Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: How Vladimir Putin has a personal quest to create a USSR of old

Vladimir Putin’s very personal quest comes from a deep desire to restore the golden age glory of the USSR one war at a time.

Paths to war are always complex and traditionally involve old maps and claims fused with cultural, political or religious rivalries dating back centuries and rarely resolved.

But this war is down to just one thing – Vladimir Putin.

He has been on a quest of bloody minded revenge for 30 years against Western democracies, notably from Europe and the US, whom he blames for putting an end to the once glory of the USSR.

Indeed he quit his role as a KGB agent in 1991, the year the Soviet Union declared glasnost reformation that put an end to the Cold War, a strict corrosive Communist dogma and the empire which ultimately broke allowing States to pursue the sorts of freedoms enjoyed by other nations.

He has been obsessed ever since with re-forming the union, one region or nation at a time and Ukraine and Georgia and their fledgling democratic parliaments have long remained easy targets.

For many Russians of his generation, who were raised on a diet of Soviet propaganda, the disintegration of the USSR and its global standing has remained an open wound.

Russian President Vladimir Putin. Picture: AFP

It was a defeat without a war that many like Putin believed should never have happened and consider former leaders and architects of glasnost “openness” Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin something of traitors.

Putin has declared more than once the USSR’s demise was the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century”, over and above apparently two devastating world wars.

That is why he thinks little now of starting a third global conflict.

In pictures: Horrific scenes as Russia invades Ukraine

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Since Putin began working for the Yeltsin administration in Moscow in 1996, where he was appointed Yeltsin’s deputy chief of presidential staff, he could see first-hand how a policy of transparency devalued authoritarian leadership allowing criticism and challenge to policy and rule and foreign intrusion.

He also watched as the European Union expanded and began absorbing either in friendship or membership, nations once part of or close to the USSR.

Former Russian President Boris Yeltsin and his former National Security Chief, Vladimir Putin in 1998.

When in 1999 Putin became acting president of the Russian Federation he vowed to make Russia great again.

In 2014 a chance opened when a pro-democracy movement in Ukraine saw the Russian-aligned Viktor Yanukovych voted out of parliament after he failed to adopt promised reforms to align closer to the EU.

Putin declared the action “a coup” and ordered his generals to invade and seize the already restive Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea.

His rationale was simple: “if a fight is inevitable, you must strike first” he said in 2015 as he authorised Russian troops to then invade Ukraine’s Donbas region. This was ostensibly in support of pro-Russian militias also seeking greater autonomy from Kyiv. Autonomy was granted but then the two major cities Donetsk and Kharkiv backed by Russian troops and heavy armaments declared themselves mini republics.

People participate in a Unity March to show solidarity and patriotic spirit over the escalating tensions with Russia in Kyiv Ukraine. Picture: Getty

More than 14,000 lives have been lost in this Donbas battle since 2014, including the 298 lives lost aboard the accidentally shot down Malaysian Airlines flight MH17.

Now Putin wants the rest of Ukraine.

His logic has always been Ukrainians were pro-Russian but were “the subject of manipulation” by the West, namely the United States and the European NATO bloc seeking to contain Russian ambitions.

“In their (the Kremlin) understanding, war would not be an attack on Ukraine, but a liberation of the Ukrainian people from a foreign occupier,” the CEO of R.Politik analytical centre Tatiana Stanovaya.

A conquest of Ukraine, Putin envisages, would see something of a domino effect for other former USSR states then history, he hopes, can be reversed.