Putin's maniacal obsession with Ukraine has become a threat to European security

One of the ideologists of the mythical «Russian world», the great-power Russian imperialist Sergei Karaganov, declared: «We are waging war with Europe, not with the unfortunate, pitiful and deceived Ukraine. The war will not end until we defeat Europe». How «happy» Muscovy has become from the war in Ukraine is another question. But do Brussels and other European capitals understand that Russia is waging an existential war against the entire European civilization, where Ukraine is only the first line of defense?

After all, Putin’s manic obsession with the destruction of Ukraine’s statehood has become a threat to the security of all of Europe. Russian aggression against Ukraine fundamentally does not fit into the classic model of a limited interstate conflict, in which the parties fight for specific resources, territorial concessions or a change in the balance of power.

Although the territories are certainly one of the key objects of the war, the Russian Federation’s attempts to seize them do not exhaust the political content of the hostile actions. The main goal of the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine is to deprive Ukraine of full political subjectivity – the right to independently determine its own state system, foreign policy, system of alliances and the future of its own society.

However, Ukrainian statehood is only a «tactical field» in the broader confrontation between the terrorist Russian Federation and the collective West. It is obvious that the Western vector of Ukraine has become an important factor in the conflict for the Kremlin, but it is not its primary cause. Much deeper is the denial of the very possibility of Ukraine’s existence as an independent political subject outside the Russian sphere of control.

And this conclusion follows not only from the nature of Russian military actions, but also from dictator Putin’s own program texts. It is worth recalling that back in July 2021, he published an article «On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians», in which he conceptually denied the modern understanding of the Ukrainian political nation and treated Russians and Ukrainians as parts of a common historical integrity. And already in February 2022, this «historical argumentation» was transformed into a direct political justification for the war.

Thus, we are not just dealing with the Kremlin’s geopolitical revanchism. This is an ideological system in which Ukraine’s right to independent existence is completely denied, and Russian dominance is presented as an allegedly natural and historically determined state of affairs.

This is the central problem of modern European security: a country that denies the political subjectivity of a neighboring state actually denies the very principle of sovereign equality of states.

One of the fundamental elements of the Kremlin’s worldview is the assertion of the existence of some mythical «single Russian-Ukrainian people». Which at first glance may seem like a historical and cultural thesis. However, the political consequences of such an assertion are much more radical.

In the modern international system, no nation is the property of another state. The proximity of languages, religion, historical traditions, or ethnocultural origin does not cancel political sovereignty. Even if two states once had extremely close historical ties, this does not create for one of them the right to determine the future of the other.

And it is here that the Kremlin concept makes a fundamental «logical leap»: from alleged cultural proximity to political subordination. Turning the common historical past into an instrument of geopolitical pressure, and the legitimate desire of neighboring states for independence into a pretext for unleashing a bloody war of aggression.

This Putin thesis «about one people» actually assumes that Ukrainian separateness is either a historical mistake or a consequence of external intervention. In such a perverse construction, independent Ukraine appears not as a natural result of historical development, but as an artificial deviation from the «correct» state of affairs.

This explains why Kremlin rhetoric so often returns to the issues of Soviet administrative borders, Bolshevik decisions, and historical claims. When the modern Ukrainian state is declared to be an accidental product of history, then its borders can be declared subject to revision. And if Ukraine is recognized as a full-fledged sovereign state, such revision loses its ideological basis.

It is worth noting that historical revisionism here is not decorative propaganda. It performs a very specific political function: it creates a moral and pseudo-legitimate argument for denying Ukrainian sovereignty.

No less important is the thesis about the alleged artificiality of Ukrainian borders. Its political danger lies in the fact that almost any modern state can be subjected to such revisionist reworking.

After all, the borders of Europe have been shaped over the centuries by wars, empires, treaties, the collapse of multinational states, and political decisions. If each state gains the right to revise the borders of its neighbors based on its own version of history, the international system will return to the logic according to which force is the source of law.

Therefore, the threat is not only that the Kremlin illegally claims certain Ukrainian regions. The danger is that it is trying to change the very criteria for the legitimacy of international borders. Instead of international law, the «historical memory» of the aggressor state, supported by military force, is proposed. What is particularly significant is that the Russian ideological construction has not remained at the level of journalism. In 2022, Moscow began to criminally implement it in practice.

And here the sequence of stages is fundamentally important: first the separateness of the Ukrainian people is denied, then the legitimacy of the Ukrainian state, then the right of Ukraine to independently determine its policy, and the final stage is an attempt to change the territorial status of Ukraine by force. This is no longer just a foreign policy dispute, but a systemic project to dismantle the sovereignty of an independent state.

Sometimes it is proposed to consider the Russian-Ukrainian war as a conflict that can be ended with a compromise on territories. It is possible that such an approach has some diplomatic appeal for someone, but it ignores the fundamental problem.

Although mutual concessions are a justified tool for resolving regional or geopolitical conflicts, they cannot serve as a basis for legalizing the violent encroachment of any state on the sovereignty of another country.

Because according to the Kremlin’s «logic», then any revisionist state is encouraged to test the limits of what is permissible. A stronger state will be able to declare historical claims, create dependent political entities, deploy troops, hold a pseudo-referendum, and then demand international recognition of the «new territories».

