March 09, 2022
War in the Ukraine: What’s Happening and Why
Dr. Sharon Murphy, professor of history, presented a lecture on the causes of the conflict in Ukraine on Wednesday, March 2. The talk was sponsored by the Liberal Arts Honors Program.
Transcript:
Great, thank you very much. A couple of disclaimers. First, I am not an expert on Russian history. We have been trying to hire a new expert on Russian history in our department and unsuccessfully the last couple of years. So hopefully we’ll have one in the near future. So, but I have had a long-standing interest in the Ukraine, even though it’s outside my area of interest.
So, I feel like I’m equipped enough for these purposes here. Two, we don’t have a huge amount of time and it’s a lot of history. So, I’m going to be oversimplifying things to just kind of give you… and hopefully I have time for Q&A, if there’s stuff you want me to talk about a little more in-depth, I will do that.
As Dr. Lynch was saying, history matters. So, I have the class list for what’s being offered in history next semester. If you’d like to take one afterwards, feel free. Lots of great things to learn about. I’m going to do this mostly in maps. And so, we’re going to be talking about what Ukraine was, is, and part of that is because some of the argument being made by Vladimir Putin is about historic Ukraine, and that it’s historically part of Russia.
So that’s part of what we’re going to interrogate, is whether or not that’s actually so or not. So, I’d like to start just by looking at Ukraine today or actually I should say Ukraine two weeks ago, not exactly today, because we need to be centered a little on what we’re talking about. Where it is. Ukraine sits just north of the Black Sea here.
And so, it’s always easy to find it. If you kind of look for this Crimean Peninsula jutting out into the Black Sea and then draw an oval – that’s basically Ukraine. And here’s a more detailed map of it. Ukraine is bisected by the Juniper River and Kiev is right here in the middle. So, there’s an eastern Ukraine and a western Ukraine.
And historically, they have slightly different histories and have been occupied by different people at different times. So, keep this river in mind as well. It is the second largest country in Europe, after Russia. Most of you probably didn’t know that if I had asked you. It’s slightly larger than France by land area. It’s not the second largest in population, but it does have 44 million people.
That’s not a small number of people. This is a substantial number we’re talking about, about a third the size of Russia’s population.
Most are, three quarters, are ethnic Ukrainians, and they are a distinct ethnicity. They are Slavic. They come from the same kind of ethnic rootstock as Russians, but they do consider themselves to be ethnically different. About 17% are ethnic Russians living within the borders of Ukraine. It is a democracy. It has been struggling to establish that democracy over the past two decades to three decades.
But it is a democracy. So, when you have certain pundits making comments about why do we get involved with two authoritarian governments competing, that’s false. It’s not an authoritarian government in the Ukraine. And to us, if you’re not a Russian speaker or Ukrainian speaker, you may think that the language just sounds the same. They aren’t. It is a distinct language.
It’s roughly equivalent to Italian and Spanish. So, if you think about that, that’s it’s got about a third commonality between the languages. They share an alphabet. There’s a lot of similarities, but it’s about the same. So, you know, an Italian speaker and a Spanish speaker if they try, can get along and think about it. But they are distinct languages there.
So. Okay, so let’s go back in time a little. This is the end of the 17th century, the Russian Empire. And if we locate ourself here and this map is a little turned. But here we have our Crimean Peninsula jutting out into the Black Sea. Here’s our Juniper River. And so, you can see the eastern half of Ukraine is part of this Russian empire.
The western half is partially part of Poland. Ottoman Empire is encircling the Black Sea. One thing to always think about with the Russian empire, they are a vast empire, with a lot of ice. They are constantly looking for a warm water port, a way to access the Mediterranean, to get out. So, they’re constantly trying to get more access to land along the Black Sea.
Ideally, they’d love to get the Dardanelles in the Bosporus and but yeah, they’ve never actually accomplished that. But they need this warm water port. So that’s something that they’re always, they’re always working at. Over the course of the 18th and 19th century, they do move further along. And so, by the time we’re on the eve of World War I. This is the Russian Empire at its vastest at the early 20th century.
And you can see here that Ukraine is completely part of the empire even though certain Western sections are still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But also consider and this is something really thinking ahead of, if Putin’s trying to reestablish the Russian empire, what else was part of the Russian empire? Poland, or a good chunk of Poland. Some of it was German empire.
