Ivan Krastev on Russia's Invasion of Ukraine
This is an incredibly interesting article that everyone interested in Putin&#x27;s state of mind will enjoy<p>Edit: I made a list of some assertions made so I can cross check some of them:<p>- The West doesn&#x27;t understand that Crimea is Russian<p>- His messianism comes from being in power for 20 years in an authoritarian state, nobody dares to contradict him<p>- He&#x27;s created a system, he&#x27;s become the system himself, and he can’t imagine that the entire country doesn’t reflect that<p>- He can’t imagine there being anybody who could be an adequate successor<p>- He has to solve all problems himself for as long as he is alive<p>- Putin believes Russia isn&#x27;t a country in the standard sense; it is a kind of historic, 1,000-year-old body<p>- He&#x27;s very intelligent and quick, forthright, confrontative. Sarcastic when speaking with someone from the West<p>- Obama put women in charge of Russia policy. He thinks that an intentional attempt to humiliate him<p>- He is obsessed with the hypocrisy of the West<p>- He wants to teach the West a lesson. He wants us to know he can do the things we do too, even if he hates us for it<p>- He is outraged that the annexation of the Crimea has been compared with Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland in 1938<p>- He thinks all and any enemies of eternal Russia must be Nazis<p>- He is constantly speaking of betrayal and deceit<p>- Western media has contributed to creating a false image of Putin<p>---- they say that Putin is corrupt<p>---- they say that Putin is a cynical gambler, a trickster<p>---- they say that Putin is somebody who is extremely strategic and tactical<p>----(Article describes why these are wrong)<p>- He really believes what he says<p>- He&#x27;s obsessed with what happened to Gadhafi. He wasn&#x27;t supposed to become president again after Medvedev, but did so to prevent that from happening to him<p>- Putin and the KGB didn’t understand why The Soviet Union collapsed overnight without a war, without an invasion. It was their job to protect it. They failed. He has a strong feeling of guilt<p>- He sees this as reunification of Russia and Ukraine, like East and West Germany<p>- He&#x27;s become the father of Ukraine. By his actions he vastly magnified Ukrainian national identity<p>- Now, he finds himself in a situation that we know from Russian literature, when the father says to his son: I have created you, but now I must kill you<p>- The myth of the Soviet Union and the heroic fight against the Nazis is not, in fact, embodied by Putin, but by Zelenskyy<p>- The Russian elite was perhaps taken by surprise to an even greater degree than we were in the West. And I think that<p>- The American government’s radical approach of making its intelligence information public helped to destroy Putin’s narrative that Russia is a victim<p>- Our world has changed. We used to be in a postwar world, now we are in a prewar world<p>- Ukrainians are even prepared to let their own state founder as a way of gaining an identity<p>- It is a situation like in the 19th century. Russia as a classic imperial power. And Ukraine in an anti-colonialist fight against it.<p>- He believes that Russia needs the men and women of Ukraine to survive in the new world. Population decline is hitting Russia hard. It’s not about the territory of Ukraine, but about the Ukrainian people.<p>- It is said that he has been strongly influenced by the memoirs of General Anton Denikin, one of the leading officers in the White Army, which was defeated by the Bolsheviks in the civil war of the 1920s. In the speech in which he declared war on Ukraine, Putin also attacked Russia’s Soviet legacy for the first time. Lenin, he says, was the one who created Ukraine. It was the speech of a nationalist, of an anti-Bolshevik.<p>- If Putin yields, it’s over for him. So, he has to escalate in order to force the Ukrainians to capitulate<p>- Putin managed to put an end to Swedish neutrality and German pacifism. He triggered solidarity and resilience in the West<p>- Whatever happens, and this is why it’s all so interesting: There is no path back to the way things were. Things are the way they are. And we don’t know where it will lead us.<p>- By imposing the such strong sanctions the US wants to save Taiwan by showing China the price of an intervention<p>- The world of globalization and free trade, in which the economy was only interested in bottom lines and not in politics, will soon be over<p>- Russia is going to change dramatically. But so will we