Eric Zuniga, Campus Carrier staff writer

On Oct. 10, the Russian military launched missiles into 14 regions of Ukraine, including the country’s capital of Kyiv. According to a report by the Associated Press, the attacks wounded almost 100 people and killed at least 14 while causing a widespread blackout and infrastructure damage.

            The missile strikes come in response to an explosion on the 12 mile Kerch Strait Bridge, which links Russia to the Crimean Peninsula and has served as a critical supply route for Russian forces in Ukraine’s south. According to a report in the New York Times, while the Ukrainian government did not officially take responsibility for the explosion, a senior Ukrainian official said that the attack was orchestrated by the Ukrainian intelligence service. In a televised address, Russian president Vladimir Putin said that the bridge explosion constituted an act of terrorism and that there may be further retaliation.

            “Let there be no doubt, if attempts at terrorist attacks continue, the response from Russia will be severe,” Putin said in a televised statement to the security council. 

            Matthew Stanard, professor of history, said that the recent missile strikes could be a sign of Russian military weakness after recent Ukrainian success in its counteroffensive against the invasion.

             “To me, it potentially signals Russian weakness,” Stanard said. “It looks like a big show of force, but if Russia really had things pretty well in hand, they wouldn’t have to resort to these sort of lash-out attacks. They’re supposed to look intimidating in the short term, but do they really contribute to any long-term gain?”

Over the past month, Ukrainian forces have taken back large swaths of land that Russia had seized earlier in the summer. In the northeast, Ukrainian forces drove Russian forces out of the key strategic city of Lyman on October 1, having taken back 1,000 square miles of the Kharkiv province a month prior. In the country’s south, Ukraine regained control of 29 towns and villages over the past week. Kelsey Rice, assistant professor of history, said that the key factor in Ukraine’s recent success has been increased aid from the United States. 

“Without this U.S. aid, I don’t think we’d be seeing what we’re seeing now in Ukraine,” Rice said. “The U.S. has been giving billions of dollars of military aid, and—this is very key—sharing intelligence. The U.S. has provided a lot of weaponry. Notably it’s providing rockets, very precise rockets, that the Ukrainians have been using to very good effect. In addition to providing those rockets, the U.S. has an immense intelligence apparatus and is sharing with the Ukrainians all of its intel on Russian movements and positions. That intel, combined with the rockets, is what’s been turning the fortunes on the side of Ukrainians the past few weeks.”

As Ukrainian forces have been making advances in recent weeks, Putin has been raising the stakes of the conflict in both rhetoric and action. On Sept. 21, he announced a mobilization of over 300,000 people in the military reserves. James Foggo, a retired U.S. Navy admiral, said to Foreign Policy magazine that the draft was a sign of Russian military failure.

“They’re not 10 feet tall,” Foggo said. “The partial mobilization measure is an admission of failure in my mind. And I don’t think they’ll ever get there, because as you can see, they’re leaving in droves and none of these young people want to fight.”

Independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta reported that 261,000 men of military age left the country in the four days after Putin’s announcement. Rice said that the draft has stoked increased opposition to the war in Russia because those that are now being called up come from more affluent backgrounds.

“The Russian population is now getting pretty tired because people are getting drafted,” Rice said. “Most of the people who have been fighting in Ukraine have been poor young men from Siberia in the Russian far east. It hasn’t really hit the cities; it hasn’t hit the middle class. Now, all of a sudden, middle-class Moscow-dwelling computer science people are getting conscription notices.”

Additionally, in the same televised address, Putin announced the annexation of the Ukrainian regions of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. According to United Nations Secretary General António Guterres, this declaration was against international law. While Putin declared that these regions were a part of Russia, Ukraine still held control over a large portion of the annexed territory. 

Putin also seemed to suggest that he was willing to use nuclear weapons in the conflict, saying that he would use all tools at his disposal if Russia is threatened. According to the New York Times, Russia’s weapon arsenal includes about 2,000 small nuclear weapons. Rice said that these comments should not be taken lightly. 

