DEEP ROOTS IN THE FORMATION OF NATIONS
In France, some people claim that NATO and the United States bear a heavy responsibility for the war in Ukraine, because of the enlargement of NATO. But if we look a little further back in history, the facts show that all the countries of the former Eastern bloc that had belonged by force to the Warsaw Pact wanted to join NATO, which is a defensive alliance, from the early 1990s.
They did so for a variety of reasons: to protect themselves from Russia's desire for domination, to guard against a resurgence of Russian imperialism; because they had endured Soviet occupation and the Soviet yoke for the previous 45 years; because they had experienced centuries of Russian political violence. For example, in the spring of 1940, the massacre in Katyń, Poland, and in other places (including Kiev, Kherson and Kharkiv) of around 22,000 members of the Polish elite (officers, engineers, teachers, doctors, etc.) by the NKVD, the Soviet political police.
As far as Ukraine is concerned, if we go back much further, we can see that the country was formed on a different model from Russia, even if Vladimir Putin often emphasises the supposed common origins of the two states within the very ancient Rus' of Kiev (from the 9th to the 13th centuries). Indeed, as early as the XIVe and XVe In the 19th century, several towns in what is now Ukraine adopted the Magdeburg law, a form of urban privilege that had originated in Saxony, in what is now Germany: Sianok (1339), Lviv (1356), Kamianets-Podilskyï (1374), Loutsk (1432), Kiev (1497)...
"This municipal law was at the origin of the national formation in Ukraine, distinct from the Russian cities, which were subject to a different legal reality", points out Nathalie de Kaniv, a doctor of history and general delegate of the association of IHEDN auditors, in National Defence Review. "From this period onwards, there was a break between the territories of Eastern Europe, which explains the distinct routes taken, albeit united, during the 20th century.e It was the result of the expansion of a new imperial culture, that of international communism.
RECENT HISTORICAL ARGUMENTS PUT FORWARD BY RUSSIA
Before the war, Russian leaders expressed four main grievances. The first concerned the functioning of the international order. In the 1990s, Russia was unable to prevent Western intervention, in particular the NATO air strikes against Serbian positions in Kosovo and Serbia in March 1999. This military campaign, which took place outside any UN framework, was perceived by the Russian elite as a humiliation and marked the first cooling in Russian-American relations.
Their dissatisfaction will crescendo. It became even more pronounced after the unilateral withdrawal of the United States from the ABM Treaty ("Anti-Ballistic Missile", signed in Moscow in 1972) in 2002, and again following the military intervention in Iraq in 2003. Then there was President Putin's famous speech in Munich in 2007, in which he blamed the malfunctioning of the international system on the unipolarity of the world and delivered a scathing critique of the United States, denouncing in particular its "disdain for the basic principles of international law and its almost reckless hyperuse of force".
The second grievance obviously concerned the enlargement of NATO. The Russians would have liked it, a posterioriThey are convinced that verbal guarantees were given to Gorbachev that NATO would not expand eastwards. This is historically false, but that doesn't stop them believing in their historical mystification.
The third grievance concerned the rapprochement of Ukraine and Georgia with Western countries in general, and with NATO in particular. After many changes, point 23 of the final declaration of the NATO summit in Bucharest in April 2008 stated: "Today we have decided that these countries will become members of NATO". From the Russian point of view, this declaration represents a break with the past.
In parallel with this NATO process, in June 2008 the European Council discussed for the first time the Eastern Partnership project with the former Soviet countries in the Union's immediate neighbourhood, without Russia. But in August 2008, the war in Georgia, which resulted in Russian recognition of the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, interrupted the rapprochement of Ukraine and Georgia with NATO.
Then, at the end of 2013, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych gave in at the last moment to Putin's demands that he not sign the association agreement with the European Union. This was followed by the mobilisation on Maïdan Square and then Yanukovych's flight. Convinced that these movements were being orchestrated from abroad to harm their interests, the Russians responded by annexing Crimea and sending commandos to the Donbass.
Finally, the fourth grievance concerned the failure to implement the Minsk II agreements of February 2015, in particular the amnesty for the pro-Russian separatists.
