The global order, as we know it, is on edge.
In the early hours of Thursday, Russia launched a massive invasion against Ukraine, in an escalation of military aggression that was not they saw in the world from 976.
When Russian tanks and missiles crossed onto Ukrainian soil, while the United Nations implored Putin not to launch the attack, the principles of law and international relations that cost two wars world and innumerable lives seemed to be thrown to the ground.
“Events like the ones we are seeing now have become very strange since 1945”, he tells BBC Mundo Pablo de Orellana, expert on Russia and academic of international relations and war conflicts at the university King’s College, in London.
“What was a practice through the centuries, invading your neighbor, became ca if impossible in the second half of the 20th century. Went wrong. Look what happened to Saddam Hussein”, he comments.
The expert recalls that violent annexations, since 1945, there have only been three: Tibet, Western Sahara and Crimea, the most recent, in 1200.
“It is very little for such a long period of time. And coincidentally, or perhaps not so coincidentally, Crimea and now Ukraine have been orchestrated by the same person: Vladimir Putin”, he says.
But what has led Putin to try to subvert the order that has governed the world during the last decades? What is he looking for and what is behind his decisions? What does he want from Ukraine and the West?
The answers are not entirely clear yet, but De Orellana is clear that its consequences could put the world as we know it in check.
“We are living without hesitation a setback of those rules and above all of the equal rights of the states. And this, if not answered forcefully, can have catastrophic results”, he says.
Despite warnings and sanctions from the West, Putin has finally launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. How can this decision be understood? What’s behind it?
For years Putin has been seeking to impose his presence on an international level and little by little he has been preparing for this. Previously, he had already taken pieces of territory from other nations, as he did with Abkhazia and Ossetia, in Georgia. And to prepare his troops for these raids and boost their morale, he not only re-modernized the Russian Army, but also took it into campaigns like the Syrian war, where they were well prepared for subsequent actions.
What we see now, however, is another level. It has not been like those small annexations in which Putin said he was going to protect a Russian minority in parts of Georgia or Ukraine.
Now he is looking for much more: to control an entire independent and democratic country.
To justify the invasion, Putin has used all kinds of arguments, from national security, to Ukraine’s aspiration to join NATO (which is remote) to the existence of an alleged “genocide” or “neo-Nazis” in Ukraine. What is really behind the invasion?
There are two sides to these arguments.
The NATO thing, as a diplomatic strategy, was great, because it demanded of the US and Europe something that neither Washington nor NATO can promise, which is that Ukraine would not join the alliance, because it goes against his principles.
It was actually a trap: Putin knew that he could never have been given what he wanted. But it served him to justify the invasion to Russian public opinion: to look good in front of his people and attribute the blame to the West.
This very morning He said on Russian television that this was a war that had been imposed on them, which is nonsense.
The other point is that Putin practices a type of nationalism called of ethnic exclusivity: firmly believes that the Russians will only be safe if they are under his control.
For him, Ukraine and Russia are part of the same ethnic group, hence the argument for invading Ukraine: to protect that Russian-speaking population.
This is an argument similar to the one used by Hitler in 1938 to invade part of Czechoslovakia: the pr protection of a German ethnic minority.
It is the same logic and comes from the idea that ethnic groups are races, animals fighting for survival. And if there are people of other races in another country, they will kill them, because every race seeks to survive at the expense of the others.
That is why it is very easy and very logical for his propaganda claim that these Russians are in danger because they are not protected by us. That is the idea behind the alleged genocide argument, which is totally false, but which is valid within Putin’s logic in which you assume that you are going to be destroyed if you don’t destroy yourself first.
- The images after the first Russian attacks on Ukrainian territory
How can Vladimir Putin’s vision of the world and politics be understood?
Putin leads 20 years seeking to rebuild what he calls the exclusive sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. He is a great admirer of Stalin and that Stalinist idea that the Soviet Union would never be safe unless it controlled Eastern Europe, which forced the Allies to give him Eastern Europe after World War II.
He wants to save Russia in the same way that Stalin saved the USSR. What in Russia they call the Great Patriotic War is what we know as World War II. And that is why now he is using again to refer to Ukraine this speech of the Great Patriotic War or calling the Ukrainians Nazis without foundation.