Mediators of territorial compromise often proceed from a dubious model: if some of the Kremlin’s demands are met, Russia will have an incentive to end the war. However, peace does not mean the legalization of territorial seizures carried out by Muscovy. And the precedent itself is no less dangerous than the illegal seizure of Ukrainian lands.

Because if the forcible redrawing of borders in Europe can be transformed into a legitimate outcome of war, the consequences go far beyond Ukraine. This will create a dangerous precedent for other revisionist states, pushing them to test the stability of the global security system.

After World War II, the main achievement of the international order was not the elimination of all conflicts, but the creation of rules according to which war should not be an instrument of territorial expansion. The prohibition of the use of force, the sovereign equality of states, and territorial integrity are interrelated elements of this order.

But after Moscow began to ignore these rules, the Russian-Ukrainian war acquired universal significance. Because this is not a conflict between Russia and the West, in which Ukraine accidentally found itself in the middle. This is a test of the ability of the international system to protect a state that has become the object of aggression.

The problem lies not only in individual regions, but in the very existence of an independent Ukraine as a subject of international politics. In this sense, the key question is not how many square kilometers will be written into the ceasefire agreement. The key question is whether the principle that the Ukrainian people have the right to independently determine the political future of their state is preserved.

However, this principle is incompatible with the concept of «spheres of privileged interests», within which Moscow wants to gain a veto over Ukraine’s foreign policy choices.

But the paradox of the Kremlin’s strategy is that the desire to restore imperial control over Ukraine accelerates the transformation of Russia itself.

This war changes its state institutions, budget structure, economic priorities, relations between the state and business, the role of the security apparatus, and the nature of the social contract. The longer the war lasts, the more the Russian system depends on the logic of mobilization.

And here a vicious circle arises: to continue the war, Moscow needs an ever greater concentration of resources; to justify these expenses, an ever more radical explanation of the war is needed, and the radicalization of the explanation reduces the scope for diplomatic maneuver or compromise.

Lasting peace in Europe cannot be based on appeasing the aggressor. A ceasefire in itself is desirable, but it is not synonymous with peace. It should be about the defeat of a specific political doctrine – the doctrine according to which Ukraine supposedly has no right to an independent existence.

A necessary prerequisite for lasting peace should be the preservation and strengthening of Ukrainian statehood, the restoration of Ukraine’s territorial integrity within its internationally recognized borders, as well as the provision of reliable international security guarantees under which repeated aggression by Russia will be impossible.

The main strategic contradiction of Kremlin revanchism is that Russia is destroying the very order in which it could have been a great power. Despite the fact that the Kremlin seeks to restore the status of the Russian Federation as one of the centers of world power, it has chosen a method that weakens the instruments of influence on which its previous status was based.

The Great War accelerated the consolidation of the states of a united Europe in the security sphere, changed the defense policies of many countries, increased the strategic significance of NATO, stimulated a rethinking of energy dependence, and created long-term distrust of Moscow. As a result, Russia did not get the neutralization of the Ukrainian issue, but its international growth.

Until February 2022, Ukrainian security could be perceived by individual leaders and EU institutions as an important, but regional, problem. After the full-scale invasion, it became the central issue of European security. The strategic result of Russian policy turned out to be the opposite of what was stated: instead of weakening the Western security system, the war contributed to its consolidation.

And the democratic West today must have a specific political goal: to deprive the Kremlin of the opportunity to achieve revisionist goals through aggression and to force it to accept the basic rules of the international order.

And this means at least four main aspects.

First, Ukraine must preserve and strengthen its full-fledged state subjectivity – political, military, economic, diplomatic and institutional.

Second, no territorial change carried out through Russian aggression should become an internationally recognized fact. The UN General Assembly has directly established that Russia’s attempts to annex Ukrainian territories have no legal force.

Third, a peaceful settlement should provide for not just a cessation of hostilities, but mechanisms that make repeated aggression politically and militarily disadvantageous for the Kremlin.

Fourth, the principle of Ukraine’s territorial integrity should be linked to the restoration of the international legal order, and not be seen as a purely Ukrainian national demand.

The post-war security system should take into account the lesson: political assurances alone are not enough if the aggressor retains the ability to revise the outcome of the agreements by force. From which we can conclude that peace can be achieved through the restoration of rules, not through rewards for their violation.

It is necessary to take into account that the Kremlin’s policy towards Ukraine is dangerous not only because it has given rise to the largest war in Europe in recent decades. Its fundamental danger lies in the political idea that a stronger state has the right to determine the boundaries of the political subjectivity of a weaker neighbor.

The ideological construction of «one people» currently invented by the apologists of the «Russian world», the denial of the legitimacy of Ukrainian statehood, the revisionist interpretation of history and attempts to change borders by force form a single political coordinate system. And its fundamental problem is that it is incompatible with modern international law.

If the aggression of the Putin regime ends with a reward, it will inevitably become an instrument of politics. While its failure will form a powerful deterrent precedent against Moscow’s revisionism.

Since the full restoration of Ukrainian territorial integrity is not only a matter of justice for Ukraine. This is a condition for restoring the principle that borders in Europe are not determined by force, and the sovereignty of states does not depend on the permission of the imperial center.

The strategic stakes of the Russian-Ukrainian war are not only who will own certain territories, but also in preserving international law as a real system of restrictions on state violence.

In this sense, Ukrainian statehood is not a peripheral object of international politics, but the main test of the viability of the international security system itself. A test that will determine the future rules of coexistence in the world and whether the force of law or the law of force will prevail in it.