Previous Subchapter → 3.3 The Kremlin’s search for lost glory - 2000-2011
So NATO wasn’t just a concern because it was expanding its borders, but because it was also expanding its military role on the world, it changed from a defensive alliance with one purpose - protecting the borders of its members, to an offensive alliance with many purposes, including intervention in outside wars and overthrowing governments, acting as a foreign policy instrument for the US and its allies.
Combine this track record of increased interventionism by NATO with Russia’s Post-Soviet saviour mentality, and you have the perfect recipe for a new civilisational clash, these experiences gave the Russians the impression that NATO expansion had to be contained and that while Western leaders would protest, Russian leaders could do this, because they had the power to assert themselves in the Post-Soviet space, using local Pro-Russian activists as the staging ground.
So, when the Russians supported the separatists in Donbas and later invaded Ukraine, they were essentially just following their old playbook expecting that the reaction from the West would follow the same script, lots of complaining, lots of condemnation but doing nothing, forgive and forget later.
The Russo-Georgian war in particular was especially a prototype for what later happened in Ukraine, with the same factors and even the same narratives behind it.
Put simply, supporting seperatist groups and breakaway states is nothing new for Russia, because it’s something that has been happening ever since the USSR collapsed.
In the West, War in Europe is seen as something new, something that started in 2022 with the invasion of Ukraine, or maybe something that started in 2014 with Ukraine’s seperatist conflict, or for those with an even longer memory, the Yugoslav Wars, but for Russia the idea of European wars isn’t something new at all, it’s something that has been happening for just over 30 years ever since the Soviet Union started to crumble.
To Russia, intervention in these ethnic and political conflicts was the right thing to do, an attempt to resolve these disputes and recover some of Russia’s lost influence in the world.
The Post-Soviet flashpoints we mentioned were just 4 in a long list of wars, civil wars, revolutions and insurgencies that sprouted from Soviet collapse, Wikipedia has an entire article dedicated to all of them and it’s a very long list, reading it can help paint a picture of why Russian leaders like Vladimir Putin have described the USSR’s fall with phrases like “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century”. This whole wave of terror, which has a death toll numbering in the tens or even hundreds of thousands, extended inside Russia’s own borders too, sparking a series of conflicts that only officially ended 6 years ago.
To Western bystanders the transition from the Soviet Union to the countries we know of today was a mostly peaceful process, a series of events that went by without war because in the end Soviet leaders weren’t willing to use tanks on their own people or anyone else’s, but this list and these examples shows us that our idea of the Soviet collapse is gravely mistaken.
For much of the ex-USSR the 1990s was hell, with the Post-Soviet nations being the most dysfunctional family on planet Earth, this all was on top of the constitutional crisis Russia was going through, which was a kind of brief, small scale civil war in itself.
To put this into perspective, imagine if the USA started collapsing over the next few months, within a year or so its state borders become international borders that everyone has to live with whether they like it or not, suddenly a world map is printed with countries on it like the “Federation of New York” or the “Republic of South Carolina”, Hawaiʻi is a Kingdom again, Puerto Rico has to figure out what to do with itself, that kind of thing; All these new nations start pulling in different directions and fighting for their own interests, suddenly masses of people find themselves in new countries that they may or may not feel they belong to depending on their heritage, their background and family history, it would be madness.
It’s not a perfect example, the national story of ex-Soviet states like Ukraine, Armenia or Uzbekistan goes back a lot further than the story of the 13 colonies and what they became, but you can start to see where the problems arise.
This chain of events, the long list of conflicts, many of which Russia intervened in, has come to dramatically affect Russian thinking today, this mentality is why Putin tried to draw a red line around Ukraine.
To Russia this whole Post-Soviet region is a great big powder keg that they have been trying to keep a lid on for over 3 decades, a continuation of one great long running conflict, an episode of Post-Soviet control freaking that Russia can’t seem to drag itself out of which started in countries like Georgia and now has spread all the way to Ukraine, through this experience of collective trauma in the Post-Soviet space the Russia has locked itself into this saviour complex: Russia as Peacekeeper, the Post-Soviet police, with an exclusive right to settle conflicts in that region and ensure its security.
This isn’t a phenomenon that popped out of nowhere or was impossible to foresee, it was expressed in private talks, in speeches and in plain text, for 30 years, but it was brushed off, and now we’re seeing the consequences in real time.