Elias Götz & Jørgen Staun. Contemporary Security Policy. Volume 43, Issue 3, 2022.
Why did Russia attack Ukraine in February 2022? This question has generated an intense debate among journalists, think-tank analysts, and academics. A number of possible explanations have been offered, ranging from President Putin’s personal worldview (Liik, 2022; Torbakov, 2022) and the increased autocratization of the Russian regime (Daalder, 2022; Person & McFaul, 2022) to NATO enlargement and the shifting distribution of power in the international system (Mearsheimer, 2022; Walt, 2022).
This article explores Russia’s war against Ukraine from a strategic culture perspective. For our purposes, we define strategic culture as a set of discursive expressions and narratives related to security-military affairs, which are shared by a country’s political leaders and elites. These discursive expressions and narratives are rooted in socially constructed interpretations of history, geography, and domestic traditions. The upshot is that states do not respond to international pressures and opportunities in the same mechanistic way, but they assess and act upon external stimuli through the prism of their distinct strategic culture. This leads to different foreign and security policies.
That said, it is important to stress that strategic culture does not, on its own, determine the specific details of state behavior. Rather, it circumscribes how government officials understand the world, enabling some policy avenues while closing down others. It is also worth highlighting that political elites are not merely the purveyors of a prevailing strategic culture. They can adjust and, within limits, reshape particular narratives. This is often done by powerful individuals with a strong belief system, in response to external crises, or a combination of both. In other words, this article does not dispute the impact of Putin’s worldview or international-level influences on Russia’s Ukraine policy. Instead, it suggests that explanations highlighting these factors are incomplete and potentially misleading without taking into account Russian strategic culture.
Specifically, we identify two primary strands in Russian strategic culture. The first is a deep-seated sense of vulnerability, especially vis-à-vis “the West.” To counter this perceived threat, Russia’s national security establishment has long emphasized the importance of possessing strategic depth and buffer zones. The second strand revolves around a feeling of entitlement to great power status. A central component in Russia’s great power vision is the right to have a sphere of “privileged interests” in its Eurasian neighborhood. We derive these two strands from an analysis of strategic documents, statements by high-ranked Kremlin officials, and the rich scholarly literature on Russian strategic culture (for example, Adamsky, 2018; Covington, 2016; Jonsson, 2019). Building on that, this study shows that the national security establishment in Moscow perceived Ukraine’s drift toward the West as a major threat to both Russia’s security interests and its status as a great power. As a result, Russia’s rhetorical milieu regarding Ukraine became increasingly radicalized. This in turn provided the discursive and intellectual habitat that enabled Putin to make his decision to launch a large-scale invasion.
Before proceeding, a methodological note is in order. One might legitimately wonder whether verbal and written expressions of Russian government officials can be taken at face value. According to one prominent interpretation, the Putin leadership uses the image of a beleaguered Russia instrumentally to rally the people behind the regime. There is a kernel of truth in it; Kremlin officials (like most politicians) shape their short-term messaging to fit internal and/or international audiences. Yet, it seems unlikely that Russian elites over several years and decades can maintain two markedly different discourses—one that is secret and one used for public consumption—without cracks and ambiguities in the argumentation appearing over time. Thus, we reject the assumption that long-term discursive patterns among Kremlin officials are mere window-dressing designed to cloak the “real” motives behind their policies. The premise of our argument is that longstanding discursive patterns constitute and reflect Russia’s prevailing strategic culture.
Vulnerability and fear
A central strand in Russian strategic culture is the perceived vulnerability to external attack. This strand consists of four interrelated narratives. The first revolves around Russia’s territorial grandness and long borders, which makes it difficult to defend all of the country, everywhere, at the same time (Covington, 2016; Lo, 2015, pp. 100-112; Vitkovskiy, 1992).
This sense of vulnerability is reinforced by a second narrative focusing on Russia’s experience of repeated invasions over the centuries. The collective memory of these invasions is deeply ingrained in Russian strategic thought. The lesson Russian national security professionals have drawn from these conflicts is that it is important to control one’s immediate geographical vicinity and prevent great-power rivals from establishing a foothold there. Thus, Russian strategic culture puts a premium on the creation of buffer zones and the pursuit of strategic depth (Lo, 2015, p. 103). A statement by Fyodor Lukyanov (2016, p. 32), research director for the Valdai International Discussion Club, nicely encapsulates this view: “As a country of plains,” he writes, “Russia has experienced devastating invasions more than once; the Kremlin has long seen reinforcing ‘strategic depth’ as the only way to guarantee its survival.”
