(CN) — What drove Russian President Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine? Why has war returned to Europe?
For Volodymyr Ishchenko, a Ukrainian political sociologist at the Free University of Berlin, the horrors of war now destroying his country have come about by failures of leadership at multiple levels.
“On the global level, that's actually the crisis of the United States' hegemony,” Ishchenko said in a telephone interview with Courthouse News.
America's failure as a world leader allowed Russia's elites to see themselves as “somehow equal to the Western elites, to the American capitalists, to the European capitalists,” he said.
Focusing on the politics of post-Soviet societies, he said states that emerged from the Soviet bloc were defined by a lack of national leadership.
“My analysis of the post-Soviet transformations was exactly taking this point about the crisis of hegemony – capacity of the ruling class to lead the whole society, not simply to dominate it but to actually present themselves as actual leaders in the development of society,” he said.
He said those who came to rule in post-Soviet Russia and elsewhere in the former Soviet bloc gained their power “through the stealing of the state.”
“When the Soviet Union was collapsing, those guys were basically stealing former state property and that's how they amassed their wealth,” he said.
He said the West viewed post-Soviet elites as illegitimate and unequal. Inside their own nations, post-Soviet elites – many of whom amassed great wealth in a matter of months – also were not regarded as legitimate “even by their own citizens,” he said.
“We understand that there is massive mistrust among Russian citizens and the citizens in other post-Soviet countries toward their own elites,” he said. “There's no legitimacy in that oligarchic wealth.”
Narrowing the lens even further, he said Russia has failed on the regional level to offer the old Soviet republics much reason to tie their futures in with Russia.
“It's again the crisis of hegemony in the meaning of not being capable to present an attractive soft power project to the former Soviet peripheries: to the former Soviet republics, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, the Caucasian republics, Central Asia and so on,” Ishchenko said.
“Russia, for 30 years, could not present anything comparable to American soft power, to the European Union's soft power – the power of attraction,” he continued.
“Russia failed in doing this despite all the talk about Russian propaganda that influences the outcome of elections,” he said. “It has proved to be much weaker even in the closest states, in the neighboring states, and that's why this Euromaidan Revolution” happened.
The roots of the war in Ukraine go back to the so-called “Euromaidan Revolution.”
Over the winter of 2013 and 2014, a mass uprising broke out when former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych scrapped a deal to bring Ukraine into closer alignment with the EU and instead opted to deepen relations with Russia.
Protesters took over Maidan Square at the center of Kyiv in November 2013 and stayed for months. The uprisingeventually turned violent under the influence of far-right radical nationalists.
The revolt was massively supported in western Ukraine, but also by many urban segments. In eastern and southern Ukraine, though, support was much weaker. Eventually, the violent uprising forced Yanukovych to flee to Russia and a pro-Western government was installed in Kyiv.
But the tensions within Ukraine only sharpened and worsened following the Euromaidan Revolution with Russia's annexation of Crimea and the breakout of armed conflict in Donbas, a region of eastern Ukraine. The war in Donbas carried on for eight years, killing about 14,000 civilians and forcing 2 million people from their homes.
Ishchenko said Russia decided to use coercion and military force to get its way in Ukraine.