Trump Still Doesn’t Understand Why Putin Is Fighting in Ukraine

By Mark Champion

When I lived in Moscow in the 1990s, I remember watching a skit starring a Russian woman I knew after dinner. He would stand next to a large map of the newly dissolved Soviet empire, swiping a stick at Russia’s new neighboring countries, and then shout, “Vote! Nashi!” (Here! Ours!), “I vote! Nashi!” (Here! Our Republic!), hitting each former republic in turn, before moving on to Alaska, California, and beyond.

Of course, he was making fun of the country’s neo-fascist nationalists, who had formed a group called Nashi. It seemed funny then, but it seems less funny now.

It was 1993, the year Harvard professor Samuel Huntington published his controversial essay in International Affairs, “The Clash of Civilizations?”, predicting that the world would not embrace Western values ​​but would instead divide and fight along religious and cultural lines. I had already met nationalists fighting pro-Russian separatists in Georgia and Moldova, but they had broken with the Kremlin. By 2014, however, Russian President Vladimir Putin would embrace their ideas, annex Crimea and invade Ukraine.

Russia’s motives

Western leaders need to better understand Russia’s motivations in its so-called near abroad if they are to properly interpret Putin’s approach to ending the conflict in Ukraine. We are by nature “selfish,” and we believe that everything revolves around us. And that’s before we even get to the sheer narcissism of former US President Donald Trump, who insisted again in a recent podcast that if he were still in the White House in February 2022, Putin would never have invaded Ukraine because… he’s Trump — and Hamas wouldn’t dare attack Israel either. The root of the problem, he said, as Putin and many others have, is NATO’s defiant decision to admit new members from the former Soviet bloc.

Putin was clearly angry about NATO expansion. However, the real questions here are why and whether Russia would continue to invade its neighbors if NATO did not exist. The answer to the last part is, of course, rhetoric, but most of the evidence suggests that he would, because it is not primarily about us, but about Russia.

disintegration of the soviet union

In the 1990s, Nashi looked like “dinosaurs,” but Russian nationalists were right about one thing: the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 was only the beginning of a contested imperial collapse, not its end. The country was just beginning the process of understanding what it meant to be Russian. Russia had never been a Western nation-state before. The new post-Soviet borders seemed unnatural, and not just to former KGB agents like Putin. Few Russians I met in the 1990s believed that Ukraine was a real country, like Belarus or Kazakhstan.

It took the Kremlin a long time to clarify what it meant to be a Russian citizen in the post-Soviet era, and to find a “name” for this ambiguity about where the country ended up. Putin began defining Russia as a “civilizational state” (as opposed to a simple nation-state) around 2012, but it became a full-fledged doctrine in the 2023 version of the Russian Federation’s foreign policy concept. The document in question proclaims “Russia’s special status as a state of a distinct civilization,” responsible for all peoples within the “Russian world.”

Putin’s aggressive reaction

This idea is essential to setting expectations about the conditions under which Putin might be able to achieve peace in Ukraine and for how long. It is also important to remember that Russia has never been merely a victim of threats, but has pursued its own agenda of expansion and transformation, which it sees as positive.

That is why Putin reacted so aggressively in 2013 to Ukraine’s decision to sign a trade and association agreement with the European Union – the deal threatened to undermine his plans for Ukraine. At the time, joining NATO was not on anyone’s agenda, not even for Ukraine, whose constitution bars it from joining any military alliance. That obstacle was removed only in December 2014, nine months after Putin annexed Crimea and long after he had sent Russian troops and tanks into eastern Ukraine to fight.

Russia as a country – culture taught to young people

This way of understanding Russia as a cultural state against the West is now being taught to young people, who may be more exposed to Western ideals and culture. Since September 1 last year, every student entering a university in Russia has had to take a new compulsory course called “Fundamentals of Russian Statehood.”

The basic idea is that Russia, as a cultural state, is “the heir to the historical and political experience of all the previous states that existed on the territory of our country: the Russian land, the Russian state, the Russian kingdom, the Russian empire, the USSR.” Putting together this version of the story is a huge task. It involves appointing vice-rectors as modern university commissars, responsible for the ideological content of courses, and sending nearly 6,000 professors to “retraining” centers.

There is also a new incarnation of the communist-era Young Pioneers, launched in 2022 to teach collectivism to some 5 million children, among other values ​​considered traditional to Russia, in contrast to the decline of individualism in the West. History textbooks in the younger grades have also been replaced with a set of new, approved titles.

Russian students now say that the name Ukraine was never a national or ethnic designation, but rather referred to a region of Russia’s borderlands.

existential competition

Civilizations are not fixed, smaller states, and ordinary people can move. A large proportion of the Ukrainian soldiers fighting the invasion are Russian speakers from the east. On June 25, even as the war dragged on, Ukraine (and Moldova) began talks with the European Union not just about trade but also about full membership, a choice that might be described as cultural. The process involves adopting more than 100,000 pages of rules that will make the two countries look more like Poland and Romania and less like Russia.

From the Kremlin’s perspective, this competition is existential, not because it fears NATO forces attacking outside its internationally recognized borders, but because even the prospect of joining Western institutions encourages Moscow’s former possessions to resist the Kremlin’s expansionist plans. If Russia wants to become not just a nation-state but a cultural superpower, then losing the chance to control Ukraine means losing the role of a superpower.

The Problem with Putin’s Worldview

The problem posed by Putin’s worldview of Ukrainian sovereignty is obvious. But it is also a problem for Europe, because it is not at all clear where Russia’s cultural project ends or how absorbing Ukraine can meet its ambitions. The “Russian world” is both large and ambiguous. So what should we do? Let Putin impose his “civilizational state” or stop him in Ukraine?

Russia is not the first empire to resist the loss of its long-held colonies, so there is nothing unique about its efforts. But few would argue that the Ottoman, British, or French empires had the right to maintain, let alone regain, their imperial claims, or that the desire to do so was “inducible.”

Understanding Putin’s point of view is essential to understanding that the “neutrality” and “demilitarization” demanded by Russia’s neighbors is not his ultimate goal. It is a prerequisite for rebuilding Russian state culture and Moscow’s status as a great power. Any peace proposal for Ukraine should have this rationale at its heart, should a future President Trump wish to play the role of mediator. But he should start by reading the Kremlin’s new book on universities.

Performance – Editing: Stathis Ketejian

Read more:

* Putin: I believe in Trump’s ‘sincere’ intention to end war in Ukraine