His reasoning is demonstrated in hundreds of years of Russia history.
By Dr. Michael A. McFaul
Ken Olivier and Angela Nomellini Professor of International Studies, Department of Political Science
Director, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution
Stanford University
By Dr. Robert Person
Associate Professor of International Affairs
United States Military Academy West Point
Introduction
On February 24, 2022, Russian president Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, expanding dramatically the war against Ukraine he began in 2014 and starting the largest war in Europe since World War II. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian soldiers have already been killed or wounded. More than ten thousand Ukrainian (and a handful of Russian) civilians have died and many more have been wounded. Tens of thousands of tanks, artillery, aircraft, and ships have been destroyed. The war has done deep damage to, first and foremost, the Ukrainian economy but also the Russian economy. Some worry that Ukraine is the first front of a larger war in Europe that will eventually expand to Moldova, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and even Poland, thereby dragging the United States and NATO into war with Russia. Understanding why this war started, therefore, is important not only to scholars of international relations but to policymakers, present and future.
We argue that three factors—power, regimes, and individuals—interacted to cause this war. Specifically, we argue that the perception of an asymmetric balance of power provided a necessary, permissive condition for starting this war. A more powerful Ukraine and a less powerful Russia would have made war less likely. Second, regime types played a role too. Over the last twenty years, Russia has become more autocratic while Ukraine has become more democratic. Those divergent regime trajectories fueled growing tensions between the two countries. However, shifting balances of power and changing regime types were necessary but insufficient causes for starting this war. A third factor—Putin and his ideas—was essential. Enabled by a growing personalistic dictatorship, Putin and his distinct world outlook played a direct causal role in launching this invasion.
In focusing on power, regimes, and individuals as the causes of this war, we reject two alternative explanations—NATO expansion and innate Russian imperialism. NATO expansion has been a source of tension between Moscow and the West for a long time, dating back to the alliance’s creation in 1949. But this tension has not been a constant driver of conflict over the decades; rather, it has been a variable. And it was most certainly not the main reason for Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine in 2022: there was no movement underway to offer Ukraine membership in NATO at the time. There had not been since 2008.
Russian imperialism is a more powerful alternative explanation—a hypothesis supported by hundreds of years of history. Russia has expanded when it has the means to do so, irrespective of regime type or leadership, so the argument goes. True, Putin has invoked imperial legacies to help mobilize support for his invasion of Ukraine in 2022. That many Russians support his war underscores the fact that imperialist ideas are deeply rooted in Russian society. But there is evidence to undermine this argument of imperial continuity. Russia in the post-Soviet era has not always sought to attack or annex its neighbors. There has been variation, and that variation has been driven by power, regimes, and individuals. A less powerful Russia, a more democratic Russia, or a Russia ruled by a leader other than Putin would have been less imperial and less bellicose toward its neighbors, including Ukraine.
The Balance of Power
Overview
Any explanation of war must begin with an analysis of the balance of power, both real and perceived. The distribution of the material means of war always plays some role in starting wars. In fact, some realist theorists believe that the balance of power between states is all one needs to know to explain the behavior of states in the international system. In their view, regime type and individuals play no role. For example, when explaining the clash between Great Britain and Germany in the 19th century, Eyre Crowe, the British Foreign Office’s leading expert on Germany, concluded “that Germany’s intentions were irrelevant; its capabilities were what mattered.”1 The changing map of Europe over the last thousand years shows that strong states grow at the expense of their weaker neighbors. Set against this historical pattern, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 is nothing unusual—it’s just what great powers do.
Power Asymmetries
The shifting balance of military capabilities between Ukraine and Russia over the last thirty years most certainly played a role in triggering this war. In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union (USSR), Russia’s military and economic capabilities were weak. Some at the time even fretted over the collapse of the Russian Federation itself. Amidst the post-Soviet economic meltdown, Russia simply did not have the means to invade Ukraine. Even a decade after the USSR’s dissolution, many analysts concluded that Russia was “finished” as a significant player in international politics. As Thomas Graham wrote in 1999, “We are witnessing a geo-political and geo-economic shift of historic dimensions, one in which Russia will become less and less an actor in world affairs, while running the risk of becoming an object of competition among more advanced and dynamic powers.”2
Since the mid-1990s, however, Russia has strengthened politically and economically, even if events like the 1998 or 2008 economic meltdowns slowed its growth temporarily. Russia’s economy in 2022 was much larger and stronger than thirty years earlier. Moreover, because of the extensive military modernization reform known as “New Look” in 2008, the Russian army became smaller but better armed and trained than its Soviet predecessor. Putin and Russia’s minister of defense Sergei Shoigu also devoted significant resources to revamping military equipment, enhancing military training, and strengthening Russia’s power projection capabilities more broadly. Before the invasion, Russia had over one million soldiers on active duty and regularly spent more on defense as a percentage of GDP than the United States. Since 2022, Russian military expenditures could now be over 6%–8% of its GDP.3
As Russia became more powerful in the three decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine did not keep up. By most measures, Ukraine’s power was growing too but not as fast as Russia’s. This was especially true concerning military capabilities: Ukrainian defense spending remained flat until 2014. On other basic metrics of power such as fighting-age male population, size of the economy, and raw materials, Russia also maintained an advantage that grew over time.
If a state cannot balance against the power of an opponent alone, allying with more powerful states is another option. That choice, however, was not available to Ukrainian leaders since Ukraine has never been issued an invitation to join NATO. Until 2022, NATO countries had done little to help Ukrainians defend themselves and a lot to weaken Ukrainian deterrence. In 1994, the United States and the United Kingdom collaborated with Russia to convince Ukraine to give up its nuclear weapons in exchange for security assurances, as well as financial assistance to dismantle its nuclear weapons. In compelling Ukraine to sign the Budapest Memorandum, the West was disarming, not arming, Ukraine.
