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FEBRUARY 10, 2022 | The Jewish Home OCTOBER 29, 2015 | The Jewish Home
Ukraine is Just a Small Piece of a Global Power Struggle By Shammai Siskind
F
or the current generation, a massive, multinational European ground war is a foreign concept. When most people today think of armed conflict in that part of the world, it’s in the context of a good action movie. Or maybe a history textbook. Nothing to do with reality. What the current tensions over Ukraine have reminded us (or should remind us) is that core-geopolitical interests never really go away. They’re determined by things like
geography and deeply rooted cultural trends – phenomena that typically don’t change. Indeed, the roots of what we’re now seeing on the news go back a long time. The historical links between Russia and Ukraine date as far back as the 9th century, when a group of people called the Rus moved their capital to Kyiv — a historical vignette President Vladimir Putin often likes to invoke.
Ukraine was, for a long time, an important economic asset for Russia. During the decades it was controlled by Moscow, Ukraine was a strategic component of the Soviet Union, with a large agricultural industry and important ports on the Black Sea. There are also security factors. Positioned in the middle of warring empires for centuries, Russia’s national security has always been profoundly based on its strategic depth – the geographical buffer that
separates it from hostile neighbors and also acts as a serious deterrent for potential invaders. (Napoleon and Hitler can both tell us a bit about that.) During the Cold War era, Russia’s satellite states like Ukraine played an important role in forming that buffer. But for the past thirty years, with Western (and particularly American) influence permeating Central and Eastern Europe, Russia has had to come up with new methods to assure
