Why Did Russia Invade Ukraine?

Russia invaded Ukraine on 24th February. In the weeks before, that this would happen was called both impossible and inevitable. The reasons why are less important than what happens on the ground in Ukraine, but they are not unimportant.

What follows is only an attempt at an answer based on the information available. It is not a definite answer. Geopolitical events are hard to explain as they’re happening (hard afterwards too, but for different reasons). I’ve outlined three broad narratives that are being used to explain the invasion, looked at what they get right, and how they fail to adequately explain things.

The most common answer to why Russia invaded Ukraine is the simplest, and juiciest: Putin. Russia is typically presented as an autocracy, its every action traceable to one man. You can see the prevalence of this way of thinking in the way it has hijacked language: people don’t say that ‘Russia’ or ‘the Russian army’ has launched an attack or lost a battalion, they say ‘Putin’. European politicians have referred to the invasion as ‘Putin’s War’. This might seem like just a linguistic shortcut but it highlights why the Putin narrative is so appealing: Putin provides a face, a character — an evil villain persona — in a story, to what are for most of us faraway events.