Just a few years later in 2008, Russia invaded Georgia. Six years after that, Russia attacked Ukraine, annexed Crimea, and stoked a separatist war in the Donbas. Even after this Russian aggression, however, the United States and other NATO allies consistently refused to provide lethal military assistance to Ukraine. Only in March 2018 did the Trump administration finally decide to send anti-tank Javelin missiles to Ukraine, but on the condition that they would be stored in western Ukraine, far from the front lines in the east. NATO also took no definitive steps to accelerate Ukraine’s membership in the alliance in the decade leading up to the 2022 war. Any objective assessment of the balance of power between Russia and Ukraine in early 2022 would have concluded that Russia had a decisive advantage.
Perceptions and Misperceptions of the Balance of Power
The objective balance of powers matters but so do perceptions (and misperceptions) of capabilities. Before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Putin already had used military power successfully several times, thus fueling the perception that Russia’s armed forces had growing capabilities. In the Kremlin’s view, Russia had used military power effectively in Chechnya in 1999–2000, Georgia in 2008, Ukraine in 2014, and Syria in 2015. Successful information operations against Ukraine, Europe, and the United States from 2014 onwards also fueled Putin’s propensity for risky but successful behavior, leading him to believe in his intelligence services’ ability to pave the way for successful military action.
This run of apparent successes boosted Putin’s confidence in the ability of Russia’s military to win easily again in Ukraine in 2022. His confidence in a quick decapitation strike against Kyiv and easy victory in Ukraine is apparent in the array of military units and weaponry that formed the first wave of Russia’s 2022 invasion: these were largely “administrative columns” of infantry and mechanized forces equipped to advance quickly in the face of minimal resistance. They were accompanied by numerous Rosgvardia (Russian National Guard) troops to stabilize and establish political control over quickly conquered Ukrainian territories.
Putin was not the only leader with these expectations of a quick, decisive Russian victory. President Joe Biden and his administration shared the same assessment, as did many other leaders in Europe. Once the war began, US intelligence—at least according to information leaked to the press—believed that Russian soldiers would conquer Ukraine easily. This assessment was made by counting both the number of Russian soldiers and tanks but also Ukrainian soldiers, tanks, and the like. Variables like “resolve,” “will to fight,” or “preparedness” are more difficult to measure and did not factor prominently in these analyses, perhaps due to a misreading of the collapse of Afghanistan just a few months prior. Ukraine’s Territorial Defense Forces—reservists and volunteers who took up arms to defend their local cities and villages—also did not feature prominently in the initial balance-of-power assessments.
Since many predicted that Russian soldiers would be patrolling downtown Kyiv just weeks after the war began, American and European leaders encouraged the Biden administration to withdraw its diplomatic mission from Kyiv accordingly and destroy sensitive equipment at the American embassy in the Ukrainian capital—they didn’t think they would be back anytime soon. We now know that these assessments made in Moscow and Washington were incorrect, but this became evident only after we witnessed Russia’s military on the battlefield.
Leaders often initiate wars when they assess (accurately or not) the balance of power to be in their favor. Even relatively equal distributions of power can tempt leaders into believing that they can benefit from war. Furthermore, leaders may be more likely to start wars when they believe that changes in the long-term balance of power favor decisive action now, rather than waiting to fight in the future when the adversary might be stronger. This “better now than later” logic sits at the heart of preventive war strategies. But the farther a leader looks beyond the horizon, the greater the role of perception (and misperception) in assessing the likelihood of future conflict and the balance of power. Extrapolating from trends in Russian, Ukrainian, and Western power (as he saw them), by 2022 Putin came to the conclusion that the balance of power favored bold Russian action.
Capabilities, Resolve, and the Failure of Deterrence
Ukraine and the West failed to deter the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Though Putin received private warnings from the United States and other Western governments about the political and economic consequences of invading, the West’s weak response to Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014 provided ample evidence to Putin that threats in 2022, too, were empty. Furthermore, Putin (incorrectly) expected Ukrainian citizens to welcome his army with open arms, which would lead Ukrainian forces to wither under Russian attack. This misguided assessment of Ukraine’s will to fight further undermined the deterrent threat. But the balance of capabilities—Russian power set against weak Ukraine—was an objective reality that undermined hope of deterring Putin’s decision to invade. As tanks rolled across the frontier in February 2022, Ukraine did not have the military power (or Western military support) to alter Putin’s calculus.
A different balance of power more in favor of Ukraine might have changed Putin’s calculus. Imagine, for instance, if NATO in 2014 had delivered to Ukraine the weapons they delivered after 2022. Or what if Ukraine had joined NATO in 2008 or 1998 when Russia did not have the military means nor a leader in place with the impulse to try to stop membership? A stronger Ukraine in NATO could have deterred Putin from invading in 2022.
Regimes
Overview
Capabilities shape decisions about war and peace but do not determine them. Today, the United States has the capability to invade Canada, but no one is worried about an American president deciding to invade, occupy, and annex Saskatchewan. Germany and Japan today are much more powerful than they were at the end of World War II, but their weaker neighbors are not worried about being attacked as they were in the last century. Amazingly, Lithuanian leaders have welcomed the permanent stationing of five thousand German soldiers on their soil even though this same neighbor ravaged the Baltic country just a few decades ago. The ability to invade does not automatically lead to war. Other factors shaping the ability and willingness to wage war matter too.
