Vicious Rants of an Angry Yellow Man

 This is the second installment of the Ukraine crisis and how we got to this tragedy.  We left off with the breakup of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact and there was nothing Russia could do about it.  By the time Putin was in his first term as president of Russia, only Georgia and Ukraine were not part of NATO.  Putin was very popular during his first two terms from 2000 to 2008.  He talked about reforms, getting rid of corruption, making law and order a priority.  That is not too different from politicians anywhere.  He did hint at regaining the old glory of the Soviet Union, at least no more NATO advances.  He was tough on the Chechnya rebels.  But luck was also on his side.  While Russia's GDP plummeted after the breakup of the USSR, oil prices skyrocketed during Putin's first two terms.  While the average Russians felt that changing to capitalism made things worse, now they felt having a strongman like Putin is why things are better.

Putin took advantage of the situation.  He jailed some oligarchs and took away their wealth.  He told the people that changing to the West system was terrible, that it was all these capitalists who were stealing from Russia.  Of course, he let those oligarchs who are on his side to keep and continue to make money.  It was not difficult to make a case of the West trying to kick Russia when it is down.  NATO is a military alliance.  What is the purpose of adding countries like Poland, Hungary and the Baltic states to their membership?  These countries don't provide much military might to NATO.  There are no Asian, African or American countries who threaten Europe.  So it was easy to reason that the whole purpose of adding these countries is to threaten Russia or at least embarrass it by surrounding it.  This was an easy sell to the Russian people.  And with the economy improving due to oil sales, Putin's approval rating was sky high.

It could be argue that ambition of Putin to get Russia back to the glory days of the USSR will eventually  lead to war sometime down the line.  But the actions of NATO certainly did not help and some would argue that it led to what is happening today.  In a NATO summit in 2008, NATO announced that Ukraine and Georgia would eventually be admitted into NATO.  That would be a line in the sand for Putin.  There was no way that he could have kept his strongman image and let NATO admit those two, particularly Ukraine.  

It is easy to paint Putin as evil and Russia is bad.  But things are never black and white like that.  Russians are no different than any other people.   They want a better life for their family.  They have pride in their nation.  So if anyone can show that others are humiliating or threatening them and at the same time provide them with a better standard of living, they are going to follow that person.  The West was kicking Russia when it was down but at the same time craved the oil that Russia can provide cheaply.  So it can be said that the West actually help the rise of Putin to the detriment of the world.

So what happens to Georgia and Ukraine was fairly predictable, given what happened in that NATO summit and the ambition of Putin.  Next will go over what happened after that summit and eventually the annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014.