“Great wars sometimes start over small offenses. A murdered duke. An angered pope. The belief of a lonely king that his rivals aren’t playing fair,” Time magazine reminds us.
And, Time says, “When historians study why armies began gathering in Europe during the plague of 2021, their interest might turn to a teenage girl, the goddaughter of Moscow’s isolated sovereign.”
The kid’s name is Daria, the daughter of Ukraine’s leading pro-Moscow politician. When she was born, he asked Putin to be her godfather, and that opened the door to a longtime friendship between the two men. Putin, Time says, “doted on her.”
That politician, Viktor Medvedchuk — Time calls him “the leading voice for Russian interests in Ukraine” — is Putin’s doorway into Ukraine. He’ll probably be the not-quite-puppet, but subservient, ruler Putin installs in what’s left of Kiev after Russia’s armed forces seize the country.
Meantime, with Medvedchuk blacklisted and under house arrest by Ukrainian president Zelensky and his political allies, and Medvedchuk’s party in retreat, “the Kremlin has no clear path to influence over Ukraine through politics, and that raises the temptation to use hard power” (i.e., military force).
Oleh Voloshyn, a “prominent member” of Medvedchuk’s party, told Time, “You have to understand, there are hawks around Putin who want this crisis. They are ready to invade. They come to him and say, ‘Look at your Medvedchuk. Where is he now? Where is your peaceful solution? Sitting under house arrest? Should we wait until all pro-Russian forces are arrested?’”
The Ukrainian crisis, like all politics-driven events, is a tangled web. But its basic outlines are clear: Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, NATO has encroached into many former Warsaw Pact countries, and former KGB guy Putin doesn’t like it. He wants to push NATO back. Until 2014, Ukraine was ruled by a Moscow lackey, but he was overthrown by a popular revolt, and Ukraine’s people elected a pro-Western president. Putin then promptly seized the strategic Crimea peninsula, and sent disguised Russian troops into the Ukrainian (but heavily-Russian) Donbas industrial region bordering Russia.
Now, he wants to bring the rest of Ukraine, or at least its eastern territory, back under Russian control. He’s apparently willing to go to war to do that. It isn’t about this girl, it’s about that; but Putin’s friendship with her father, and fatherly affection for her, likely adds further impetus to his resolve to replace Ukraine’s pro-Western, democratically elected leader with Medvedchuk and his pro-Russia party.
But, as Time points out, it’s larger than any individual, or Ukraine’s internal politics. Time says, “Nearly 12 months since it began, the crisis in Ukraine has become far bigger and more dangerous than any political grudge.” Indeed it has.
Read the rest of the story here.
Photo: Medvedchuk and Putin
