Student-spearheaded demonstrations across Ukraine’s major cities and campuses are extraordinary because they are being staged in defiance of the missiles launched by invading Russian forces and their Kremlin commander, says a leading scholar on Russia’s attempt to crush and annex the besieged democracy.
As protests against the dismissal of Ukraine’s young reformist defense minister spread out across its major cities, Moscow has been intensifying its rocket blitzes.
Yet university students have not retreated in the face of these strikes, and are still pressing for Ukraine’s president to reinstate Mykhailo Fedorov, the tech wizard who pushed forward innovations in drone-jet fighters and robotic battlefront soldiers.
Fedorov led Ukraine’s remarkable turnaround in countering the Russian invasion, and in safeguarding Ukraine’s independence and vibrant democratic system, says Peter Dickinson, a leading scholar on the conflict at the Atlantic Council, one of the top defense and diplomacy think tanks in Washington, DC.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has attempted to accommodate the protesters by offering Fedorov an alternative position in the government, Dickinson says.
But in far-off Moscow, he adds, the Russian president has been infuriated by the demonstrations.
Vladimir Putin has viewed people-powered protests as an existential threat to Russia’s and his own future ever since he was stationed in the Soviet puppet state of East Germany as a KGB agent, back in the 1980s, Dickinson told me in an interview.
As prodemocracy protests erupted across the Soviet bloc, Dickinson says, Putin watched in agony as West German and East German youths joined forces to tear down the machine-gun-guarded Berlin Wall.
At the time, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev broke with decades of Stalinist tradition by refusing to send in Russian tanks and troops to quell the marches that criss-crossed Eastern Europe, and the Soviet satellite states began asserting their independence.
Changing the world and the future, Gorbachev “declared that he would not support Communist regimes in other countries if their peoples were opposed to them,” the Norwegian Nobel Committee stated on awarding him the Nobel Peace Prize a year after the dismantling of the Berlin Wall. “He thus started a chain reaction which led to the fall of communism in Europe.”
Then, the entire Soviet Union disintegrated, with all 15 republics breaking away, but in a peaceful process that Gorbachev hoped would lead to the creation of new democracies across Europe and Asia.
Yet since Putin gained power a quarter-century ago, Dickinson says, he has harbored the goal of forcibly reconstructing the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, starting with the reconquest of Ukraine.
Popular movements triggered Ukraine’s declaration of independence and its evolution into a liberal, pro-European democracy, and citizen-volunteers helped fend off the first stage of Russia’s invasion back in 2014, Dickinson says.
Now, Putin is overwhelmed by fear that Ukraine’s pacific transition into a democracy that protects universal human rights, including the freedom to stage peaceful demonstrations, could inspire young Russians to restart their own protests for democratic change and a new leadership at the Kremlin.
Toward the start of his reign, Putin told a gathering of the Russia’s Federal Assembly that: “Above all, we should acknowledge that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical disaster of the century.”
“As for the Russian nation, it became a genuine drama.”
As the USSR’s republics began breaking free of Moscow’s rule, Putin added, “Tens of millions of our co-citizens and compatriots found themselves outside Russian territory.”
“Moreover, the epidemic of disintegration infected Russia itself.”
The Russian leader, Dickinson says, might be convinced that if a democratic system were allowed to take hold in Russia, that could mark the end of Putin’s rule and perhaps even the break-up of the Russian Federation.
As a result, Putin has become obsessed with the goal of destroying Ukraine as a democratic model of Russia’s own potential future.
While jailing democracy activists across the Russian Federation, and even assassinating one, via a state-concocted poison, inside his archipelago of prison gulags, Putin is determined to prevent civil movements for change stymy his quest for a renewed Russian empire, says Dickinson, who was first dispatched to Ukraine as an officer of the British Council two decades ago.
Today’s battlefront in Ukraine, he adds, also represents the forefront of Putin’s masterplan to revive the Soviet Russian imperium of the last century.
“The key to understanding Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine is the realization that modern Russia is not a typical European country,” Dickinson says.
“It is an empire.”
“Ever since the fall of the Soviet Union, Putin has been obsessed with the idea of imperial collapse … sparked by people power uprisings.”
As a result, he says, “Putin will never agree to a peace deal that leaves Ukraine intact as a European democracy, even if currently occupied regions remain under Russian control.”
“Putin cannot permit the existence of a free and democratic Ukraine as this would undermine the entire purpose of the invasion and would be widely seen in Russia as an historic defeat.”
At the same time, he says, “Kyiv’s Western partners have provided Ukraine with enough support to survive, but not enough support to defeat Russia militarily.”
“This is a major strategic mistake that undermined European security” and could lead to an eternal war.
“Unless Russia suffers a clear defeat in Ukraine, Putin will be emboldened. He will continue the war.”
“The invasion,” Dickinson says, “is transforming Putin’s Russia into a regime dependent on war and focused on long-term hostility toward the West.”
“It is delusional to think that some kind of meaningful compromise settlement is possible with such a regime.”
“Putin will not stop until he is stopped – and the cost of stopping Russia will only rise.”
Meanwhile, though Mikhail Gorbachev initially lauded Putin’s early promises to expand democracy across the Russian Federation, in line with Gorbachev’s own leaps toward dismantling the Soviet dictatorship, he later came to criticize Putin’s quest for limitless power.
In history books of the future, Mikhail Gorbachev and Vladimir Putin are likely to be chronicled as two equal but diametrically opposed forces on the world stage.
While bestowing the Nobel Peace Prize on Gorbachev, Gidske Anderson, Chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, said the great Soviet reformist played a leading role “in the radical changes that have taken place in East-West relations.”
“East and West, the two mighty power blocs, have managed to abandon their life-threatening confrontation and have, instead, embarked on the long and patient road to cooperation on the basis of negotiation.”
“Ancient European nations, such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and now East Germany too, have regained their freedom,” he added.
“It is possible today, maybe for the first time in many hundreds of years, to envisage … a Europe at peace.”
“Comprehensive negotiations, bilateral as well as multilateral, accompanied by concrete and realistic compromise, have led to a process involving substantial reductions in standing armies and death-dealing armaments.”
“These changes,” Anderson added, “have given the United Nations a new lease of life: for the first time since its creation after the Second World War this organization has been able to play the role for which it was originally intended.”
Yet for every one of these tremendous leaps forward engineered by Gorbachev, Putin has commanded a sensational step backward.
Putin’s invasion of Ukraine violates the central pillar of the UN Charter – the Article 2 prohibition on the “use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state” – and he has upended the entire UN-mediated world order in the process.
East and West are once again locked in a life-and-death confrontation, even as Putin fires off a fusillade of threats to launch nuclear missiles against any Western power that comes to Ukraine’s aid.
And with the end of the New START Treaty – the last nuclear arms control pact binding Russia and the U.S. to limits on their arsenals – some American defense scholars say Putin, the KGB master of subterfuge, might have already started secretly loading more warheads onto his ICBMs, tucked away in subterranean silos, and into submarines that clandestinely crisscross the oceans, submerged beneath the seas.