In 2004 and again in 2014 the people of Ukraine rose up in protest against the corruption in the country which rendered elections futile and which returned time and again Russian stooges.
These protests later came to be known as the Orange Revolution from the colour of the garments worn by the protesters.
The free world later came to acknowledge the gains of the Orange Revolution, although many acknowledged it was still incomplete. But Russia never did. In Putin’s mind the Ukraine is not an independent, sovereign, state but the former Ukrainian oblast (region) of Soviet times.
President Barack Obama stood firm in favour of the Ukraine throughout his presidency. But not his successor Donald Trump. Not only he held back from continuing to support a free Ukraine but he also found time to involve the Ukraine in a nasty attempt to wage party politics across so many thousands of miles.
His aim, in the run-up to the 2010 presidential election, was to try and throw dirt on Joe Biden’s son Hunter who had business interests in the Ukraine.
He sent in an army of investigators led by the hero of New York after the 9/11 attack, Rudy Giuliani, to ferret out dirt, any dirt, on Hunter Biden. And worse, he threatened to block congressional help to Ukraine unless the Ukrainian government collaborated with him.
This detail was leaked outside the Oval Office through a whistleblower and Trump faced an attempt to remove him from office.
This attempt was unsuccessful but this was not the only consequence. The Russian government, specifically Putin, got the impression that the US was only lukewarm in its support of the Ukraine and could easily be scared away.
Hence the invasion of Ukraine three weeks ago.
A contributing factor could also have been the muted reaction by the West as a whole after the invasion and annexation of Crimea and the Donbass regions.
Putin and his government underestimated the sturdy defence put up by the Ukrainian people. They assumed that the protests by the West would be perfunctory. They also assumed the invasion would be over in a couple of days and that a puppet regime could be set up in Kyiv and people could eventually get used to the idea.
It is Putin’s nature to come back with renewed aggression any time he meets with a setback (see Syria) and this is the greatest risk the world is facing now.
In Syria too he accused those on the other side of using chemical weapons before using them himself. His forces bombed the maternity hospital in Mariupol forcing women who had just had a baby out of the building into cold and snow but then his foreign minister said this was all fake news originating in the Ukraine.
Apart from bombs, missiles and so on, the war is being waged on the social media not just of the Ukraine but also worldwide. Although the EU has banned the transmission by Russian television stations RU and the like, there still remain many sleeper sources of fake news.
Hence the enduring importance of distinguishing real news from fake news, the importance of fact-checking by all those involved in bringing the news to the people and the importance of creating a distance between the news and the purveyors of news slanted to persuade people this way or that.
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