What are the Mysterious Root Causes of War, Putin Keeps Talking About

 

Various news articles that write about War in Ukraine often mention that Putin keeps talking about "root causes" of war that, according to him, has to be addressed to end the war. Putin does not explain what these root causes are, so news pundits speculate themselves. Often, they conclude something that Putin does not think that Ukraine is a state as he wrote in his book in 2021 so he wants to completely annex it.

That is not the case. Over the course of my blogging, I wrote a lot of articles about real reasons (or "root causes" in Putin's terms) for this war. The articles I wrote often suffered from too much wordiness as I tried to connect all the dots in the complex logical chains that led to this outcome. Here I will try to word it out again.

Putin is democratiaphobe, he is afraid of democracy. 

What is so scary in a democracy that make a man who hunts tigers shirtless to shit his pants and hide under the bad, hoping it will go away? A very simple and real possibility to lose power if people vote against you. Real accountability and criminal responsibility for one's actions. Inability to embezzle public money, store them in tax heavens and use them for personal pet projects. All things Putin likes to do, but things Russian public increasingly unwilling to allow him doing.

After all appeal of democracy is simple and very straightforward. People should be allowed to vote to decide why governs and how they allowed to govern. You do not need much effort to convince anyone it is a good system. Its common sense simple and appealing.

However, democracy means dictator and elites in charge could lose power so what they want is to convince people that democracy is bad. How to do that? Not so simple actually. No matter what various paid pundits and people like Dmitri Kiselev and Vladimir Solovyov say, public remains skeptical and unconvinced. After all various prospering Western countries are all democratic and those former eastern bloc nations that were better at transitioning towards democracy are more prosperous than those who did not. It really is a common sense that democracy is better than dictatorship.

However, what if your political career and even physical survival depend on defying this common sense and continuously denying people their democracy. What do you do in such situation? Any argument against democracy is also against common sense. How you defy common sense? You will need some really twisted 5D chess logic that puts everything upside down and somehow makes black white and white black.

To defy common sense, you need solutions that contradict common sense. Starting a war to increase your support at home sound just like what you need. Do not forget to blame the victim for starting or provoking war in the first place and then spice it up with complex reason for war, called root causes, justified by alleged historical wrongs, did to your country in the past. I even wrote an article about specifically this solution and why it works in a dictatorship. 

Why this problem suddenly surfaced now?

During Soviet times USSR was insulated from democracy by the Iron Curtain and then a belt of Eastern European puppet states, that all practiced communism controlled by Moscow. There was no internet, and average Soviet Citizen was not allowed to travel to the West and see for themselves just what they are missing out on.

All that changed after the collapse of USSR and dissolution of Warsaw Pact and Comecon. Al first all including Russia experimented with democracy and what not. However, if Russia later consolidated into an autocracy, many of its immediate neighbors instead moved towards democracy. Gradually a diffused field of transitional regimes, divided into two neat blocks of new democracies and neo autocracies. 

This division made it simple to compare who has it better new democracies or neo autocracies and the comparison was not in autocracies favor. Democracies enjoy economic growth, better quality of life, less corruption and even visa free access across the Europe. Meanwhile autocracies are on average poorer, have corrupt rent-seeking police and government officials, worse quality of life or life expectancy and citizens of these countries have to apply for complex Schengen Visas to visit almost anywhere in Europe. 

No wonder that people who live in autocracies look across the border into neighboring democracies and ask themselves why we can't have all that as well. Why some dirt-poor gypsy Moldovan citizen can have EU grants and travel to Schengen area visa free, and a citizen of fancy Moscow has to get a visa first. To which EU happily answers it is because Moldova is democracy and Russia is not, get rid of Putin, establish democracy and you will be able to travel visa free to EU as well. If you go as far as join the EU, you will even be able to legally live and work anywhere in the EU like German or French citizen. A tempting offer for a citizen of Moscow. So, tempting they sometimes stage large antigovernment protests in hope of overthrowing Putin and establishing democracy. After all similar protests in Ukraine did lead towards fall of autocratic government and establishment of democratic governance, it can work in Russia as well.

All that certainly does not endear Putin or Russian elites to the democracy. If Euromaidan fills average citizen with hope, it fills elites with existential dread. If protesters win, then it will be the end of them all.

Putin and the elites tend to blame the West for the protests but what they blame in reality is existence of democracy itself. They think if only democracy did not exist, then they would not have to deal with these protests and there will be no 

So, when Putin talks about root causes, he means existence of democracy as a system of government. System which very existence puts his existence in danger.

So, what Putin wants from war in Ukraine is not the 4 oblasts or even change of government in Kyiv or complete annexation. He wants to make democracy go away. He invaded Ukraine because it's from Ukraine democracy leaks into Russia. Putin wants to stop that leakage somehow.

However, that means they have to fight against democracy, against idea, system, abstract concept. It's like fighting against sunrise or gravity force or windmills like Don Quichotte de la Mancha. How do you even fight against something like that?

If it was possible to stop democracy by putting "No democracy beyond this point. Please discard your democracy into bins provided before crossing the border." signs on Russian borders, Putin would have done that. Alas, democracy is no deterred by such signage or prohibitions.

Plan number two involves shelling Ukrainian cities, then show this damage on Russian TV as evidence of "failures of democracy". Someone like Dmitri Kiselev can weave together a narrative where he will blame the damage on democratic nature of Ukrainian government, contrasting it with Russia where autocratic government prevented such damage. That will not convince everyone but at least it something. 

Putin does however open to other suggestions that will somehow defeat democracy and, with it, danger to his continued rule in Russia. Alternatively, if not defeat it, then at least insulate him and his position of power from it. 

If you have any ideas that will help this case, please comment to this article or reply to me on X.

As things stand, Putin will continue fight democracy until forever. That is all he ever done since he became Prime Minister in 1999.