Three widely cited explanations for why Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 do not withstand scrutiny, Michael Kofman has argued, pushing back against narratives that center on the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, a Russian fear of democracy spreading, and the idea that the war served as a domestic diversion for Putin.
Kofman, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment, laid out his case in a discussion on the origins of the war hosted by the Kennan Institute, as "Hvylya" reports.
On Afghanistan, Kofman was blunt. The Biden administration's mismanaged withdrawal was a significant foreign policy failure, but "two things can be true" at the same time: the withdrawal was a debacle, and Putin had already been planning the invasion and "had been putting the pieces in place for a long time." Concrete Russian invasion plans discovered shortly after the withdrawal "cannot be explained by the fact that they were written late on a Friday night" - these were not documents assembled in a few weeks.
The democracy promotion theory fared no better. Kofman argued that authoritarian elites in Russia "don't see democratic states as really being democratic. They have a very cynical view of them." The Kremlin does not believe democracy spreads organically - it views it as something imposed instrumentally by intelligence services and foreign powers. The idea that Putin invaded Ukraine to prevent democratic contagion is, in Kofman's view, "a self-validating theory" favored by those in the democracy promotion space.
As for diversionary war theory, Kofman said the empirical basis is weak in general and especially inapplicable to Russia's case. At the time of the invasion, Putin had consolidated political control, the opposition was "largely in disarray and exile," and the Russian economy was recovering from COVID faster than expected. "There's nothing obviously happening in Russian domestic politics that at all requires Putin to launch a risky war," he said.
The real drivers, Kofman argued, lay in the interaction between Russia and Ukraine itself - Putin's visible frustration at losing political influence, the failure of the Minsk process, Volodymyr Zelensky's crackdown on pro-Russian TV stations, and the sanctions against Viktor Medvedchuk, a figure personally close to Putin.
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