(MENAFN- Asia Times) The Mongols. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Sweden. Crimean Tatars. The Ottoman Empire. Napoleon. Hitler.
And now, NATO?
This is at least how the regime of Vladimir Putin sees things.
The Kremlin's view: A conspiracy against Russia
Since its inception, the Russian state has struggled against what it feared was a conspiracy of outsiders seeking to invade, pick apart, and subjugate Mother Russia. The overriding desire of Russian leaders has been the expansion of the great state's defensive perimeter to prevent the kind of destructive invasion that the leadership has feared since the very beginning of the Russian state.
We in the West understandably view this as imperialistic and expansionistic. Yet for the Russians, this is a matter of survival. The more that Moscow can push its borders away from the Russian cultural core, the less likely an invader is to conquer the country. Russia's neighbors, notably those in Eastern Europe, rightly resent Russia's behavior.
Today, Russia's autocratic leaders have convinced themselves that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is seeking to destroy their state by using Ukraine, once a bastion of the Russian Empire (and the Soviet Union), as a launchpad against Russia.
The rhetoric of the West as well as the string of attacks emanating from Ukraine with NATO weapons into Russia during the Russo-Ukraine war has only served to reinforce these concerns in the Kremlin.
In turn, these actions have further militated Russia against the West. This is why there will be no negotiated settlement ending the Russo-Ukraine war. The war will end after one side has vanquished the other.
Despite the generous military assistance from the West, Ukraine will not be able to prevail under current conditions. Moscow, therefore, will achieve its objective in crushing the Ukrainian state; it will have merged Russian power with that of Belarus and the remnants of Ukraine – thereby creating the“civilization-state” that Russian strategists of the neo-eurasianist school of geopolitics have long fantasized about.
Warm-water ports
A key element of Russian foreign policy going back centuries has been the quest for vaunted warm-water ports. A nation spanning the northern stretch of Eurasia, unlike the great powers of Europe and Asia throughout history, Russia was never fully able to develop a navy because it lacked reliable access to warm-water ports.
In essence, Russia was a mostly landlocked country. Its access to water was limited to ports that froze for much of the year, restraining Russia's ability to project its naval power beyond its shores. The story of Russia has, in part, been the story of seeking out warm-water ports from whence to propel power outward.
One of the areas of focus for Russian strategists was acquiring a warm-water port in the Black Sea.
Under the czarina Catherine the Great, that was precisely what the Russians achieved. Colonizing eastern Ukraine and the Crimean Peninsula, the Russians built a sprawling naval facility in Sevastopol. Thus Russia became a key player in the Black Sea and enhanced its navy in the process. Moscow maintained this presence since Catherine the Great all the way through the chaotic collapse of the Soviet Union.
At a time when Russian power was imploding, and the West appeared to be moving into the regions abandoned by the collapsing Soviet Union, Moscow clung on to whatever military advantages it could. Crimea was an essential advantage around which Russia could reconstitute its ailing power.
For Putin, geopolitics is his lodestar
In fact, Sevastopol is but one of only two Russian warm-water ports today (the second being in Syria, another area that has been the subject of a major proxy conflict between Washington and Moscow). As early as 2010, there were murmurs coming out of Kiev, Ukraine's capital, that it might not renew the lease that had allowed for Russia to maintain its Black Sea Fleet at Sevastopol.
That had occurred during a longer-running conflict between the West and Russia over whose preferred client would rule Ukraine. But from the Russian perspective the geopolitical implications of losing Ukraine – specifically, access to the Black Sea – was an unacceptable risk.
Unsurprisingly, the current round of Russo-Ukrainian fighting that began last February with Russia's initial underwhelming invasion of its Western-backed neighbor, likely initiated because the Western-backed government in Kiev passed an ill-advised law in parliament demanding that the Ukrainian government restore Crimea to Kiev's control by force.
Shortly thereafter, a dangerous incident occurred between a British Royal Navy warship and the Russian Navy off the coast of Crimea that may have resulted in Russian warplanes dropping bombs in front of the interdicting British warship to get it to leave Crimean waters in the middle of a Russian Navy drill.
For Russia, Crimea is not negotiable, not when one of its only two warm-water ports is in danger. The Americans know this. Yet Washington refuses to rein in its Ukrainian clients, who are banging the drum to launch a massive attack against Crimea. (It almost makes you wonder if that was the purpose of all the money that President Joe Biden's son Hunter received while serving as a non-expert in natural gas for a Ukrainian oil company.)
It is my belief that Ukraine understands fully that any offensive against the fortified Russian positions in Crimea will end in disaster for Kiev's cause. Yet it insists on this move likely because it continues hoping to draw NATO (and specifically the Americans) into a direct engagement against Russia on Kiev's behalf.
Shortly before Christmas last year, a Ukrainian air defense missile supposedly hit its neighbors in Poland. Kiev denied that it was its missile and laid the blame squarely on Moscow. It was hard not to wonder if Ukraine's government, fully aware that time was not on its side, was trying to provoke a wider conflict between NATO and Russia to save its beleaguered country.
Unlike in eastern Ukraine, where the Ukrainian military reclaimed much territory from the Russians, Crimea will be defended to the end by Russia. What's more, there's little indication that most Russian-speaking people living in Crimea want to be returned to Kiev's control.
The Ukrainians will face Russian nuclear reprisals if they appear poised to succeed in their mission to recapture Crimea from Russian forces.
The Biden team: Dithering, blithering idiots
The Americans should have known better than to have encouraged such recklessness from the Ukrainians. We can sympathize with the Ukrainians who desire to restore all the territory they've lost because of Russia's illegal invasion. But we do not have any interest in courting nuclear warfare with Moscow just to see if Ukraine can recapture Crimea.
Washington is clearly blinkered both by its suffering Ukrainian ward and with notions that it can break Russian military power by shoving Russia out of the Black Sea once and for all.
This is, of course, childish thinking.
In Crimea, the Russian naval base at Sevastopol is critical. It is the vital linkage connecting Russian maritime trade and power with the wider world beyond the jaws of Eurasia. Should Moscow lose its Sevastopol port, its power will have been bottled up permanently, and it truly will be on the way to another round of imperial collapse brought about by the West.
Thus Moscow will fight to the death to preserve its strategic foothold on the Black Sea. As the Ukrainians gear up for their quixotic (and doomed) offensive against Crimea, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is reported to have expressed“hesitancy” to give Kiev the Biden administration's official blessing for the ill-fated offensive. Even the naïfs who run US foreign policy realize that Crimea is a red line that Moscow will not let the West cross.
Meanwhile, at the recent NATO summit in Germany, the gelded German Chancellor Olaf Sholz has yet again called for a peaceful resolution to the seemingly endless Russo-Ukraine war, as has French President Emmanuel Macron.
Germany was the most potent economic power in Europe until the war began, France was the most powerful military on the continent, and the United States is purportedly the sole remaining superpower. If there's all this unease about Ukrainian military plans (which is a non-NATO proxy state of these three powerful nations), then why not simply tell Kiev that it cannot escalate against Russian-held Crimea?
Fact is, the hope for a peaceful settlement that splits Ukraine in half is over.
None of the combatants are willing to countenance that reality. This war has dragged on too far and both sides are now foolishly overcommitted.
In essence, America's so-called strategy has led us to the precipice of either nuclear war with Russia or the end of NATO. Because either way, Ukraine is not going to last as an independent state at this rate, and that will trigger a wider geopolitical crisis in Europe and between Russia and the United States.
Trying to take Crimea is the textbook definition of a fool's errand.