A third narrative evident in Russian strategic thought is a deep-seated sense of insecurity vis-à-vis the West. This is at least partly the result of historical lessons learned from the two wars of existence Russia fought in modern times—with Napoleonic France (1803-1815) and Nazi Germany (1941-1945). In both cases, the enemy came from the West. Moreover, during the decades-long Cold War with the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the threat from the West was also the dominant one. Seen in this light, it is not surprising that a powerful narrative has taken hold among Russian decision-makers and strategic thinkers, depicting NATO as a potential threat. This is reflected in the persistent “othering” of NATO in Russian political discourses and official policy documents. In fact, all Russian Military Doctrines and National Security Strategies since 1993 have identified NATO enlargement as a potential risk/danger (opasnost) or threat (ugroza). To be sure, the language has intensified in the past few years. The 2014 and 2021 iterations of the Russian Military Doctrine explicitly name NATO enlargement and the Alliance’s “military infrastructure” near Russia’s borders as one of the “main risks.” Still, even during the first years of President Yeltsin, in the 1990s, large parts of the Russian security establishment looked with deep-seated suspicion at the Alliance (Black, 2000; Dannreuther, 1999; Götz, 2019b).
A fourth and related narrative centers on the connection between internal and external threats. This has been a recurrent theme in Soviet military writings. Since the “color revolutions” in Georgia (2003), Ukraine (2004), and Kyrgyzstan (2005), it has once again figured prominently in Russian strategic thinking (German, 2020; Poulsen & Staun, 2021, pp. 81-83). In this context, it is important to stress that the perceived threat is not only that of the West seeking to implement a regime change in Russia. It is also about the West’s alleged machinations and color revolution techniques to remove pro-Russian leaders in other states, particularly in the post-Soviet region. As Nikolai Patrushev (2005), the then-director of the FSB, put it: “Our opponents purposefully and consistently seek to weaken Russian influence in the CIS space (…). Recent events in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan clearly confirm this.” Likewise, the Russian Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov (2013) noted that color revolutions essentially are “externally organized coup d’états.” Similar assessments are expressed in official documents, such as the 2014 Military Doctrine, 2015 Russian National Security Strategy, and 2016 Foreign Policy Concept.
Great power status and regional domination
A second key strand in Russian strategic culture is the quest for great power status. The narrative revolving around Russia’s great power status is present in many of Putin’s speeches and the speeches of other Kremlin elites. It is also present in all central Russian strategy papers that have been published since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, where the ambition has evolved from being little more than a regional “great power” (veliko derzhav) to one of the “leading world powers” (lidiruyushchikh mirovykh derzhav) (President of the Russian Federation, 2000, p. 2; President of the Russian Federation, 2015, p. 30). We also find this theme in many speeches by former President Yeltsin as well as by Soviet and Tsarist leaders. In other words, the belief that Russia is destined to be a great power has been a fixture of Moscow’s political elite for several decades, if not centuries (Neumann, 2008; Poulsen & Staun, 2018, 2021; Tsygankov, 2008). Furthermore, for the elite it is an existential matter: Russia has to be a great power, or it will cease to exist (Bassim & Aksenov, 2006; Reshetnikov, 2011). As Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov argued in a 2007 speech, “Russia can (…) only exist within its present borders if it is one of the world’s leading states” (as cited in Tsygankov, 2008, p. 46).
What is especially significant for the purposes of this study is that Russia’s status ambitions are deeply intertwined with spheres-of-influence thinking. In Russian eyes, international politics is a system dominated by a small number of great powers each having their own sphere of influence. Accordingly, many Kremlin officials regard a geographical sphere of influence as necessary to re-establish and maintain great power status. In September 1995, for example, President Yeltsin issued a decree on The Strategic Course of Russia with the Member States of the Commonwealth of Independent States, declaring that Moscow wanted to establish a “leading position” in the post-Soviet region that would allow Russia to “claim a worthy place in the world community” (Yeltsin, 1995). Some fifteen years later, President Putin pushed for the creation of a Eurasian Economic Union. The stated aim was to reintegrate the post-Soviet region under Russian leadership, with the hope of becoming “one of the poles in a future multipolar world” (as cited in Krickovic & Pellicciari, 2021, p. 86).
