St. Catharines professor says Putin is proving he doesn’t view Ukraine as a sovereign nation

A Brock University History professor says Russian President Vladimir Putin doesn’t see the invasion of Ukraine as the graphic statement of war that the rest of the world does.

“The Russian view of the world is not our view,” Gregor Kranjc, Associate Professor with the Department of History told the Brock News. “It doesn’t view the principles that we think we all agree on, like sovereignty, the same as we do.”

Kranjc, also an expert on war, genocide and military occupations, said through his actions, Putin is showing that he clearly refuses to believe Ukraine sovereignty exists and thus the country needs to be brought back into the Russian fold.

However, compounding the atrocity of Putin’s behavior is the fact that the Soviet Union and other European states signed the Helsinki Accords in 1975, which promised that territorial sovereignty will not be challenged and that other countries cannot interfere internally with another state.

So even though Ukraine has been its own independent nation since 1991, “What we see from Putin now is that Ukrainian sovereignty doesn’t fall under this (Helsinki) umbrella and that it is somehow illegitimate,” says Kranjc.

“He doesn’t see the sovereignty of Ukraine in the same way as Western states see the sovereignty of Ukraine. His speech was to make Ukraine basically a false state, and therefore sovereignty doesn’t really apply there.”

Kranjc suggests Putin is trying salvage something from the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s where countries such as Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Armenia and Moldova simply left the USSR collective and became their own nations.

“Russia (suddenly on its own) went through one of the most drastic drops in economics and standard of living in peace time,” says Kranjc. “Putin saw, in his view, the decline of Russian prestige and power. Ever since he has come to power, part of his image has been to project himself as a strong leader who is going to regain the prestige of Russia.”

Kranjc, also an expert on the history of terrorism, ethnic cleansing and genocide, nationalism, and the history of military occupations, says Putin is simply setting new rules that work for him. If he believes that Ukraine is not a sovereign nation, then to him this is not an act of war.

Despite being delusional and ultimately dangerous, it’s the mindset that Putin is using here.