What's Really Happening with Putin and Ukraine?

 As a humble citizen, unschooled in military strategies and geopolitical oil and gas stratagems, and the psychological profile of Vladimir Putin, I have only youtube, the Atlantic, the New Yorker and NPR to help me understand why Mr. Putin pulled an Adolph Hitler and launched his invasion.

Here's what I've got so far:

1/ Mr. Putin has some psychological buzz going on in his brain regarding things that have to do with the vagaries of respect, power, prestige and all like that. As Nina Khruschev has described him: He is a 5 foot five man trying to look 5 feet six. 

So there's that, the small man syndrome. 

And he has been reported to have commented on the demise of Omar Ghaddafi on multiple occasion, and he may well fear suffering a similar fate, should he ever relinquish  a scintilla of power. 

Masha Gessen and others have suggested Putin's invasion is simply pay back for the humiliation he felt when Clinton bombed Kosovo, when Russia was too weak to do much about it. It's a long revenge game, according to Gessen. 

That sounds titillating, but I'm not sure I buy that.

2/ But there are other concerns you can find on various youtube podcasts:

A very elaborate explanation about the geography of the great Russian/European plane which allows armies to sweep across the areas between the Baltic states, Germany, Poland, Byelorussia, Romania and Ukraine, and if you have Ukraine within Russia, that protects a flank. 

The problem with all this is it applies only if armies are sweeping across that vast plane on horseback, or even in tanks, and with airplanes, but how much does that sort of large World War II type battle scene matter when Russia is stacked high with nuclear missiles? 

Get too close to Moscow or Volgograd and poof: you are nuclear toast. 

It's the Jungian Thing

3/ The Gas/Oil theory: Now this makes a lot more sense. Apparently, Ukraine is not only the breadbasket of that part of Europe, but it has lots of oil in both eastern and western Ukraine on land, and off shore lots of natural gas, and the Crimean peninsula is particularly rich in oil and off shore natural gas.

With Russia providing 1/3 to 1/2 of Western Europe's gas and oil, and most of that crossing Ukraine, for which Ukraine exacts a large fee, it would be nice to control the gas line territory, so this invasion, bringing Ukraine back to mother Russia, makes sense as blood for oil.  

Russia, apparently, pumps more oil than Saudi Arabia. Who knew?

Enjoy the Beach, But we're watching you

It's a petrol state and it's more of a petrol state if it owns Ukraine.

So now we don't have to invoke Imperial Russia and Putin's psychopathology; we've got good old fashioned oil and power and we can certainly understand that. 

Then you get all the shenanigans about Russia and Ukraine being one country, or maybe one family with a divorce and whenever you get into the history, it gets really confusing. 

Khrushchev, who was born in Ukraine, apparently gave the Crimean peninsula to Ukraine sometime in the 20th century, not all that long ago, as a sort of consolation prize for becoming a republic in the USSR. And Crimea has not only all that natural gas and oil but it also has one of Russia's only big warm water ports, which does not ice over and allows the Russian Navy to rule the Black sea and to get into the Mediterranean. 

Putin has for years told anyone who would listen that Ukraine isn't even a real country, just part of Russia, which is like telling Jacqueline Onassis she isn't really an Onassis because she's really a Kennedy and then one of her sisters shows up and tells you she's actually a Bouvier. Gets very confusing.

What we all can see are the soldiers in tanks and Russians firing rockets into Ukrainian buildings and fighting their way into nuclear power plants and none of this looks like a humanitarian operation or a peace keeping mission.

And, except in the eastern part of Ukraine, the Ukrainians do not appear to be terribly fond of the Russians right now, even though many of them have relatives in Russia.

I imagine it's sort of like how people in Massachusetts feel about people from Texas, Louisiana and Kentucky: you know there's a connection there, and we speak more or less the same language,  but right now, we're not inviting any of them over for Thanksgiving dinner.