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Putin’s Nationalist Strategy
...It is no exaggeration to say that tensions between Russia and the West over Ukraine evoke the prolonged division that defined the Cold War. The geopolitical struggles over Iran, Syria, Georgia, and, now, Ukraine do not rise to the apocalyptic potential of the Cuban missile crisis, but the stakes are enormous. One major difference between then and now is the absence of ideological antagonism: the postwar Soviet empire proclaimed the advantage of the socialist path over the capitalist one. Today, Russia’s opposition to the West has evolved as a purely nationalist project. Russia’s military response to the events in Ukraine is framed as a protection of “ours”—and “ours” are Russian, no matter where they live. The idea of Ukrainian sovereignty is totally disregarded.
This is Putin’s response to Ukraine’s attempt to build a new nationhood that combines a leaning toward the Western world with the nationalism of Ukraine’s own west; both wests are regarded by Putin as utterly hostile to Russian interests. In the words of Dmitry Trenin, an expert on Russian foreign policy, the fear in Moscow is that “the new official Ukrainian narrative would change from the post-Soviet ‘Ukraine is not Russia’ to something like ‘Ukraine in opposition to Russia.’ ”
The anti-Western nationalist trend has been on the rise in Russia for nearly a decade; it has become an engine of aggressive and expansionist action. This presages some powerful shifts at home, particularly a division of the Russian citizens into friends and foes, and a shift toward a more dictatorial, police-state mode of dealing with dissenting opinion. Today, more than a thousand Muscovites dared to protest against the Russian military intervention in Ukraine, chanting, “No to war.” Police detained more than three hundred people. The feelings among the liberal minority in Russia are of anguish, fear, anger, and shame. But the liberals are powerless to stop the invasion taking shape in Crimea...
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2014/03/putins-nationalist-strategy.html
This is Putin’s response to Ukraine’s attempt to build a new nationhood that combines a leaning toward the Western world with the nationalism of Ukraine’s own west; both wests are regarded by Putin as utterly hostile to Russian interests. In the words of Dmitry Trenin, an expert on Russian foreign policy, the fear in Moscow is that “the new official Ukrainian narrative would change from the post-Soviet ‘Ukraine is not Russia’ to something like ‘Ukraine in opposition to Russia.’ ”
The anti-Western nationalist trend has been on the rise in Russia for nearly a decade; it has become an engine of aggressive and expansionist action. This presages some powerful shifts at home, particularly a division of the Russian citizens into friends and foes, and a shift toward a more dictatorial, police-state mode of dealing with dissenting opinion. Today, more than a thousand Muscovites dared to protest against the Russian military intervention in Ukraine, chanting, “No to war.” Police detained more than three hundred people. The feelings among the liberal minority in Russia are of anguish, fear, anger, and shame. But the liberals are powerless to stop the invasion taking shape in Crimea...
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2014/03/putins-nationalist-strategy.html