A Bridge Too Far?
As a military move, the annexation of Crimea was admirable and efficient. As a step toward taking the whole of Ukraine, however, it might turn out to have been self-defeating.
Ukraine before Crimea was deeply troubled, crime-ridden, and corruption plagued.
Dissatisfaction with the old way of ruling was riding high, and the West—and all things Western—were becoming more and more alluring to the population as a whole. As McCain noted in the epigraph to this chapter, you don’t want your people to even see the greener grass. Once they see it, it's hard to convince them that Euro-grass is bad compared to the brown, withered Russian-grass.A far-reaching aspirational movement was developing. Ukrainian nationalism became a notional tool for leaving the Russian East and joining up with the European West. Anti-Russian solidarity was ratcheted up a notch. Anyone could see that Putin wanted the whole of Ukraine. In 2021, he even wrote an essay (well, probably his ghostwriter did) in which he argued that Russians and Ukrainians were “one people” (Putin, 2021). For anyone who had managed to get a reliable history text on the Stalin years, this would have been horrifying.
At just the wrong time for Russian plans, Ukrainian self-consciousness reached its highest level in eight centuries. The mood of the nation crystallized as needing to move away from Russia, and toward Europe under the powerful leadership of Zelensky.
A seemingly easy pacification of a sympathetic region (Crimea) might just be the spark that ignited an explosion of resistance in Ukraine.