Kremlin’s unwillingness to recognize Ukraine as a sovereign state has resulted in major strategic failure for Russia, Stanford scholar says
As Russia increases its military presence along the Ukrainian border, Stanford scholar Steven Pifer discusses what Russia hopes to achieve and why its policies toward Ukraine are backfiring.
By stepping up its military presence along the Ukrainian border, Russian President Vladimir Putin hopes that Ukraine and the West will make concessions and Ukraine will realign itself back to Moscow, says Stanford scholar Steven Pifer. But nothing has alienated Ukraine more than Kremlin policy over the past eight years, particularly Russia’s military seizure of Crimea in 2014 and its role in the Donbas conflict that has claimed more than 13,000 lives, he said.
Here, Pifer, the William J. Perry Fellow at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), discusses what Putin hopes to accomplish by amassing military troops along the Ukrainian border and why Ukraine’s democratic ambitions pose such a threat to Russia’s authoritarian leader.
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