: What the West Will Never Understand About Putin’s Ukraine Obsession #WorldNEWS The way Russian President Vladimir Putin and Kremlin propaganda talk about the countries Russia threatens—with

What the West Will Never Understand About Putin’s Ukraine Obsession #WorldNEWS
The way Russian President Vladimir Putin and Kremlin propaganda talk about the countries Russia threatens—with Ukraine front and center—to invade, occupy, coerce and control tells the story of perhaps the unhappiest family in the world.
Reading Putin’s mind is in many ways a mug’s game, but can we parse something more fundamental about the deeper drives compelling the Kremlin’s behaviour from its language and social dynamics? What do they tell us about its motivations—and how to deal with them? It’s tempting to think about Moscow’s foreign policy as reducible to rational self-interest, a demand for spheres of influence articulated in the sober logic of security and realist international relations, but its language also hints at something more intermingled with the intimacies of family dynamics.
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Firstly, there’s the obsessive stalking of Kyiv, which is deified as the mother of all Russian cities, and then castigated either as a prostitute who has sold out to the West, or a sort of zombie-mummy, manipulated by dark forces who have turned her into a tool against Russia.
Then there’s the oft repeated definition of Ukrainians and Belarussians as Russians’ younger Brothers, a definition at once patronising and suffocating, with the insistence that all these different countries are actually one people, one mass destined to be locked forever in the communal apartment of the Russian state (of mind).
Thus to justify his annexation of Crimea and invasion of East Ukraine, Putin argued in 2014 that “Russians and Ukrainians are one people. Kiev is the mother of Russian cities. Ancient Rus is our common source and we cannot live without each other,” and then earlier this year described Ukraine as being turned into the anti-Russia by the West. The language and memes become ever less elegant as you descend into the vomitarium of Russian state media talk shows and troll farms.
Though the references to ‘younger brothers’ and ‘mother Kyiv’ are age-old tropes embedded in Russian culture, a more recent innovation is the Russian Foreign Ministry’s depiction of countries who used to be in the USSR and Warsaw Pact as ‘orphaned’ by the end of the Cold War: as if Estonia, Poland and the Czech Republic were lost urchins somehow pining for the return of Big Daddy Moscow.
Such constant references to family relations make me think that other motivations could be relevant here: could even a touch of psychoanalysis help inform the geopolitical analysis?
There’s some history to this approach. At the end of World War II the British psychiatrist Henry Dicks conducted a series of in-depth interviews with German POWs selected to represent different German social segments.