By Prof. Geoffrey Roberts, Journal of Military and Strategic Studies, Volume 22, Issue 2

Geoffrey Roberts is an historian, biographer, and political commentator. A renowned specialist in Russian and Soviet foreign and military policy and an expert on Stalin and the Second World War, his books have been translated into Arabic, Chinese, Czech, Estonian, Greek, Finnish, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish.

Historians like to tell two sorts of stories about the origins of wars. Firstly, the story of how the situation that made a war possible, probable or even inevitable, came about, a narrative that will typically include an account of relevant background conditions, analysis of important preceding events, and an exploration of long-term political, economic, military and ideational trends.

Secondly, the story of the decision-making process that actually led to war. Wars happen for a reason or, rather, a series of reasons. Historians aim to reconstruct the reasoning that leads to war, usually in the form of a chronologically-driven narrative. The circumstance and influences impacting on the thinking and motivations of critical actors will be integral to the explanatory content of the narrative – the explanation of why someone or some people took decisions that resulted in war.2

Tudor history specialist, Geoffrey Elton, described this narrative duality as the search for both the situational and the direct causes of historical events. Situational causes are the circumstances and conditions that make an event possible, while direct causes are the human actions that make things happen. Crucially, humans are the cause of all their own actions, not least in precipitating war. Such actions may be irrational, incoherent or overly emotional, but they remain intelligible and re-presentable in an explanatory narrative of what happened and why.3

This narrative approach to war origins is empirically driven. It relies on the existence and availability of evidence that enables us to figure out and demonstrate agent motivations and calculations. That is why historians prefer to study the origins of a war a relatively long time after the event – when there is more evidence, particularly that of a confidential character. The passage of time also facilitates identification of the most significant antecedent events in the run-up to war.

This essay is devoted to the when and why of President Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine in February 2022. As far as possible, it refrains from speculation and relies almost entirely on the record of Putin’s public pronouncements during the immediate prewar crisis. That public record is currently the best available evidence of his motivations and calculations. What this evidence shows is that Putin went to war to prevent Ukraine from becoming an ever-stronger and threatening NATO bridgehead on Russia’s borders.

At the heart of Putin’s preventative war thinking was an imagined future in which Russia would confront an existential threat. The longer war was delayed, he argued in February 2022, the greater would be the danger and the more costly a future conflict between Russia, Ukraine, and the West. Better to go to war now, before NATO’s Ukrainian bridgehead on Russia’s borders became an imminent rather than a potential existential threat – a statement that he repeated during the course of the war.

Such rhetoric and reasoning has characterized preventative war decision-making throughout the ages. “It’s now or never,” exclaimed Kaiser Wilhelm II in July 1914 when he urged Austria-Hungary to attack Serbia before it became too powerful, thus setting in motion an escalatory sequence that resulted in a cataclysmic war involving all Europe’s great powers.4

“The world will hold its breath,” Hitler predicted when he launched his crusade to liquidate the strategic-ideological threat of the judeo-bolshevik Soviet regime. Egyptian President Gamel Abdel Nasser was a new Hitler claimed the British and French when they seized control of the Suez Canal in 1956, while President Eisenhower’s domino theory had the communists’ advance in Vietnam threatening all of South East Asia.

And according to President George W. Bush and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein had to be stopped before he acquired deliverable weapons of mass destruction and became too dangerous to be attacked and removed from power.

Pre-emptive action to preclude an even bloodier conflict in the future is a standard justification for aggressive war, one that is often accompanied by illusions of quick and easy victory. To say that Putin believed he had been backed into a corner by Ukraine and the West is not to endorse his perceptions and assessments of the situation. But greater understanding of Putin’s calculations may help clarify how this calamity came about, how it could have been prevented, and how an even greater future catastrophe might be averted.

There are many theories and interpretations of the reasoning behind Putin’s decision for war with Ukraine. Some see Putin’s actions as driven by an underlying geo-ideological ambition, such as the restoration of the Soviet/Tsarist empire or Orthodox Russia’s pursuit of a civilizational struggle with a decadent West. Others view it is part of a persistent pattern of centuries-long Russian aggression, authoritarianism and expansionism. More parochial explanations include the idea that war served to shore up Putin’s domestic regime and popularity. Or perhaps, as some argue, it was the decision of an isolated, egoistical dictator, surrounded by fawning courtiers, who believed Russia’s invasion would be welcomed by his Ukrainian blood-brothers.

The limitation of all these explanations is their lack of definite documentary evidence. They attribute reasons for Putin’s actions for which there is no proof except a perceived pattern of events that is deemed to fit the assumed motivation. Maybe in decades to come more probative evidence will emerge from the Russian archives or other confidential sources. But for the moment the best guide we have to what was going on in Putin’s mind when he made his decisions for war is twofold: what he said and what he did.

Putin’s own explanations of his actions cannot be accepted at face value: what he said at various meetings and press conferences in the run-up to the invasion were part and parcel of his propaganda battle with Ukraine and NATO. And his rhetoric may well have masked a pre-existing intention and determination to go to war for motives other than those he stated.

But historical experience shows that while politicians do lie and dissemble – and Putin is no exception – what they say publicly invariably reflects a core of authentic belief. Their rhetoric reflects and constructs their version of reality, warped though it may be. What appears to outside observers as false, tendentious, exaggerated or irrational claims may make complete sense to the actors themselves.

While this essay does not present a long-term, situational narrative of the war’s origins, it is worth noting that Putin has his own version of that history. According to him, the war’s origins lie in the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia in 1917 and Lenin’s subsequent decision to include Russian territory within the administrative boundaries of the newly created Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic that became part of the USSR in 1922 – a sub-state structure that, claims Putin, incubated a virulent anti-Russian Ukrainian nationalism. As a man of the multi-ethnic borderlands himself, Stalin saw that nationalist danger but did nothing to de-nationalise the structure of the Soviet constitution, while Khrushchev compounded the problem by transferring Crimea to Ukraine in 1954. When the USSR collapsed in 1991 no thought was given to the millions of Russians stranded in Ukraine as a result of a series of arbitrary decisions by the Bolsheviks and their post-communist successors. Post-Soviet Russia was prepared to live with this unsatisfactory situation but Moscow’s efforts at peaceful co-existence were thwarted by the machinations of Ukrainian nationalists and their western backers, notably the anti-Russia coup in Kyiv in 2014 and NATO’s subsequent military build-up of Ukraine.5

Putin’s long-term story of the origins of the Russia-Ukraine crisis was very much to the fore as he pondered and plotted to liquidate what he saw as the lethal threat of a NAT0-backed nationalist Ukraine that would attempt to retake by force its lost territories in Crimea and the Donbass.

The Russians’ military planning and preparation for the war remains opaque but they must have been gaming war with Ukraine over the Donbass since 2014 when separatist rebels in that region broke away from the Kyiv regime. Putin’s final decision to go to war seems to have been last-minute but the groundwork for military action would have been initiated many months previously.

On the eve of the invasion, many astute and well-informed commentators convinced themselves that the supposedly realistic and pragmatic Putin would not risk such an attack.

What they missed was the crystallisation of Putin’s apocalyptic vision of a future, nuclear-armed Ukraine, embedded in NATO and intent on provoking a Russian-Western war. Arguably, it was that long-term nuclear danger that finally prompted Putin to go to war.

Finish reading this essay here.