Regime type is one of those factors. As a tendency in international politics, democracies are less likely to go to war with each other than with autocracies; the correlation of peace between democracies is a strong one. Power interacts with regime type too: the correlation of conflict between powerful autocracies and powerful democracies is also robust. To think of extreme cases, the powerful and democratic United States is not threatened by weak autocracies like Tajikistan or Equatorial Guinea. Nor, for that matter, is Ukraine. But regime type can play an independent role in fueling conflict that is not solely derivative of power. Dictatorships in weaker countries can be threatening to democracies, as American anxieties over the theocracies in Afghanistan and Iran show. And democracy in small countries can threaten even the most powerful autocracies, as China’s anxieties about democratic Taiwan prove.
In this vein, changes in regime types have influenced dynamics in Ukraine-Russia relations over the last three decades. In the 1990s, the political systems in both Ukraine and Russia were considered by most to be unconsolidated democracies. In fact, democratization in the Russian Republic in the final days of the Soviet Union helped Ukraine secure its sovereignty and post-Soviet independence. In the final years of the Soviet period, Russia’s leading democratic movement, Democratic Russia, considered the democratic forces in Ukraine as their allies, not their enemies. Throughout the 1990s, the leaders of both Russia’s democracy and Ukraine’s democracy sought integration and closer relations with the democratic West. The security interests of these two new democracies were aligned. There was no specter of war between Ukraine and Russia.
In the first two decades of the 21st century, Ukraine democratized further, albeit in fits and starts, while Russia under Putin became more autocratic. Key moments of democratic breakthrough in Ukraine—the Orange Revolution in 2004–2005 and the Revolution of Dignity in 2013–2014—especially exacerbated tensions between the two countries.4 To remember the obvious counterfactual, if there was no Revolution of Dignity overthrowing Ukraine’s corrupt and increasingly autocratic president Viktor Yanukovych, there would have been no Russian invasion and annexation of Ukraine in 2014. In parallel, tensions between Russia and the wider democratic world rose as Putin sought to undermine democracy in numerous Western countries with even sharper methods, setting the stage for hostilities not seen since the height of the Cold War.
Personalized Dictatorship
Throughout this period, the Russian political regime grew increasingly autocratic under Vladimir Putin as well. Admittedly, this makes it difficult to untangle whether it was the regime type or the individual Russian leader that was driving these tensions. But what is clear is that as Russia became more autocratic, that political system gave Putin more influence over decision-making, making his personal role in starting this war even more apparent.
Not all autocracies are alike and therefore not all dictatorships behave the same way in international politics. Russia’s specific form of authoritarianism matters too. It has evolved into a classic personalist dictatorship with overwhelming power concentrated in Putin’s hands. In Putin’s Russia, power is exercised largely through informal, noninstitutionalized personal relationships: for members of the political elite, their power, influence, and wealth are derived not from their formal position in the Russian political system but rather from one’s direct personal relationship with Putin. It is no wonder that nearly everyone thought to be in Putin’s inner circle today have relations that stretch back decades, some as far back as Putin’s childhood in Leningrad, or his career as a Committee for State Security (KGB) officer, or even his time in the St. Petersburg mayor’s office in the early 1990s.
These loyalists have not earned Putin’s confidence, let alone trust, by telling him unpleasant hard truths. Like the sycophants that surround most personalist dictators, they have maintained their privileged positions by telling Putin the things he wants to hear. Surrounded by these yes-men and unconstrained by independent political parties, economic interest groups, free media, or robust civil society, Putin now rules from an echo chamber that is increasingly isolated from reality. Misled by his top advisors about the likelihood of quick victory in Ukraine, Putin’s personalist dictatorship denied him critical information that could have slowed the march to war.
Even if they disagreed with Putin’s decision to launch an ill-advised war against Ukraine in 2022, Russian political elites had no incentive to express their true preferences. Putin’s main source of political control is his power to direct the vast inflow of natural resource rents to those individuals who implemented his policy preferences. This, along with a trove of compromising material on elites compiled over decades, provides Putin with an extraordinary blackmail power over government officials and oligarchs who might be tempted to challenge him.
To defect from Putin’s coalition (whether before or after the decision was taken to launch the war) would have been highly risky, or even suicidal, with minimal chance of success. His assassination of Yevgeny Prigozhin in 2023, once a Putin loyalist in charge of a vital instrument of Russian power, the mercenary Wagner Group, sent a powerful signal to elites about the costs of defection, echoing earlier coercive acts from Putin such as the killing of Alexander Litvinenko in 2006 and the 2003 jailing for a decade of Russia’s richest businessman, Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
Though Russia’s power asymmetry was significant and its personalist autocracy nearly unchecked domestically, these two factors alone did not make war inevitable in 2022. A different leader, controlling these same power capabilities and empowered by this same regime type still could have made a different choice about invading Ukraine in 2022. To understand why Russia decided to launch this invasion, we must add a third factor—its leader, Vladimir Putin.
Leaders
Overview
Putin was an accidental president. Boris Yeltsin and his inner circle chose Putin to be prime minister in 1999, acting president on January 1, 2000, and their candidate for president in the March 2000 elections. Yeltsin’s goal was to preserve the political and economic system in place at the time, not destroy it. At the time, Yeltsin’s entourage (Yeltsin himself was quite incapacitated) was worried about the resurgence of an alternative group of elites winning power. This group of challengers centered around communist-friendly prime minister Yevgeny Primakov and Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov. Putin was considered the best candidate within their circles to defeat these challengers—and he did.
