Kriz ya da iç savaş değil, bir yabancı saldırı: Rusya neden 2014'te Ukrayna'ya saldırdı?

Abstract

On 18 March 2014 Vladimir Putin, the President of the Russian Federation triumphantly declared the “reunification of the Crimea” with Russia. However, this was not the end, but just the beginning of overambitious plans to annex the whole South-Eastern Ukraine with its large industrial centers and mainly Russian-speaking population. The small groups of the Russian secret forces and paid “political tourists” tried to orchestrate a series of separatist pro-Russian meetings in a number of cities in the South-Eastern Ukraine. Ukrainian society faced with systematically planned foreign aggression, camouflaged as a “civil war” of Russian-financed, Russian-armed and directly Russian-led “miners and tractor-drivers” against a “fascist anti-democratic junta” in Kyiv. What in Kremlin’s language came as a “reunification” and “civil war”, for the rest of the world became a blatant violation of international law and meets the definition of international aggression adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1974. Thus, the most fundamental question remains not who initiated yet another protracted armed conflict in the post-Soviet space, but reasons lying behind it. The article attempts to look into what might be the driving force of the Russian aggression in Ukraine.