Europe’s moment has come and action is called for in the face of Russia’s continued aggression in Ukraine as U.S. commitment predictably gives ground to its longstanding adversary. Vladimir Putin’s imperialist designs are committed first to bringing both Ukraine and Belarus back into Russia’s fold before considering the options of returning the nations of the Baltic region and Eastern Europe under Russian hegemony. That doesn’t mean to say Putin is not meddling elsewhere to cause instability within Europe as in the Western Balkan nations, Germany, Romania, Poland, France, the United Kingdom and still other nations.
Over several years, Putin has mixed a strategy of deceit, using his own brand of double-speak, misinformation and foreign political meddling, with outright criminality and intimidation to both gain territorial advantage and accumulate wealth. The approach with its heavy coating of denialism has continued to confound Western leaders sufficiently to prevent outright confrontation, a situation Putin desperately wishes to avoid, while pushing the threshold of such an occurrence to its limit. Thus far, Putin has managed to sustain his illegal war with Ukraine while narrowly avoiding economic collapse and manipulating the Trump administration to his advantage. One needn’t look further than the servile posturing of the U.S. diplomatic envoy, Steven Witkoff, at his most recent meeting with Putin from which he returned with Russia’s original unaltered wish list. Soon after, as if to show its disregard for the U.S. visit, Russia bombed the northeastern Ukrainian city of Sumy on the morning of Palm Sunday, killing at least 34, including children.
Belarus, a nation of about 9.2 million people, separates Russia to the east from Poland and Lithuania to the west, and spans a territory of 80,200 square miles, a bit smaller than Kansas. Some 26 years ago, a “Union State Treaty” was signed by Belarus and Russia with the goal of integrating economic, military and intelligence interests. In 2018, Putin approached Alexander Lukashenko, president and self-professed dictator of Belarus since 1994, with an “offer” that promised to maintain Russian energy subsidies for Belarus in exchange for more “intensified integration.” Increasingly dependent upon Russia for energy, trade and his own security in the face of mounting public dissent, Lukashenko appears to have reached a state of understanding with Putin that looks to ultimately relinquish his nation’s sovereignty by a process of annexation to its larger neighbor.
Both Belarus and Ukraine under Russian control would provide Putin with a wide land bridge to the former Warsaw Pact nations of Eastern Europe. While currently occupied militarily with Ukraine, he is likely to gain control over Belarus by a much less expensive tact. In 2022, a new doctrine was established with Belarus making it an even more closely integrated security partner of Russia by allowing Putin to place nuclear weapons in Belarus. Such a move largely assures a Russian presence in Belarus into the foreseeable future. Lukashenko’s subservience to Putin has similarly afforded Russia the convenience of using Belarusian territory to launch military operations against Ukraine with which it shares a near 700-mile border. The move has obliged Belarus to become militarily allied with Russia against Ukraine and subject to international sanctions beyond those imposed in response to its fraudulent presidential elections.
Russian largesse in providing for Belarusian public well-being through trade and preferred status has managed to quell, for the time being, its polarized society unhappy with the illegitimacy of the Lukashenko regime. Moreover, Putin stands prepared to provide military support for the Lukashenko regime as he was when the regime was challenged by the public over what were overwhelmingly regarded as rigged electoral results in 2020 and will undoubtedly continue to do the same in order to keep Belarus in its state of dependency. Despite Russia’s strong support and Lukashenko’s repressive policies, there remains internal instability among Belarusians. The Kremlin’s rhetorical comments about the commonality of the people of Russia and Belarus are designed to further lull the Belarusians into passive submission to Russian influence and rule.
