PanamaTimes

Friday, Jul 11, 2025

For years, Putin didn’t invade Ukraine. What made him finally snap in 2022?

For years, Putin didn’t invade Ukraine. What made him finally snap in 2022?

This war is Russia’s fault. But European nations rebuffing Russia during the noughties did not help

Why did Vladimir Putin invade Ukraine and try to capture Kyiv in February 2022, and not years earlier? Moscow has always wanted to dominate Ukraine, and Putin has given the reasons for this in his speeches and writings. Why then did he not try to take all or most of the country after the Ukrainian revolution of 2014, rather than only annexing Crimea, and giving limited, semi-covert help to separatists in the Donbas?

On Friday’s one-year anniversary of Russia’s criminal invasion of Ukraine, it is worth thinking about precisely how we got to this point – and where things might be going.

Indeed, Russian hardliners spent years criticising their leader for not invading sooner. In 2014, the Ukrainian army was hopelessly weak; in Viktor Yanukovych, the Russians had a pro-Russian, democratically elected Ukrainian president; and incidents like the killing of pro-Russian demonstrators in Odesa provided a good pretext for action.

The reason for Putin’s past restraint lies in what was a core part of Russian strategy dating back to the 1990s: trying to wedge more distance between Europe and the United States, and ultimately to create a new security order in Europe with Russia as a full partner and respected power. It was always clear that a full-scale invasion of Ukraine would destroy any hope of rapprochement with the western Europeans, driving them for the foreseeable future into the arms of the US. Simultaneously, such a move would leave Russia diplomatically isolated and dangerously dependent on China.

This Russian strategy was correctly seen as an attempt to split the west, and cement a Russian sphere of influence in the states of the former Soviet Union. However, having a European security order with Russia at the table would also have removed the risk of a Russian attack on Nato, the EU, and most likely, Ukraine; and allowed Moscow to exert a looser influence over its neighbours – closer perhaps to the present approach of the US to Central America – rather than gripping them tightly. It was an approach that had roots in Mikhail Gorbachev’s idea – welcomed in the west at the time – of a “common European home”.

At one time, Putin subscribed to this idea. He wrote in 2012 that: “Russia is an inseparable, organic part of Greater Europe, of the wider European civilisation. Our citizens feel themselves to be Europeans.” This vision has now been abandoned in favour of the concept of Russia as a separate “Eurasian civilisation”.

Between 1999, when Putin came to power, and 2020, when Biden was elected president of the US, this Russian strategy experienced severe disappointments, but also enough encouraging signs from Paris and Berlin to keep it alive.

Putin and President Macron of France meet in Moscow in February 2022


The most systematic Russian attempt to negotiate a new European security order came with the interim presidency of Dmitry Medvedev from 2008 to 2012. With Putin’s approval, he proposed a European security treaty that would have frozen Nato enlargement, effectively ensured the neutrality of Ukraine and other states, and institutionalised consultation on equal terms between Russia and leading western countries. But western states barely even pretended to take these proposals seriously.

In 2014, it appears to have been Chancellor Angela Merkel’s warnings of “massive damage” to Russia and German-Russian relations that persuaded Putin to call a halt to the advance of the Russian-backed separatists in the Donbas. In return, Germany refused to arm Ukraine, and with France, brokered the Minsk 2 agreement, whereby the Donbas would return to Ukraine as an autonomous territory.

In 2016, Russian hopes of a split between western Europe and the United States were revived by the election of Donald Trump – not because of any specific policy, rather because of the strong hostility that he provoked in Europe. But Biden’s election brought the US administration and west European establishments back together again. These years also saw Ukraine refuse to guarantee autonomy for the Donbas, and western failure to put any pressure on Kyiv to do so.

This was accompanied by other developments that made Putin decide to bring matters concerning Ukraine to a head. These included the US-Ukrainian Strategic Partnership of November 2021, which held out the prospect of Ukraine becoming a heavily armed US ally in all but name, while continuing to threaten to retake the Donbas by force.

In recent months, the German and French leaders in 2015, Merkel and François Hollande, have declared that the Minsk 2 agreement on Donbas autonomy was only a manoeuvre on their part to allow the Ukrainians the time to build up their armed forces. This is what Russian hardliners always believed, and by 2022, Putin himself seems to have come to the same conclusion.

Nonetheless, almost until the eve of invasion, Putin continued unsuccessfully to press the French president, Emmanuel Macron, in particular to support a treaty of neutrality for Ukraine and negotiate directly with the separatist leaders in the Donbas. We cannot, of course, say for sure if this would have led Putin to call off the invasion; but since it would have opened up a deep split between Paris and Washington, such a move by Macron might well have revived in Putin’s mind the old and deeply held Russian strategy of trying to divide the west and forge agreement with France and Germany.

Putin now seems to agree fully with Russian hardline nationalists that no western government can be trusted, and that the west as a whole is implacably hostile to Russia. He remains, however, vulnerable to attack from those same hardliners, both because of the deep incompetence with which the invasion was conducted, and because their charge that he was previously naive about the hopes of rapprochement with Europe appears to have been completely vindicated.

