REGINALD DUMAS

Pt I

VLADIMIR PUTIN, Russia's maximalist leader, has invaded his neighbour Ukraine. By the time this article appears, his troops will be in control of significant areas of that country. But why has he invaded?

Many say he wants to re-establish Czarist Russia (or Stalinist Soviet Union?) along ethnic lines, and that he is merely continuing the exercise he began in 2014 with the annexation of Crimea, followed recently by his recognition of two Russophone sections of eastern Ukraine.

Others say that Ukraine is the last buffer for Russia against NATO's eastward creep in Europe, that Putin had been voicing security concerns for decades and was being ignored, and that he felt he had finally to act.

There are two more factors I think influenced him. First, like many Russian nationalists, he almost certainly has a deep-seated fear of invasion of his country. Russia has been assaulted many times over the years: by the Mongols in the 13th century, the Swedes, the Japanese, the French under Napoleon, the Germans under Hitler. Would Putin be unreasonable to think that NATO might have the same thing in mind? Or, if not an invasion, at least an encirclement?

Second, there are Ukraine's attractive economic resources of food, minerals and technology.

You can understand any suspicion Putin might have of NATO's motives. Its eastward European expansion has reflected the western movement of Stalin's Soviet Union, long collapsed, after World War II. But nearly all Moscow's former communist client states are now in the chambers of the West - the European Union and NATO - and today's Russia is left with Lukashenko's Belarus. That's quite a comedown.

For its part, the West has been triumphalist; it has dismissed Putin's complaints and preened itself in its mirror of ideological and governance legitimacy. 'NATO's ongoing enlargement process,' the organisation boasted in its April 2008 Bucharest Declaration, 'has been an historic process in advancing stability and co-operation and bringing us closer to our common goal of a Europe whole and free, united in peace, democracy and common values.' If you were Putin, how would you have reacted to that?

And if Putin, rather quixotically, was recently 'demanding' that Ukraine not join NATO (which a Putin-controlled Ukraine certainly will not), this is what the same declaration says: 'NATO welcomes Ukraine's and Georgia's Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO…We welcome the democratic reforms in Ukraine and Georgia…' If you were an authoritarian easterner like Putin, how would you have reacted to that?

The West says with a straight face that its intentions are benign: after all, Ukraine is still not a member of NATO (though it now wants to join the EU). But did the US see the 1962 installation of Soviet ballistic missiles in Cuba in the same light? Does Cuba share a common border with the US, as Russia does with Ukraine? If you were Putin, what would you believe NATO might be plann