The country represented by the bear covers one hefty landmass. Russia is the largest in the world sitting on 11 time zones spans an area 200 times the size of Ireland.
This wasn’t always the case. To understand the people of Russia and its leaders, its necessary to understand the geography of the land they sit on.
The ethnic Russian people originated around modern day Kiev in Ukraine. This extremely flat, fertile land was ideal for farming as it contains some of the most productive farmland in the world. However, the land itself was extremely difficult to defend with wide-open planes, lacking the natural protection of mountains. This facilitated anyone with a bigger stick coming and stealing the ethnic people’s veggies as they wished.
After years of invasions from hordes of Mongols, the Russian people got fed up, picked up their bags and headed north-east, further in-land.
They settled around modern-day Moscow. This then became the geopolitical center from which the Russian state was formed. However, this land is also wide-open with no mountains and very few rivers. Again, anyone that fancied, could come unhindered with no natural defensive barriers to slow down an invasion. Finding themselves yet again situated on tactically indefensible land, they changed strategy.
The Russian Bear emerged under the mantra of ‘offence is the best defense’. They began expanding outwards with the intention of controlling an immensely vast landmass. Covering numerous mountain ranges and thousands of miles of desolate tundra. Anyone who dared charge the Russian Bear would have their supply lines stretched over an insurmountable distance. This idea is called ‘strategic depth’, in military-lingo.
This covered the Russian people from the north, south and east. However the Russian Bear was always cursed with a bald spot in its fur – the west.
To the east, the Ural mountain range and to the south, the Caucasus mountain range both act like the Wall in Game of Thrones.
Not too many lads would be willing to climb over those mountains, to then trek hundreds of miles to THEN to chance having a crack at the Bear who would have been well aware of their slow advancement weeks/months ago.
To the north the artic circle exists – needless to say it’s a bit too chilly-on-the-willy to attempt coming from that direction.
But to the west, exists the Great European Plain – these lowlands are basically a clear runway straight towards the heart of the Russian Bear.
However, Russia has never been successfully invaded from this direction. This certainty isn’t from a lack of trying either. The wee man, Napoleon made a go at it in 1812 and the angry man, Hilter tried it twice – in the 1st and 2nd world war. All failed.
A normal lad would be happy with the assurance of repeated failure, but the rulers of Russia remained paranoid that someone from Europe may try again.
After the last failed invasion in WWII, Russia had the opportunity to expand westward. Russia drew the 7,000km-long Iron Curtain across countries along its western front, imposing communism and taking control of many neighboring countries, creating a barrier between itself and the West.
However this method of expansion was not a permanent solution, similar to sticking a toupee on a bald spot. While it might have worked in every other direction, the conquered eastern, southern and northern fronts were sparsely populated and hence weak to external influence. Unfortunately for Russia, the Western states were well established, populous, ethnic communities, much more capable of telling their new Russian overlords to f*ck off.
The Iron Curtain fell off the curtain pole around 1990 and so the toupee covering the Russian Bear’s western facing bald spot fell off. Besides from exposing Russia’s enormous wide-open western flank, another geopolitical issue arose.
A country of Russia’s scale has global geopolitical ambitions. When compared to the other global players such as the US, Russia has a strategic disadvantage – the lack of a warm-water port.
Maintaining global geopolitical influence involves plenty of hand-holding and arm-twisting, depending on the circumstance. In some situations this may even involve sailing your big boat with big guns off the shore of a not-so-big country. However, Russia’s ability to launch naval-spooking-missions all year round is impaired by its lack of warm-water ports. Having your naval bases freeze over for a couple of months every year can be somewhat inconvenient, putting you at a severe disadvantage when compared to countries that can operate year-round.
Along with non-freezing naval bases, deep water ports are also key to host large military ships capable of all year-round effective spooking.
Looking at the map, the light grey area edged around the land indicates a shallow sea floor. The red arrow points towards what Russia views as its only option for a proper deep warm-water naval base - Crimea.
While the curtain was hanging, Crimea was under Russia’s control. When it fell, Russia lost its prized possession. To make matters worse, from a Russian point of view anyway, they saw NATO expanding right onto its doorstep, reigniting their fear of an invader from the west.
