The New York Times: Why all this Russian interest in Ukraine? .. And what is leading the Russian-Ukrainian crisis to the edge of the abyss?

The New York Times said that there are tactical reasons for Russia to threaten to invade its neighbor Ukraine, but the real reason may lie in the Kremlin's attachment to the idea of ​​reparations for what it sees as historical injustice.

Anton Troyanovsky, director of the newspaper's Moscow office, said in a report that the Kremlin's firm conviction is that Russia cares more about the fate of its southwestern neighbor than the West will ever care about it.

In their conversations, interviews, and articles this year, Russian President Vladimir Putin and his closest aides have sent a message that their only focus is on Ukraine.

Rather, the Kremlin’s idea is that the Ukrainians are “one people” with the Russians, but they live in a “failed” state controlled by Western powers bent on fragmenting and defeating the post-Soviet world, the American newspaper claimed in its report.

But the Ukrainians - who ousted a pro-Russian president in 2014 and favored linking their country to Western institutions - largely disagree with the Kremlin, Troyanovsky put it in his report.

However, Putin's conviction finds a receptive ear to many Russians, "who see that they are closely linked to Ukraine through linguistic, cultural, economic, political and family ties."

The newspaper notes that Russia has mobilized 175,000 soldiers and put them on standby, threatening an invasion that Western officials fear, adding that Putin's maneuver may be a deliberate blackmail supported by indications that the threat of war is real, and that its purpose is to force US President Joe Biden to admit that Eastern Europe is located within the Russian sphere of interest.

However, Putin and many other Russian citizens believe that the conflict with Ukraine, which has lasted for about 8 years, is not just a geopolitical conflict, but is related to "wounded" national feelings, and a historical injustice that must be corrected.

In a previous interview, Gleb Pavlovsky, a former adviser to Putin, described the Kremlin's view of the Ukraine issue as "a deep wound."

For many Ukrainians, Putin's rant about shared history is nothing more than an "empty attempt" to plagiarize their country's heritage and justify his territorial ambitions.

In this, Alyona Gitmanchuk, director of the "New Europe Center" in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, says that the Russians "stole our past, and they are now seeking to steal our future."

Opinion polls have shown that using military force to bring Ukraine back into the Russian fold would damage Putin's popularity at home, which is one reason Russian analysts suspect that Putin's invasion of his southwestern neighbor would have a "terrifying" cost in Ukrainian lives. And Ross.

Russians mostly consider Kiev - which is now the capital of Ukraine - as the cradle of their nation, because distinguished writers who write in the Russian language such as Nikolai Gogol and Mikhail Bulgakov came from Ukraine, just as Leon Trotsky, who is one of the most important leaders of the Russian Communist revolution, came from Ukraine. and former Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.

And the New York Times quotes Ilya Ponomarev, a former member of the Russian Parliament, as saying that "one of the difficult problems that push us towards conflict is that the Russian identity does not come in isolation from the Ukrainian identity."

Ponomarev was the only Russian parliamentarian to vote against his country's annexation of Crimea, before he fled to Ukraine, where he obtained its citizenship and still lives there.

Putin says, "It is not an exaggeration to say that the course of forced integration and the establishment of a purely Ukrainian state are hostile to Russia; factors that have consequences similar to the use of weapons of mass destruction against us."

The American newspaper pointed out that millions of Russians and Ukrainians have family members in the other country.

For example, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was spending his childhood summers in Ukraine, his father's hometown.

Although Navalny is a critic of Putin's "hostile" foreign policy - as the newspaper describes it in its report - he does not see any difference between Russians and Ukrainians at all.

Putin has long used the emotional cues of his fellow Russians toward Ukraine for his own ends internationally and for his domestic policy.

The New York Times pointed out that Putin had written an article last July about why he considers Ukrainians and Russians as one people, describing the current divisions as a "great common disaster."

In that article, he claimed that the West sought to make Ukraine a "forward center" against Russia.

He added, "It is not an exaggeration to say that the course of forced integration and the establishment of a purely Ukrainian state were hostile to Russia; factors whose consequences are analogous to the use of weapons of mass destruction against us."