#making sense

Timothy Snyder:

“Putin says a lot of things about the end of the Soviet Union now which he wouldn't have said then. 

And he says a lot of things now which people find plausible because he says them over and over again, but which are simply not true. 

One of them is that the end of the Soviet Union was somehow an American plot. But it was American policy to preserve the Soviet Union. 

That's clear from the American archival material, it's clear from the open source material about Bush's visit to Kiev in September of 1991, which is remembered as the "Chicken Kiev” visit. 

We were actually trying to hold the thing together. 

It was the Russian Federation, the country that Putin now rules, which brought the Soviet Union to an end. 

That’s a kind of fundamental fact which tends to get overlooked in all of this, because Putin starts his story from such completely outrageous places, knowing that there will be people out there who will somehow meet him halfway. (…)

I'm just going to be very straightforward about this: Russia is not afraid of NATO at all. 

Had they been afraid of NATO, they certainly wouldn't have undertaken an invasion like this. 

Had they been afraid of NATO, they wouldn't be moving the bulk of their troops from the actual NATO borders in order to fight in Ukraine, which is what they have done. 

They're not afraid of a NATO invasion, they've never been afraid of a NATO invasion. This is a giant guilt-making factory. 

Putin himself, until very late in the day, did not say anything to the effect that he was afraid of NATO. 

This is something he came up with rather late, so that we could have a guilt trap for ourselves. (…)

Ukraine had agreed to Russian bases on the Black Sea for decades. 

When Russia invaded in 2014, it was giving up, as a result of its own decision, the possibility of a friendly Ukrainian buffer to the West. 

When you invade a country, you no longer have the option of treating it as a friendly buffer, you're making an enemy of it. 

That was a choice that Moscow made on its own. They have pushed Ukraine to the West again and again with their own decisions. 

Before 2014, a majority of Ukrainians were against joining NATO. After Russia invaded in 2014, a majority of Ukrainians unsurprisingly decided that they were in favor of joining NATO. 

That's the result of Russia's choices. The option was there but that's not what they want. 

I mean this is what they say openly, day in day out on television. What they say is they want a Ukraine where they are in control. 

And that means invading the country, occupying it, replacing its leadership with someone else. That's not a friendly buffer, that's a genocidal aspiration. And that's what they care about. 

Again to repeat the point, if they cared about security from NATO, which they don't, they would be dispersing their armed forces around the Finnish border, the Polish border. That’s not what they're doing. 

What they're doing is throwing an absurd and obscene amount of their available firepower into the project of destroying Ukraine as a country. 

Which makes zero geopolitical sense. It is weakening Russia extraordinarily. 

One of the assumptions that's made in the views that you're presenting is that Putin actually cares about the interests of Russia. 

I see very little reason to think that Putin is a geopolitician who cares at all about the interests of Russia. 

If he were, he would be much more concerned about the fact that there is a great power on Russia's border which, unlike the United States, does in fact have design on Russian resources, and invests more in the Asian part of Russia than Russia does itself — and that is China.

But rather than being concerned about China, what Putin has done with his entire anti-western turn, is to create a situation in which future rulers of Russia will have little choice but to be vassals of China. And the invasion of Ukraine has only accelerated this process.

[What does Putin care about?] He cares about dying in bed. He cares about legacy.”