Russia Ukraine Invasion

REASONS FOR RUSSIA TO INVADE UKRAINE

What was Putin's goal?

The Russian leader's initial aim was to overrun Ukraine and depose its government, ending for good its desire to join the Western defensive alliance NATO. He failed to capture the capital Kyiv and after a month of setbacks turned his ambitions to Ukraine's east and south.

Launching the invasion on 24 February he told the Russian people his goal was to "demilitarize and de-Nazify Ukraine", to protect people subjected to what he called eight years of bullying and genocide by Ukraine's government.

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov spoke of freeing Ukraine from oppression. Ukraine's democratically elected president, Volodymyr Zelensky, said "the enemy has designated me as target number one; my family is target number two".

Russia's leader refused to call it an invasion or a war, and made doing so a criminal offence. Instead it can only be termed a "special military operation".

The claims of Nazis and genocide in Ukraine are completely unfounded but part of a narrative repeated by Russia for years. Moscow even made wild allegations that Ukraine was building a plutonium-based dirty bomb. But it is Russia that is now accused by the international community of carrying out atrocities. Several countries including the US and Canada go further and call it genocide.

However unjustified, this war is a pivotal moment. "Russia's future and its future place in the world are at stake," said foreign intelligence chief Sergei Naryshkin.

After so much destruction, the Russian leader's words ring very hollow now: "It is not our plan to occupy the Ukrainian territory; we do not intend to impose anything on anyone by force."

AREAS OF RUSSIAN MILITARY CONTROL IN UKRAINE

                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

How have Putin's aims changed?

A month into the invasion, Russia declared its main goal was the "liberation of Donbas" - broadly referring to Ukraine's eastern regions of Luhansk and Donetsk. More than a third of this area was already seized by Russian proxy forces in a war that began in 2014, now Russia wants to conquer all of it.

The Kremlin claimed it had "generally accomplished" the aims of the invasion's first phase, which it defined as considerably reducing Ukraine's combat potential. But it is clear from Russia's withdrawal from areas around Kyiv that it has scaled back its ambitions.

"Putin needs a victory," says Andrei Kortunov, head of the Russian International Affairs Council. "At least he needs something he can present to his constituency at home as a victory." Russia traditionally holds a World War Two Victory Day parade on 9 May and that is being widely seen as a deadline for concrete results.

Russian officials continue to speak the fictional language of "denazification" but they are now focused on seizing the two big eastern regions and creating a land corridor along the south coast, east from Crimea to the Russian border. It is not yet clear if they hope to control the entire southern region of Kherson and capture more territory along Ukraine's Black Sea coast.

If he does capture both eastern regions, there is a high chance he may seek to annexe them, as he did with Crimea in 2014. Ahead of the invasion he recognized the entirety of Luhansk and Donetsk as belonging to Russia's puppet republics. The head of his Luhansk statelet even suggested a referendum would take place in the near future - similar to the internationally discredited vote in Crimea.

Is neutrality enough for Putin?

This "neutral, demilitarized" Ukraine would have, Russia says, its own army and navy, along the lines of Austria or Sweden, which are both EU members.

It is not clear if that would be enough or what it would mean. Austria may be neutral, but Sweden is non-aligned and is now considering NATO membership.

The Ukrainians have offered neutrality in return for security guarantees from allies. And yet the Russian leader has since said peace talks have reached a dead end. So he may still harbor ambitions to return Ukraine to Russia's sphere of influence and away from its tilt to the West.

Since Ukraine achieved independence in 1991, as the Soviet Union collapsed, it has gradually looked to the West - both the EU and NATO.

Russia's leader has sought to reverse that, seeing the fall of the Soviet Union as the "disintegration of historical Russia". He has claimed Russians and Ukrainians are one people, denying Ukraine its long history and seeing today's independent state merely as an "anti-Russia project". "Ukraine never had stable traditions of genuine statehood," he asserted.

It was his pressure on Ukraine's pro-Russian leader, Viktor Yanukovych, not to sign a deal with the European Union in 2013 that led to protests that ultimately ousted the Ukrainian president in February 2014.

Russia then seized Ukraine's southern region of Crimea and triggered a separatist rebellion in the east and a war that claimed 14,000 lives.

As he prepared to invade in February, he tore up an unfulfilled 2015 Minsk peace deal and accused NATO of threatening "our historic future as a nation", claiming without foundation that NATO countries wanted to bring war to Crimea.

What about Crimea and the east?

It is difficult to see a way out of this. That's why Ukraine proposes to leave the future status of Crimea to talks over the next 15 years. The Kremlin says Crimea is now Russian territory and the Russian constitution bars discussing its status with anyone else.

As for the eastern areas, Kyiv says all Russian troops would leave Ukrainian territory and the future of Russian proxy-held areas would be discussed by the two presidents as part of a ceasefire summit.

Ukraine will never agree to ceding sovereign territory. However, President Putin will not wish to abandon any territorial gains made during the war, especially as his declared aim is "liberating" Ukraine's east.

As for Russia's other demands, Ukraine has never taken seriously Moscow's call for demilitarization, and its insistence on "de-Nazification" is merely Russian propaganda. In the words of Ukraine's foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba: "It's crazy, sometimes not even they can explain what they are referring to."

President Zelensky has said he is prepared to give Russian minority language status, along with the languages of other neighboring countries, and does not see this as a major issue.

What's Putin's problem with NATO?

For Russia's leader the West's 30-member defensive military alliance has one aim - to split society in Russia and ultimately destroy it.

Ahead of the war, he demanded that NATO turn the clock back to 1997 and reverse its eastward expansion, removing its forces and military infrastructure from member states that joined the alliance from 1997 and not deploying "strike weapons near Russia's borders". That means Central Europe, Eastern Europe and the Baltics.

In President Putin's eyes, the West promised back in 1990 that NATO would expand "not an inch to the east", but did so anyway.

That was before the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, so the promise made to then Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev only referred to East Germany in the context of a reunified Germany. Mr. Gorbachev said later that "the topic of NATO expansion was never discussed" at the time.

Does Putin have designs beyond Ukraine?

If he has, his military setbacks in Ukraine may have put paid to any wider ambitions beyond its borders. His ambition to roll NATO back to the late 1990s has taken a hit, with Finland and Sweden looking closely at joining the alliance.

Having witnessed Mr. Putin's willingness to lay waste to European cities to achieve his aims, Western leaders are now under no illusion. US President Joe Biden has labelled him a war criminal and the leaders of both Germany and France see this war as a turning point in the history of Europe.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz believes "Putin wants to build a Russian empire... he wants to fundamentally redefine the status quo within Europe in line with his own vision. And he has no qualms about using military force to do so."

Tatiana Stanovaya of analysis firm RPolitik and the Carnegie Moscow Center fears a spiral in a new Cold War confrontation: "I have very firm feelings that we should get prepared for a new ultimatum to the West which will be more militarized and aggressive than we could have imagined."