Of course, Russian elites do not see eye to eye on all matters related to the post-Soviet space. But the central notion that Russia should exert some form of control over its geopolitical environment is widely supported. This position has also figured prominently in successive strategic documents, including Russian Military Doctrines (1993, 2000, 2010, 2014) and Foreign Policy Concepts (1993, 2000, 2008, 2013, 2016).
Strategic culture and Russia’s Ukraine policy
The previous two sections suggest that the post-Soviet space has come to play a major role in Russian strategic thinking, both as a purported defensive perimeter protecting the country from external threats and as a sphere of influence denoting Russia’s great power status. In this context, the country that occupies the most central place in Russian conceptions of geopolitics and status is Ukraine. There are two main reasons for this. The first is that several invasions of Russia from the West came across the plains of Ukraine (as well as Belarus). This is present in contemporary Russian strategic thought and continues to affect the threat assessments of the country’s security policy establishment. Second, according to Russia’s dominant national identity narrative, the Kievan Rus (a loose confederation of Slavic tribes with Kiev as its capital) is the historical epicenter and cradle of Russian civilization.
Thus, large swathes of the Russian political elite consider Ukraine to be part of the country’s natural sphere of influence. As early as 1996, Yeltsin’s presidential adviser Sergey Kortunov (1996, p. 148) declared, “The direction of priority in Russia’s policy in the CIS are relations with Ukraine. In perspective, our relations must acquire an allied character.” He added, “Without a strategic alliance with Ukraine, Russia will not become a genuinely great power.” In 2013, Lukyanov (2013) similarly remarked, “The [Eurasian Union] project is in fact not focused on Eurasia as a whole but on one particular country that is actually located in Europe-Ukraine. (…) If Ukraine, with its large market and potential for a strong and diversified economy, joins, it could become a major force to be reckoned with” (see also Krickovic & Pellicciari, 2021, p. 93; Lo, 2015, pp. 107-112). In short, from Russia’s vantage point, no country in post-Soviet Eurasia is more important—or pivotal—than Ukraine.
Accordingly, Russia has used over the years a wide range of political, economic, and military tools to keep Ukraine in its zone of influence (D’Anieri, 2019; Götz, 2016). Thus, it is not difficult to understand why Kiev’s negotiations about an association agreement with the European Union (EU), which began in 2009, aroused suspicion in Moscow. As Foreign Minister Lavrov wryly noted, “We are accused of having spheres of influence. But what is the Eastern Partnership, if not an attempt to extend the EU’s sphere of influence” (as cited in Pop, 2009; see also Lavrov, 2014). It is beyond the scope of this study to retrace the sequence of events that led to the 2014 Ukraine crisis. For our purposes, it suffices to say that Kremlin officials interpreted the Euromaidan revolution—through the prism of Russian strategic culture—as a “Western-instigated coup” aimed at drawing Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit. Rightly or wrongly, Russian leaders also feared that Ukraine’s association with the EU might be a backdoor to NATO membership. These discursive patterns among Kremlin officials, which are well documented in the existing literature, enabled and partially motivated Russia’s annexation of Crimea (Casier, 2016; Hansen, 2015; Hopf, 2016).
