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Almost four months into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin’s policy is becoming clear.
This would be similar to the Marshall Plan, the funding offered by the United States after the second world war to help rebuild Europe.
Putin is trying to weaken Ukraine as much as he can to reduce its value to the Western world it is trying to join. He will seize as much Ukrainian territory as he thinks he can hold.
From the new Russian territories in eastern and southern Ukraine, Putin will then hope to dominate the rump Ukrainian state and draw it into dependence on Russia.
To Stalin, Germany was not only a grave threat to the Soviet Union as the greatest European power, it was also part of the threat posed to the USSR by the entire capitalist world.
The line marked by the Oder and Neisse rivers became the new Polish-German border.
The ethnic German population of eastern Europe, approximately 12 million people, was expelled to the territory of the rump German empire, which consisted of Germany’s western and central regions.
Stalin initially hoped that the whole of Germany would become communist and fall into the USSR’s hands.
Stalin and his successors as leaders of the USSR consistently hoped that the GDR would draw the people of the Federal Republic towards communism.
It never succeeded in doing so. In 1989-90 the people of East Germany overthrew the communist regime and voted to join the Federal Republic.
When the Russian invasion of Ukraine began in February this year, Putin expected that his army would overrun the country quickly, there would be little resistance, and the elected government would flee into exile.
This follows the 2014 seizure of Crimea, in the south of Ukraine.
Russian military commanders and government officials have claimed publicly that eastern and southern Ukraine will, from now on, belong to Russia forever.
Russification (the policy of enforcing Russian culture on populations) appears to be being reinforced by ethnic cleansing.
For the Russian president, Ukraine is not only important in itself: it is important as an asset to the Western world it seeks to join, which Putin calls “the Euro-Atlantic world” – the European community of states which looks to the US for leadership.
This is similar to the policy towards Germany which Stalin adopted in the late 1940s. He would have preferred to establish communist control over the whole of Germany.
It took 41 years – from 1949 to 1990 – for the Federal Republic to recover East Germany. It has not recovered its lost territories of Silesia, Pomerania, and East Prussia and probably will never do so.
It took France 48 years – from 1871 to 1919 – to recover Alsace-Lorraine, lost after the Franco-Prussian War. In both of these cases, the territories were only recovered once the regimes which controlled them fell from power.
Putin’s policy will fail, just like Stalin and his successors failed, only if the West proves too united and too strong to be defeated.
To take their eastern and southern territories back, the Ukrainians will not only have to wage a long war, they will have to receive enormous military, financial, and economic assistance from Europe.
Full membership in European Union for Ukraine must be on the cards, as a way of strengthening the country. Although as indicated by EU leaders, this is likely to be a slow process.
(Paul Maddrell is a Lecturer in International History and International Relations at Loughborough University. This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article here.)
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