Back then, Putin did not have firm views on many issues. Today, he wants his followers at home and abroad to believe that he resisted the collapse of the Soviet Union, criticized neoliberal economic ideas, and championed conservative values. By 2000, however, he had spent a whole decade working for Russian leaders who worked to destroy the Soviet Union, implemented neoliberal economic reforms, and embraced liberal values.5 In his first years in power, Putin continued market reforms, including a 13% flat income tax, lower corporate taxes, and conservative fiscal and monetary policies. Initially, he also continued Yeltsin’s pro-Western orientation regarding foreign policy, especially after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks against the United States, which united Putin and President George W. Bush in their common fight against terrorism. But this would soon change.
What Putin Fears Most: Democracy
In fact, Putin has held one firm view from the very beginning of his political career—a disdain for checks and balances on his power. Almost immediately, he began rolling back independent pockets of political power, starting first with television companies, then oligarchs, and later governors. The 2004 presidential election was much less free and fair than the 2000 contest and was characterized by widespread electoral fraud. By the end of the decade, the debate was over: Russia was a dictatorship, though scholars continued to debate what kind of dictatorship.
But it is not just the idea of a democratic Russia that threatens Putin. It is also the prospect of democratic neighbors, especially Slavic neighbors, that threaten his control and sense of security. Since his earliest days in power, Putin has consistently sought for Russia a privileged and uncontested sphere of influence in the post-Soviet region. In Putin’s thinking, Russia, as a great power, has the right to influence and even veto the sovereign political decisions—both foreign and domestic—of its neighbors. The authority to quash any policies that might counter Russia’s interest is the privilege Putin demands. But he also demands exclusivity of such privilege: Russia can be the only great power with free reign to pursue its interests unhindered in the region. Having independent democratic neighbors who make their own decisions is obviously incompatible with Putin’s vision: it is hard for him to pull puppet strings from the Kremlin when the puppets have a mind of their own and refuse to dance at his command. It is thus little wonder that he has lashed out with intense—even emotional—hostility whenever democracy has advanced in the region.
Throughout the early 2000s, a series of popular uprisings that would come to be labeled the “color revolutions” swept aside corrupt leaders in several postcommunist countries near Russia, replacing them with new leaders whose foreign policies were generally oriented toward the democratic West. Haunted by the alleged specter of American-led regime change, Putin perceived the 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia as a threat to his legitimacy at home and a new effort by the United States to peel away Moscow’s partners.
Hoping to install a loyal puppet in Kyiv the following year, Putin intervened in the presidential election in Ukraine that triggered the Orange Revolution. Going so far as to actively campaign with his preferred candidate, Viktor Yanukovych, Putin showed his willingness to determine the outcome of that election by any means necessary. Alas, his machinations were thwarted by the Ukrainian people, who had other ideas about how their leaders should be chosen. Putin saw the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004 as an even greater threat than the Rose Revolution in Georgia, in part because Ukraine was a more powerful country and in part because the practice of democracy in a Slavic country undermined Putin’s own argument at home that Slavs have a cultural proclivity for a strong leader and powerful autocratic state. If democratic protests could topple corrupt strongmen in Russia’s neighboring countries, why could the contagion not spread to Russia?
Regrettably, the Orange Revolution did not produce the democratic consolidation that its leaders aspired to achieve. In 2010, Putin’s corrupt Ukrainian puppet, Yanukovych, won the election as president and the defeated incumbent Viktor Yushchenko voluntarily handed over power, a hallmark of peaceful democratic transitions. But with Moscow’s man now ruling in Kyiv, Ukraine didn’t seem all that threatening to Russia anymore.
The following year, however, the Arab Spring exploded, toppling autocrats initially through mass peaceful demonstrations that rattled Putin. The shocks continued: in late 2011, a falsified parliamentary election in Russia and Putin’s announcement that he planned to run for a third presidential term the following spring sparked mass mobilization against Putin and his regime, the greatest threat to his power ever. Putin framed this mobilization as an American plot to challenge his rule and regime—a coup attempt funded and orchestrated by the administration of President Barack Obama. Putin eventually employed even more draconian and repressive methods to quell this democratic challenge to his autocratic rule. One of the popular leaders of the democratic movement, Boris Nemtsov, was murdered in 2015, followed by the 2020 poisoning and 2021 jailing of another popular leader of this movement, Alexey Navalny (who ultimately died, most likely as the result of state-sanctioned murder, in prison in February 2024). But the threat was now well-defined for Putin and his regime: “fifth column traitors” (otherwise known as democratic activists) and their Western allies posed the greatest threat to Putin’s power.
Only two years after the Arab Spring and Bolotnaya protests—the name given to the peaceful demonstrations in Russia against Putin in 2011–2012—Ukrainians took to the streets in the fall of 2013, this time to protest Yanukovych’s decision to not sign an association with the European Union. In February 2014 (most likely with prodding from the Kremlin), Yanukovych authorized the use of force against the protestors, but the tactic failed, compelling Putin’s puppet to flee Ukraine and allowing a new moment of democratic renewal in Ukraine.
Putin was infuriated. For in their refusal to become subservient vassals to the Kremlin, the Ukrainian people proved again with their protests that they saw their future aligned with the democratic West, not autocratic Russia. Both to retaliate against and to weaken the new pro-democracy and pro-Western government in Ukraine, Putin annexed Crimea and supported with money and soldiers a secessionist rebellion in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. Throughout this period, Russia also directed its full nonmilitary arsenal against the government in Kyiv, waging a multidomain political, economic, social, and information “hybrid war” in the hopes of toppling the democratically elected Ukrainian government.
