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Why Putin had to launch his “Special Military Operation”
After decades of pleading and accommodation, Putin finally had no choice but to act as he did.
When Putin launched his “Special Military Operation”, he said that he had three goals:
- Safeguard and protect the people in the Donbas and their fledgling republics
- De-Nazify the Kiev regime — i.e., liquidate the Azov Battalion and the other Nazi groups
- Demilitarise Ukraine and restore it to neutrality — i.e., kick NATO and the US out of Ukraine.
The Russian people support these goals.
First, however, we must realise that Russia does not consider itself to be “fighting with Ukraine.” Russia believes it is fighting against NATO, an organisation of Western powers that it perceives as a massive threat to Russian sovereignty, indeed to Russian survival.
Russia has long considered NATO to be an adversary. We should remember that NATO was formed to oppose the USSR and the Warsaw Pact nations of Eastern Europe. After the collapse of the USSR, the Warsaw Pact was dissolved and there was no longer any reason to maintain NATO. But the US was determined to maintain a military presence in Europe, and in order to provide a “fig leaf” of diplomatic cover for the USA’s maintaining a huge military presence in the territory of its European “friends”, they needed to keep NATO going, so that all those dozens of US bases were no…
