What–Really–Does Vladimir Putin Want?

Three years and nine months into his full-scale war against Ukraine, what does Russian President Vladimir Putin want?

His goals haven’t changed much since his initial stealth invasion almost 12 years ago. He wants Ukraine to cease to exist as a sovereign and independent country and to return to being a vassal of the Kremlin.

He wants Ukraine to be prohibited from joining Western democratic alliances that have embraced other former Soviet republics and Eastern European states that were tethered to the Communist dictatorship in Moscow during the Cold War.

Putin wants a do-over on the end of the Soviet Union, a mostly peaceful realignment of Europe after the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics collapsed under the weight of a dysfunctional economic model and a superpower arms race it couldn’t afford to keep up. Unelected government planning for the price of every essential for life with no regard for the cost of production failed to provide for its 300 million citizens even with the world’s largest and most valuable natural resource deposits, from oil and gas to gold and diamonds.

Putin’s nostalgia for the good old days of the Soviet Union is cover for a gargantuan power trip. As if he hadn’t already usurped the authority of Russia’s remaining 83 republics, provinces, regions and city-states, he launched his initial invasion of Ukraine in February 2014 after the Kremlin puppet Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich fled to Russia following the triumph of a people-powered revolution for democracy.

The Maidan Rebellion that drew millions to street protests for three months was triggered by Yanukovich’s attempt to derail Ukraine’s admission to the European Union as a candidate for membership, if and when it could meet alliance standards for human rights and economic security. At the time the forecast for attaining full EU membership was about 20 years. The Ukrainian parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, had ratified the decision to align with Western Europe but at Putin’s insistence Yanukovich withdrew Kyiv’s application in December 2013, triggering the nationwide revolt and the democratic elections that followed.

Why Putin felt the need to go to war to stop one of the last ex-Soviet republics escaping Kremlin domination is spelled out in hindsight in a long and instructive diatribe he published in July 2021. In it Putin man-splains that Russians and Ukrainians are all the same people, historically and spiritually bound and rightly ruled from the beating heart of the Kremlin.

Despite its length and dubious rationale, the essay doesn’t explain how waging a war against one Russian nation with another protects that natural unity or benefits either side.

Putin’s stated goals, and now the terms he pursues in a pantomime of Ukraine war peace talks with President Donald Trump, are international recognition of Russian annexation of Crimea and four other Ukrainian provinces his forces partially occupy but do not fully control, and the effective restoration of Ukraine to Russia’s sphere of influence with prohibition against its aligning with NATO, the European Union or other Western democratic entities.

Why Putin didn’t jump at the Trump-backed offer of almost all of his stated demands at the US-Russia summit in Alaska in August can only be explained by his expectation of further Ukrainian concessions in the de facto negotiating forum controlled by Trump. It reportedly came as a shock to Putin and his fellow Soviet nostalgic Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov that further capitulation by Ukraine was not currently on offer.

Lavrov said in a YouTube interview with a Hungarian channel last week that his most recent phone conversation with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio had revealed “a very radical change” in Trump’s approach to brokering an end to the war in Ukraine. Rubio called Lavrov ostensibly to start planning for a Trump-Putin meeting in Budapest that Trump had announced after the Alaska meeting, highly criticized for its break from Western democratic isolation of the Kremlin over its unprovoked war in Ukraine.

“When people now say ‘nothing but a ceasefire, immediate ceasefire, and then history will judge,’ it’s a very radical change,” Lavrov said in the interview, translated into English and published in full on the Russian Foreign Ministry’s website.

Lavrov cast Trump’s alleged backtracking on what was agreed at their meeting in Alaska as brought about by “huge, unbelievable pressure” from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and European “hawks” wanting to prevent any cordial relationship between the United States and Russia.

“The Europeans, they don’t sleep, they don’t eat, they try to twist the hands of this administration,” Lavrov said, spinning a narrative likely intended to goad Trump into resuming his favorable view of Putin’s maximal demands.

Putin wants so desperately to turn back the clock to the good old days of Kremlin-controlled Bolshevism that he has squandered the lives of more than a million young Russians killed or permanently injured since the full-scale war began. Those statistics from the U.S.-based Institute for the Study of War do not include the unknown number of casualties from the 2014 invasion mostly waged by Russian mercenaries and Ukrainian citizens of Russian ethnicity who were aligned with Yanukovich’s Kremlin-backed Party of Regions.

The simple answer to what Putin wants from his costly disruption of the post-World War II rules-based order is restoration of a Russian Empire of the size, power and brutality of the 16th and 17th Centuries when Russian territory was at its maximum.

Empire-building has been a more challenging undertaking in this century and the last, when even the most aggressive leaders failed to stay in power or live long enough to enjoy their spoils of war. Putin, who is 73 and has been Kremlin leader for 25 years after a career in the Soviet KGB, is far behind in emulating Peter the Great. When Putin fantasizes about ruling over an empire of the type conquered by his role model, he overlooks his long-ago predecessor’s accomplishments in modernizing the expanded Russian empire before his death at age 52.

Out of curiosity and just for fun, this writer Googled “What does Russian President Vladimir Putin want in Ukraine?” Here is the short response from Google’s AI Mode:

“Vladimir Putin’s goals in Ukraine are maximalist and aim for the subjugation of the Ukrainian state and a revision of the post-Cold War European security order. His core demands for ending the war are the recognition of Russia’s annexed territories, a guarantee that Ukraine will never join NATO, and a “neutral” and “demilitarized” status for Ukraine.”

For a more detailed AI analysis, Google it.