Thanks to the resilience of the Ukrainian people, Putin’s efforts to neuter Ukrainian democracy have mostly failed for the last two decades. They failed in 2004 when the Orange Revolution prevented Putin from installing his preferred president of Ukraine. They failed in 2014 when the Revolution of Dignity prevented the corrupt Yanukovych from shackling Ukraine’s political and economic future with Russia’s. And from 2014 onward, they failed to destabilize and topple Kyiv’s democratic government, even in the face of a Russian-manufactured-and-funded civil war. But the threat to Putin of Ukrainian democracy remained. Growing impatient and encouraged by his sycophants, Putin finally came to believe that he had only one strategy left to solve his Ukraine problem once and for all: full-scale invasion to achieve regime change and subordination.
What Putin Believes in Most and Understands Least: Identity
Putin’s deep-seated hatred of democracy is not the only idea that led him to the fateful decision to invade in 2022. Also important are his views about Ukraine and Ukrainians. Put bluntly, Putin believes that Ukrainians are just Russians with accents and that the state of Ukraine is an artificial construct that should not exist.
Putin does not try to hide these views. In 2008 at the NATO summit in Bucharest, Putin told President Bush, “You have to understand, George, that Ukraine is not even a country. Part of its territory is in Eastern Europe and the greater part was given to us.”6 Putin blames not only the West but also the Bolsheviks for “creating” the idea and reality of a sovereign Ukrainian state. In his 2021 essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” he characterizes the 1924 Soviet constitution that created the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic as an equal republic of the USSR as “a time bomb which exploded the moment the safety mechanism provided by the leading role of the [Communist Party] was gone [in 1991].” Tellingly, Putin asserted that this “time bomb” of Ukrainian sovereignty that Lenin and Stalin created threatened the very “foundation of our [Russian] statehood.”7 In Putin’s reading, not only does Ukraine lack the right to exist as a sovereign state but its independence threatens Russia’s very existence.
Even more dangerous than Putin’s view about the illegitimacy of an independent Ukrainian state are Putin’s beliefs about the Ukrainian nation, which he considers no less artificial and illegitimate. In adopting the Soviet (and Russian imperial) narrative of Ukrainians as Slavic “little brothers” to Russians, Putin denies Ukrainians the right to exist as anything other than in reference to Russia. Putin concludes his 2021 article with the following:
Our spiritual, human and civilizational ties formed for centuries and have their origins in the same sources, they have been hardened by common trials, achievements and victories. Our kinship has been transmitted from generation to generation. It is in the hearts and the memory of people living in modern Russia and Ukraine, in the blood ties that unite millions of our families. Together we have always been and will be many times stronger and more successful. For we are one people.8
These views on the artificiality of Ukrainian statehood and identity were not merely cynical propaganda to justify chess moves in a realist game of great-power politics; they are deeply held and internalized beliefs that Putin holds. He has spoken on such themes repeatedly before and during the war, including in his February 21, 2022, speech explaining the reasoning behind his full-scale invasion: “Since time immemorial, the people living in the south-west of what has historically been Russian land have called themselves Russians and Orthodox Christians.… Modern Ukraine was entirely created by Russia or, to be more precise, by Bolshevik, Communist Russia … by separating, severing what is historically Russian land.”9
Not only did these views justify in Putin’s mind the legitimacy of his invasion but they also shaped his expectations for what would happen after the invasion. Russian soldiers would be welcomed by their Slavic brethren in Ukraine, and fellow Orthodox Christians would celebrate the reunification with their historic homeland, Russia. It was a costly mistake: in denying the existence of an independent Ukrainian state and nation, Putin severely underestimated the strength of Ukraine’s national identity and the willingness of its citizens to fight and die to defend their true homeland.
Through the Looking Glass: Putin’s “Nazi” Obsession
Though he denied the existence of a distinct Ukrainian nationality, Putin’s beliefs about who exactly he was fighting were no less consequential in motivating his war. Who, in Putin’s mind, was the enemy that must be eliminated? Here again, his grotesque views on identity, history, and memory are a perversion with deadly—even genocidal—consequences.
In explaining his decision to invade Ukraine, Putin asserted that one of his central aims was “denazification”—that is the overthrow of the Ukrainian government headed by the democratically elected President Volodymyr Zelensky. Casting his war as a noble continuation of the Soviet Union’s struggle against Hitler, Putin addressed the Ukrainian armed forces directly in his February 24, 2022, speech justifying the invasion: “Your fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers did not fight the Nazi occupiers and did not defend our common Motherland to allow today’s neo-Nazis to seize power in Ukraine. You swore the oath of allegiance to the Ukrainian people and not to the junta, the people’s adversary which is plundering Ukraine and humiliating the Ukrainian people.”10
Two years after the start of his invasion, Putin has not abandoned the ideas that fueled his original war objectives: unite Ukrainians and Russians as one Slavic nation, demilitarize, and “denazify” Ukraine. Russia’s former president and current member of the Russian Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev, was even more blunt in describing the eliminationist goals of the invasion, stating on his Telegram channel that
The existence of Ukraine is deadly for Ukrainians … no matter how much they aspire to the mythical European Union and NATO. When choosing between eternal war and inevitable death and life, the absolute majority of Ukrainians (except for a minimal number of sick nationalists) will eventually choose life. They will realize that life in a big common state, which they do not love much now, is better than death. Their death and the death of their loved ones. And the sooner Ukrainians realize this, the better.11
Putin played an essential role in starting this war; the ideas animating his decision to invade were unique, downright unusual, and decidedly deadly. A different Russian leader motivated by different ideas could have responded differently. In fact, we do not have to be too creative to think of a plausible counterfactual. Imagine if the pro-democratic and pro-Western first deputy prime minister Boris Nemtsov had been elected president in 2000. He was Yeltsin’s heir apparent until the 1998 financial crisis toppled Nemtsov’s liberal government. The Russian political system would not have become so autocratic, and Russia would not have tried to undermine Ukraine’s democracy—not in 2004, not in 2014, and not in 2022.
