Hal Brands
Most of the unanswerable questions about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have to do with the future. How will this war end? Will China intervene more directly? Will hostilities escalate into a clash between Russia and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization? Yet one of the most crucial questions is about the past: Why did Vladimir Putin start this war in the first place?
It’s hard to know exactly what he was thinking: Putin’s regime is not a model of transparency. But piecing together his motives is important, not least because the origins of this war contain clues about how a conflict in Taiwan might start.
The deepest reason Putin invaded is obvious: He aims to rebuild a post-Soviet empire with Ukraine at its core. Putin has said he doesn’t consider Ukraine a “real country” and has been working for years to bring it back into Russia’s grasp.
Russians and Ukrainians are “one people — a single whole,” he wrote in 2021. “It is what I have said on numerous occasions and what I firmly believe.” This belief is key to understanding Putin’s policies toward Ukraine over the past generation — his efforts to influence the country’s elections, his invasion and annexation of Crimea in 2014, and other measures taken to suborn or subordinate Kyiv.
Yet prior to February 2022, Putin had never tried to conquer the entire country. So what caused this particular escalation at this particular time? The most plausible answer involves the same mix of opportunism and loss-aversion that often leads major powers to start brutal wars.
The international scene looked favorable for an effort to settle scores with Kyiv. The US appeared weak, after its chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, and distracted, thanks to President Joe Biden’s evident preoccupation with China. Far from getting tough with Moscow, Biden had been calling for “stable and predictable” relations with Putin.
Meanwhile, Putin wagered that a Europe dependent on Russian gas would hesitate to confront him in the depths of winter. Germany had a new government led by the Social Democratic Party, historically friendly to Russia; France was approaching a presidential election that might bring out anti-Americanism in its body politic. Even Biden worried that a Russian attack might trigger transatlantic discord rather than unity.
If Putin was able — as he believed he would be — to win the war quickly, perhaps he could destroy an independent Ukraine without setting off a strong international response. In this sense, Putin went big because he believed he could succeed at a low strategic cost.
In another sense, though, Putin went big because he realized his Ukraine policy was verging on failure. Putin had initially invaded Ukraine in 2014 because he worried that Kyiv was turning toward the West. Over the next eight years, Russian policies produced exactly that outcome.
To be clear, Ukraine wasn’t close to joining NATO in early 2022, as some Russian officials alleged. But it was building stronger ties with the alliance. During the Trump years, Ukraine had begun receiving lethal weaponry (in small quantities) from the US. Kyiv was acquiring Turkish drones and other new capabilities. And though President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had come to power in 2019 calling for peace with Russia, he took a harder line after encountering blowback at home.
In short, Putin faced a Ukraine that was edging closer to the West, refusing to buckle under Russian pressure, and strengthening itself militarily. So if Putin wanted to make Ukraine a Russian satrapy, he had to act before his window of opportunity slammed shut.
Many of Putin’s calculations were dead wrong. Russia’s military advantage was not nearly as significant as he imagined, in part because the very brazenness of his landgrab convinced the US and Europe to respond quite forcefully.
The war Putin expected was not the war he got. Yet his blunder is illustrative nonetheless.
Vicious wars are often caused by this lethal mix of optimism and pessimism. In 1914, German leaders believed Berlin could still crush France and Russia — and thereby establish a great empire in Europe. But they worried Germany would soon lose its advantage as St. Petersburg and Paris built up their forces.
Germany must “defeat the enemy while we still stand a chance of victory,” General Helmuth von Moltke, the head of the General Staff, declared, even if that meant “provoking a war in the near future.” Which is much what Berlin did by behaving so recklessly in the crisis that brought on World War I.
Similar dynamics could figure in a Chinese decision to invade Taiwan. As Michael Beckley and I have argued, the temptation to use force against Taiwan will be strongest when President Xi Jinping concludes that the military balance in Asia now favors Beijing, and that China is running out of other options to get what it wants.
This, unfortunately, is where we may be headed in the coming years, as China completes its current round of military reforms, and as Xi’s coercion of Taiwan — like Putin’s coercion of Ukraine — merely strengthens that island’s determination to chart its own course.
And so the origins of the war in Ukraine offer a warning about the dangerous decade ahead in Asia: Beware the ambitious autocrat who thinks his window is closing fast.
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