Vladimir Putin's interventions in Ukraine have produced the opposite of their intended effect, fostering the very Ukrainian national identity and Western integration that the Russian president sought to prevent, Michael Kofman has argued.
Kofman, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment, made this assessment in a discussion on the origins of the war with Kennan Institute director Michael Kimmage, "Hvylya" reports.
By 2021, it had become clear that Putin "was going to go down in history as a person who fundamentally lost Ukraine," Kofman said. "The things he did didn't work. They only exacerbated the process of fragmentation of Russian influence in Ukraine." Rather than pulling Ukraine back into Moscow's orbit, Putin's actions "helped foster the creation of Ukrainian national identity and of Ukrainian Western integration."
Kofman traced this failure to a series of deepening Russian setbacks. Volodymyr Zelensky, elected in 2019 on a platform of peace, refused to accede to Russian demands on implementing the Minsk 2 agreement. In 2020, Zelensky shut down pro-Russian television stations. In 2021, Viktor Medvedchuk - a figure personally close to Putin - was sanctioned and placed under house arrest.
These setbacks were rooted in a consistent Russian blind spot. Putin and Russian elites, Kofman argued, never saw Ukraine as a genuinely independent state or Ukrainians as a separate nation. "He sees Ukraine as something artificial created from the fallout of the Soviet Union," Kofman said. This extended to a broader Russian view of international politics in which smaller states possess limited sovereignty and their interests should be subordinate to those of great powers.
The failure ran even deeper. Russian elites viewed all political processes as elite-driven - anything that happened in a society "must be engineered by elites," either domestic or foreign. This left them with a "massive blind spot" for civil society, public aspirations, and the horizontal political structures Ukraine had developed. "They can't see Ukraine as it exists," Kofman said - and they kept failing because of it.
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