Causes behind the Ukraine war

A lot has already been written and said about the causes behind the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. I am putting this down mostly to organize my own thoughts, and to warn about trying to find and focus on a single cause for the war. Usually when someone wants to boil it down to a single cause, they do it to promote something else, such as a theory or a Youtube video. Reality rarely is this simple, and often I find that the causes behind something are arranged as a self-reinforcing network of causes that point in the same direction, rather than a single all-important cause. I think this is also the case for this war. Lets go through the causes that I see lying behind it.

Russian nationalism

As I've argued earlier, there is a strong strain of revanchist and expansionist Russian nationalism that has become quite dominant in Russian society. This is nothing new, Russia has long been called a "prison of nations" where territories and nations have been subjugated and brutally annihilated. This did not stop during the communist days, but was at its height with Stalin who was a fervent Russian nationalist even though he was from Georgia himself. This included Ukraine, which Russian rulers have attempted to assimilate into a Russian identity and eradicate the Ukrainian national identity for over a hundred years.

Putin has reportedly always been an opponent of Ukraine independence:

"Mikhail Zygar (2016) reveals that Putin has always been obsessed and frustrated with Ukraine. Zygar (2016, 85) writes that Putin was obsessed with Ukraine from the first day of his presidency saying, ‘We must do something, or we’ll lose it’ (Zygar (2016, 258). When somebody mentions Ukraine in front of Putin, ‘he flies into a fury; the words at the end of his sentences are replaced by Russian expletives. For him, everything the Ukrainian government does is a crime’ (Zygar 2016, 4)." (source)

Just after the 2014 invasion of Crimea, Putin wrote about the 1954 decision to add Crimea to Ukraine: "Back then, it was impossible to imagine that Ukraine and Russia may split up and become two separate states" (source). On the occasion of the 2022 invasion, he called modern Ukraine “Vladimir Lenin’s Ukraine” and a mistake (source).

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, not always a clear critic of Russian imperialism, recently stated his opposition to it quite clearly:

"There are several important things happening to Russia that need to be understood: First, jealousy of Ukraine and its possible successes is an innate feature of post-Soviet power in Russia; it was also characteristic of the first Russian president, Boris Yeltsin. But since the beginning of Putin’s rule, and especially after the Orange Revolution that began in 2004, hatred of Ukraine’s European choice, and the desire to turn it into a failed state, have become a lasting obsession not only for Putin but also for all politicians of his generation.

 

Control over Ukraine is the most important article of faith for all Russians with imperial views, from officials to ordinary people. In their opinion, Russia combined with a subordinate Ukraine amounts to a “reborn U.S.S.R. and empire.” Without Ukraine, in this view, Russia is just a country with no chance of world domination. Everything that Ukraine acquires is something taken away from Russia." (source)

Oil and gas

A highly trending (at time of speaking) youtube video makes a breathless monocausal argument for the oil and gas angle for the Ukraine conflict (“this is a war over resources”), with some far fetched claims about how oil prices cause various Russian invasions. However, the basic underlying facts are sound. Russia is a country very dependent on the export of oil and gas:

"By 2020, overseas trade made up 46% of Russia’s GDP, World Bank figures show. Oil and gas still provided more than half its exports, with metals accounting for 11%, chemicals about 8% and food products 7%." (source)

So the export these materials combine to about 72% of exports. What is worse, exports of oil and gas alone make up 39% of the federal budget. But it gets worse. According to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

“Trade accounts for 29 percent of Russian GDP, but Russia imports about 60 percent of its total consumption and pays for imports with earnings from exports, which are overwhelmingly dominated by oil and gas.” 

By adding up all the indirect contributions of oil to GDP, the “overall figure is now up to 67—70 percent” of GDP that comes from oil and gas (source). Even if they are off by half, that is a truly staggering number. Who are Russia's customers? Nearly all the pipelines go to Europe, and Russia is Europe's biggest source of oil and gas. The only big competitor is Norway, but Norway alone is not capable of producing enough volume to seriously threaten Russia's dominance in oil and gas.

Enter Ukraine. The last two decades, vast amounts of hydrocarbons have been found under the surface in Ukraine, mainly located in the Donbas region, and mainly gas, which is the hardest for the Europeans to source from other suppliers.

