It’s finally happening.
After weeks of building up troops along Ukraine’s borders and diplomatic brawling with the West, Russia has formally announced plans to attack its neighbor. Just before dawn on Thursday in Moscow, President Vladimir Putin announced Russia will conduct military operations in eastern Ukraine. Ukraine declared a state of emergency and there were reports of explosions in the former Soviet republic.
Why did Moscow decide to send troops and tanks into the country and risk potentially severe punishment from the international community?
Ukraine was not looking to fight its far more powerful neighbor and had already been struggling to deal with Russian-backed separatist rebellions in its southeastern Donbas region. So why did Moscow decide to risk potentially severe punishment from the international community?
Experts do not share a consensus about what motivated Russia to make its move, but there are a number of non-mutually exclusive factors that likely fueled this action. Much of it has to do with long-held concerns that Russia has about security in the region and its fear of Ukraine becoming increasingly independent from its influence. Then there’s the element of timing: It appears Putin calculated that he had the strategic upper hand and decided this was a particularly good time to strike to advance his interests.
Here’s a brief rundown of what helped bring about this moment and why Putin decided to act now.
Russia is threatened by NATO’s expansion and wanted to draw a line in the sand
In December, Russia sent a list of security demands to the U.S. calling for, among other things, a halt to NATO’s eastward expansion right up to its borders, ending Western military assistance to Ukraine, removing NATO troops and bases from former Soviet Union territory and a ban on intermediate-range missiles in Europe — and it threatened to use military force if its demands were not met diplomatically.
The major item Russia is particularly concerned about is the looming prospect of Ukraine entering NATO, a possibility that’s been floated by the U.S. for many years but for which there is no clear timeline. Anatol Lieven, the senior research fellow on Russia and Europe at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and the author of “Ukraine and Russia: A Fraternal Rivalry,” has likened that possibility to Mexico entering military alliances with China — a development that would be, of course, deeply alarming for the U.S.
This is a concern that predates Putin. As Lieven told me in a recent interview, Russia has long expressed warnings that NATO’s expansionism could trigger war:
Since the beginning of NATO expansion in the mid-’90s, when Russia had a very different government under Boris Yeltsin, the Russian government, and Russian commentators and officials, opposed NATO enlargement but also warned that if this went as far as taking in Georgia and Ukraine, then there would be confrontation and strong likelihood of war. They said that explicitly over and over again. So this is not about Putin.
The Russian foreign policy establishment as a whole has long considered Ukraine joining NATO to be a major threat, and militarily dominating Ukraine is a potential way to forestall that possibility.
Russia is unsettled by Ukrainian independence and democracy
Regional analysts have also pointed out that Russia fears how Ukraine’s status as a democracy — which has allowed it to develop an increasingly anti-Russian orientation in recent years — poses a threat to Russia’s influence over its neighbors, as well as Russia’s own internal stability.
Putin was a KGB officer in East Germany when the Soviet Union collapsed. That experience has shaped his perception of the threats that emerge from street movements, protests and anti-authoritarian rhetoric, according to Anne Applebaum, historian and staff writer at The Atlantic.