Alternative Explanations
Overview
Our explanation for Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine is a complex, multifaceted one. The twisted interaction of structural preconditions, domestic politics, and individuals and their beliefs makes for a complicated causal explanation.12 There are simpler—but flawed—theories. Two are most prominent: Russia’s reaction to NATO expansion and Russian imperialism.
NATO Expansion
In a provocative 2014 Foreign Affairs article titled “Why the Ukraine Crisis is the West’s Fault: The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin,” John Mearsheimer placed blame for Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine squarely on the West’s shoulders. “The United States and its European allies,” Mearsheimer wrote, “share most of the responsibility for the crisis. The taproot of the trouble is NATO enlargement, the central element of a larger strategy to move Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit and integrate it into the West.”13 After a selective narration of the history of NATO expansion that confirms his realist priors and denies any Ukrainian agency in his story, Mearsheimer asserts that the Revolution of Dignity was in fact a “Washington-backed … coup” that forced Putin’s hand.14 To achieve a stable peace in Eastern Europe, he argues, “the United States and its allies should publicly rule out NATO’s expansion into both Georgia and Ukraine.”15
Mearsheimer has since doubled down on the “NATO is to blame” argument to explain the 2022 invasion. Nearly four months after the invasion started, he still argued,
The United States is principally responsible for causing the Ukraine crisis.… Specifically, I am talking about America’s obsession with bringing Ukraine into NATO and making it a Western bulwark on Russia’s border. The Biden administration was unwilling to eliminate that threat through diplomacy and indeed in 2021 recommitted the United States to bringing Ukraine into NATO. Putin responded by invading Ukraine on February 24th of this year.16
Mearsheimer’s argument and its implications are simple, straightforward, and easy to understand. NATO expansion was threatening to Russia; Russia had no choice but to invade Ukraine in 2014 and again in 2022 to prevent further expansion. To work, however, this explanation has to ignore a lot of history and much of what Putin himself has said about his motivations for invading Ukraine. In Mearsheimer’s telling, NATO expansion—pushed relentlessly by Washington—was a consistent and growing source of tension between Russia and the West over the last thirty years. In truth, antagonism between Russia and the West—including over NATO—was a variable, not a growing constant, one whose variation bears little temporal relation to Russia’s hostile actions toward Ukraine.
The change in Putin’s own rhetoric around NATO across his two decades in power is striking. During a 2000 visit to London, he suggested that Russia might join NATO someday:
Why not? Why not.… I do not rule out such a possibility … in the case that Russia’s interests will be reckoned with, if it will be an equal partner. Russia is a part of European culture, and I do not consider my own country in isolation from Europe.… Therefore, it is with difficulty that I imagine NATO as an enemy.17
Why would Putin want to join an alliance allegedly threatening Russia?
Putin struck a similarly sanguine tone during a November 2001 visit to the United States, telling an interviewer that “Russia acknowledges the role of NATO in the world of today, Russia is prepared to expand its cooperation with this organization. And if we change the quality of the relationship, if we change the format of the relationship between Russia and NATO, then I think NATO enlargement will cease to be an issue—will no longer be a relevant issue.”18 Asked directly about the admission to NATO of the former Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, Putin in the same interview struck a tone that would be inconceivable today: “We of course are not in a position to tell people what to do. We cannot forbid people to make certain choices if they want to increase the security of their nations in a particular way.”
One might be tempted to suggest that the Baltics never held the same strategic significance as Ukraine and thus did not present the same redline as Ukraine’s membership in NATO. But Putin’s red line over Ukrainian membership did not exist early in his rule. During a May 2002 press conference with Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma, Putin noted, “I am absolutely convinced that Ukraine will not shy away from the processes of expanding interaction with NATO and the Western allies as a whole. Ukraine has its own relations with NATO; there is the Ukraine-NATO Council. At the end of the day, the decision is to be taken by NATO and Ukraine. It is a matter for those two partners.”19
If NATO expansion throughout the first two decades of the 21st century was the continuous driver of ever-increasing hostility between Russia and the West, we should not have seen these early expressions of acceptance, nor later instances of cooperative engagement. Yet cooperation is precisely what transpired. While attending the 2010 NATO summit in Lisbon, then-president Medvedev declared, the “period of distance in our relations and claims against each other is over now. We view the future with optimism and will work on developing relations between Russia and NATO in all areas … [as they progress toward] a full-fledged partnership.”20 At that summit, he even floated the possibility of Russia-NATO cooperation on missile defense. According to those who were in the room—including one of the authors of this essay—complaints about NATO expansion never arose.21
These episodes of substantive Russia-NATO cooperation during the process of NATO’s eastward expansion highlight the flaw in the argument that NATO expansion caused Russia to invade Ukraine in 2014 (and again in 2022). Mearsheimer and others promoting this explanation identify the statement issued at the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest—that both Ukraine and Georgia would one day become NATO members at an unspecified date—as the unforgivable sin that made war over Ukraine inevitable. If this were true, why would Russia’s cooperation with NATO expand in 2010 under President Medvedev? And if the 2008 declaration was so decisive, why did it take Russia a full six years to invade Ukraine? Timing matters, especially when it doesn’t add up.
