Ukraine Wants Peace, Russia Wants An Empire — It’s That Simple

-OpEd-

KYIV — Moscow had peace. 

There were billions in Western investments, pipelines running into Europe, Germany building a military training center for the Russian Armed Forces in Mulino, France constructing a helicopter carrier that would eventually be sold to Egypt. This was the deepest integration with the West that Russia had ever known — the kind of integration Peter the Great, whom Russian President Vladimir Putin loves to invoke, could only have dreamed of. Any leader of a resource-rich state would give his right arm for such integration without hesitation. 

There was the Sochi Olympics, which included days when only Russian tricolor flags were on the podium. There were folk dances with balalaikas and accordions in Courchevel, the French playground for Russian oligarchs. “As long as Russia has oil, I’ll be in Milan.” 

There was no need for a shadow fleet under the Liberian flag, no need for Georgian intermediaries to smuggle “Kazakh timber,” no need for Cypriot or Israeli passports to snap up London real estate. 

Russia already had all of it — and gave it all up, without a second thought, in exchange for revanchism and the restoration of empire. 

Because for the average Russian, the idea that the empire has collapsed twice in a single century is unbearable — and that now the cracks are spreading in Tatarstan and Dagestan. So they put everything on the line. 

And it isn’t just Putin. 

All of Ukraine

It was those who force Ukrainian POWs to eat off the floor in camps and cut their arms for wearing the Ukrainian emblem. Those who rush to burn in the woods for 2,500 euros. Those who take their children to marvel at chunks of gas pipeline from Sudzha. 

Whoever forgot — the “Iskra” group and callsign “General” weren’t supposed to go to the Donetsk Airport. They were heading to Mariupol. The Motorola group initially entered Kharkiv, and only after being swept out by “Jaguar” did they shift focus to Sloviansk. The “protesters” in Odesa — those who fired rifles from behind elderly women — fled to Transnistria (Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic). 

Russia’s initial goal went far beyond the borders of four regions. At a minimum, Kharkiv and Odesa were primary military targets in the first wave of the hybrid invasion — long before anyone came up with the narratives about “referendums” and the supposed “will of the people” in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions — without the cities of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. We all remember this, don’t we? 

Any pause now is just an intermission before the next bloody act. 

Crimea — that “unsinkable aircraft carrier,” as they called it — was seized, allegedly, to keep NATO from taking it. But as it turned out, they failed to take the Odesa ports, or Mykolaiv or Zmiinyi Island. They were eventually forced to retreat — from Crimea to Novorossiysk. 

And that retreat? It wasn’t driven by French or British aircraft carriers. It was the work of a few dozen naval drones, a couple hundred ballistic and cruise missiles, and long-range UAVs. Their arsenals were blown up by garage-built drones, essentially DIY kits off the civilian market. 

We remain just as lethally dangerous to them as they are to us. I understood this clearly back in 2014 — simply by looking at their goals and demands. And I urge everyone to realize it now: Their objective is all of Ukraine. 

Russia’s survival

This isn’t about Medinsky at the negotiating table. It’s not about some future lifting of sanctions. If the Kremlin had wanted to trade with the West, they wouldn’t have launched the invasion in the first place. If they had wanted to stop, they wouldn’t have initiated mobilisation, including the covert one now underway. They wouldn’t be inviting in North Korean troops, or converting their economy to full war footing, collapsing every civilian sector from logistics to housing. 

In their eyes, this is about Russia’s survival. They believe they cannot live next to a hostile country of 35 million people. 

Moscow is preparing for an attack on NATO members by 2026. 

A country that hits Moscow and Yelabuga with long-range drones, that’s knocked out a third of the Black Sea Fleet’s flagships, that captures district centers — centers so difficult to reclaim that it requires 15,000 North Korean troops, a third of them special operations forces. 

And let’s be honest: We can’t indefinitely sustain a million-strong army either. Which is why any pause now is just an intermission before the next bloody act. 

Even if they occupied Ukraine, installed a puppet government like in Georgia, and moved on to the next points on their imperial checklist — Kazakhstan, the Baltic states — it wouldn’t bring peace. On the contrary, it would ignite an even fiercer war, the one already outlined in forecasts on the German Bundeswehr’s website: Moscow is preparing for an attack on NATO members by 2026. 

End of an era

Rebuilding an empire isn’t so easy when your adversaries are backed by the richest, most desirable, and most technologically advanced market on the planet — a market that doesn’t want to live in basements or be ruled by a forever El Presidente. 

The end of the regime? The physical demise of Putin, Patrushev and the rest of the gang desperate for revenge over the collapse of their Soviet dream. It’s a possibility. But as long as they’re alive and well, it’s not on the table. 

So let’s say it again: The world changed drastically in 2014 — so drastically that Finland and Sweden had to abandon decades of neutrality. 

Many still don’t want to see this. They’d rather bury their heads in the sand until the very end — even as their cities begin to burn around them. 

Ukraine, the European Union and the United States are ready for peace. Russia is not.