By taking over the peninsula, Moscow established direct control over the part of Ukraine with the closest ethno-linguistic, cultural, and historical ties to Russia. Moreover, by stoking separatism in Ukraine’s southeastern Donbas region, Russia effectively created an insurance that Ukraine would not become a member of NATO. After all, according to NATO’s own rulebook, countries with ongoing territorial or ethno-political conflicts cannot join the Alliance. Thus, Russia seemed to have achieved two of its main goals. And yet, not everything went according to Moscow’s wishes. Despite, or rather because of Russia’s assertive behavior in the wake of the Euromaidan revolution, both the Poroshenko and the Zelensky governments pursued a staunchly pro-Western foreign policy. This was perhaps not surprising. What rattled the Kremlin, however, was that the United States and its European allies increased their diplomatic, economic, and practical security cooperation with Ukraine, both bilaterally and through various NATO and EU programs (examples are NATO’s Comprehensive Assistance Package and the European Union Advisory Mission Ukraine). The stated aim of these programs was, and still is, to create a stable, prosperous, and not least Western-leaning Ukraine. This conflicted with Russia’s self-perceived great-power prerogative to keep the entirety of Ukraine, not just the Crimean Peninsula, in its sphere of influence. Additionally, it fueled Russia’s sense of vulnerability and insecurity vis-à-vis the West. This in turn led to a radicalization of pre-existing narratives that emerged from Russian strategic culture.
To illustrate: In July 2017, the United States announced plans to build a naval operations center in Ochakiv, a small city between Odessa and Kherson, from which NATO and Ukrainian forces could direct exercises and coordinate activities in the Black Sea. The center was rather modest in size—“a small building of 10 meters by 30 meters,” in the words of one observer (Herzenshorn, 2022). Nonetheless, it evoked a strong response from Russian officials and security analysts. For example, the General Staff’s adviser and former commander of the Russian Black Sea Fleet Admiral Igor Kasatonov asserted that the naval operations center was “an outpost aimed at surveilling Russia’s forces in Crimea” and provided a springboard for attacks against Russia (as cited in Urcosta, 2022). Likewise, the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies (2017) concluded, “the creation of the center can be considered as another step by Kiev on the way to joining the North Atlantic Alliance.” In his speech on February 21, 2022, Putin echoed this line of reasoning. “The US-built Maritime Operations Centre in Ochakov makes it possible to support activity by NATO warships,” he argued, “including the use of precision weapons, against the Russian Black Sea Fleet and our infrastructure on the entire Black Sea Coast” (Putin, 2022a). From a pure balance-of-power perspective, the attention paid to this small-sized maritime center appears blown out of proportion. Viewed through the lens of Russian strategic culture, however, these concerns become explainable.
Another case in point is Russia’s response to the increased cooperation between NATO and Ukraine in terms of exercising and training. After the takeover of Crimea in 2014, NATO countries expanded their maneuvers in the Black Sea. Moreover, at the Yaroviv Training Center in western Ukraine, the United States and other NATO militaries started to train Ukrainian soldiers (Wezeman & Kuimova, 2018, p. 5). In Russia’s discursive renderings, these exercises and training programs were elevated to a pending de facto NATO membership of Ukraine. For example, the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies (2017) concluded, “As a result, even if Ukraine does not formally become a member of NATO, the country will be drawn into the plans of the alliance of an anti-Russian orientation. In particular, various bilateral treaties legalize the deployment of troops and the creation of military bases on its territory.” In the same vein, Sergey Yermakov, a Russian military analyst, stated:
The fact that Ukraine is already becoming an integral part of the Western model of deterrence is actually evidenced by the constant presence of servicemen of the member countries of the Alliance at the training grounds of Ukraine. This permanent presence is covered by rotation, bilateral joint exercises, or exercises within NATO, or the need for the presence of observers from the Alliance. But that doesn’t change the point. (as cited in Russian Institute for Strategic Studies, 2017)
Commenting on the increasing number of NATO training exercises, Konstantin Zatulin, first Deputy Chairman of the Duma’s Committee for Relations with the CIS, made it clear that Russia “cannot be happy about seeing a military-political bloc that has a much mightier military potential than the Russian Federation move ever closer to our borders.” Moreover, referring to Russia’s history of invasion from the West, Zatulin asserted, “Clearly, our historical experience tells us that we must be concerned with our security, and we are concerned about it” (as cited in Simes, 2018). Following this line of reasoning, Foreign Minister Lavrov concluded, “NATO member states are systematically transforming Ukraine into a military foothold against Russia, building their bases there and using its territory for military exercises” (as cited in Sputnik, 2021).
