Ukraine: How We Got Here, What Putin Is Saying and Doing, and How the West Is Responding

The situation in Ukraine, which had been escalating for months as Russia built up a force of over 150,000 troops along its borders, is now rapidly deteriorating politically. Last night, Russian military forces were ordered into and seen entering the eastern part of the country in two breakaway regions. The EU and the US have announced sanctions to respond to that incursion, but the full range of sanctions available to them have not yet been deployed, despite some calls to label it an invasion and pull the trigger. 

To understand what’s going on, we need to rewind a bit and see how we got here. We can then try to parse the reasons Russia is giving, however disingenuous, for its recent politically destabilizing moves and military aggression and how Ukraine and the West view them. Finally, we can explore what sanctions have already been announced by the West and what options remain on the table.

The Breakaway Regions in Eastern Ukraine

In 2014, after mass protests in Ukraine led to a pro-Moscow leader in Kyiv being deposed, Russia invaded and then annexed a part of Ukraine called Crimea. The move was roundly condemned as illegal by the U.S. and Europe. During the same period, the Kremlin began backing an armed rebellion in the Eastern part of Ukraine in two regions known as Donetsk and Luhansk, where ethnic Russian separatists wanted independence, seizing control of government buildings and territory and proclaiming two new “people’s republics.” More than 14,000 people have been killed in that conflict.

In 2015, Russian and Ukraine finally agreed to end the conflict under something called the Minsk agreement, which was brokered by Germany and France. Ukraine agreed to give the two regions special status and a great deal of autonomy, while Russia agreed to return control of the border to Ukraine.

All that changed yesterday after Russia recognized the two regions as sovereign states and then moved troops into the region, claiming the forces were “peacekeepers” instead of an invading army. Russia has claimed without basis that Ukraine is provoking conflict there and has used false flags of “genocide” against ethnic Russians in the region to justify sending in troops.

How Putin Sees It

In a fiery, hour-long speech leading up to the official state recognitions and the movement of troops across the border into Donetsk and Luhansk, Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed Ukraine was an integral part of Russia’s history while describing Eastern Ukraine as “ancient Russian lands.” In an essay written last July, Putin had described Russians and Ukrainians as “one people” noting ominously—and in truly Orwellian terms—that the “true sovereignty of Ukraine is possible only in partnerships with Russia.”

The BBC noted that Putin’s speech felt “angry, impatient and directly threatening,” as if he “was getting 20-odd years of hurt off his chest and hitting back. ‘You didn’t want us to be friends,’ Putin said, his words directed to the West, ‘but you didn’t have to make an enemy of us.’ ” By this, he certainly meant NATO’s expansion to the East, with Ukraine being Putin’s red line. He sees Ukrainian overtures as further evidence that the West is trying to contain Russia.

He also aggressively rewrote history, claiming Ukraine “has never had its own authentic statehood” and that it owes its very existence to the former Soviet Union. He then derided the country as economically backward, corrupt, and bent on seeking weapons of mass destruction including nuclear weapons—which it had voluntarily relinquished to Russia at the break-up of the Soviet Union. He spoke of Ukraine as ungrateful for all the help and attention Russia had provided since independence. 

Ukraine’s and the West’s Response

In response to the recognition of the two breakaway regions as sovereign states and the order to deploy military “peacekeepers” there, President Zelensky of Ukraine chaired a security council meeting at the U.N. and accused Russia, correctly, of violating his country’s territorial integrity and of backing out of the Minsk peace agreement and its ongoing talks. 

The U.S. concurred. “Russia’s clear attack on Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity is unprovoked,” said U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Linda Thomas-Greenfield. “Putin wants the world to travel back in time. To a time before the United Nations. To a time when empires ruled the world,” she said. “But the rest of the world has moved forward. It is not 1919. It is 2022.”

President Zelensky also swore that Ukraine intended to cede no lands to Russia. “We are committed to the peaceful and diplomatic path, we will follow it and only it,” Zelensky said. “But we are on our own land, we are not afraid of anything and anybody, we owe nothing to no one, and we will give nothing to no one.”

The Matter of Sanctions

The U.S. promised to announce sanctions later on Tuesday in response to Russia moving troops into the breakaway regions, but it stopped short of saying the full range of sanctions it had planned would be deployed. That is in part because the movement of Russian forces into Donetsk and Luhansk isn’t really something new, as it has been done many times over the past eight years. Washington is more worried about a full-scale invasion of the rest of the country but is still holding out hope for a diplomatic solution.

The E.U. also announced it would impose sanctions for the military incursion, according to French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian. “Obviously we are going to initiate sanctions,” Le Drian said as European foreign ministers prepared to meet in Paris. “It’s a violation of international law, it’s an attack on the sovereignty and integrity of Ukraine, it’s Russia renouncing its international commitments and the Minsk accords that it had signed,” he said. “So the situation is very serious.” He added that E.U. leaders had three messages: taking a firm stance against Russia’s actions, showing solidarity with Ukraine, and showing unity in Europe. 

The most serious development for Russia came from Germany this morning, which in response to the military incursion froze the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project by refusing to complete its certification. NS2 is a Baltic Sea pipeline that would double the flow of Russian gas directly to Germany, circumventing routes based in Ukraine. Its suspension comes at a difficult time of rising gas prices for European consumers. 

The United Kingdom also already announced it will impose tough sanctions and this morning did so on five Russian banks and three Russian billionaires with close links to Putin. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson described these as the “first tranche, the first barrage of what we are prepared to do,” while noting, “It is absolutely vital that we hold in reserve further powerful sanctions…in view of what President Putin may do next.”

If Russia were to move on any part of Ukraine it did not already control (that is to say, areas outside of Crimea or the Eastern breakaway regions), the West is prepared to ratchet up sanctions within banking and financing to include possibly locking Russia out of international SWIFT transactions. The biggest sanction of all would be to restrict or cut off existing energy supplies from Russia, a move that does not have uniform support of all E.U. nations with holdouts such as Italy saying it would not go so far, at least not yet.

The next move is Putin’s. If he expands beyond the eastern breakaway regions of the country, that certainly will be considered a new development and likely seen universally as an invasion, with a whole host of consequences to follow on all sides and the possible beginning of the largest land war in Europe since World War II.