Why Is Russia Massing Troops on Its Ukraine Border?

MOSCOW – As the Kremlin rallies near Ukraine, it signals a central belief: Russia cares more about the fate of its southwestern neighbor than the West ever will.

In speeches, interviews and detailed articles, President Vladimir V. Putin and his close associates this year telegraphed a unique fixation on the former Soviet republic. The Kremlin thesis holds that the Ukrainians are “one people” with the Russians and live in a crumbling state controlled by Western forces determined to divide and conquer the post-Soviet world.

Ukrainians who overthrew a pro-Russia president in 2014 and are increasingly committed to tying their country to Western institutions would disagree. But Putin’s condemnation finds an open ear among many Russians who see themselves closely linked to Ukraine through generations of linguistic, cultural, economic, political and family ties. With a force of 175,000 Russian soldiers scheduled to be in position near Ukraine early next year, which Western officials fear may mark the start of an invasion, centuries of shared history will play a major role.

Putin’s move can be a cold, compulsory calculation, backed up by signals that the threat of war is real – a way of forcing President Biden to recognize a Russian sphere of interest in Eastern Europe. Mr Putin said in the past few days that Russia will demand “legal guarantees” that Ukraine will not join the NATO alliance or take on additional Western forces, and he is due to speak to Mr Biden via videoconference on Tuesday.

But for Putin – and many other Russians – the almost eight-year-old conflict with Ukraine is not just about geopolitics; it is about a wounded national psyche, a historical injustice that needs to be corrected. One of his former advisers, Gleb O. Pavlovsky, described in an interview the Kremlin’s view of Ukraine as “a trauma wrapped in trauma” – the dissolution of the Soviet Union combined with the separation of a nation that Russians long viewed as just an extension on their own.

For many Ukrainians, Putin’s appeal to a common history is just a hollow attempt to appropriate the country’s own legacy and justify territorial ambitions.

“They stole our past,” said Alyona Getmanchuk, director of the New Europe Center, a pro-Western think tank in Kiev. “Now they are trying to steal our future.”

After the pro-Western revolution in Ukraine in 2014, Russia invaded and then annexed the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea, fueling an ongoing separatist war in the east of the country. Mr Putin has since tried to prevent Ukraine from drifting west – and has expressed growing anger that the United States is training with and helping Ukrainian soldiers to arm them.

Using military force to bring Ukraine back on the Russian side would damage Putin’s domestic standing, polls suggest – one reason Russian analysts are skeptical that Putin would pull the trigger on what is likely a terrifying invasion Price will bear in Ukrainian, and Russian lives. But Putin’s conviction that Russians and Ukrainians are unfairly and artificially divided is shared even by Putin’s opponents in his country.

While other conflicts in the post-Soviet world have drawn ethnic groups against one another, the conflict between Russia and Ukraine is more complicated. Ukrainian is the official language of Ukraine, but Russian – which is closely related – is still widely spoken.

Russians often consider Kiev, now the Ukrainian capital and once the center of medieval Kievan Rus, to be the birthplace of their nation. Well-known Russian-speaking writers such as Nikolai Gogol and Mikhail Bulgakov came from Ukraine, as did the communist revolutionary Leon Trotsky and the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyj speaks Ukrainian in public today, but was first best known as a Russian-speaking comedian who performed throughout the former Soviet Union.

“One of the colossal problems that drive us into conflict is that Russian identity does not exist without Ukrainian identity,” said Ilya Ponomarev, a former member of the Russian parliament who was the only lawmaker to vote against the annexation of Crimea.

Mr. Ponomarev later fled to Ukraine, where he received Ukrainian citizenship and continues to live.

Millions of Russians and Ukrainians have family members in each other’s countries, in part a product of migration during the Soviet era when Ukraine was an industrial location. The Russian opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny, who was arrested earlier this year, spent the summers of his childhood in Ukraine, the birthplace of his father. Despite being a critic of Putin’s aggressive foreign policy, Navalny said in 2014 that he disagreed with Ukrainians “for whom it is a matter of principle to prove that we are different peoples”.