The list of such statements could go on, but the point is clear: Russian decision-makers and national security professionals described joint exercising and training between Ukraine and NATO as a national security threat of the first order. Once again, from a pure balance-of-power perspective, this appears somewhat puzzling. After all, Russia’s armed forces enjoyed overwhelming military advantages over Ukraine. Moreover, NATO deployments and training exercises in Ukraine were on a moderate scale. Still, they elicited a strong response from Moscow. This response was made possible by Russia’s strategic culture, which provided Kremlin officials with the discursive resources to interpret Ukraine’s cooperation with NATO as a severe threat to Russia’s national security interests.
Not surprisingly, therefore, Putin took up the issue in his February 21 speech, stating matter-of-factly, “Ukraine is home to NATO training missions which are, in fact, foreign military bases.” Stressing the importance of geography, he furthermore noted:
Many Ukrainian airfields are located not far from our borders. NATO’s tactical aviation deployed there, including precision weapon carriers, will be capable of striking at our territory to the depth of the Volgograd-Kazan-Samara-Astrakhan line. (…) The flying time of Tomahawk cruise missiles to Moscow will be less than 35 minutes; ballistic missiles from Kharkov will take seven to eight minutes; and hypersonic assault weapons, four to five minutes. It is like a knife to the throat. (Putin, 2022a)
In his speech on February 24, Putin struck similar themes and stressed that “a military presence in territories bordering on Russia, if we permit it to go ahead, will stay for decades to come or maybe forever, creating an ever mounting and totally unacceptable threat for Russia.” In extension, he referred to the Great Patriotic War and concluded:
If history is any guide, we know that in 1940 and early 1941 the Soviet Union went to great lengths to prevent war or at least delay its outbreak. (…) When it finally acted, it was too late. We will not make this mistake the second time. (Putin, 2022b)
As these excerpts illustrate, Putin’s war speeches are littered with references to geography, distance, and the historical threat posed by the West, along with articulations of a deep-seated sense of vulnerability vis-à-vis NATO in general and the United States in particular. These speech acts are, in effect, a continuation and radicalization of longstanding tropes in Russian strategic thinking.
Focusing on perceived security concerns alone is insufficient, however. No less important are Russia’s status aspirations. In the years prior to the attack, Russian policymakers recurrently made it clear that they regarded the West’s stepped-up cooperation with Ukraine as the latest in a long series of developments displaying the West’s unwillingness to treat Russia as a full-fledged great power. For example, in 2016, Foreign Minister Lavrov argued that the world is most secure when the great powers agree on spheres of influence, like after the Vienna Congress in 1815, and complained that NATO expansion was the “root of the systemic problems from which Russia’s relations with the United States and the European Union suffer” (Lavrov, 2016). At the Valdai Discussion Club in 2017, Putin referred to NATO enlargement as the “redistribution of spheres of influence” (Putin, 2017). Similarly, Lavrov noted at the 2018 Munich Security Conference that Western governments had promised Moscow that “any actions taken by countries outside the region in Russia’s neighborhood are not directed against our interests.” He added, “They gave us similar promises regarding the EU Eastern Partnership project. And we see one of the consequences with our own eyes, it is Ukraine affected by an internal conflict” (Lavrov, 2018). Moreover, in April 2021, Lavrov (2021) told reporters that the West had fomented the Ukraine crisis. “Once again,” he elaborated, “we see the truth as stated by many analysts and political scientists, including Zbigeniew Brzezinski, being reaffirmed. They look at Ukraine from a geopolitical perspective: as a country that is close to Russia, Ukraine makes Russia a great state; without Ukraine, Russia does not have global significance.”
The perhaps clearest expressions of Russia’s great power ambitions are found in the documents that Moscow submitted to NATO and the United States on December 21, 2021. In these documents, Moscow called for formal guarantees that Ukraine (and other former Soviet republics) would never become NATO members and for a complete withdrawal of US forces and weapons from Eastern Europe. The Kremlin, in short, demanded a more or less explicit recognition of a Russian sphere of influence in post-Soviet Eurasia.
