He doesn’t want an increasingly westernized country in his backyard instead he wants puppets whom he can control to protect his own domestic political position. ![]() Goemans: One answer could be that he now feels strong enough to do it while the West appears in disarray. ![]() Putin perceives the West as weak but is also fighting for his own political survival.Both of these goals overlap in the sense that he is seeking regime change, which is a dangerous game. As my colleague Alexander Downes at George Washington University has recently shown, regime change can be a “catastrophic success.” He wants to prevent more of these revolutions and prevent a democratic encirclement of countries around him, which could provide a safe haven for Russian dissidents who’d be dangerous to Putin’s political survival. Indeed, it was a Color Revolution in Ukraine in 2014, which Putin mischaracterizes as a military coup. A second possible answer has to do with the role of domestic Russian politics, which the standard literature on conflict takes very seriously: Putin has seen what happened in some former Soviet successor republics and the former Yugoslavia, several of which experienced “ Color Revolutions” and democratized. Goemans: I read his goals as twofold: he wants to reestablish directly or indirectly, by annexation or by puppet-regimes, a Russian empire-be it the former USSR or Tsarist Russia. Putin wants to reestablish a Russian empire and at the same time prevent a democratic encirclement around Russia.Goemans warns that a Russian victory-but also a Russian defeat or stalemate-could have dramatically bad consequences for the West, and indeed the whole world. Many of them will die because of Putin’s folly,” says Goemans, who is the author of War and Punishment (Princeton University Press, 2000) and the coauthor of Leaders and International Conflict (Cambridge University Press, 2011). We should not forget those people who are fighting and the costs they are willing to shoulder. “War brings massive casualties, destruction, and costs for everybody concerned. ![]() “I study war because war is awful it’s truly terrible.” Thousands of Ukrainian civilians, and Ukrainian soldiers in the trenches, he notes, are going to die as a result of missiles and artillery fire without ever seeing any Russian soldiers. That’s important to recognize,” says Hein Goemans, a professor of political science at the University of Rochester, who is an expert on international conflicts, territorial disputes, why countries go to war, and how wars end. “When shooting starts, things get out of hand.
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