(Image: Private Media)
(Image: Private Media)

Vladimir Putin’s extended justification for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, under the fiction of “peacekeeping” in two Russian-controlled separatist provinces, makes for uncomfortable reading for Putin’s apologists right across the political and foreign policy spectrum.

For many on the left, Russia’s aggression against Ukraine is the fault of the West, and especially NATO, under US leadership. The US has breached commitments there would be no expansion of NATO after the Cold War. Russia is entitled to control its “near abroad”. The West has refused to guarantee Putin’s security.

And for some, the West’s responsibility goes much further. Veteran leftist stereotype John Pilger accuses the West of abetting neo-Nazi genocide by the Ukrainian government (although, to be fair, it might be quicker for Pilger to identify places in the world where he doesn’t think the West is responsible for genocide).

Nor is this “it’s all our fault” line confined to the left. It can also find a home in conservative journals like The Spectator, read by people who regard Putin as the kind of tough-minded authoritarian that the flabby liberal West could do with. Thomas “suck on this” Friedman, long the court jester of neoconservatism who once urged us all to “keep rootin’ for Putin“, echoed this sentiment with his hot take yesterday that the US and NATO are also to blame.

It’s also a line beloved of self-described foreign policy “realists” who like to think they only respond to how the world is, not how we wish it to be, who want Putin to be accommodated on his demands for security, and think anything else is “liberal internationalist” folly.

But Putin has made it clear that the purported threat to Russia from Ukraine is a secondary issue. Instead, Putin devoted more than half of his 7500-word speech to detailing why Ukraine was part of Russia. “It is an inalienable part of our own history, culture and spiritual space. These are our comrades, those dearest to us — not only colleagues, friends and people who once served together, but also relatives, people bound by blood, by family ties.” Its “pro-Western civilisational choice” was one made by corrupt oligarchs, not by Ukrainians. 

“Now is not the time or place to go into matters pertaining to state or constitutional law,” Putin said, but he did exactly that, as well as gave an extensive history lesson on the incorporation of Ukraine into the Soviet Union. No mention, peculiarly, of the four million Ukrainians murdered by Stalin in the Holdomor, but plenty of detail on why “modern Ukraine was entirely created by Russia or, to be more precise, by Bolshevik, Communist Russia”.

That’s why in his speech Putin referred far more often to the USSR, the Soviet Union, Lenin, Stalin and the Bolsheviks than to NATO.

Putin’s invasion is an act of imperialist aggression, one that denies the existence of Ukraine as any sort of independent state. For Putin, it’s a rogue province that must be re-incorporated into Russia, or at least kept under strict economic and military control.

The entire argument that Putin is engaged in a transactional project, in which his goal was security, is in effect demolished by his own words: Ukraine is Russia and must always be so. There’s no transaction or security guarantee that will change that.

Meantime the Morrison government is, inexplicably, still to announce its formal response to Putin’s aggression, long after the EU and the United States announced new rounds of sanctions and financial prohibitions to punish the Putin regime and its friends. For a government that has been warning the Tsar for weeks, it seems to have been caught by surprise by the invasion it long warned of.