To this point, Ukraine in early 2014 was nowhere closer to joining NATO than it had been in 2008 or at any other point in its post-Soviet history. From 2010 until December 2014, Ukraine maintained an official policy of nonalignment: the government was prohibited under Ukrainian law from pursuing NATO membership. The Ukrainian parliament revoked this nonaligned policy only in December 2014, nearly ten months after Russia had invaded Crimea and the Donbas. How could Ukrainian NATO membership have caused Russia’s invasion in February 2014 at a time when neither Kyiv, Washington, nor Brussels were heading in that direction?
The same must be said about the lead-up to the February 2022 invasion. In 2022, there was no imminent “threat” of NATO membership for Ukraine. Just the opposite: NATO leaders, including President Biden, were continually pushing that decision far into the future. During their first White House bilateral meeting in 2021, Biden made clear to Zelensky that NATO membership was not a subject for serious discussion. Ukraine in early 2021 did not begin “moving rapidly toward joining NATO,” as Mearsheimer incorrectly claims.22 By invading Georgia in 2008 and occupying parts of its territory, Putin had stopped all momentum for Georgian membership in 2008. By both annexing Crimea and keeping the Donbas conflict smoldering and alive, Putin did the same thing to Ukraine in 2014. He did not need to invade Ukraine (again) in 2022 to prevent NATO expansion because NATO expansion was not happening.
Perpetual Imperialism
A more compelling alternative theory to our explanation is Russian imperialism. This explanation is believed widely in Ukraine, the Baltic states, and Poland for understandable reasons, given their long history as objects of Moscow’s imperial desires. Russian culture is inherently imperial, so the argument goes. Like regime type, this factor only becomes salient when interacting with power: when Russia has the power to do so, Russia invades its neighbors in all directions, including Ukraine. Interregnums interrupt these imperial proclivities when Russia or the Soviet Union has been weak as in 1917, 1941, and 1991. But they do not last. This innate, imperial impulse kicks in when Moscow has the power to invade other countries, irrespective of regime type or leader in the Kremlin. That’s what we witnessed in 2022, according to this argument.
The long arc of Russian history provides ample data to support this hypothesis. For several centuries, Russia expanded relentlessly. The country long wore the title of Russian Empire with pride. Putin most certainly tapped into this imperial tradition to justify his 2022 invasion of Ukraine, almost as if Russia had an obligation to fulfill its imperial mandate and honor its imperial traditions. Putin openly cultivates comparisons between himself and former tsars of the Russian Empire. This explanation warns that Russian impulses to conquer and devour other countries will not stop in Ukraine. Indeed, Putin himself famously said that “Russia’s borders do not end anywhere,” a phrase that subsequently appeared on a billboard in downtown Moscow in January 2024.23 Other Russian leaders, including most brazenly former president Dmitry Medvedev, have openly advocated for the recreation of the Russian Empire’s old borders, which would include the Baltic states, Poland, and Finland.
Putin most certainly has resurrected and nurtured these Russian imperial attitudes from the past to justify his invasion of Ukraine and sustain public support for the war. That he can do so easily and successfully underscores that such imperial ideas and culture do exist in Russian society. Since the war began, these impulses have exploded in public commentary about the war. Putin’s propagandists on television and social media now openly advocate imperial ideas.
This theory, however, has its limits. First, it implies that this war was inevitable, no matter who was in power in the Kremlin and what kind of regime type ruled Russia. This argument must ignore a lot of history to be sustained. In 1991, Russia was not acting imperially towards Ukraine—just the opposite. If not for Yeltsin’s desire to destroy the Soviet empire, Ukraine might have not ever gained its independence. Yeltsin was just as Russian as Putin. In addition, not all Russians think alike today and their preferences for things like democracy and imperialism have varied over time. Even today there are pockets of Russians who oppose the war, resisting their alleged imperial genes. To be sure, even some Russian opposition leaders have occasionally expressed ideas that are bigoted, racist, and sometimes downright imperial. But to suggest that they all share Putin’s commitment to imperial expansion is inaccurate. The same cultural and historical variable cannot explain two different outcomes, either in Russian behavior abroad or in Russian attitudes about Russian wars. To explain this variation, other variables must be added to the equation, factors such as power, regimes, and individuals.
Conclusion
We have argued that the changing balance of power, Russia’s form of personalist autocracy, and Putin (and Putinism) are individually insufficient but jointly necessary and sufficient conditions to explain the causes of Russia’s war against Ukraine. This multifaceted explanation is more compelling and empirically supported than more simplistic explanations that NATO expansion or Russian imperialism caused this war. The former explanation fails to account for why Russia’s attitude and cooperative engagement with NATO—a variable, not a constant—varies temporally in ways that are inconsistent with Moscow’s decisions to intervene politically and militarily in Ukraine in 2004, 2014, and 2022. Conversely, the latter explanation in particular fails to show how imperialism—a supposed constant in Russian culture—accounts for variation in Russia’s policies toward Ukraine over the last thirty years. A single constant factor cannot explain variable outcomes. The changing balance of power, consolidating Russian autocracy, and the evolution of Putin’s personal beliefs—especially in reaction to the color revolutions and Bolotnaya protests—provide a better fit with the data.
But one piece is missing from our explanation: the precise timing or final precipitant of the war. Specifically, why did Putin choose February 24, 2022, to launch his invasion? Over the last two years, analysts have proposed numerous hypotheses for the proximate precipitants of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. This speculative list includes the following:
- Putin’s self-imposed isolation during COVID-19 reinforced the dictator’s usual echo chamber and intensified his isolation from alternative information sources, leading to highly flawed decision-making;
- Putin’s top intelligence officials misled Putin about the true state of affairs in Ukraine and lied about the success of their efforts to lay the groundwork in Ukraine for invasion;
- Putin’s need to boost his popularity and legitimacy in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential elections led him to launch what he expected to be a quick, victorious war;
- The May 2021 arrest and treason charges against Ukrainian oligarch and Putin ally Viktor Medvedchuk motivated Putin to act decisively to retain his waning influence in Kyiv;
- Trump’s loss in 2020 took away Putin’s hope of negotiating control of Ukraine with Washington;
- or (6) the disorganized American withdrawal of military forces from Afghanistan in August 2021 convinced Putin that the Biden administration was weak, distracted, and unlikely to intervene on behalf of Ukraine.