Minsk is part of Belarus. Then we have Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. And Finland … were all historically at one time, part of the Russian Empire. So, all of those people are a little nervous right now about what Putin is thinking. Their only advantage is, with the exception of Belarus, who is kind of a Russian ally right now, Poland Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia are all part of NATO.
So that gives them a little bit of comfort. And I’ll get to NATO in just a second. Now, part of this Russian empire was this idea of Russification. So, they wanted to really downplay the ethnic differences and make everybody Slavic. And they’re also eyeing places like Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Serbia, looking at them as well. Greece is not Slavic, but these other Slavic areas, talking about Pan-Slavism, with Russia as the mother Slav. And really like bringing all these Slavic peoples together even if they’re not all one country, but all in alliance.
But definitely for the people who are the ethnic minorities in Russia, there is an emphasis – No, you have to stop speaking your language. You have to start speaking Russian, you have to adopt Russian culture. So really downplaying those other ethnicities with this Russification.
You can imagine, it was resisted by a lot of people. They did not like this, but this was part of the plan here. Okay, so during the early 20th century, we do have two major episodes of revolution in Russia.
The first is in 1905. And notice here, this area in green here are the most intense peasant unrests during the 1905 revolution. And if you locate our Crimean Peninsula here, you see that a good chunk of this is within the area of Ukraine, the historic area of Ukraine. They are very rebellious, they do not like what’s going on within the Russian empire under Czar Alexander – sorry Czar Nicholas – and so their protesting that. 1917 is when we have our big revolutions in Russia this is during World War I and you’ll see, you see again, with these slash marks, this is also, again, a hotbed of turmoil.
So, this has always been a region that’s kind of resisted its Russian control. The Russia trying to dominate it. Okay so still in World War I, Russia is part of the allies in World War I – So with France, Spain, sorry – France, Britain, Italy, the United States eventually, but Russia is still a backwards country in terms of industrialization.
It doesn’t have a modern railroad system. It doesn’t have modern industry. It’s a very much still an agricultural country. And so, before the US gets into the war, the Russians are bearing the brunt of a lot of the fighting in, especially on the eastern front, but they’re bearing the brunt of a lot of fighting. It’s not going well.
The people are being sent to, troops are being sent to, the front with no equipment, with no guns, are being told, just find a dead comrade, and get their boots and get their gun. Not the most morale boosting. And so, there’s a lot of unrest, there’s a lot of starvation in Russia at this time, a lot of disruption of… Oh, I should have mentioned … so this area of Ukraine is also one of the most fertile regions of Europe.
It’s known as the breadbasket of Europe. They have some of the most fertile land, produce a lot of grain. So, if you’re in the midst of a war in an area that’s, you know, producing your food, that’s also going to disrupt your food production. So, during World War I, Russia is really struggling. And in 1917, there are peasant uprisings and eventually Czar Nicholas II has to abdicate and for a brief couple months there, Russia is a republic kind of modeled on the republics of like France.
But that still doesn’t solve the problem. They’re still fighting, they’re still starving. The Bolsheviks, this is when the Bolsheviks come in, Lenin comes in and takes control of the country. So, we have by November our Bolshevik Revolution, or October revolution, but it’s in November, so whatever. But, whoops, I just lost my ear. Excuse me, I have to stop talking with my hands. I’m half-Italian.
So, the Bolsheviks come in, and one of the things the Bolsheviks promised…and so the Bolsheviks come in, and Lenin says, ‘we’re going to give you peace and bread’. This is what the people wanted, and they said great. And in the Bolshevik mind, *cough*, excuse me. This war was a war of the capitalist system.
And so as far as they were concerned, let them battle it out. Let them all die and kill each other, and we’ll just then rise up and be the alternative. So, they were very happy to let the war go on without them. So, what’s important about this is the treaty they sign, it’s the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. And this is what…Russia leaves World War I; they exit the war. And this line here is the treaty line.
And one of the things I want you to notice is how much that exactly mirrors the current boundaries. So in some ways, Russia was recognizing, partially, that Germany was in their territory and was controlling that territory. But also, these are areas that are not historically part…These are areas they were willing to give up as part of this treaty line.
Okay. Very briefly. After World War I, post-World War I, we have Woodrow Wilson. President Woodrow Wilson is talking about – we don’t want all these countries in Europe who had formerly been part of the Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the German empire – being taken over again. So, it’s the idea of self-determination that people should be able to decide their own fate.