The approach conforms to what Putin tried and ultimately failed to do in Ukraine before his 2022 invasion. His attempt at promoting a universal “Russian-speaking” nation follows upon the centuries-old Imperial Russian and subsequent Soviet tradition of erasing the language, history, and culture of other nationalities in order to homogenize them into a singular body committed to a centralized authority in Moscow. Much of 18th and 19th century Imperial Russia is now the Russian Federation (RF) or simply “Russia” and contains 21 republics along with other designated federal entities inhabited by pluralities of indigenous ethnicities. All are Russian-speaking but are not treated as equals of ethnic Russians the majority of whom dwell in the European part of Russia, concentrated within heavily populated urban areas. The more remote ethnic peoples are mostly distributed elsewhere in the North Caucasus and east of the Ural Mountains in Russia’s Asiatic lands. Standards of living among them fall well below Western norms and health care infrastructure remains chronically underfunded and poorly distributed.
Most evident in how ethnic non-Russians have been recently treated was manifested by their disproportionate recruitment into the Russian military for use as cannon fodder in Ukraine where mortality of ethnic minority combatants have exceeded that for urban Russians from Moscow by more than 100 times. In similar fashion, Putin has endeavored to level indiscriminately the civilian infrastructure of his “Russian-speakers” in eastern and southeastern Ukraine accounting for more than 12,500 civilian deaths. Ironically, his victimization of this population stands in marked contrast to one of his several flawed justifications for the war which was to rescue it from a “genocide” waged by the Ukrainian government.
Putin began his assault on Ukraine in 2014 by overtaking Crimea with an unmarked Russian paramilitary force while also assisting pro-Russian insurgents in eastern Ukraine to conduct a civil war with the intent of destabilizing the central government. This followed the flight of Ukraine’s pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, from the country. The Maidan revolt of 2013-14 in Ukraine which instigated these events had come in reaction to Putin’s attempt to halt the nation’s alignment with the European Union (EU). Peace talks to stop the conflict initially brokered by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) led to the Minsk I and II agreements, both of which failed to bring about any substantive resolution. Rather, Russia had maneuvered its involvement in these agreements in such a way as to deny any obligation to their provisions, allowing it to blame Ukraine for continuation of the conflict while working behind the scenes to promote the conflict in Russia’s favor. Ceasefire agreements with Russia were repeatedly broken by the Kremlin then and continue to be disregarded to the present day.
Putin has long been able to outmaneuver past U.S. administrations in the course of his malign activities as leader of Russia using a subterfuge of denials, threats, and countermeasures. His easiest mark by far has been the Trump administration over which he appears to have exerted control in some fashion. Accommodations have been announced by the U.S. preemptively in the form of outright territorial concessions to Russia as well as denial of Ukrainian membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). This all has occurred while attempting to extort mineral rights from Ukraine. More recently, the reopening of Russian gas pipeline transit into Europe through Ukrainian land has been added to Ukraine’s obligations in pending negotiations.
The EU has understood the threat from Russia upon both Ukraine and itself and is reacting to it while Putin attempts to gauge its preparedness against the retreat of the U.S. from its prior commitments. Russian attacks in Europe in the form of sabotage and subversion have accelerated considerably during the time of Putin’s war in Ukraine from 2022 through to the present, much of it mediated by Russia’s military intelligence service or the Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (GRU). These follow upon several pre-war efforts to destabilize European society in the buildup to Putin’s invasion.
After so many years of engagement, his agenda does not include submission to weak-minded U.S. efforts to halt the killing. Rather, his intentions are to continue terrorizing Ukraine’s civilian population while attempting to overcome, by sheer volume, its military efforts to defend itself. Ukrainian resilience these past three years, however, has proven to be more of an obstacle than Putin had realized, and it remains the unknowable factor that may well overcome his best efforts to prevail. On the other hand, Europe’s opportunity to make its stand boldly alongside Ukraine has arrived as Putin’s time is running very short. Russia’s economy sinks further into uncertainty as neglect of public welfare becomes increasingly evident, anti-war sentiment mounts as casualties exceed tolerable levels, frontline desertions punctuate minimalist incremental battlefield gains, and major military assets continue to be lost. Landing on the right side of history should be Europe’s goal and the decision to make that happen is now.
Copyright @Kost Elisevich, MD, PhD 2025. All rights reserved. Any illegal reproduction of this content will result in immediate legal action.
