Why Does Russia Forced War on Ukraine?
After World War II, the next biggest war would be the war unleashed by Vladimir Putin in Europe against western-leaning Ukraine.
Since the war began, numerous people have been martyred, and cities and towns have been ruined, with the displacement of around 13 million people. The world wants to know, will things ever normalize back in Ukraine?
What is the aim of Putin?
The president of Russia aims at disposing of the government of Ukraine, ending its desire to join NATO, a western defensive alliance. After numerous failures, he stopped the efforts to capture Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and focused on capturing the east and south of the country.
Putin launched the invasion on February 24, 2022, by informing the Russian people that he wants to de-Nazify and demilitarise Ukraine. Putin also claimed that he wants to protect the people subjected to eight-year bullying and genocide by Ukraine’s government. Another major objective was to ensure the neutral status of Ukraine.
What led to the War Between Russia and Ukraine?
Moscow declared the separatist regions of Luhansk and Donets as independent countries. According to Russia, Kyiv was planning to use the opportunity window to position the military to capture back the separatist regions, and make efforts to nullify the Minsk Accord agreements.
Therefore, the Russian troops moved to the Donbas region to prevent Kyiv from launching a military offensive against the separatist region. The Russian military also carried out several precision strikes to destroy the military infrastructure and air defense systems of Ukraine.
Russia had to take a drastic step, as the US created immense pressure on German counterparts to stall the Nord Stream 2 project’s operationalization process, after the war declaration by Russia on February 22, 2022.
Energy Security Role in the War
After the dissolution of the USSR, Ukraine kept relying on Russia to fulfill its gas requirement and continued to receive heavily subsidized gas shipments in the early 2000s. But, when the orange revolution was about to end, it resulted in replacing the pro-Russian leader with a West-inclined leader. Therefore, the Russian Gas Corporation, Gazprom stopped providing the massive subsidized gas to Ukraine and asked the country to pay full market prices.
As Ukraine refused to comply with it, Russia stopped the gas flow through its pipeline to Ukrain and kept just enough to supply it to Western Europe to meet the contracts. It resulted in immense economic pressure on the pro-Western government of Ukraine. It was also used to support the claim that it is an unreliable gas transit economy. It further helped in building a new pipeline known as Nord Stream that directly transfers the gas from Russia to Germany.
The Nord Stream pipeline caused a loss of around $720 million to Ukraine and resulted in the growing dependence of Germany on Russia to cater to its energy demand. By 2020, Russia was delivering 75% of the natural gas supply to Germany.
The power industry of Germany is largely dependent on natural gas to conduct its operations and generate electricity to cater to the demand across the country.
It resulted in increased worry of the US, that Russia would no longer be held hostage by Western-inclined countries such as Ukraine and Poland for energy exports.