EUROPEAN WAR 6 1914 PLUS

Earlier leaders, like Peter the Great, had expanded Russian power in their own time. Putin wants to restore what he calls the ‘ Russian world’, and, as he has approached the age of 70, he has been thinking about his legacy. He also thought Ukraine had been ungrateful, offending Russia with its 2014 Maidan uprising, which removed a pro-Russian government, and its deepening of trade relationswith the European Union.

Putin lamented the breakup of the Soviet Union, which he had served as a KGB officer, and, owing to Ukraine and Russia’s close cultural affinities, he considered Ukraine a phony state. We know from Putin’s own writings, and from various biographers like Philip Short, that the intermediate cause was a refusal to see Ukraine as a legitimate state. But given how seriously he miscalculated, we must ask what he was really thinking. Putin told the Russian people that he was conducting a ‘special military operation’ to ‘denazify’ Ukraine and prevent NATO from expanding to Russia’s borders. Airborne troops would capture the airport and advancing tanks would seize Kyiv, removing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and installing a puppet government. Like the leaders of the great powers in 1914, he probably believed that it would be a short, sharp war with a quick victory, somewhat like the Soviet Union’s takeover of Budapest in 1956 or Prague in 1968. In Ukraine, there is no question that Putin lit the match when he ordered Russian troops to invade on 24 February. Poor policy choices were a crucial cause of the catastrophe. As historian Christopher Clark notes in his book about the origins of WWI, The sleepwalkers, in 1914, ‘the future was still open-just’. A strong wind may extinguish the match, or a sudden rainstorm may have soaked the wood. But even then, a bonfire is not inevitable. Think of building a bonfire: piling up the logs is a deep cause, adding kindling and paper is an intermediate cause, and striking a match is a precipitating cause. To sort things out, it helps to distinguish between deep, intermediate and immediate causes. But war was not inevitable until it actually broke out in August 1914, and even then it was not inevitable that four years of carnage had to follow.

EUROPEAN WAR 6 1914 PLUS

Did it start because a Serbian terrorist assassinated an Austrian archduke in 1914, or did it have more to do with ascendant German power challenging Britain, or rising nationalism throughout Europe? The answer is ‘all of the above, plus more’.

World War I occurred more than a century ago, yet historians still write books debating what caused it. How can we discern the origins of a war that may last for years? While many in the West see a war of choice by Russian President Vladimir Putin, he says that NATO’s 2008 decision in favour of eventual Ukrainian membership brought an existential threat to Russia’s borders, and still others trace the conflict back to the Cold War’s end and the failure of the West to support Russia adequately after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Russia’s war in Ukraine is the most disruptive conflict that Europe has seen since 1945.

European war 6 1914