The current phase of this crisis in Ukraine has been manufactured by Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin, and I think for all of us it's quite difficult to identify a specific trigger for the decision to build up forces to such an extent on the borders close to Ukraine or to suddenly escalate events in December of last year. In many respects, the timing seems driven more by Vladimir Putin's own political predilections and perceptions of developments rather than by events on the ground in Ukraine or on the contested Donbas region. So I will just give a few overview points for us to take into consideration before hearing more from my colleagues. So in terms of understanding the current context for the crisis, there are several factors at play for Moscow and Putin I think are relevant for us to consider during this hearing. First of all, Moscow has actually successfully reasserted itself as the dominant political force and security provider in Eurasia. In contrast with Ukraine, currently the other former Soviet states have now either been pressured into closer political and security relations with Moscow or into a more neutral, marginal international status. Just as a couple of examples, you've already mentioned Kazakhstan and some of the other republics here, but I'll just give a couple of key examples from the last couple of years. In Georgia, for example, 14 years after Russia's August 2008 invasion, the current government is, I would say, more on the back foot than it has been before, treading very carefully with Russia more so than its predecessors. Georgia's former president Mikheil Saakashvili, who was a perennial thorn in Moscow's side, now sits in jail in Tbilisi after an ill-advised return to Georgia in October 2021. Although Russia can't claim direct credit for this, Russian officials nonetheless and commentators frequently use Saakashvili and his fate as a cautionary tale for the rest of the region, including Ukraine.
In summer 2020, in Armenia, President Nikol Pashinyan, another leader who's fallen out of favor with Moscow, saw his domestic position and former foreign policy autonomy crushed by the war with Azerbaijan. Given the fact that Russia and Armenia have a long-standing defense pact and Russian forces are permanently based in Armenia, Azerbaijan's military assault to retake territory occupied by Armenia for the last three decades was unlikely to have been feasible without a green light from Moscow. And Russia has now exploited the 2020 war to introduce its military forces into Nagorno-Karabakh, sidelining the OSCE Minsk Group. Elsewhere, Belarusian strongman Alexander Lukashenko has been forced back into the fold after a disastrous presidential election on his part in the last year, and in January 2022, so just in the last month, Russia and its regional security alliance, the Collective Security Treaty Organization, or CSTO, were of course called in to quash protests and to quell a political power struggle in Kazakhstan. This was the first time that the CSTO was deployed on the territory of a member country. So Russia feels emboldened by all of these developments in Eurasia. From Russia's perspective, the United States played no significant role in addressing these upheavals, and the United States, again from Russia's perspective, seems grievously weakened at home and abroad. For Vladimir Putin, again, this is his view: America's political disarray mirrors Russia's predicament immediately after the dissolution of the USSR and offers a rare opportunity. If the United States really is in a state of collapse at home and in retreat abroad, as Putin and the Kremlin assess, then in Putin's view, again, perhaps Russia can overturn the last 30 years of American dominance in European security and also constrain Ukraine's independence.
If we look at Europe, not just at Eurasia, Moscow now sees ample opportunity to take advantage of developments there. The reverberations from Brexit, Poland and Hungary's disputes with the EU, of course, we've just seen Viktor Orbán in Moscow meeting with Vladimir Putin directly, the legacy of four years of rifts between the United States and its European allies, the departure of long-serving German Chancellor Angela Merkel from the political scene, preparations for presidential elections in France, and Washington's precipitous withdrawal from Afghanistan have exacerbated frictions and fractures in NATO and the EU that Russia thinks it can exploit. And again, from Russia's perspective, there's an opportunity because European military spending and operational readiness have declined over the last decades relative to the United States and Russia. And despite an uptick in spending and deployment since Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, two of our most significant European military partners, the UK and France, are increasingly at loggerheads, while our other major partner, Turkey, is preoccupied with Syria and the Middle East. Again, from Russia's perspective, Europe's punitive financial tools, along with the political will to deploy them, have been weakened. Moscow has effectively moved over the past decade, and especially since its annexation of Crimea in 2014, to shore up the Russian economy against Western sanctions, including through paying off state debts, making strategic direct investments in companies across Europe in critical infrastructure, energy, and metallurgy, and also by deepening ties with the private sectors of key European countries. Even at the height of this crisis, to try to offset any retaliatory economic actions that we might take, Putin and the Kremlin clearly believe that European and American investors will serve as Russian allies and advocates for limited sanctions, and that they will push for a speedy reconciliation with Russia, limiting our government's capacity for confrontation.