Wilson, pretty naively, just assumed, well, we’ll do it based on ethnicity. How hard could that be? Except for the fact that wherever you have an ethnic majority, you usually have an ethnic minority so it’s not like these clean-cut boundaries here. But in the aftermath of the war, they are successful in establishing a number of countries in Europe, many of which we recognize today. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Poland, Ukraine, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, which just means southern Slavs, that was that they just threw up their hands – ‘we’re not even going to try with you people’, Bulgaria, Albania, all are countries.
And notice here, Belarus and Ukraine are actually their own country at this time, coming out of World War I. Now, unfortunately for both of those countries, that didn’t last, they weren’t able to maintain that independence. And by 1920 in the case of Ukraine, 1921, in the case of Belarus, they are divided up between Poland, Lithuania, with Belarus and Russia, kind of divide up those countries.
And so again, not completely the East-West divide, but you do have a, you know, the western portions are more oriented to a pole and the eastern portions were oriented towards Russia here. Okay. And this is just an ethnic map of the Russian Empire. And you can see here, so the red are Russians, all of this yellow are Siberia and no one lives there, so, but you see here – what I really want to point out – are the Ukrainians up here. They are a separate ethnic group.
Even if the little red dots are Russians living in this area. As are the Belarussians, or white Russians, it was often called. And so, they’re Slavic. They’re all Slavic, but at the same time, they are still their own ethnic group here. Okay. So now here we have our USSR, our Soviet Union, one of the things to notice about this is the way the Soviet Union was put together.
It’s the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The idea was you can keep adding to it. It’s like American states. You can keep adding another one. The different ethnic groups were able to maintain… They are some separate identity within the Soviet Union. So, you have the Ukraine SSR, you have White Russia, Belarus, you have Kazakhstan as its own.
So, these different parts, it was actually part of the Soviet mindset that these are different peoples. They are recognizing them as separate peoples. Okay. So, a really important episode in Ukrainian history, when Stalin is trying to rapidly modernize the Soviet Union, trying to get them as industrialize as possible. He recognizes that he needs to really modernize agriculture first before he can modernize industry.
And he also needs the profits from agriculture, and the most profitable part of the country is the area of Ukraine. This fertile breadbasket. So, Stalin tells the Ukrainian people they need to turn over all of their grain to the Soviets who are going to then sell that grain, use that money to industrialize to the point that every piece of grain is confiscated from the Ukrainian people.
So here they are turning over all their grain. This grain is put in storehouses where it is under armed guard until it can be shipped abroad or to the rest of Europe. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian people have nothing. They’re not allowed to keep any grain for themselves. They are eating leaves off of trees and bark. They’re eating frogs, they’re eating their dogs, they’re eating anything they can find. There is nothing for them to eat.
Seven million Ukrainians die in the early 1930s from this episode. The term genocide doesn’t get invented until 1944 after the Holocaust. Once that term is invented, once the United Nations defines what a genocide is, they then go back and say, are there earlier episodes in the 20th century where we experienced genocide before the Holocaust? And they come up with three that are widely agreed on.
The first is Armenians in Turkey during World War I. The second is the Ukrainian genocide under Stalin. The third is the rape of Nanking in China. So, the Russians don’t recognize this. They say there was a famine. People died of starvation. They recognize that. They do not admit their role in inducing that famine. The Ukrainian people, on the other hand, do. So, it is something that they remember, they memorialize. It is something that is a strong part of their history – This treatment under the Soviets.
Okay, what’s next?
After World War II, fast forward, as we get into our Cold War between the West and the Soviet Union. Immediately after the end of World War II, now, United States and the Soviet Union are allies against Germany, against Hitler. After the war ends, the Soviet Union occupies, as we’re defeating Germany, the Soviet Union occupies most of Eastern Europe.
And during the mid-forties, what’s called the force Soviet invasion of Eastern Europe, they put in place puppet governments, that are going to be pro-Soviet. And so, they make sure places like Poland and Czechoslovakia and Hungary have governments that are going to be pro-Soviet in power. In response to this, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO. And you’ve been hearing a lot about NATO, gets created.
It is a defensive alliance. It’s the first time the United States ever enters a peacetime military alliance. It is a military alliance, but it’s a defensive military alliance. And the most important part is, an attack on any member of NATO is an attack on all. And so that will trigger everybody’s response. And so, you can see here in blue, all the countries are formed, part of NATO.