“As of late 2019, known Ukrainian reserves amounted to 1.09 trillion cubic meters of natural gas, second only to Norway’s known resources of 1.53 trillion cubic meters.” (source)

As luck would have it, a large pipeline network already goes from Russia to Europe through Ukraine. So all Ukraine needed to do is pump up the oil and gas. Shell signed a contract to extract gas from the Yuzivska  gas fields in the Donbas in 2013, one year before the 2014 invasion. They abandoned the drilling in 2015 because of the ongoing war. One competitor had been eliminated.

Food

Ukraine is a food producing powerhouse:

Ukraine produces 18% of the world’s sunflower seed, safflower or cottonseed oil exports; 13% of corn production; 12% of global barley exports; and 8% of wheat and meslin. (source)

While the income from the sale of food may appear small compared to oil and gas, it does buy considerable leverage:

Between them, Ukraine and Russia account for 70% of Egypt and Turkey’s wheat supply. While Ukraine is a major exporter to Asia, Russia provide a large percentage of the wheat demands for sub-Saharan Africa. (source)

Together, Russia and Ukraine would "account for almost 30% of global wheat trade ... Russia, along with its ally Belarus, is also a major exporter of the fertilizers needed to plant a wide range of crops.".

Taking control of Ukraine, which is somewhat inaccurately described as the "breadbasket of Europe" as the EU produces four times as much wheat, would dramatically increase Russia's leverage over food markets, and access to food is a vital political and economic weapon that Russia could use to gain influence. They are already using the threat of famine in the third world to pressure western nations, making the problem worse by mining ports and bombing grain facilities (source).

Political competition

Putin's regime is fake democracy, and it repeats daily through its state media daily how flawed western democracies are. Russians are not stupid, they know their democracy is fake. The point the regime wants to drive home is not that it is genuine or not corrupt, this would not work, but rather that all democracies are fake, all regimes are corrupt, and all held principles are hypocritical. Its aim is not to rouse the population to action, but to drive it to apathy.

This strategy is not unique to Russia, but is prevalent in the far-right, as the writer Amanda Marcotte has pointed out:

"This precedes Trump, but he's made it worse: The GOP tactic is not to claim to be good guys, but to claim everyone is equally bad, and to breed cynicism and paranoia. Notably, this is also how Putin controls the Russian public." (source)

Leftist writer Paul Mason concludes that 

“Putin’s attack on Ukraine is driven by the need to delegitimise any form of democracy in a country whose language, religion and culture is adjacent to that of Russia” (source)

Moreover, Russia is a economically a kleptocracy, where a class of extremely wealthy political rentiers extract value from low-complexity industry such as raw materials and metallurgy. The Ukrainian sociologst Volodymyr Ishchenko, calling these rentiers "political capitalists", wrote:

The discussion of the role of the West in paving the way for the Russian invasion is typically focused on NATO’s threatening stance toward Russia. But taking the phenomenon of political capitalism into account, we can see the class conflict behind Western expansion, and why Western integration of Russia without the latter’s fundamental transformation could never have worked. There was no way to integrate post-Soviet political capitalists into Western-led institutions that explicitly sought to eliminate them as a class by depriving them of their main competitive advantage: selective benefits bestowed by the post-Soviet states. The so-called “anti-corruption” agenda has been a vital, if not the most important, part of Western institutions’ vision for the post-Soviet space, widely shared by the pro-Western middle class in the region. For political capitalists, the success of that agenda would mean their political and economic end. (source)

The political trajectory started by the Maidan revolution set Ukraine on a collision course with the rentier class, many of whom had economic interests in Ukraine, or feared direct competition from it. 

Redirecting internal dissent

This is the argument that regime security was a much bigger motivation for the invasions than national security. Many articles have been written pushing this idea. Cambridge University professor Aleksandar Matovski argues that both invasions coincided with mass discontent in Russia:

“to the extent you can capture the threat of mass rebellion with opinion and protest trends, late 2021 looked the worst in Putin’s entire tenure. In 2021, ~20% of Russians openly declared they would join protests with political or economic demands, per Levada data. The rate of labor protest was the highest recorded during Putin’s tenure - despite the pandemic and the much greater repression. At the same time, popular revolts have pushed neighboring dictatorships in Belarus and Kazakhstan to the brink of collapse – and Russian pollsters detected signs that these events might motivate Russians to rise up in protest too. Trust in Putin dipped below 30% for the first time, suggesting that his approval (which remained high) was “hollowing out” and that he was starting to lose the confidence even of core supporters. Also, the share of Russians who declared they wanted to retire after the end of his term in 2024 was about to surpass those wanting him to stay. Last time that happened was in 2013– and it was reversed by the Crimea annexation. The invasion of Ukraine is achieving the same now.” (source)

