Year: 2023
Type: article
Abstract: The invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022 triggered a multitude of debates between pundits and policy makers alike over Russia's, and more specifically, Vladimir Putin's motivations in invading Ukraine.Without oversimplifying excessively, on the one hand, one group argued that Putin's move was understandable given the fact that since the end of the Cold War, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (nato) expansion was bringing the alliance dangerously close to Russia's traditional sphere of influence and therefore represented a direct threat to the national security interests of the country.Following this logic therefore, Putin's invasion was a defensive move against nato and the United States aggressive and anti-Russian post-Cold War European policy.The most vocal of proponents of this argument is the renowned University of Chicago academic, John Mearsheimer.He argues that prevailing view in the West is that the Ukraine war is primarily due to Russian aggression and Putin's desire to revive the Soviet empire (Giles, 2022).However, Mearsheimer argues that the United States and nato are to blame for the invasion because the expansion of the alliance into Russia's traditional sphere of influence threatened the latter's geopolitical integrity.Russia was too weak to respond to nato's enlargement when Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia joined in 2004.However, the red line for Moscow was the formal announcement of Ukraine and Georgia's desire to join nato in 2008.At the time, Putin even went so far as to say that Ukraine was not even a real country (Marson, 2009).Great powers are always sensitive to potential threats in their spheres of influence and Russia should not be portrayed as
Source: México y la Cuenca del Pacífico
Authors: Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM), Athanasios Hristoulas
Institution: Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4367672592