“I don’t see any difference between Russians and Ukrainians, absolutely none,” he said in a radio interview at the time.

Emotion aside, the idea of ​​a Ukraine allied with the West as a security threat to Russia is widespread in Russian foreign policy circles. Ivan Timofeev, program director of the state-funded Russian International Affairs Council, said NATO forces in Ukraine would drastically alter the military balance even though the alliance already borders Russia in the Baltic and Arctic.

“If it is Ukraine too, the potential theater of war will be very large,” said Timofeev of NATO expansion. “The longer the front line, the less clear it is where the attack will come from.”

In an article for the Valdai Club, a foreign policy forum closely linked to the Russian government, Timofeev said last month that a full Russian invasion of Ukraine was highly unlikely, in part because it could fuel internal discontent. Even if Ukraine always has a higher priority for Russia than for the US, he warns that Western sanctions and military aid would make a Russian invasion extremely costly. Rather than announcing a major war, Russia’s military build-up is intended as a signal to the West of Russia’s extreme dissatisfaction with its growing influence in Ukraine.

“If reunification with Crimea has been enthusiastically received by the Russian public for many reasons, it is unlikely that a major war would find such support,” wrote Timofeev.

Nonetheless, Mr Putin has used the emotional weight many Russians attach to Ukraine for his own ends, both on the world stage and in domestic politics. Mr Pavlovsky, a longtime Kremlin adviser until turning against Putin in 2011, told Ukraine has now become a vehicle for Putin’s ambitions to revive Russia’s status as a world power. That means talks with the United States in particular – as has been shown in recent weeks, when Russia is pushing for Washington to negotiate Ukraine despite its troop movements fearing the West will invade it.

Understand the escalating tensions in Ukraine

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Ominous warnings. Russia described the strike as a destabilizing act in violation of the ceasefire agreement and raised fears of renewed intervention in Ukraine, which could drag the US and Europe into a new phase of the conflict.

The position of the Kremlin. Russia’s President Vladimir V. Putin, who increasingly portrays NATO’s eastward expansion as an existential threat to his country, said Moscow’s military build-up was a response to Ukraine’s deepening partnership with the alliance.

“Ukraine is a field of strategic maneuvers to bring Russia back into strategic dialogue,” said Pavlovsky. “He is interested in the global level, not the regional one.”

Domestically, the annexation of Crimea, a glittering Black Sea peninsula, drove Putin’s approval rating to almost 90 percent in 2014. This year the Kremlin escalated its attacks on Ukraine’s pro-Western leadership by appealing for Ukraine’s place in Russian identity; Mr Putin opened a July article on why Ukrainians and Russians are “one people” by describing their current split as “a great common disaster”.

The West, he wrote, is trying to turn Ukraine into a “bridgehead against Russia”, similar to how it claimed that the Poles and Austrians tried to tear the Ukrainians away in earlier centuries. As evidence, Mr. Putin presented such diverse trends as laws promoting the use of the Ukrainian language in Ukraine and the country’s deepened cooperation with Western military.

“It would not be an exaggeration to say that the course of forced assimilation, the formation of an ethnically pure Ukrainian state that is aggressively oriented towards Russia, is comparable in its consequences to the use of a weapon of mass destruction against us,” wrote Putin.

The message is having an impact. According to surveys by the independent Levada Center in Moscow this year, the proportion of Russians who say they have negative attitudes towards Ukraine rose from 31 percent in February to 49 percent in August.

In fact, it was Putin’s policy that incited large numbers of Ukrainians against Russia, said Ms. Getmanchuk, director of the think tank in Kiev. Ukrainian support for joining NATO rose to 54 percent this year, compared to 14 percent in 2012, according to the Razumkov Center, a research facility in Kiev.

“Of course, he inadvertently contributed to the development of Ukraine as a nation,” she said.

Alina Lobzina contributed to the reporting.