Russian authoritarianism demands a permanent state of conflict. A democratic, successful Ukraine is indeed a threat to Putin, but not a military one.
Kyiv Post
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In the faculty lounges of Western universities, a stubborn theory persists regarding Russia’s war on Ukraine. It is the theory of “defensive realism” championed most prominently by John Mearsheimer, which posits that Russia was backed into a corner by NATO enlargement, leaving Vladimir Putin no choice but to lash out to secure his strategic periphery. It is a seductive narrative because it offers a tidy solution: acknowledge the West’s error, freeze the alliance, and peace will return.
There is only one flaw in this theory: it contradicts the Kremlin’s own stated logic.
To find the true drivers, one must examine the axioms laid out in Putin’s July 2021 essay, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.” Here, the Russian president does not discuss security architectures or missile defense systems. In the article, he discusses a number of historical myths ranging from the 10th to 20th centuries. He posits a world where Ukrainian sovereignty is not a geometric reality, but a historical error to be corrected. In this zero-sum game, Ukraine has no independent value; it acts merely as a subset of Greater Russia.
To understand the vacuum of Putin’s worldview we must look into the work of Serhii Plokhy. In his work “The Lost Kingdom” he explains that Ukrainian Identity is not an invention of the West or the Bolsheviks, but is rooted in a centuries-old struggle for statehood. While Putin uses the Treaty of Pereyaslav in 1654 as a symbol of “eternal union,” the Cossacks use it as a temporary military union between equals to protect them against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
Ibrahim Azizi invoked Article 51 of the UN Charter, arguing Iran could act in self-defense if Ukraine joins the conflict.
If we look even closer at the history of Ukraine and freedom, we should look deeper into the old location of Sloboda Ukraine. This spirit of autonomy is nowhere more evident in Ukrainian history than in this part. While the imperial term “Malorossiya” (Little Russia) was designed to reduce Ukraine to a folkloric appendage, the Sloboda, the “free settlements” around present-day Kharkiv, represented a different reality. This was a frontier shaped from the bottom up by pioneers seeking refuge from Muscovite autocracy and Polish serfdom. The Sloboda regiments were built on contractual rights and self-governance, a horizontal social structure that stood in total contrast to the vertical tyranny of the tsars. By invoking the myth of “historical unity,” Putin attempts to erase this distinct tradition of freedom. To him, the East is “historically Russian” land; to history, it is a land defined by the very refusal to be a subject. The fierce resistance seen today in Kharkiv is not a 21st-century anomaly; it is the modern manifestation of the Sloboda spirit, a centuries-old rejection of the imperial “center.”
When an autocrat publishes a manifesto claiming a neighbor does not exist, and then invades said neighbor six months later, it is intellectual dishonesty to blame a defensive alliance in Brussels. The “NATO threat” serves merely as a pretext, a variable invoked to confuse Western audiences while the real work of imperial restoration takes place.
The West did not provoke this war by expanding the zone of democracy, Russia launched it to expand the zone of subjugation.
This hypothesis is confirmed by the reality on the ground. If NATO were truly an existential threat, the accession of Finland and Sweden, doubling the alliance’s border with Russia, should have triggered a crisis. Instead, Moscow responded with a strategic shrug, stripping its garrisons on the Finnish border to feed the frontlines in Donbas. The Kremlin knows perfectly well that NATO does not attack. It simply uses the specter of the alliance to justify the second driver of this war: the survival of the regime itself.
The internal dynamics of Russian authoritarianism demand a permanent state of conflict. The old social contract of prosperity in exchange for passivity, has evaporated. It has been replaced by a contract of mobilization. To justify tightening repression and isolating the population from democratic influence, the regime requires a besieging enemy.
A democratic, successful Ukraine is indeed a threat to Putin, but not a military one. It is a threat by example. The persistence of authoritarian rule in Russia, and the public support it often receives, is widely interpreted as evidence that strong rule reflects a societal preference rather than political constraint. Ukraine challenges this conclusion by demonstrating that even a society shaped by the same Soviet legacy can build and sustain democratic institutions.
Reframing this narrative is urgent because false diagnoses lead to fatal prescriptions. If the war were about security guarantees, diplomacy could solve it. But because the war is driven by imperial ambition and domestic survival, concessions will only whet the appetite. An empire is not satiated by territory; it is only stopped by force.
European policy must therefore pivot. The task is not to reassure Russia, but to contain it. The West did not provoke this war by expanding the zone of democracy, Russia launched it to expand the zone of subjugation. Recognizing this distinction is the only way to secure the future of the continent.
Ukraine did not drift toward the West; it chose it. From the Orange Revolution to the Revolution of Dignity, millions of Ukrainians repeatedly took to the streets to defend a political future anchored in law, accountability, and European integration. These uprisings were not geopolitical accidents but conscious societal choices, made at immense personal cost. It was this choice, not NATO enlargement, that rendered Ukraine incompatible with the Russian system. The flight of Viktor Yanukovych was not the result of Western interference, but the collapse of a regime that refused to respect the clearly expressed will of its own people.
Ultimately, the central issue is not NATO tanks on its borders, but political legitimacy. To secure the continent, the West must finally stop viewing the war through the lens of Russian anxieties and start respecting the clarity of Ukrainian choice.
The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.
Kevin Son Zisting is a student at Humboldt University of Berlin. His interests include Ukrainian and Russian politics, regional security, and economic and fiscal policy in Eastern Europe.