He concludes:

“It does not matter where NATO’s border is; the Putin regime will still have an incentive to stage conflicts to demobilize opposition in Russia” (source)

Another two British professors, experts on Russia, wrote along the same lines:

“That the benefits in Russia’s cost-benefit calculations are evident only to its president presents a problem both for understanding the current situation and predicting Putin’s next move. To solve this puzzle, it’s helpful to take the Ukraine crisis out of the realm of foreign policy and put it into the world in which Putin spends most of his time: that of Russian domestic politics. Viewed in that light, the war represents a continuation of Putin’s efforts to govern by presenting Russia as threatened by external forces bent on its destruction, and himself as the only leader who can successfully oppose them.” (source)

Navalny sees it the same way:

" the Russian elite over the past 23 years has learned rules that have never failed: War is not that expensive, it solves all domestic political problems, it raises public approval sky-high, it does not particularly harm the economy, and — most importantly — winners face no accountability. Sooner or later, one of the constantly changing Western leaders will come to us to negotiate." (source)

 

The Russian military industry

Besides oil and gas, there is one industry in which Russia actually produces technologically advanced products for export - weapons. Its military industry is both a pride and a substantial income and it is also necessary for Russia's rapid re-armament effort:

Russia’s arms export revenues of 15 billion U.S. dollars are dwarfed by its export of fuel and energy products that amounted to 134.7 billion U.S. dollars in 2016, according to the UN Comtrade database. Since 2014, export of agricultural products and foodstuffs have surpassed Russia’s arms export; for 2016 this line amounted to 17 billion U.S. dollars. Still, arms account for approximately 70% of Russia’s export of machinery and equipment. It is also an important source for complementary revenues without which defence industrial marginal costs would be higher. (source)

When the USSR was dissolved in 1991, Ukraine was left with about 30 percent of the Soviet military industry. This is a huge chunk of the its military industry, but it got worse:

“There are, however, parts and services that Russia currently imports only from Ukraine. Russia’s military depends on Motor Sich in the southeastern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhia for helicopter engines and on the Russian company Antonov’s plant in Kyiv for transport planes. Most importantly, the Russian army relies on the Southern Machine Building Plant Association, known as Yuzhmash, in the southeastern Ukrainian city of Dnipropetrovsk, which designs, manufactures, and services rockets and missiles.

Some of the most important ties between the two countries’ military industries relate to Russia’s strategic nuclear forces. More than half of the components of Russia’s ground-based intercontinental ballistic missiles come from Ukraine. Ukrainian specialists carry out regular inspections of Russia’s strategic missiles to certify them for service as well as supplying essential missile components including targeting and control systems for the RS-20 Voyevoda missile (known by NATO as the SS-18 Satan).” (source)

It was not just manufacture, but also many of the famous military design bureaus were in Ukraine.

“The technologies of Ukrainian companies made it possible to produce 12 of the 20 most powerful missile technologies of the Cold War, including the unparalleled “Satan” (developed by the design bureau “Southern” Dnipro)" (source) 

The shipyards in Mykolaiv built some of Russia’s most iconic vessels, including Russia’s only aircraft carrier and the now famous Black Fleet flagship Moskva that was recently sunk. In 2012, Ukraine was at its peak as an independent weapons exporter, and became the world’s 4th largest. At the start of the conflict in 2014, Ukraine was the world’s 8th largest arms exporter (source).

As the 2014 invasion began, Ukraine stopped selling weapons technology to Russia. The weapons and dual-use technology sanctions levied on Russia by the western nations made it difficult for Russia to find substitutes, and it had to make its own, which substantially delayed many projects.

"Allegedly, 400 Russian defence companies were dependent on supplies from Ukraine for more than 3,000 parts, components and final products for more than 200 different arms systems, including engines for helicopters, aircraft and surface ships." (source)

Take for instance navy gas turbines. After the 2014 invasion, Russia struggled to complete its latest naval vessels:

“Prior to the current tensions, Ukraine was Russia’s primary producer of marine gas turbines … Reportedly, two Project 22350 frigates, the Admiral Golovko and Admiral Isakov, are sitting with no propulsion plants. ... New ships lying idle are a strategic hindrance to the Russian Navy” (source)

Eventually Russia managed to produce new engines domestically. But the problems cascaded throughout their military industry, and Russia's military industry is on the clock:

"However, a shared weak point in many of these export products is that they are in fact modernised versions of Soviet systems and equipment, and the need to replace them with new generation systems is rapidly getting more pressing." (source)

If Russia had succeeded in taking control of Ukraine in 2014, they would have not only removed a competitor in the military market, but also consolidated and secured vital supply chains to their own military industry.

