Please note: I am not a European historian. This is not intended to predict what will happen in the next few hours, days, weeks, months, etc. This is just a "how we got here" type of thing.
Okay, so let's start at the beginning. And by "the beginning" I mean, "What happened today [February 21, 2022]." Vladimir Putin - who has been President of Russia since 1999 (save for a four-year stint from 2008 to 2012 when his dude Dmitri Medvedev was President...and Putin was Prime Minister. This is known as a "tandemocracy" and we're not really sure who was really in charge during those four years).
Putin "stepped" "aside" from 2008 to 2012 thanks to a constitutional provision that prohibited a president from serving more than two consecutive terms. Putin led a referendum to change that rule, which was successful in July 2020 and allows Putin to serve as President until [squints] 2036. Apparently the public referendum - and not just a parliamentary procedure - would lend legitimacy to the change. A bunch of people say the vote was rigged. Also part of the public referendum was a ban on same-sex marriages and an official affirmation of the Russian peoples' belief in God. You can see how certain elements of the American media landscape are not terribly upset with Russia as, say, their parents and grandparents were in the 1970s and 1980s.
In a speech given Monday night (Russia time) Putin went all-in on Ukrainian independence...from Ukraine's pro-West government. Over the last few weeks Russia has amassed about 150,000 troops near the Donbas region of Ukraine which, before February 2022 I would have assumed used their socks to sponsor numerous podcasts. Donbas (an abbreviation of "Donetsk Coal Basin"), however, is of particular cultural, historical, and economic importance to Russia dating back to the 19th century, when their coal reserves were massive, up to the revolution that took Russia out of World War 1 and ended up with Vladimir Lenin at the head of a communist government. Oh, and Donbas borders Russia but also has more access to the Black Sea.
Today Donbas is the center of a big ol' separatist campaign (backed by Moscow) to return Ukraine to Russia. And this tactic of using "separatists" to drive division was how the Soviet Union got control over Ukraine after Red October, and how the Soviets maintained control over Eastern Europe in the Cold War. But let's quickly go back to the breakup of the Soviet Union. At the time that the USSR fell apart, Ukraine had the third-most nuclear weapons (behind the USA and former Soviet Union). A bunch of diplomatic agreements de-nuclearized Ukraine, giving those weapons back to Russia essentially in exchange for a pinky-promise that Russia wouldn't invade Ukraine.
That promise lasted about 20 years, when in 2014 Russia invaded and then annexed the Crimean Peninsula and also happened to support a pro-Russia rebellion in eastern Donbas. A big part of that was a result of massive protests across Ukraine against their pro-Russian president Victor Yanukovych. When US diplomats visited the protestors in solidarity, it just pissed Putin off more.
President Obama didn't want to run the risk of escalating tensions with Russia, so he slow-walked both a diplomatic response and a military one. Putin is the center of this. The former KGB officer turned director of the FSB (the KGB's successor) hated seeing the end of the Soviet Union. Now, it seems, he's trying to restore it. Over the years that Putin has been in power in Russia - and especially considering he might run the country until 2036 - this has, and will continue, to make him the longest-serving leader of the country, eclipsing Joseph Stalin's 29 years in power.
Putin has long been on record against Ukraine's existence as an independent nation saying alternately that Ukraine isn't a real country, or that it's a country but it was an accident, or that the sense that Ukrainians have of being a country isn't real. It's worth mentioning that the rising standards of living in the years following the fall of the Soviet Union led to at least a general indifference to who was running the country, a hallmark of authoritarianism reminiscent of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini - a willingness to overlook certain aspects of society with which one might be uncomfortable in exchange for a better economic situation. The "If I'm not wet, it's not raining" mindset, if you will.
In July 2021 Putin gave a speech saying that Russians and Ukrainians were "one people - a single whole" and would be if it weren't for those dastardly kids the meddling of the West. This puts the focus on regaining the former glory of Russia's past, and not that the economy in Russia has stagnated significantly in the last few years, or on Russia's almost non-existent response to COVID-19.
One thing that Putin absolutely does not want is Ukraine joining NATO, and President Biden has indicated that's not something that will happen any time soon. NATO was formed in 1949 - four years after the end of World War 2 - to provide collective security against the communist threat of the Soviet Union and its lackeys.
The meat on the bones of NATO is Article 5, which says that an attack on a member nation is an attack on all member nations. The idea is that the Soviet Union is less willing to invade, say, Estonia if they know that the full weight of Western Europe and the United States is willing to respond with the full force of their militaries. (The Soviet Union responded with the Warsaw Pact - the same deal, but for communist countries). While Ukraine is not officially a NATO member, there is a long history of cooperation between NATO and Ukraine (not to mention President Bush's support for Ukraine and Georgia - but not, like, the ATLiens one - joining NATO back in 2008). But! if Ukraine isn't a part of NATO, then those member nations are not obligated by over 70 years of history to come to Ukraine's aid.
A message from NATO just this afternoon noted:
Moscow continues to fuel the conflict in eastern Ukraine by providing financial and military support to the separatists. It is also trying to stage a pretext to invade Ukraine once again...NATO supports the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine within its internationally recognized borders. Allies urge Russia, in the strongest possible terms, to choose the path of diplomacy, and to immediately reverse its massive military build-up in and around Ukraine...
It's not likely to happen. Putin is planning on the rest of the world being too tired from the health/economic impacts of COVID to put up much of a fight for a country that was still a part of the Soviet Union in my lifetime. As Vox puts it:
All of this has put Ukraine in an impossible position: an applicant for an alliance that wasn't going to accept it, while irritating a political opponent next door, without having any degree of NATO protection.
On Ukraine's part, the 2019 election of former tv comedian Volodymyr Zelensky to Ukraine's presidency (some real Dave crap going on here) - one who openly lobbied for admission to both NATO and the European Union - is a threat to Ukraine willingly rejoining the former Soviet fold. If Putin doesn't act now, perhaps the window will close on Ukraine if those relationships and perceived benefits develop.
Ultimately, the falling of the United States' worldwide estimation in the wake of the Trump Administration, combined with the botched nuclear agreement that pissed off France, combined with the fallout from Brexit, combined with everyone dealing with COVID, just may have provided an opening for Putin to capitalize on the chaos.
What we do know is that, as of now, there are Russian troops in eastern Ukraine on what Putin/the Kremlin are calling a "peacekeeping mission." How much peace is kept is up to Putin.
