Hello, and thank you for this invitation.
I am a professor of political science. I have worked on Russian and Ukrainian domestic politics for about 20 years now. I have extensive experience researching the political processes of both countries. I have written articles and books about that.
What I want to talk about today is the political root of the crisis. As you'll hear in a second, I have a slightly different view from the admiral's, so you'll get a broad range of views here.
The root cause of Russia's invasion of Ukraine is the view expressed many times by Putin, but also probably held by a portion of Russian elites in society, that Ukraine is not a real nation and should not be entitled to its own state. The dissolution of the Soviet Union was a tragedy, according to Putin. He has emphasized this numerous times, and he is working right now to restore it—and here I agree with the admiral—with a view towards his legacy.
One key point that I wanted to emphasize here is that this rhetoric from Russia lays bare the fact that NATO's eastern expansion neither precipitated nor hastened this crisis. NATO [Technical difficulty—Editor] issue to Russia. I'm not going to say that it's irrelevant, but it is behind in importance to the reunification of the Russian and Ukrainian peoples. Even former Soviet president Gorbachev opined recently that he always thought the separation of the Ukrainian and Russian people into two states would cause serious problems. This is first about this issue, and only secondarily about security issues.
Wrapped up, however, in this world view is really a very gross miscalculation about how strongly Ukrainian citizens are attached to their national identity and to their independent state. The resistance that we see from the Ukrainian army and the Ukrainian population at large shows that Russia's expectation with which they went into this war—that they would easily advance to Kyiv as the Ukrainian army lays arms down and the population acquiesces—has turned out to be false. Ironically, this view of Putin, partly a Russian view, undermines rather than advances Russia's stated security interests in the region. Had Putin taken Ukrainian independence seriously, the current crisis could have been avoided.
Even after pro-Russian president Yanukovych was driven out by a popular uprising in 2014, Russia could have achieved many of its security goals through soft power: no NATO expansion into Ukraine, as Ukraine has never been even close to joining NATO; a Ukraine that was separate but largely friendly to Russia; and continued levers of Russia's influence over the political process in Ukraine. More pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian presidents alternated in power throughout Ukraine's 30 years of independence. Russia had important levers of economic and political power in Ukraine. All that was needed was for Putin to recognize the 2014 events for what they really were, a domestic upheaval against an increasingly authoritarian and unpopular president, rather than a western plot against Russia. He went with the second interpretation. This is where we're at now.
I also wanted to address the broader issue of how peace can be achieved, and what security and political situation we will have once these hostilities end, which we hope is sooner rather than later.
The latest news from today is that Russia may be willing to start talks with two pre-conditions: Ukraine should disarm and stay neutral outside of NATO; and the west should agree to a formal recognition of Crimea as Russian territory. For now, these are non-starters, but we really need to start thinking about what peace may and should look like. Agreeing to disarm is equivalent to capitulation of Ukraine without any security guarantees from somewhere that Russia would not invade again.