Revealed! Why Vladimir Putin is invading Ukraine

On Thursday, Russia began a full scale invasion of Ukraine, attacking the country’s military installations, warning NATO and the US to stay off or face attacks too.

While many have speculated on what may be the reason for the attacks, National Daily is bringing out three possible reasons why Russia is attacking the country without provocation.

NATO’s eastward expansion

Putin has said that the expansion of NATO is “menacing”, so the fact that Ukraine could join the European Union and join NATO is a concern for the Russian president.

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In December of 2021, Russia demanded a guarantee that Ukraine would never join NATO and that NATO would order forces in other Eastern European countries to back down, but this hasn’t happened.

Furthermore, the USA has sold hundreds of anti-tank Javelin missiles to Ukraine in recent years and Turkey has supplied the Ukrainian army with armed drones.

An obsession with Kyiv

Another key element to the debate is the fact that Kyiv and Ukraine used to be an important part of the Soviet Union, with Putin viewing its breakup in the 1990s as a step back.

He has previously labelled Kyiv as “the mother of Russian cities”, which is why there is more of an obsession with Ukraine and its capital than with other countries with whom Russia shared a border.

Proving Russia is still a superpower

Another theory is that Putin wants to throw his weight around to prove that Russia is still a superpower. “It’s the return of history, where great powers go at it and things get really bad sometimes,” Barry Pavel, a director at the Atlantic Council, told the New York Times. “We need to think about spheres of influence as remits in which a state can exercise disproportionate influence that’s not only territorial,” Graham Allison, a political scientist at Harvard, added.