Putin’s Fear of a Revolution in Russia Caused Him to Go to War in Ukraine, Trebeyko Says

 Paul Goble

            Staunton, Jan. 19 – Many observers have focused on Vladimir Putin’s use of the word “war” in his recent speech in St. Petersburg to talk about the conflict in Ukraine, a usage that puts him at odds with his own regime’s massive effort to punish anyone who refers to his actions there as anything but “a special military operation.”

            But that is not the most important thing he said in that speech, Nikita Trebeyko argues. Instead, “the most important thing” was contained in the following lines: “The tragedy began in 2014,” Putin said, “with the anti-constitutional overthrow of the government in Ukraine by an armed rising” (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=63C83974EDB45 https://vkrizis.ru/russia/putin-obyasnil-gde-vse-byli-vosem-let/).

            “The essence of this is clear,” the commentator says. Putin began the war as “vengeance against a popular uprising for its overthrow of the corrupt regime of Viktor Yanukovich” and thus the war as a whole represents nothing more than “an attempt by the imperial oligarchate to suppress that rising.”

            Putin and his regime were prepared before 2014 to “’reconcile themselves’” to the loss of the territory of Ukraine, Trebeyko says; but “they couldn’t do so with the victory of a popular uprising there because the provided a model for Russians and thus directly threatened the ruling nomenklatura of the Russian Federation.”