Hopefully, future historians will have access to archival materials that can answer this question about precipitants more definitively than we can now. But what is striking about this list, however, is that they all center on the individual beliefs and personal decisions of one man: Vladimir Putin. This is consistent with our argument: individuals and their ideas matter. Just as Putin’s long-standing hostility to democracy and his denial of the Ukrainian nation were necessary beliefs that conditioned his choice for war, so too must his personal beliefs on the timing of the war matter in explaining “why now?” The choice for war was his and his alone.
Our explanation of the causes of this war also suggests what factors might shape its end. Putin is an ideologue. His strong ideological convictions compelled him to invade Ukraine in 2022. While Putin remains in power, he is unlikely to change his mind about his goals in this war. If leadership in the Kremlin were to change, the war could end. When that will happen is impossible to predict. Regime change in Russia—more precisely, a transition to democracy—could also end the war. That outcome—a change in the value of one of our variables explaining the causes of this war—is even more unlikely in the short term than a change in leadership. Finally, a change in the balance of power more in favor of Ukraine also could produce an end to this war. If Putin can no longer advance his forces on the battlefield or if his soldiers are forced to retreat due to reduced Russian military capabilities or increasing Ukrainian military capabilities, Putin might be compelled to end his war, either by negotiation or withdrawal.
While he has the means to continue his invasion, however, he will not stop. Of the three factors that combined to cause this war—the balance of power, regimes, and leaders—the balance of power is the most volatile variable of the three in the short term. Today, it remains unclear, especially given America’s wavering commitment to help Ukraine win this war, in which direction this variable will change. In the meantime, the rules-based international order and Ukraine’s sovereign place in it hangs in the balance.
Endnotes
- Eyre Crowe, quoted in Graham Allison, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017), 59.
- Thomas Graham Jr., “World without Russia?,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, January 9, 1999, https://carnegieendowment.org/1999/06/09/world-without-russia-pub-285.
- Michael Kofman, Rob Lee, and Dara Massicot, “Hold, Build, and Strike: A Vision for Rebuilding Ukraine’s Advantage in 2024,” War on the Rocks, January 26, 2024, https://warontherocks.com/2024/01/hold-build-and-strike-a-vision-for-rebuilding-ukraines-advantage-in-2024/.
- One could even argue that Russia’s multifaceted war against Ukraine began in 2004 with Russia’s attempt to install Viktor Yanukovych as Ukraine’s president, an attack on Ukrainian democracy and sovereignty that precipitated the Orange Revolution.
- First for St. Petersburg mayor Anatoly Sobchak and then for Yeltsin.
- Vladimir Putin, quoted in Fiona Hill, “Putin Has the U.S. Right Where He Wants It,” New York Times, January 24, 2022.
- Vladimir Putin, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” Presidential Administration of Russia, July 12, 2021, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66181.
- Putin, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.”
- Vladimir Putin, “Address by the President of the Russian Federation” (speech, Moscow, February 21, 2022), http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/67828.
- Vladimir Putin, “Address by the President of the Russian Federation” (speech, Moscow, February 24, 2022), http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/67843.
- Dmitry Medvedev@medvedev. 2024. “Why Ukraine Is Dangerous for Its Inhabitants,” Telegram, January 17, 2024, https://t.me/medvedev_telegram/437.
- We are fully cognizant of the methodological violations that we are making in using three independent variables to explain one dependent variable.
- John J. Mearsheimer, “Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault: The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin,” Foreign Affairs, August 18, 2014.
- Mearsheimer, “Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault.”
- Mearsheimer, “Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault.”
- John J. Mearsheimer, “The Causes and Consequences of the Ukraine War” (lecture, European University Institute, June 16, 2022), https://www.eui.eu/news-hub?id=john-mearsheimers-lecture-on-the-causes-and-consequences-of-the-ukraine-war.
- David Hoffman, “Putin Says ‘Why Not?’ to Russia Joining NATO,” Washington Post, March 6, 2000.
- “Transcript of Robert Siegel Interview with Vladimir Putin,” NPR, November 15, 2001, https://legacy.npr.org/news/specials/putin/nprinterview.html.
- Presidential Administration of Russia, “Press Statement and Answers to Questions at a Joint News Conference with Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma,” press statement, May 17, 2002, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/21598.
- Presidential Administration of Russia, “News Conference Following NATO-Russia Council Meeting,” news conference, November 20, 2010, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/9570.
- or elaboration, see Michael McFaul, “Hard Accounts: Russia’s Neighborhood and Missile Defense,” in From Cold War to Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin’s Russia (Boston: Mariner Books, 2018).
- John J. Mearsheimer, “The Causes and Consequences of the Ukraine Crisis,” National Interest, June 23, 2022.
- Vladimir Putin, “Valdai International Discussion Club Meeting” (plenary session, Sochi, October 5, 2023), http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/72444.
Chapter 2: Why Putin Invaded Ukraine, by Stephen Kotkin, from War in Ukraine: Conflict, Strategy, and the Return of a Fractured World, edited by Hal Brands (Johns Hopkins University Press, 04.02.2024), published by Project Muse, Johns Hopkins University, under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International license.