In a bombshell two-hour interview with American TV host Tucker Carlson, Russian President Vladimir Putin pinpointed the “moment he decided he had to invade Ukraine”. Tracing tensions back to the 2014 pro-democracy uprising in Kyiv, Putin cited the ousting of the pro-Kremlin President Viktor Yanukovych as a “colossal mistake” that prompted Russia’s full-scale invasion eight years later.
The uprising, dubbed the “Revolution of Dignity” by Ukrainians but seen by Putin as a Western-orchestrated “coup”, drove Yanukovych from power after months of protests over his decision to abandon an EU association agreement. In Putin’s view, while Yanukovych had “agreed to all conditions” of a transition plan involving early elections, “the CIA did its job to complete the coup” and the West crossed Russia’s red line.
In the aftermath, with a new pro-Western government installed in Kyiv, Russia responded by annexing Crimea and backing armed separatists in the eastern Donbas region, setting the stage for over eight years of grueling conflict in Ukraine’s east. “The political mistake was colossal,” Putin told Carlson. “All this could be done without victims.”
Buttressing Putin’s contemporary security rationale for the invasion is his longstanding grievance over NATO’s eastward expansion towards Russia’s borders after the Cold War, despite what he describes as assurances to the contrary. We never agreed to NATO’s expansion and we never agreed Ukraine would be in NATO,” Putin stressed. “For decades we kept asking, ‘don’t do this, don’t do that.'”
With Ukraine drifting out of Russia’s orbit amid NATO proliferation along its perimeter, tensions escalated sharply last year as the Zelenskyy administration signaled its intent to revive the country’s NATO accession bid. By the end of 2021, the failure of renewed ceasefire negotiations over the conflict in eastern Ukraine tipped Putin’s hand for war.
“The current Ukraine leadership said it would not implement the current Minsk agreements,” Putin noted, referring to stalled peace accords for the Donbas region negotiated in 2014-15. In his view, this defiance was the last straw, eliminating hope for a diplomatic solution. “In other words, they were not going to implement it.”
Shortly thereafter in February 2022, Putin unleashed a three-pronged invasion of Ukraine from the north, east and south, aiming to topple Zelenskyy’s government and install new leadership aligned with Moscow. Nearly one year later and tens of thousands of lives lost, Russian forces remain locked in a brutal war of attrition largely confined to Ukraine’s east and south, having failed to achieve Putin’s initial objective of capturing the capital Kyiv and decapitating Ukraine’s elected government.
Far from a victorious outcome, the invasion has proven enormously costly for Russia, turning it into a pariah in the West and spurring NATO alliance unity and arms provisions that have bolstered Ukraine’s military resilience. Meanwhile, waves of punitive economic sanctions have battered Russia’s economy and financial system, challenging Putin’s invasion gambit domestically.
For critics in the West, Putin’s effort to frame the invasion as defensive and unavoidable rings hollow given the scale of death and destruction wrought across Ukraine over the past year at Russia’s hands. Former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lambasted the interview itself for providing Putin an uncritical platform to propagate his distorted version of events leading up to the war.
Nevertheless, nearly a year on with no end in sight and both sides refusing to yield, glimmers of insight into Putin’s rationale and perspective remain critical for the world to understand as it grapples with the enormous human and geopolitical consequences unleashed by Russia’s fateful decision for war.