The NATO bogeyman

While I do not buy the argument about NATO causing the war by offering a lukewarm invite to Ukraine, NATO did have a role to play. Once Putin started the 2014 invasion, the die was cast. The attempt failed, and made an enemy out of Ukraine. NATO supported Ukraine in its resistance to the invasion and attempt destabilization of their country, selling it weapons and offering its army training. Support for NATO membership was soaring and Russian popularity was plummeting. Every year that passed Ukraine became a more capable and well-armed opponent. From the Russian perspective, Putin was on the clock, and the time to get Ukraine back under Russian control was running out.

Two years before the war broke out, Zelenskyy advisor Oleksiy Arestovych spelled out the perspective from the Ukrainian side, and almost prophetically predicted the 2022 invasion two years before it happened:

If Ukraine wants to join NATO, "it will probably lead to a massive military operation by Russia against Ukraine. Because they're going to have to destroy us in terms of infrastructure and turn everything into devastation territory so that they [NATO] don't want us... They have to do it before we join NATO, so NATO won't be interested in us. They wouldn't be interested because of the devastation. With a 99.9% probability, the price for our entry into NATO is a major war with Russia. And if we don't join NATO, it's gonna be a Russian takeover in 10 to 12 years. And that's our current crossroads." (source)

Then he was asked: which course would then be better? He responded, "Of course, a big war with Russia, and joining NATO on the basis of victory over Russia." He then outlined the strategy that Russia would follow, and it matched almost perfectly with what happened.  

But I also kind of agree with the argument that Russia feared the EU more than NATO:

“It's worth remembering that Russia's 2014 invasion of Ukraine was sparked by a trade treaty, not by a near- or even mid-term threat of NATO expansion. And no, the EU is not a back door to NATO. If anything, the NATO is a back door to the EU, which is much, much harder to join. …

The expansion of EU influence puts insurmountable pressure on the Russian political economy to move from a rent-based, patronal model of wealth creation and power relations, to a system of institutionalized competition. Having satellite states that are governed in the same patronalist mode as Russia gives Moscow geo-economic breathing space, adding years or decades to the system's viability.” (source)

This argument also ties in neatly with the other arguments above about political competition and internal dissent. NATO is the bogey-man in Russia - it was after all created to contain the threat from the USSR, which Russians still identify with - and so it is at the same time a military competitor or threat, and a useful external enemy to stifle internal dissent. The one does not rule out the other.

In conclusion

In my view, the Russian invasion of Ukraine is fueled ultimately by its internal politics and goals. As long as Russia has thousands of nuclear missiles, there simply can be no threats to Russian national security from other states. All its threats are internal, and its fears should be viewed as regime security, not national security. Russia is one of the few remaining powers in the world today that has not abandoned the colonial model of the world. What it is doing is very much in line with its own historical precedent and with how colonial powers acted in the past. Colonial conquest in the past for the European powers were not just about conquering wealth, but also internal prestige of the regimes, redirecting away from dissent, and having an escape valve for troublesome elements at home.

The Russian regime is building up an image of itself as a strongman regime, and such a regime needs a powerful military, and it needs enemies that it can protects its people from. Given its history as the USSR, the only enemy that could give it sufficient legitimacy in the long run would be NATO. An unending conflict in a small breakaway republic simply does not rally the population sufficiently to offset the unrest the conflict itself generates in terms of dead soldiers, a lesson learned after Chechnya. In order to maintain a military capable of matching NATO, it needs a larger domestic production, and much of that capability was lost with the USSR as it lost its satellite states. To pay for it all, it also needs to maintain its dominance within oil and gas exports, and to a lesser extent food exports, all of which were threatened by the rise of an independent Ukraine. To top it off, Ukraine also offered the vision of an alternative Slavic identity with genuine democracy and a break with patronage economics.

If I am right in this analysis, then negotiations will lead nowhere until all alternatives have been completely exhausted. When leading Russian politicians explicitly say they want Ukraine to stop existing as an independent nation - believe them. The war will continue until the Russian regime believes its regime is threatened more by the continuation of the war through its costs than by ending it and suffer the failure of its internal propaganda. Even Ukraine's capitulation would not end the conflict, it would merely move it elsewhere as the Russian regime needs to maintain the external enemy to silence the internal enemy.