A couple of years later, the Soviet Union orchestrates its response, which is known as the Warsaw Pact. And those are the countries in red. And there, we have our Cold War in a nutshell. So. Okay, one other important episode that you’ve probably been hearing a little bit about. I’m not going to talk about much about this.
But near the end of the Soviet Union, there is a disaster in Chernobyl. Now, Chernobyl is right north of Kiev, right near the Belarus border. It’s a nuclear site that had a major failure, and it was a huge disaster. Mikhail Gorbachev who was leader of the Soviet Union at the time, much later, attributes the amount of money the Soviet Union had to devote to trying to clean up this disaster to the fall of the Soviet Union.
It basically bankrupted the country. So, we can talk about, you know, the importance of what Reagan was doing, we can talk about perestroika, and all these other things. Gorbachev later says, no, you know what? We were broke because of this. And this is on Ukrainian, so, I’m not going to get too much into that. But you might have heard, that was one of the first places the Russians took when they started this invasion.
Okay. After Chernobyl, after the bankruptcy, whatever the cause of it was, the Soviet Union dissolves. Ukraine immediately declares sovereignty. So, 1990, they declared themselves to be a sovereign nation. In 1991, they hold an independence referendum in which 90% of the population vote to leave the Soviet Union to become an independent country. And so they are, they are independent. So, similar to Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, these all are places formerly part of the Soviet Union who leave with the collapse of the Soviet Union. So, back to NATO.
So, we had this NATO – Warsaw Pact thing going on. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact goes away, NATO doesn’t, and in fact it grows. So, 1998, It’s pretty much the original countries. It’s kind of hard to see the borders here, but you can see, and this is, and I think this is Spanish. But anyway, you, you could figure out what the countries are.
You can see how much Nano has expanded to the point that some of the staunched former parts of the Soviet Union, or former parts of the Russian Empire, are now part of NATO. Ukraine has been asking to become part of NATO, that’s part of this discussion as well. So, you can see, NATO is on the one hand, definitely moving well into Eastern Europe.
On the other hand, remember, it’s a defensive alliance. It’s not an offensive alliance. So, Putin complains that, oh, I’m feeling threatened. What are you feeling threatened about? It’s a defensive alliance. It’s never, in its history, been offensive in any way.
Okay. So we are now in the nineties, in the early 21st century, Ukraine has to decide; are we going to be pro-Western, are we going to be pro Russia?
And they kind of swing back and forth. Part of it’s economic ties, trade ties. But in the last couple of years, they have been swinging very hard towards the west, towards Europe. They had – I forget the date on it now – a few years ago, their trade with Russia and their trade with the European Union was about equal in size.
It’s now swung almost all towards Europe, and their trade ties with Russia have been reduced significantly. A part of the reaction of Putin to this has been in 2014 when he actually invaded the Crimean Peninsula and took control of the Crimean Peninsula and has remained occupying that and at the same time, started promoting Russian insurgence in the most eastern districts. It’s important to recognize, though, even though, as we said, about 17% of the Ukraine is ethnic Russians.
Even higher percentage of native speaking Russians within the Ukraine. Just because they’re native speaking Russians or ethnically Russian, does not make them pro-Russia. Most of them still prefer an independent Ukraine. They are not…And I think that’s one of Putin’s miscalculations here, is he assumed that anyone who was ethnically Russian, or a Russian speaker, was going to automatically join when the Russians showed up.
And so, I think that’s been one of his surprises, is that, oh, wait, just because they’re Russian doesn’t mean they want to be with us, they kind of like being independent. And so, the last piece is 2019. Volodymyr Zelenskyy is elected, and he is very openly pro-Western. He’s not the only pro-Western politician they’ve had, but he has been very openly pro-Western.
So, he hasn’t been in power that long. He’s a young politician, he’s a comedian by trade. This is not his…he’s not a politician by trade…but…So, I think that that’s part of it. Again, Putin miscalculated, thinking he’s going to just run and not stand up to him. So, I think that was all I have, so I’ll go back to this map.
So, we have time. I was hoping I could get this done in a half hour. I’m right on a half hour. So, we have time for questions. After that blitzkrieg of a lecture there. So, Norm, we have to get where we need to… there we go. He’s going to…Norm right there, right behind you.
This is Phil Donahue. If you don’t know the reference, you’re too young.
[Phil] I have two questions. One, regarding Chernobyl.
