This week, I want to break from our usual format and respond to the fairly unusual global events. I expect a lot of my readers are trying to get a grasp on what is happening right now in Ukraine and in my own experience the traditional news media often struggles to adequately explain complex issues that go beyond simply describing events. So I thought that, as a professional thing-explainer (also known as a teacher) who also, as a military historian makes an effort to follow these events as closely as I can, I might try to explain some of the elements of the conflict, particularly questions I’ve seen pop up on social media.

I should note of course that I am not a Ukraine or Russia expert, though as a military historian I am at least a little familiar with both the history of the region and also the IR and military theory that guides a lot of the decision-making. And of course, since I teach on warfare, I try to stay well read on current conflicts. While I am not an expert here, I will reference people who are.

If you just want to tune this out…well, I’d ask you not to. This is important, even if it is painful to watch. But if you’d rather be reading something else, my analytics tell me that y’all still mostly haven’t read my analysis of Thucydides’ Fear, Honor and Interest (which is actually quite relevant here) or the three primary source analyses on medieval military aristocrats: Dhuoda, ‘Antarah ibn Shaddad, and Bertan de Born (which are much less relevant here).

And finally, if you want to support what I’m doing here – well, this week, support something else. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is almost certain to create a refugee crisis both within Ukraine and in neighboring countries. Consider donating to the UNHCR or other aid groups and charities that support refugees. There are going to be a lot more refugees that need help and they will need your money more than me.

I also must note that I wrote this during the day on the 24th of February 2020, with some light editing in the very early hours of the 25th, so it reflects what I knew as of then. I have tried, where applicable here to indicate where there are points of real uncertainty in unfolding events, especially when it comes to the course future events may take. Confidence about outcomes in war is mere delusion, but some outcomes are more probable than others.

Alright? Onward.

First, we need to clarify some terms:

• NATO is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a mutual defense alliance between the United States, Canada and 28 European countries. NATO members commit to mutual defense (but not mutual aggression). Neither Ukraine nor Russia is a member of NATO. The government of Ukraine has expressed some interest joining NATO, but was, even before this conflict, unlikely to do so any time in the foreseeable future. Joining NATO is quite intentionally a slow and careful process, so it is not possible to ‘crash-join’ a country into NATO in an emergency (nor, for reasons below, would you generally want to).
• The Donbas is a region of Ukraine north and east of Crimea, which borders Russia. It contains two major regions, Donetsk and Luhansk. Russian-backed separatists in these regions attempted to secede from Ukraine in 2014 with substantial Russian encouragement; when they proved unable to gain full control, Russia supported them directly. Russia has continued to maintain these two breakaway republics, though the majority in both regions oppose secession. There has been an active frontline and continued fighting there since 2014, the fighting kept going almost entirely through Russian support.

Why is this happening?

The short version is “because Vladimir Putin wanted it to happen.” The long version requires us to ask a different question:

What Does Vladimir Putin Want?

This can be a confusing question in this context because Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Russian Foreign Ministry have given multiple conflicting and in some cases mutually contradictory answers for why they are proceeding as they are. Indeed, just 10 days ago, a spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry announced that the Russians were standing down and leaving the Ukrainian border, a statement that is now a quite transparent lie. Moreover, the Russian government also engages in different communications to different people: an ethnocentric, nationalist message in Russian to Russians (‘Ukraine isn’t a real country’) but a softer, diplomatic message to westerners (‘we’re concerned about NATO’), mixed with lies and manufactured ‘attacks’ on Russians.

How do we untangle the lies and try to get at the truth? First, it is important to note that declaring war and invading a country in the real world is not like in a video game – in video games, you declare war with a button press and immediately move forward. You can make the decision to attack and be attacking in moments. In the real world, the kind of military operation Russia is engaging in requires months of preparation and planning. Thus while the ‘go’ or ‘no go’ decision may be contingent on events that occur after planning begins, the conditions which would have resulted in a Russian invasion of Ukraine were likely decided on weeks or months ago.

What were those conditions? Well, the best way to get at Putin’s war aims is to look at his statement of war aims. This past Monday, Putin claimed in a speech that “Ukraine actually never had stable traditions of real statehood” and that its creation was a mistake dating back to the organization of the Soviet Union in 1917. This claim is nonsense; Ukrainians had attempted to gain independence before being violently forced back into the Soviet Union, but Putin (and many other irredentist Russians) appear to believe it.

