NP - How Putin backed himself into a Ukraine invasion he never wanted

[David Morris]

http://www.vox.com/2014/8/29/6082769/one-chart-why-putin-invading-ukraine

In late 2011, after a few years as prime minister, then-Prime Minister
Putin announced that he would run for a not-quite-legal third term as
president (Russia, like the US, has term limits), and his party won big in
fraud-heavy parliamentary elections in December 2011. Putin expected
another boisterously positive reception, but that's not what he happened.
Instead, he got protests in majorcities, opposition candidates, and, even
according to the highly suspicious official tally, only 63 percent of the
vote.

Putin panicked. He saw his legitimacy slipping and feared a popular revolt.
So he changed strategies. Rather than basing his political legitimacy on
economic growth, he would base it on reviving Russian nationalism: imperial
nostalgia, anti-Western paranoia, and conservative Orthodox Christianity.

Then the Ukraine crisis began in late 2013, as Ukrainians protested to
replace their corrupt pro-Russian government with a clean pro-European
leader, and it was a gift to Putin. He used state media, which he had put
under his thumb, to create a parallel universe in which American-backed
fascists were toppling Ukraine's rightful pro-Russian leader. He worked his
citizens up into a nationalist fury at the West's meddling and stoked a
very real fear that literal Nazis had returned in Ukraine and were
threatening their Russian-speaking, Slavic brethren. Russians rallied
around the flag, and Putin's approval rose.

In March 2014, Putin indulged his own rhetoric about saving Ukraine's
ethnic Russians — and seized an opportunity to reclaim a former Soviet
strategic port — when he launched a stealth invasion of Crimea, which he
annexed. His popularity *soared. *This wasn't just Putin's popularity
recovering from years of doldrums — his approval rating skyrocketed to 80
percent, a high he had not seen in years.

Putin had backed himself into an impossible position. By early August,
Western sanctions over his meddling had pushed Russia's economy to the
point of recession, making Putin more reliant than ever on maintaining the
nationalistic fervor over Ukraine. But the violence in eastern Ukraine was
spinning out of control, with Ukrainian military forces looking like they
were on the verge of overrunning the rebels.

In a rational world, Putin would have cut his losses and withdrawn support
for the rebels. But, thanks to months of propagandistic state media,
Russians do not live in a rational world. They live in a world where
surrendering in eastern Ukraine would mean surrendering to American-backed
Ukrainian Nazis, and they believe everything that Putin has told them about
being the only person capable of defeating these forces of darkness. To
withdraw would be to admit that it was all a lie and to sacrifice the
nationalism that is now his only source of real legitimacy. So Putin did
the only thing he could to do to keep up the fiction upon which his
political survival hinges: he invaded Ukraine outright.

What makes this so scary is that it means that Putin does not have a
rational strategy in Ukraine, because he is not invading for rational
strategic reasons. If he had a specific objective, then the West could make
some concession or find some way to meet him halfway. But he does not. He
is invading because the momentum of the crisis he himself created is
careening beyond his control, and there's nothing that he or Ukraine or the
United States can easily do to stop it.
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