“I need the Ukraine”, wrote Hitler, “so that no one can starve us any longer, as in the last war”. As historian Timothy Snyder reports in his book, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, Ukraine was to provide the Lebensraum, or living space, that Hitler needed for the expansion of the Third Reich. Ukraine’s “black earth” is chernozem, a particularly fertile soil, of which it has a quarter of the world’s supply. The Ukrainian people were of no importance – mere “amorphous masses” to be dealt with as needed.

These masses had suffered a catastrophic famine in the early 1930s, which Ukraine has since declared a genocide, and would suffer another famine immediately after the war. Ukrainian losses in the fight against Germany (combat with the Red Army) exceeded those of Great Britain, France and the United States combined. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s grandfather, who is Jewish, was among the Ukrainians fighting in the Red Army; his own father and three uncles were killed in the Holocaust, among a million and a half Jews murdered in Ukraine.

It is the country that Russian President Vladimir Putin said last week needed “denazification” and is committing “genocide” against ethnic Russians in his eastern region, Donbass.

Moscow has been advancing both of these claims since 2014. The question now is whether these are simply part of the fog of war in which the Kremlin intends to shroud its operations in Ukraine – a tactic successfully deployed in 2014 when the Global reaction to Russia’s annexation of Crimea and intervention in the Donbass has been muted – or whether they contain any hint that Putin’s ambitions are broader.

Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine has been a kind of buffer zone between two spheres of political-military influence, those of Europe/NATO and Russia. Economic historian Adam Tooze compared this last week to two weather fronts clashing and noted its economic context: Since independence, Ukraine has underperformed both Russia, to the east, and Poland, to the west; its economic performance between 1990 and 2017 was the fifth worst in the world.

“It feels like Ukraine is the low pressure zone where two distinct fronts of global economic development collide,” he wrote in his e-newsletter.

The creation of this buffer zone was partly the result of Western policy. In 1990, US Secretary of State James Baker assured Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not expand “an inch eastward” after German unification. This promise was quickly forgotten. In 1999, the former Warsaw Pact countries of Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic joined NATO; in 2004, further expansion included the former Soviet republics of Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia; in 2008 Ukraine applied to join.

This eastward expansion was controversial, not just with Russia, but with the “realistic” element of the U.S. foreign policy community: It was “a strategic mistake of potentially epic proportions,” said George Kennan, the former diplomat who drafted the policy of “containment” of the Soviet Union.

This has been a constant note in Putin’s war drumbeat. In a long essay last summer on “the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians”, he suggested that Ukraine was being used as “a springboard against Russia”. His recent joint statement with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Winter Olympics called on NATO “to abandon its ideologized Cold War approaches”. In Putin’s speech on Thursday declaring war, he said of NATO pledges in 1990, “they just cheated us.”

NATO expansion may well have been an epic blunder. But even taking Putin’s antagonism at face value, it doesn’t offer much indication as to where his intentions may now lie. The obvious “realistic” response to this reassertion of Russian power would be to concede sovereignty over eastern Ukraine and guarantee that Ukraine will not be allowed to join NATO: relegate Ukraine to its status , at best, a buffer zone.

But it is not clear that this would be enough. Speaking at an event streamed live on Twitter Spaces, Tom Wright, an Irish political scientist at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC, said Putin’s move against Ukraine was “qualitatively different” from his earlier reputation as a to be “incrementalist and cautious”. He suggested Putin, who is 69, may be thinking about his legacy, determined to reunite Russia and Ukraine while he still can. “He has decided that whatever price is imposed on him and whatever risks are incurred, they are worth paying,” Wright surmised.

Putin’s rhetoric has become more expansive. His plan to protect Russian populations in eastern Ukraine became that of demilitarizing and “denazifying” Ukraine. His plan to take on Ukraine appears to be only part of a larger plan to reassert Russian authority along its borders. “The problem is that in territories adjacent to us – territories that were historically ours, I insist – an ‘anti-Russia’ hostile to us is being created,” he said on Thursday. . But this problem is not simply the hostility of neighbors – the very existence of these neighbors as separate entities is illegitimate, he suggested: in 1991, they were removed “overnight”. of “their historic homeland”, he wrote last year.

“He’s trying to confuse the Kiev government with the Nazi regime,” Constanze Stelzenmuller, a German expert at Brookings, said last week. “This rhetoric seems to suggest that what he is really doing is resuming World War II. Anyone who thinks that the impact, the collateral damage, of this conflict can be limited to the territory of Ukraine is gravely mistaken.

One of the countries for which this prospect is the most threatening is Finland — the only other European country
country bordering Russia, alongside Ukraine and Belarus, which is not a member of NATO. In a speech last Monday, Putin spoke of how Lenin and the Bolshevik leaders had “created” modern Ukraine after the 1917 revolution “in an extremely hard way for Russia – by separating, cutting off what is historically Russian land”.

“Finland also gained independence around the same time – people felt that this statement may also be about Finland,” said Kerstin Kronvall, a veteran Finnish journalist who has lived in both Russia and Ukraine. Finnish public opinion has traditionally been hostile to NATO membership for fear of upsetting Russia; in recent weeks it has swung dramatically in favor of NATO membership. “People here are really scared,” she said. “What if Finland was next?”

Two thousand five hundred years ago, the Greek island of Melos was in the buffer zone between the city-states of Athens and Sparta, then locked in the Peloponnesian War. Melos had ties to Sparta, but preferred to remain neutral; but Athens invaded and demanded his loyalty.

The historian Thucydides recorded (or perhaps imagined) a summit between the Melians and the Athenians. The Melians sought to appeal to the Athenians’ sense of justice, but the Athenians – the “realists” – dismissed this as naivety. “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must,” they said. The Melians argued that this would damage Athens’ reputation; on the contrary, said the Athenians, “besides extending our empire, we should gain in security by your subjugation.” The Melians warned that the Spartans would come to their aid, but the Athenians laughed it off; the Spartans would not intervene on principle, but only if they were unconvinced they had “superior power”, they said.

The Athenians duly gave Melos an ultimatum: to become a “tributary ally” of Athens while retaining nominal sovereignty. The Melians refused and the Athenians besieged. The Melians held out for a while, with surprising early success, but eventually fell apart. Athens put all adult men to death, sold women and children into slavery, and colonized the island.

A conflict that initially seemed like a step-up on Russian aggression is now existential for Ukraine. But Putin also considers it existential. The creation of what he called “an anti-Russia” in neighboring territories was “a real threat not only to our interests, but to the very existence of our state, its sovereignty”, he said. Thursday. “It’s the very red line that has often been talked about. They crossed it.

The problem for the West is precisely the vagueness of this formulation. He’s not sure that even “realistic” notions of recreating a buffer zone, or recognizing a Russian “sphere of influence” on its borders, will appease him.