That view – that Ukraine isn’t a real country and doesn’t deserve independence, but is rather something like a wayward Russian province, thus informs Putin’s stated war aims, given in a speech on Wednesday as the initial assault began. Putin claimed the objectives of the “special military operation” were the “demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine.” It is of course necessary to note that the idea that Ukraine has a Nazi government is a farce; for all of its considerable problems with corruption, Ukraine’s current government was democratically elected and while Ukraine has historically had a problem with anti-semitism, its current president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy is Jewish.

But to demilitarize a country means the complete destruction of its armed forces – which would of course then render that country perfectly vulnerable to further military coercion – while claiming to ‘denazify’ the government essentially requires dismantling the current system of government and replacing it. In short then, “demilitarization and denazification” is a deceptive, round-about way of saying “conquer.” Putin’s state goal is the conquest of Ukraine and the installation of a pro-Russian government there (or perhaps integration into the Russian Federation, something that, during a televised meeting of Russia’s security council, Putin’s own security minister suggested was on the table.)

Which, to back up, means that Putin decided, probably months ago, that he was willing to use armed force to install a pro-Russian government in Ukraine, toppling its democracy. Given that goal, it seems profoundly unlikely that any diplomatic solution offered by the West or Ukraine could have avoided this conflict.

It also means that many of the other offered pretexts, while they may speak to Putin’s frame of mind, seem to have been secondary if not entirely red-herrings. In particular, Putin’s offensive operation is utterly and absurdly excessive for what would be necessary if his goal was only to secure the separatist regions in the Donbas; instead his offensive seems aimed at the Ukrainian capital in Kyiv, c. 300 miles away, with an airborne assault on Kyiv’s main airport in the first 24 hours of his offensive (which failed). More broadly, of course, the claim to be protecting people in those regions is nonsense; as noted, while there is some support for secession there, it is not a majority view and prior to Putin’s (lawless) annexation of Crimea in 2014 and subsequent decision to back separatists there (and support them with un-uniformed Russian troops and weapons) the area was peaceful. The Donetsk and Luhansk ‘republics,’ one is left to assume, were manufactured entirely for this purpose: to be used as an excuse to attack the rest of Ukraine (must the way Putin has also used South Ossetia against Georgia). Indeed, Ukranian forces were sufficiently restrained, even now when there has been a hot war in the Donbas for eight years that Russian forces found it necessary to manufacture fairly transparently false ‘attacks’ to justify further intervention.

The other such pretext was Ukraine’s supposed failure to hew to the precise conditions of the Minsk Protocols, two ceasefire agreements negotiated in 2014 and 2015 which were ostensibly to stop the fighting in the Donbas. The Russian-backed separatists there have not honored any ceasefire so negotiated, despite the fact that, as formulated the Minsk Protocols are extremely favorable to them (because they were negotiated with Ukraine under the threat of an ongoing direct and quite illegal Russian intervention). It is also the case that Ukrainian implementation of some of the provisions of the Minsk Protocols has been uneven (but not entirely absent). However, late in this crisis Ukraine indicated that it was willing to go back to the Minsk Protocols; Russia responded by recognizing the ‘independence’ of Donetsk and Luhansk in a blatant violation of the agreement before invading. Once again, if the Russian concern was legitimately Donetsk and Luhansk, an invasion of the rest of Ukraine would be fairly obviously unnecessary and indeed counter-productive. It is thus now quite obvious that Putin had no intention of keeping to Minsk during this crisis, if he ever did.

Thus, the war happened because Vladimir Putin wanted it to happen and he wanted it to happen to overthrow the democratically elected government of Ukraine; it is as yet unclear if he then intends to annex the country or place a puppet government in charge of it (which given the diminished independence of Belarus, might amount to the same thing in the end).

Could NATO have stopped this?

No, probably not. But right now there are a lot of Monday-morning-quarterbacks suggesting all of the ways they would have avoided the war, so let’s go ahead and discuss them them down to make the point.

Concessions from NATO – some of Putin’s western enablers (particularly on the far-right, though in some cases also on the far-left) have suggested that NATO could have avoided this by making some sort of concessions to Putin, like agreeing to never permit Ukraine to enter the alliance. Often this is couched in terms of NATO being ‘threatening’ to Russia. Now on the one hand, NATO is a purely defensive alliance, nevertheless it is not hard to imagine that Putin, a repressive dictator, felt threatened by a strong alliance of (mostly) free and democratic states to his West. But given that Putin’s goal was, as above, regime change (at least) in Ukraine, it is hard to see how permanently barring Ukraine from NATO would have prevented his actions.

Instead, the clearest understanding of Putin’s complaints about NATO is that they are reflections of his real fears, but that as diplomatic negotiating tools, they were red herrings, designed to create exactly the sort of smokescreen that some media personalities worked t