MAINTENANCE – Before being an issue for Vladimir Putin, Ukraine, and particularly the Donbass, interested many heads of state… including Napoleon, recalls Martin Motte, member of the Institute of Comparative Strategy.
Martin Motte is director of studies at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes and a member of the Institute of Comparative Strategy. He is notably the author of The measurement of force: strategy treatise of the School of Warpublished by Tallandier in 2018.
LE FIGARO. – Why, from a strategic point of view, has Ukraine been of so much interest to Russia since 1991?
Martin MOTTE. – Ukraine is the opening of the former Russian empire then of the late USSR on the Black Sea, at the southern end of the great isthmus linking the north and the south of Eastern Europe. This isthmus is a commercial and strategic route of prime importance, since it leads to the Mediterranean and therefore allows Russia to escape the curse of continental isolation. In a word attributed to Churchill, “Russia is a giant whose two nostrils have been blocked», the Baltic and the Black Sea. A structuring axis of its policy therefore consists in trying to unblock them, which, in the South, supposes the control of Ukraine.
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