Why Does Putin Want Ukraine?
In the last few weeks, Russian President Vladimir Putin has attempted to pry away Ukraine from the European continent, claiming that Ukraine is part Russian Federation. What is behind this power grab?
Illustration by Katheryne Menendez
Russian President Vladimir Putin has staked his whole presidency on attempting to pry away Ukraine from the European continent, citing that Ukraine was always part of Russia's heritage and shall be brought back into the fold whether they like it or not. Putin specified NATO as the main agitator of his national security concerns, however, Ukraine had not been realistically in the position to join NATO in the near future given its necessary neutrality in the region. What was behind this power grab?
To answer that question, we must ask another one. Why does Russia command such power on the world stage? Although the landmass and population of Russia is substantial, Russia’s economy is smaller than South Korea’s, which has a population 171 times smaller and is 0.58 percent the size of Russia. Yet, Russia commands dominance because it is the world’s second-largest oil producer by production capacity. Additionally, Russia is the world’s largest natural gas producer, making Russia the leading exporter of natural gas.
The recent sanctions that have been enacted by the EU and the U.S. do not apply to Russian oil and natural gas exports. This is because in recent years, the European Union has received nearly 40 percent of its gas and more than a quarter of its oil from Russia. In the U.S, 8 percent of imports of oil and refined products come from Russia.
To put a fine point on it, the combined revenue from the sale of oil and natural gas is quite literally what the Russian economy is built upon, making up to 36 percent of the country’s total budget.
This complete reliance on oil, the wealth from which is entirely concentrated at the top, makes Russia a “petrostate”, much like Saudi Arabia and Libya. Currently, Russia is the only petro-state on the European continent. This is where Ukraine enters the stage.
In 2012, it was discovered that in Ukraine’s exclusive economic zone on the Black Sea, there are deposits of natural gas the size of about two trillion cubic meters, becoming a real competitor to Russia’s landlocked reserves. The largest concentration of these deposits is around the Crimean Peninsula.
Added to Ukraine’s newly discovered chest of gold is another prize. Since the technological advancement in the early 2010s, successful drilling of oil and natural gas can now be produced from shale rock. In Ukraine, there are several shale rock formations in the Donbas region in the east and around the Carpathian Mountains in the west.
This treasure-trove would mean a complete transformation of the Ukrainian economy. However, it had no technology or the finances to build the necessary infrastructure that harvesting these resources required.
To get itself on the road to building that infrastructure, Ukraine began to license its drilling rights to the American companies Shell and Exxon, which meant that within a few years, Ukraine would officially become the second-largest exporter of oil and natural gas in Europe. Not to mention, it did not need to build such complicated pipelines to sell these resources to the European Union, like Russia has had to do because of its landlocked status by other sovereign nations.
Given this road to prosperity, it became almost certain that Ukraine’s path to enter the European Union, and then NATO, could be guaranteed.
In 2012, the sitting president of Ukraine was Viktor Yanukovych, a pro-Russian leader who was keeping in lockstep with the interests of Moscow. As long as Yanukovych was in power, the new oil and gas discoveries in Ukraine were not directly threatening Russia’s interests. This was demonstrated in November 2013, when Yanukovych abruptly struck a deal with Russia and rejected a long-negotiated EU trade agreement. Russia agreed to invest $15 billion in Ukraine’s government debt and reduce by a third the international price of gas that Ukraine buys from Russia.
As reported by Reuters, "public and private arm-twisting by Putin, including threats to Ukraine’s economy and Yanukovych’s political future, played a significant part [in Yanukovych’s decision]."
Yanukovych’s decision was a betrayal to Ukrainian citizens who had been desperately wanting to have closer ties with Europe and had elected him on that promise. Protests quickly grew to tens of thousands of Ukrainian citizens gathering at Kyiv’s Maidan Square and at the Ukrainian Parliament. As the numbers swelled, Yanukovych’s security units became more violent with their repression of the demonstrations.
By mid-Feb. 2014, after nearly three months of protests by millions of Ukrainian citizens, the demonstrations reached a bloody climax in clashes with the Yanukovych police force. Many people were killed and thousands more were wounded. With only the will of the people becoming more volatile in their fight, Yanukovych fled to Russia, officially toppling his government on Feb. 22, 2014, in what later became known as the Revolution of Dignity.
This changed the chessboard for Moscow. No longer able to operate covertly with a puppet government in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin went on the offensive within days of Yanukovych fleeing.
Putin began with annexing the Crimean Peninsula for Russia by claiming that he was protecting ethnic-speaking Russians living on the territory. As a result, Russia now took control of two-thirds of the Black Sea coastline, the vast majority of Ukraine’s exclusive maritime economic zone.
Why does that matter? By achieving this control, Putin took for Russia approximately 80 percent of Ukraine’s newly discovered oil and gas reserves. In addition, he seized billions of dollars worth of drilling equipment and other infrastructure. This move completely crippled Ukraine’s ability to challenge Russia’s oil and gas supremacy on the European continent.
Once this was secured, Putin began funding a long, drawn-out conflict in the Donbas region, the area where the shale rock formations were discovered. As a result of the ongoing conflict, both Shell and Exxon backed out of their contract with Ukraine to mine those areas due to volatility in the region. This left Ukraine with no capability to extract those resources on its own.
Due to this strategic plunder, Russia secured the position it had coveted since the breakup of the Soviet Union. Not only were the newly discovered oil and gas reserves now Russia’s, but it also secured the strategic port city of Sevastopol, located on Crimea’s southern end of the peninsula. Sevastopol is one of the very few year-round, ice-free ports that the Russian navy can use and needs to operate throughout the Black Sea and the Mediterranean Sea.
This brings us to the present day and why Putin decided to invade Ukraine.
For several years, Ukraine President Zelenskyy has vowed to get Crimea back for its people. On Aug. 23, 2021, as reported by the Associated Press, Zelenskyy organized the Crimean Platform Summit which was attended by top officials from 46 countries, including the U.S.
An impassioned Zelenskyy spoke to his counterparts. The “occupation of Crimea casts doubts on the effectiveness of the entire international security system,” he said. “Without restoring the trust in it, not a single state can be sure that it wouldn’t become the next victim of occupation.
Following the summit, a joint resolution was signed by the participating parties condemning Crimea's annexation and subsequent militarization of the region. The resolution stressed the need to "return to Ukraine" the Crimean Peninsula and stated that "the participants welcome necessary joint diplomatic efforts aimed at restoring Ukraine's territorial integrity. Russia’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, denounced the summit as an “anti-Russian event.”
If Crimea is returned to Ukraine, then Ukraine will doubtless join NATO to ensure that no more ‘annexations’ could occur. Russia would then lose its strategic military port of Sevastopol, as well as find itself in a completely different position regarding its main resources of oil and gas, drastically changing its dominance on the world stage.
From Putin’s perspective, the escalation of conflict, bombing cities and villages across Ukraine, which he calls “special military operations”, was the only way that he could solve this situation once and for all.
From Ukraine’s perspective, losing the resource-rich Crimea peninsula and its Eastern territories condemn it to a future of poverty, with the only path forward getting swallowed by the Russian Federation. As Zelensky starkly put it, “... our truth lies in the fact that this is our land, this is our country, our children, and we are going to defend all of this. Glory to Ukraine!”
