‘A Knife to the Throat’: Putin’s Logic for Invading Ukraine

From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily.

As the world has waited to see whether Russia will or will not invade Ukraine, and with early signs that an invasion may now have begun, much of the uncertainty has hinged on the question of what exactly Vladimir Putin is thinking. Today: My colleague, Anton Troianovski says that the answer may lie in an unusual speech that Putin delivered on Monday night.

It’s Wednesday, February 23.

Anton, set the scene for us as this major speech from Vladimir Putin gets underway.

Well, it’s almost 10 p.m. in Moscow on Monday night when state television breaks into regular programming and shows Putin sitting in the Kremlin in a nondescript wood-paneled office, Russian flags behind him, a bank of telephones to his left.

And he starts to deliver a speech that’s certainly the most remarkable speech I’ve seen him give in the time I’ve been in Moscow.

Remarkable, why?

It was this emotion, this sense of grievance, even this anger that you could see breaking through again and again as he spoke for almost an hour and that we haven’t seen to this degree in Putin’s public appearances over the years. You would see flashes of it, but to have him speaking to an hour addressing the nation on national television in prime time, it was really something new, something different.

And at a very high level, Anton, what is the goal of this speech?

Well, that’s another thing that made the speech so remarkable is that tensions were so incredibly high. You had the sense that after months of buildup, Putin would finally reveal his plans for Ukraine. Was he going to invade? What goals was he pursuing? And leading up to this, there was a lot of tension, and the Kremlin had really left this question wide open. What did Putin actually want? And there was a sense, well, maybe we’re about to finally find out.

Right, which is why, Anton, we wanted to talk through this speech with you because it feels like really it’s our best chance of answering the question that pretty much the entire world has right now. How is Vladimir Putin thinking about Ukraine and about whether to invade it? And so we want to have you focus in on a few key passages from this speech as a way of doing that and to explain not just what Putin says here, but what he really means — especially given the subtext that is probably lost on non-Russians and on non-Ukrainians. So with that in mind, where should we start?

Well, we should start at the beginning, which was this very lengthy distorted history lesson that laid out a historical rationale for, by all appearances, is Putin preparing his nation for potential military action against Ukraine. He starts in medieval times.