Why was that the first objective of the Russians, was a for the nuclear material for a bomb? The second question is what… China has usually been associated with Russian politics. They’re not doing anything right now, are they just being cautious? Is that likely that they’re going to align themselves with Russia?
[Murphy] Good question. So first, why did Russia take Chernobyl first? I think it’s because it’s the easiest way to get to Kiev. So, it’s like the most direct… So, they’re invading through Belarus. Belarus is pro-Russian, but that’s like the road to Kiev. So, I think that it was just strategically the most direct route. I don’t think there was any other logic to it. I don’t know why you would want that.
The China question is really interesting. So, China… I think Chairman Xi is trying to be very careful here. On the one hand… So, China has Taiwan as their place that they claim is still part of China, that the Taiwanese say, no, we want nothing to do with you.
And on the one hand, um, a lot of people are worried that if Putin gets away with this, that’s going to give Xi an open hand to just say, Great, now I can go invade Taiwan and take them over. Now, Taiwan is much more militarily capable than Ukraine. So, he should be like looking very closely at this, that Ukraine is doing a pretty good job with what limited resources they have.
Taiwan is much better equipped. But I think she is also being very careful because you could actually think of Taiwan as being a renegade province, like the eastern provinces. And Putin’s argument is, these renegade provinces want to be with us. So, I am just supporting them. Taiwan is a renegade province in China’s eyes. If the rest of the world turns around and says Taiwan is also a renegade province, we’re going to recognize them. That just undid what she…So I think she is worried that this kind of…the way Putin has couched this, could actually work to their disadvantage with Taiwan. So, I think he’s trying to be very careful there. He’s also worried about the economic implications. I mean, it’s a much bigger economy and it could turn out bad for them as well.
They’ve been suffering during the pandemic. I don’t think they want the kind of sanctions put on them that they’re seeing put on Russia. So, it’s interesting to watch how cautious they’re being in China. Yeah, good question.
[Audience] Hi, thank you, Sharon. Putin has given, as the reasons for the invasion, the demilitarization of Ukraine. Right. And also, what he calls the de-Nazification of Ukraine. And we might say, let’s say the boundaries of battalions and the Aza battalions, which are Neo-Nazi organizations. Right. The other thing that I wanted to point out is that what they see, and this is a point made by before he died by the Russian expert, Stephen Cohen, that Russia’s security concerns are, rationally speaking, entirely legitimate.
If you talk to the Bush administration officials in 91, you know, they said we will not move NATO eastward. Right. And yet they moved NATO’s eastward. We will not expand membership. They have expanded membership. Right. Then you add to that, other things like, for instance, in Reagan’s last year in office, he signed a theater nuclear weapons treaty.
And the Trump administration pulled out of that treaty. So, they’re looking at all these actions that we do, and they say, oh, you say it’s just offensive. Right. But you know, you keep moving eastward. Right. You say it’s just us. You say you’re not going. We have no plans to admit Ukraine into NATO. But then you stuffed them full of weapons, right. And you do maneuvers with them.
You make them into virtually members of NATO. So, isn’t he just simply making a kind of preemptive strike on this? And he’s basically saying… and also, you know, he does invoke, with some reason, that what is going on in the lower Donbas and the Luhansk, right. Is a kind of ethnic cleansing of the pro-Russian population there.
So, are his security concerns legitimate or not, I guess, is what I’m saying.
[Murphy] Yeah, no, good question. So, I will say, first… So, Zelenskyy and the Zelenskyy government… Zelenskyy is part Jewish who has grandparents who died in the Holocaust. The, you know, there being Neo-Nazi groups in Ukraine who are pretty minor versus saying the government is Neo-Nazi. There is no evidence of any kind of Neo-Nazi affiliation with Zelenskyy government. So that’s kind of a farce.
And a lot of people scratch their heads at him, even Putin even saying something like that. There’s also no evidence of any kind of ethnic cleansing against Russians in the Donetsk and the regions of eastern Ukraine here that have some of these separatist movements. And he’s used that as a one of his pretexts, but there’s no evidence that that’s actually going on. So, I think any evidence of it, is from Putin himself. But there’s no outside corroboration of that.
[in audible]
I’m not sure that that’s been corroborated. And that would be a high number. To your point about security concerns. There is a logic to that, in both World War I and World War II, the Soviet Union, Russia, the Soviet Union were invaded from the east. So, their security concerns, and they took a brunt of fighting in both those wars on that eastern front, so those concerns, security concerns, are legitimate.