These fears were unfounded. NATO is a defensive organisation incorporated to protect democratic values. But try telling that to the crackpot that is Vladimir Putin and his obsession with covering his western facing bald patch.
To help himself sleep at night, he employed the dark arts of geopolitics. He injected cheap natural gas into European countries’ veins, getting them addicted to cheap energy and forcing them to think twice about going against him. This worked quite effectively against even seemingly impenetrable vibrant democracies such as Germany.
For more troubled countries along the Russian-European border, he backed authoritarian strong-men who were willing to drop their knickers and bend over whenever Putin said so. This kept those countries weak and unsettled, creating a buffer zone between him and the west. A huge country that covered a large portion of this toupee was Ukraine.
Ukraine’s geographical position sees a key gas pipeline passed directly through its land. This vital artery provided Europe with its energy needs while funneling cash into the Russian economy.
When the Iron Curtain fell, the mates-rates Ukraine was getting for cheap gas as a part of Soviet Russia was in question. Ukraine then faced a tough decision.
Either get back into bed with the Russians and continue to receive a supply of cheap gas, or, jump into bed with the West but risk gas prices skyrocketing, destroying the economy in the process.
The Ukrainians decided on a third option. As the pipelines passed directly through their land, Ukraine saw the opportunity to become the gate-keepers of Russia’s hydrocarbon-business with the energy-hungry western Europeans. Ukraine decided to demand tariffs off Russia to allow the gas to pass through their country and in one move, turned the tables around and backed Russia into a corner.
This phenomenon is what economists call ‘rents of energy dependency’. Ukraine then controlled the toll and took their share of whatever passed through.
However, this business arrangement was underpinned by a wealth of corruption on both sides. Putin tolerated getting squeezed for rents as long as there was a pro-Russian president of Ukraine. Ensuring a pro-Russian president would keep the Ukrainian sized toupee on his bald patch after all.
This continued right up until 2004, when huge protests called ‘The Orange Revolution’, were sparked over a rigged Ukrainian election which saw a Putin-backed politician attempt to steal the presidency. Russia worried Ukraine could slip further into bed with the West, while maintaining a firm grip on Russia’s main gas artery.
At the time, 80% of Russia’s gas to Europe was flowing through the Ukrainian pipelines.
Since that peak, Putin begun reducing this dependency by building a series of additional pipelines, circumventing Ukraine, with plans to cease using the Ukrainian pipelines altogether by 2024. All this would dismantle the power Ukraine held over his petrol station business.
This was a looming disaster for Ukraine.
That was until, in 2012, huge potential deposits of natural gas were discovered off Ukraine’s coast in the Black Sea around Crimea. As the U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry put it;
“the potential for exploration and production in Ukraine - this is quite a statement from me, but Ukraine would be the Texas of Europe."
In a few years, Ukraine was on track to become Europe’s petrol station going into direct competition with Russia. Putin started to get nervous.
In 2014, the then President of Ukraine, Yanukovych was close to signing a huge trade deal with the EU. In Putin’s head, if the deal went through, this would simply be a prerequisite for EU membership, and maybe even membership to NATO (oh no). If that were to happen, the Ukrainian buffer state would be lost exposing Russia to the world.
Putin courted Yanukovych to do a U-turn on the EU deal and to sign one with Russia instead. Riots ensued, the president shit his pants and proceeded to flee the country. To replace his shit-stained seat as the leader of Ukraine, an anti-Russian / pro-Western government took over.
From this point, the Ukrainian toupee started to peel off and Putin’s nightmare was becoming reality. In a matter of days, Putin instructed his forces to move on Crimea in an illegal annexation and claim it as Russian sovereign territory.
This geopolitical stunt got him control of the sacred deep warm-water port, further hydrocarbon reserves and billions of dollars’ worth of drilling equipment already set up.
As Putin stated himself following the land-grab, “Russia found itself in a position it could not retreat from. If you compress the spring all the way to its limit, it will snap back hard.”
Putin regarded the matter of Crimea as an existential threat to his country and gambled the West would not intervene in such a move. He was right.
The repercussions for stealing a piece of land the size of half of Ireland was a few ineffective sanctions, which was the geopolitical equivalent to a slap on the wrist.
In Putin’s eyes, he got away with it. What was to stop him doing it again?