territory, with its border ending at Estonia, Latvia, Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, and Azerbaijan.
As long as a pro-Russia or even neutral government was in power in Ukraine, Russia could be confident of its buffer zone with the European Plain. But when a more pro-Western government came into power in 2014, Putin responded by seizing and annexing the Crimean peninsula. On February 24, 2022, he invaded Ukraine itself.
Putin and Peter the Great
Vladimir Putin has long seen himself as being on a historic mission to rebuild the Russian Empire, a goal with which many of his people agree. As Princeton history professor Stephen Kotkin notes, “Many Russians view their country as a providential power, with a distinct civilization and a special mission in the world.”
Putin often compares himself to Peter the Great, who founded the Russian Empire in 1721. Putin’s hometown is St. Petersburg, a city named for Peter and built on land he conquered from Sweden. Putin says he shares the eighteenth-century tsar’s goal of creating a Russian empire as it existed prior to 1917. This would call into question all of the former Soviet states as well as a large part of Poland, which was part of the Russian Empire.
Going back to Ivan IV (also known as Ivan the Terrible) in 1547, Russia has typically been ruled by a “tsar” (derived from the Latin caesar, meaning “emperor”). In 1721, Peter adopted the title of emperor and proclaimed the Russian Empire, though he continued to be called the tsar as well. According to Oxford historian Andrei Zorin, the “tsar” has been “deeply rooted in the cultural mythology of Russia” for at least five hundred years.
To this end, Putin keeps statues of four of Imperial Russia’s most revered tsars in the corners of his Kremlin cabinet office. A towering bronze statue of Peter the Great looms over Putin’s ceremonial desk. Putin says of Peter, “He will live as long as his cause is alive.”
The most powerful person who ever lived
Tomorrow we’ll explore Ukraine’s view of its history and its likely response to Putin’s demands. For today, we’ll close with this reminder: the quest for personal power commodifies people in a cycle of violence and vengeance that narrates human history.
Peter the Great tortured and killed his own son for allegedly conspiring against him and enslaved 540,000 people to build St Petersburg, many of them Swedish prisoners of war; as many as one hundred thousand died during the project. The British Ministry of Defense likewise estimates that over one million Russian troops have been killed or injured since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine began.
For Putin, these are merely means to the end of his personal power in his quest to restore Mother Russia. He treats the rest of his citizens with similar disregard. In my visits to St. Petersburg over the years, I marveled at the historic beauty of the city but grieved at the enormous number of homeless people, many of whom freeze to death during the brutal winters.
What Nietzsche called the “will to power” tempts all of us to be the tsar of our “empire” and exploit people as means to our ends. Here we find another reason we need what only Jesus can do in our fallen hearts.
Christ was the most powerful person who ever lived. He could calm stormy seas, heal diseased bodies, and even raise the dead back to life. And yet he “came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Matthew 20:28).
When we make him our Lord by submitting to his Spirit, we similarly exhibit his sacrificial love (Galatians 5:22), a power that ends wars, heals marriages and families, and restores nations. But only then.
We can seek our own transactional power or submit to the transforming power of God’s Spirit, but we cannot do both.
Choose wisely today.
Quote for the day:
“Jesus will say, ‘Well done, my good and faithful servant,’ not ‘Well said.’” —Sean Smith
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