“I think if there’s one thing we’ve learned, it’s that we shouldn’t assume that there’s anything Putin wouldn’t do,” Rice said. 

The current conflict between Russia and Ukraine occurs within a historical context that dates back hundreds of years. For most of these years, Ukraine has not been an independent state but was instead under the control of Russian governance. According to Rice, even though Ukraine has been ruled as a part of Russia for many years in the past, it has long had a distinct national identity.

“Ukraine was part of the Russian Empire long before it was a part of the Soviet Union,” Rice said. “It was fully integrated into the Russian Empire under Catherine the Great. But there has always been a distinction between Ukranian and Russian identity. If you’re a Ukrainian, you have a specific heritage. Even if you’re a Russian-speaking Ukrainian, you have a unique folk culture, you have a specific history, Gogol is one of your great writers. And there’s been Ukrainian nationalists well before the Soviet Union.”

 Rice said that this national identity was strengthened during the Soviet era.

“With the formation of the Soviet Union, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was created, and that lent itself to the further establishment of distinctive Ukrainian nationality,” Rice said. 

Although the Soviet Union supported the development of Ukrainian identity, Ukrainians did face repression under Soviet governance. According to Stanard, the Soviet Union targeted agricultural policies that caused widespread famine in Ukraine under the rule of Joseph Stalin. 

“Stalin came to power in 1928, and he imposed this new direction on the Soviet Union which was called socialism in one country,” Stanard said. “Strengthening socialism at home included crash industrialization and collectivization of agriculture, where smaller farms were collected into these big state-run farms. A lot of peasants resisted, especially ones who were well-off. The resistance was crushed through violence, and basically the Soviet government essentially provoked a kind of famine in that area. About six million people died of starvation, and about half of them were people in Ukraine. That’s around 1932 or so.”

Upon the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine became an independent country. Stanard said that in the decades following its independence, it began to become more aligned with the west, which Putin perceived as a sign of the collapse of Russia’s sphere of influence.

“There were growing political tensions between Ukraine and Russia as it looked like maybe Ukraine was moving more in the Western camp,” Stanard said. “This connects with the broader issue of NATO expansion and this idea that the West won the Cold War, which they did, and Russia got humiliated.” 

According to Stanard, Ukraine’s increasing alignment with Europe and its intentions of joining NATO caused Putin to pursue efforts to keep it under his influence.

“When Putin comes in power about 20 years ago, he’s very much interested in keeping Ukraine within the Russian sphere of influence, and that includes political meddling, assassinating journalists, these kinds of things,” Stanard said.

Rice said that these efforts culminated in Russia’s annexation of Crimea, a peninsula located on the southern border of Ukraine, in 2014.

“In 2014, Russia started stoking separatist fires in the Luhansk region and in Crimea, and annexed Crimea. That resulted in this kind of eight years of lower-key military intervention and aggression from Russia,” Rice said. “Most people, myself included, didn’t think it was going to escalate to anything beyond that, and a lot of Ukrainians didn’t think it would escalate.”

Contrary to most expectations, Russia did escalate the conflict to a full invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24 of this year. While Ukrainian forces have recently reversed many of the gains Russia made during the summer, Rice said that she would not predict the war to end anytime soon for many reasons, including Ukraine’s insistence on reclaiming all territory that Russia has annexed.

“With the Russians, I think it’s always best to bet on a long war. Wars of late don’t tend to be short,” Rice said. “Russia has a really strong toehold, especially in the Luhansk region, which it’s now trying and it has annexed Crimea. Zelensky has made it very clear that he wants all of that back. He wants Crimea back, he wants the Luhansk region back. So also the question is, when would the Ukrainians be willing to stop?””

Despite this, Rice also said that those following the situation should be aware of its uncertainty.

“Just always be careful if you’re trying to predict what will happen next,” Rice said. “Putin is unpredictable.”