There is a legitimacy to that. However, the idea that, you know…and what you’re saying about the concerns about NATO’s moving in. There is a big difference, though, between, I mean, what they’re doing currently in the Ukraine. One, is not going into those Eastern regions and trying to help people who are potentially or that they’re arguing or being ethnically cleansed. They are attacking the whole country. That’s very different.
And to say that we are going to preemptively invade, and I mean, from the looks of it, take over a country. On the possibility that NATO may do something they’ve never done before, which is act proactively against us, seems to be above and beyond any kind of legitimate kind of response into these kinds of things.
That that’s not the way you would deal with that if you were trying to deal with it. I mean, there would be diplomatic ways you should deal with that, not invading and bombing a country and taking over, but any other questions… or student questions? Yeah, up in the back.
[Student] Thank you for the lecture. We just had a Zelenskyy assassination attempt. So, what do you think?
I haven’t seen that. Okay.
Yeah, yeah, we have. I saw it earlier this morning. So, what do you think is the move if that happens? What’s the next thing, or the next dominoes to fall for the West or?
If Zelenskyy were assassinated? Oh, I mean, we’re in a realm where we don’t know. I think, at this point, I mean, Zelenskyy has stepped up in a way that no one anticipated, I think. I don’t think there’s anyone who honestly thought that he was going to be as statesman like, as he has turned out to be, and that he has become the voice of the Ukrainian people in a way…we’ve almost watched in two weeks, him grow as a politician in a way that no one ever expected. Two weeks ago, if he had been assassinated, I think that would have been a problem for Ukraine.
I think if he gets assassinated today, he becomes a huge martyr, and that may destabilize…you know, there’s a question of what would be the fallout for the government. But I don’t know that Putin wants him assassinated right now because of the way he’s risen. So, day one, that probably would have been a good move to destabilize the government that way.
This far in, I think that would actually be bad for Russia. Not bad, I mean, I don’t want him to get assassinated, but I think that would be bad for Russia, more so than that for Ukraine. But that’s a… But it’s hard to predict what’s going to happen, like these kinds of things. This is out of your you know… I think it was a Hitler quote that said, ‘once you start a war that’s opening a black box’, you don’t know where it’s going to go.
So, you know these things. You don’t know how these things are going to play out. But there were some other questions right next to them. Yeah.
[Student] Hi. I was just curious, what’s NATO’s position now? Because Ukraine, as you were saying, isn’t actually part of NATO’s. So where do they stand with this?
[Murphy] Yeah. So, they’re trying to balance that because, on the one hand, they’re trying to be very clear that, you try to go into Poland or Latvia, Lithuania, that will trigger an automatic reaction, that is triggering a reaction. They want to… So, they’re trying to protect those borders. There are very nervous people in Poland. Poland, especially Poland, has historically been attacked and torn apart and put back together multiple times.
So, they’re very nervous people. They’re trying to find a way…. How do you support…and this is where it’s so dicey, how do you support Ukraine without giving Putin the pretext that NATO’s actually doing something actively? Again, they are, they’re trying to support a government under attack as opposed to preemptively do this. But this is this is actually the balancing act, like do you, and even all the countries that are providing military support and they’re not doing it under the banner of NATO’s, they’re doing it as Germany or as, well Finland’s non-NATO and they’re providing stuff.
Like so they’re doing it as the country, but they don’t want it to be… like How do you get that military equipment in, without Putin saying, oh, look, you’re now involved in the war? I’m declaring war back on you. And so, it’s a very delicate situation that NATO’s actually in. If Ukraine was in NATO, I don’t want to say it would be easy because we’d all be at war with Russia.
Again, I’m not sure I want this, but like Ukraine right now, NATO’s trying to be very careful not to pull themselves in while still supporting Ukraine and what they’re trying to do. Yeah.
So, they were like lined up in a row there.
[Student] I really like your talk, Dr. Murphy, I just had a question on… when Putin started this invasion, he talks about the government being like a junta, like not legitimate. And one of the first things that he said when he did invade was, you know, Ukrainian people I’m not attacking you, lay down your arms, I’m going for the government.