Increasingly, the Kremlin’s rhetoric was laced with ethno-political and historical arguments. The best-known example is Putin’s June 2021 treatise “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” (Putin, 2021). In the essay, he stressed Kiev’s role as the “mother of all Russian cities.” After an extended review of selectively chosen historical and cultural events, Putin concluded, “Together we have always been and will be many times stronger and more successful. For we are one people.” Similar discursive patterns are found in his war speeches, yet in a more extreme form. Putin (2022b), for instance, argued, “The problem is that in territories adjacent to Russia, which I have to note is our historical land, a hostile ‘anti-Russia’ is taking shape.” In the next breath he stressed, “For our country, it is a matter of life and death, a matter of our historical future as a nation. (…) It is not only a very real threat to our interests but to the very existence of our state and to its sovereignty.” In Russia’s political lexicon, one should add, true “sovereignty” is possessed only by a few great powers; they are entitled to have their own sphere of influence, whereas the sovereignty of smaller states is negotiable. It is in this sense that Ukraine’s westward orientation threatened not just Russia’s perceived security interests but also its very self-understanding as a great power.
As noted at the outset of this article, some observers hold that Russia’s attack is attributable to Putin’s personal worldview. Indeed, Putin has a long record of making controversial statements about Ukraine’s historical and cultural belongingness to Russia. Yet, while Putin may be one of the most vocal advocates of this position, he is not alone. The geopolitical and historical significance of Ukraine has been a prominent part of Russian foreign policy rhetoric for many years prior to Putin’s accession to the presidency. Kremlin officials and public intellectuals of various ideological hues (including such figures as the venerated Soviet dissident and Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn) have over and again emphasized the importance of restoring Ukraine to its—as they see it—rightful place in Russia’s orbit. Thus, any argument that focuses solely or even primarily on Putin is incomplete. Moreover, any such argument is hard-pressed to explain why Putin did not launch a large-scale assault on Ukraine at an earlier point during his 22 years in power. Our analysis suggests that an important part of the explanation are radicalized narratives, which emerged from Russia’s strategic culture. They made possible and thinkable his decision to go to war. In other words, the increasingly militant rhetorical milieu in and around the Kremlin undercut support for moderation and created permissive discursive conditions for launching a large-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Conclusion
The previous sections have shown that political elites in Moscow perceived Ukraine’s drift toward the West as a threat to Russia’s national security interests and great power standing. This broad-based discursive consensus was rooted in Russian strategic culture. Russian strategic culture has long emphasized the importance of exerting influence over the post-Soviet space—and Ukraine in particular—as a defensive perimeter and symbol denoting its great power status. It provided the discursive raw material out of which Kremlin officials created radical representations of Ukraine and its cooperation with the West. This, coupled with Putin’s personal worldview, goes a long way toward explaining Russia’s attack. Put differently, strategic culture helps to account for the conditions that made Russia’s military assault on Ukraine possible in a way that links international-level pressures with individual-level decision-making.
In extension, our findings suggest that Russia is unlikely to back down in the near future, despite heavy military losses in Ukraine. The perceived interests at stake—security and status—are vital for any government in Moscow. Thus, regardless of who occupies the Kremlin, any Russian leadership will want to keep Ukraine in its orbit of influence. This does not mean that any Russian leadership would have launched a large-scale invasion. Putin’s personal goals and beliefs (especially regarding the Ukrainians’ willingness to resist) most likely played a role here. Still, given Russia’s prevailing strategic culture and the increasing radicalization of narratives, any leader in the Kremlin would have been predisposed to employ highly assertive means toward Ukraine to defend Russia’s perceived security interests and great power ambitions.
Granted, it is impossible to make our case conclusively without better evidence than is currently available. Yet, the circumstantial evidence is solid enough to suggest its plausibility and warrant further research. Thus, if and when more evidence about decision-making processes in the Kremlin becomes accessible—transcripts of high-level meetings and internal government documents, for instance—one should test our argument against this material. More generally, our study points to the need to build synthetic explanations of Russia’s attack on Ukraine, which combine material and ideational factors as well as domestic and international determinants in a systematic manner. It may be worth investigating, for instance, how exactly external pressures contributed to the radicalization of narratives. Likewise, it would be interesting to explore more thoroughly the domestic-level mechanisms that facilitated the move from moderate revisionism to a more expansionist and aggressive approach. For instance, one could hypothesize that Russia’s increasingly closed political system and media space enabled this process by fostering a group-think environment. Finally, an exploration of whether and how external actors may influence Russian strategic culture constitutes another potentially fruitful and policy-relevant area for future research that emerges from the findings of this study.