It is from this side, not the Russian liberals, that the greatest threat to his rule now comes; and of course this makes it even more difficult for Putin to seek any peace that does not have some appearance, at least, of Russian victory.

Meanwhile, the Russian invasion and its accompanying atrocities have destroyed whatever genuine sympathy for Russia existed in the French and German establishments. A peaceful and consensual security order in Europe looks very far away. But while Putin and his criminal invasion of Ukraine are chiefly responsible for this, we should also recognise that western and central Europeans also did far too little to try to keep Gorbachev’s dream of a common European home alive.


Comments

Oh ya 2 year ago
Ukraine has continued to bomb the Dombas area since the 2014 agreement killing approximately 14.000 people. Russia had to do something to stop the slaughter of these people who id as Russians. Many Germany has learned a lesson now that America is not their friend and allies after blowing up their gas pipeline and then charging them 5 times more than the Russians for natural gas. BASF and many steel mills have closed in Germany because of the high cost of gas and thus power. When this breaks we will see Germany and France on the side of Russia in the world war that the USA is pushing for. Remember folks the last thing a dying empire does is take its people to war and the US is a dying empire like those before it. Even Saudi has said they will sell oil in other than US dollars, thus the start of the end of the petro dollar thus World reserve currency

Newsletter

Related Articles

PanamaTimes
0:00
0:00
Close
US Imposes New Tariffs on Brazilian Exports Amid Political Tensions
U.S. Enacts Sweeping Tax and Spending Legislation Amid Trade Policy Shifts
AI Raises Alarms Over Long-Term Job Security
House Oversight Committee Subpoenas Former Jill Biden Aide Amid Investigation into Alleged Concealment of President Biden's Cognitive Health
OpenAI Secures Multimillion-Dollar AI Contracts with Pentagon, India, and Grab
Brazilian Congress Rejects Lula's Proposed Tax Increase on Financial Transactions
Landslide in Bello, Colombia, Results in Multiple Casualties
Papa Johns pizza surge near the Pentagon tipped off social media before Trump's decisive Iran strike
Juncker Criticizes EU Inaction on Trump Tariffs
Minnesota Lawmaker Melissa Hortman and Husband Killed in Targeted Attack; Senator John Hoffman and Wife Injured
Wreck of $17 Billion San José Galleon Identified Off Colombia After 300 Years
Sole Survivor of Air India Crash Recounts Escape
Coinbase CEO Warns Bitcoin Could Supplant US Dollar Amid Mounting National Debt
UK and EU Reach Agreement on Gibraltar's Schengen Integration
Israeli Finance Minister Imposes Banking Penalties on Palestinians
U.S. Inflation Rises to 2.4% in May Amid Trade Tensions
Trump's Policies Prompt Decline in Chinese Student Enrollment in U.S.
Global Oceans Near Record Temperatures as CO₂ Levels Climb
Trump Announces U.S.-China Trade Deal Covering Rare Earths
Smuggled U.S. Fuel Funds Mexican Cartels Amid Crackdown
Protests Erupt in Los Angeles with Symbolic Flag Burning
Trump Administration Issues New Travel Ban Targeting 12 Countries
Man Group Mandates Full-Time Office Return for Quantitative Analysts
JPMorgan Warns Analysts Against Accepting Future-Dated Job Offers
Builder.ai Faces Legal Scrutiny Amid Financial Misreporting Allegations
Japan Grapples with Rice Shortage Amid Soaring Prices
Goldman Sachs Reduces Risk Exposure Amid Market Volatility
HSBC Chairman Mark Tucker to Return to AIA as Non-Executive Chair
Israel Confirms Arming Gaza Clan to Counter Hamas Influence
Judge Blocks Trump's Ban on International Students at Harvard
Trump Proposes Travel Ban on 'Uncontrolled' Countries
Panama Port Owner Balances US-China Pressures
Trump Administration Accused of Obstructing Deportation Cases
Trump’s China Strategy Remains a Geopolitical Puzzle
Eurozone Inflation Falls Below ECB Target to 1.9%
Call for a New Chapter in Globalisation Emerges
Blackstone and Rivals Diverge on Private Equity Strategy
Mayor’s Security Officer Implicated | Shocking New Details Emerge in NYC Kidnapping Case
Bangkok Ranked World's Top City for Remote Work in 2025
Denmark Increases Retirement Age to 70, Setting a European Precedent
Netanyahu Accuses Western Leaders of 'Emboldening Hamas'
Escalating Trade Tensions and Market Reactions
OnlyFans Reportedly in Talks for $8 Billion Sale
JBS Gains Shareholder Approval for U.S. Stock Listing
Booz Allen Hamilton to Cut 2,500 Jobs Amid Federal Spending Reductions
Trump Signs Executive Orders to Accelerate Nuclear Energy Development
Harvard Temporarily Blocks Trump Administration's International Student Ban
Nippon Steel Forms Partnership with U.S. Steel, Headquarters to Remain in Pittsburgh
Trump Expands Tariff Threats to Apple and Samsung Devices
Oracle and OpenAI Plan $40 Billion Nvidia Chip Purchase for AI Data Center
×