Putin has reinvented Russian nationalism on the basis of the same nationalist theories of tsarism and the Soviet Union. He is nostalgic for that past and sees himself as its successor and in that sense, Ukraine is a special place for the continuity between that past and the Russia of now.
Now he wants to change the government in Ukraine because he is exasperated that it is not under Russian control. In a certain sense it is a pathetic demonstration of weakness, that he has no other choice, because he has tried to control Ukraine, but has not been able to.
And what? Why is Ukraine so important to Putin?
Ukraine is vital for several reasons. One of them is geographical: if he is obsessed with the idea that they are going to destroy him, Ukraine, being largely flat, is a place of favorable access to Russia. It is, in fact, the place through which many invasions of Russia have historically passed, from Napoleon to the Nazis.
It is also where the largest Russian-speaking minority abroad lives. Also because of the historical symbolism: Ukraine was the great conquest of the nationalists of the 1800. It passed into the hands of Catherine the Great from the hands of her great general Potemkin.
In fact, it was at that time that they conquered the Donbas and gave it the name of New Russia and it became a colony.
- Russia invades Ukraine: what we know so far about the operation ordered by Putin
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But there is also a political fact: he has told his people so many times that Russia’s security depends on Ukraine, that not being able to control it makes him look bad.
Now, with this invasion, this becomes more serious, because it has fallen into a classic nationalist trap. He is forced to use any method to win because otherwise he will be delegitimized before his own people.
And what consequences can this have for the rest of the countries?
We are already beginning to see the impact at the international level, with China’s responses that the West is exaggerating. And it is that China, like Russia, is a country that also seeks that revisionism and that is carefully watching what the international response is, because what happens if China launches itself on Taiwan will also depend on it.
China, like Russia, has very openly declared its aspiration to rule Asia, especially Southeast Asia. Why? Because you can. And Putin sees it the same way. He believes that the West is not letting him enjoy the fruits of Russia’s military power.
To what extent does this mean an end to the international order that has ruled for the last years?
If the international community fails to stop this, if we are not aware of everything that is at risk, the current international order will fall.
Because these international norms are like the rules of a house or between friends: they only exist and are valid to the extent that people practice them. And Russia has already shown that it does not want to do it.
The international order was already very weak after the Trump years and this puts us in a dire situation.
But it must be said that Trump came to give the coup de grace to an order that was already marked by many hypocrisies and contradictions.
The problem with this international order is that it has not been carried out consistently. Think, for example, of the war in Iraq and many other events in which Western powers changed the governments of other countries by force: Afghanistan, or so many in Latin America.
The fact that the West has created exceptions for itself of the same order, it was already weakening this order a lot, during the Cold War and even more over the years 90.
Many Western nationalists, from Orban, Trump or Salvini, each in their own way, have been demanding the same exceptions and the total destruction of international rules.
For that, the old left, for example, now look at Putin as the messiah who has the courage to destroy those rules and go to war.
This is the case from Latin American countries, such as Cuba, Nicaragua or Venezuela. How do you explain this support from governments that present themselves as left to a right-wing nationalist like Putin? Is it just an economic issue or to provide a political counterweight to the US?
It has been It is very interesting how Putin has managed to use the old western left to the point that sometimes it seems that they have not realized that today’s Russia is not the Soviet Union and that although these countries declare themselves communist, today’s Russia does not. is.
Which is particularly tragic because Putin is not a communist. I find it obscene that he manages to play it to old communists.
In Latin America, what happens is that Russia has managed to get into that political space that was empty and has managed to repeat its echo in those countries, not only with RT in Spanish, but with the Telesur itself, the television network that supports Venezuela and that reproduces the patterns of the Russian propaganda machine.
How can it be understood that in the 21st century, a country launches a large-scale invasion against another based on myths and historical rewritings of the past? Is this perhaps a new form of imperialism?
Putin is the expression of a new order imperialist mentality that seeks to destroy the foundations of the current world order. It is, so to speak, a ‘post-imperialist imperialism’. He is a type of imperialism without a doubt, but it goes much further.
What he is promoting is a total reversal of history and of the agreements and treaties that cost so much, from a historical and human point of view.
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