And a lot of his grievances, and the reason, the pretext, for his invasion into Crimea in 2014 was, of course, because of the revolution that took place and then the subsequent elections that followed were Donetsk and Luhansk, weren’t allowed to allow to take part in the vote of Zelenskyy because they’re actively rebelling. Right. He seems to have sort of miscalculated… I think the government, the top military advisers in Russia basically said that they didn’t expect as much resistance. They thought it’d be, you know, over Paper Tiger, you know, you walk in and it’s over.
I want to know if you think that Putin actually believes that, you know, the people wouldn’t stand by the government or if it’s just dogma, all dogma that he’s trying to prop up and sort of use as a pretext for this invasion.
[Prof Murphy] I mean, I think I think the analysts are pretty much in agreement that that he really believed that he was going to be met as a savior, that he really believed, especially in the fact that the about…. Let me go back to a different map here. You know, this is a good map. The fact that Kharkiv is still, I mean, that has a lot of ethnic Russians in it. They expected that would be an easy one.
The fact that they’re having trouble there is just…. All the analysts seem to think that Putin really thought this part was going to be the easy part. And he also thought Zelenskyy would roll over. He thought the people wouldn’t really resist, that they’d rather just roll over. So, I think that most of the analysts think he believes it; He believes his own rhetoric.
But also, he’s been very isolated. He’s, you know, you see him at the table. He’s here and his advisers are over there. And he doesn’t want to get too close. And you know, everything is…he’s, you know, very Covid. But he’s isolated himself so much that you wonder how much he’s… and he’s an autocrat. He doesn’t have to listen to anyone.
Yeah. I don’t agree with you. Shut up. So that’s basically his way of operating.
But other questions…Oh right down here.
[Student] I’m not sure if you already answered this, but is the reason that NATO didn’t ever officially accept Ukraine because they wanted to avoid having automatic loyalties in a conflict?
[Murphy] That’s a good question. I’m not entirely sure if that’s why they didn’t or not. That’s… I don’t want to answer that because I don’t know. I don’t have a clear answer on that, so I’m not. That’s a really good question, though, whether or not that’s part of the rationale. I think to some extent, yes, because, I mean, Ukraine is kind of the on the forefront here, but I don’t think that’s the only reason.
But there was… I thought there was another, right up there. Yes.
[Student] All right. So, I guess I mean, obviously, I know that the Russian forces are kind of on their way into Kyiv. That’s their ultimate goal, is to reach that capital.
I guess I’m wondering, like, what happens? Yeah, what happens, like when they reach that point? I mean, at what point does, you know, Ukraine, if at any point, fall to Russia?
[Murphy] I mean, it’s a really good question. So, the alternatives are, you know, you invade and eventually the people give up and go, oh, okay, sure, I guess you’re ruling us, or you have to you have to rule over a hostile people.
And so, I don’t know. Is Putin going to win this piece of the war? Probably. It’s hard to imagine…he’s got a much stronger military…military might… this part of the war he’s probably. But then what’s the next step? How do you rule over these people? How do you…Are you going to just put in place a puppet government and walk away?
So, it’s hard to imagine he’s thought this through. Again, I think he thought that the people were like, yeah, Russia’s not so bad, let’s join with them, and that they were going to just roll over. I don’t think he’s thought through the implications of ruling over people who are actively hostile. I mean, we’ve been there before. Our country, the United States is not, you know, free of…completely unstained by this. But, you know, the ruling over people who don’t want to be ruled over is not easy. And Ukrainians are making it very clear to him they’re not going to make it easy for him. So, yeah.
So, we have time for one more question.
[Student] Here we go to speak a little bit to like the resistance that the Ukrainians have put up. I saw something the other day about how the Russian government thought all of Ukraine would fall in 15 days. They just intercepted papers about that, and it’s been, I think, seven or eight now.
So, unless they plan on doing it in the next week, it’s going to be hard for them to do that. But my question was, if they do get through all of Ukraine and are up against the Romanian or Polish borders and they keep going. Do you think our government will keep its promise to the NATO countries and act with them because we have a history of staying out of European wars when we don’t necessarily need to?
[Murphy] Yeah, I have a feeling this time we wouldn’t, and that’s a scary thought because I certainly don’t want World War III in a nuclear world, but I don’t think the US would stay out if they cross that border, if they go into Romania, if they go into Poland, Lithuania, I don’t think we’re not getting involved.
I think that that would be troops going in. I could be wrong on that. But I think it would be that we’d honor that. If we didn’t then the whole…The minute we don’t honor that, the whole NATO is gone. That’s the whole purpose of it. So, um, I think we may be out of time.