Putin has also, as members of the commission are well aware, taken Russia's ambitions and positions during this crisis well beyond Eurasia and Europe. Russia is consolidating relationships with U.S. adversaries, with the blatantly signaled goal of challenging America's global posture. We've seen this with recent visits to Iran by Putin, and of course we're soon going to be seeing Vladimir Putin sitting alongside President Xi at the opening of the Beijing Olympics. And there have been many other instances where Putin has clearly moved out into other theaters to signal that Russia means business there as well. Putin's been quite explicit about these moves, as well as about the ideas of deploying new nuclear weapon systems to parts of territory closer to Europe, or perhaps even to the Caribbean, under some recent commentary out of Moscow. And this whole goal here seems to be to undermine the current international order, or at least to show an intent to do so, as a gambit to get the United States to the negotiating table. As members of the commission have already stated, Russia has long sought a commitment from the United States, NATO, and the European Union that it will have a clearly defined role in post-Cold War European security institutions, and also decision-making power whenever developments or events run counter to its interests. Russian officials have recently expressed frustration about the slow response from the United States to Moscow's repeated requests to engage on proposals for a new European security order. And in many respects, Putin is pushing this really hard because of his own timeline. So just again, something to bear in mind: Putin's very mindful of 2024, not just when we have our presidential election, but also when he must theoretically, as well as in practice, submit himself to re-election at home to then gain the presidency for perhaps another six to even 12 years, depending on how many terms he sees before him at this particular juncture. So in many respects, time is of the essence for Putin. He would like to achieve a resolution of these issues before 2024. And right now, his public opinion ratings are not what they used to be. The last time Putin's popular approval fell significantly was just before the annexation of Crimea back in 2014. At that juncture, annexation proved universally popular in Russia, and Putin may hope for a similar boost ahead of the Russian presidential elections by showing the Russian people that he can take decisive action against Ukraine, NATO, and the United States.
In the meantime, at home, Putin has done a very good job in Russia of making the United States and NATO look like the aggressors in the perpetration of this crisis. Abroad, he's also bent on convincing the rest of the world that Ukraine is either an internal matter for Russia to resolve or the object of a Cold War-style dust-up with the United States. It's Putin that's trying to depict this as a proxy war, like Korea and Vietnam were in the Cold War. But however, in recent Russian polling, half of Russians believe that the United States and NATO were to blame for the crisis, and only a tiny fraction thought that Russia itself was to blame. But across the border in Ukraine, in stark contrast, more than 70% of Ukrainians now view Russia as a hostile state, which has increased from 60% in spring of 2021. And I would just offer to the commission, and again, I'd be very interested to hear what Lieutenant General Hodges and Ambassador Taylor have to say about this after their recent visit to Ukraine, that this latter point about Ukrainian attitudes could prove very problematic for Putin. The Russian president knows history inside out, Russian history that is, but he also has his very own version of it that isn't always shared, not only by us but also by Ukrainians. The Kremlin and Putin have long deployed Russian values and Russian history as weapons in their conduct of information warfare, especially when it comes to Ukraine. And Putin has, of course, asserted that Russia and Ukraine are historically, culturally, linguistically, and inextricably tied together. He posits that they have only been separated by an accident of history, the collapse of the Soviet Union. And in this narrative context, for Putin, this is why we're in this crisis. The mere prospect of any kind of formal relationship between Ukraine and NATO, or between Ukraine and the EU, or Ukraine and the United States, is considered a direct threat to Russia and also to Putin personally, because every aspect of the Ukraine conflict has been made personal for him. He's talked repeatedly about his own connections to Ukraine and to Crimea, and every move has so far been on his timetable. And every Russian official and commentator has stressed that the ultimate decision-making in Ukraine is up to Vladimir Putin, as well as the small group of people in his inner circle who share his own views. But in acting against Ukraine, Putin and Russia look set to create an eternal enemy out of this neighboring country, as well as destabilizing European and global affairs for years to come, especially if Ukrainian views that Russia is engaged in hostile acts are really as high as they seem to be in the polls.
And this is where something interesting should be borne in mind, and reflects what Congressman Wilson said in his references to World War II about some of the impacts of hostile acts. Even Putin himself has reflected upon the fact at the beginning of his presidency that acts of aggression against another country, no matter what the motivation and whatever the intent, have lasting consequences. When he was asked by a journalist at the very beginning of his presidency in 2000 whether the Soviet interventions in Hungary in 1956, in Czechoslovakia in 1968, or in Germany in 1953 were big mistakes, he said, 'Yes, they were. They were all big mistakes, in my opinion. And the Russophobia that we have today in Eastern Europe, that's the result of those mistakes.' That was Vladimir Putin in the year 2000. Well, in 2022, well, 22 years exactly to when he made these comments, the Russophobia or negative attitudes towards Russia today in Ukraine and elsewhere are the direct result of Russian military interventions, cyber attacks and intrusions, and political influence operations that we've seen to 2000. So in closing, in countering Putin on this occasion, we have to continue to keep demonstrating to Putin that today's actions in and around Ukraine are a significant mistake, just as they were in the 1950s and 1960s. We should continue to make clear to Moscow that we are open to negotiation, as Chairman Cardin has said and other members have, but not under the current coercive circumstances. We need to reframe this crisis for what it is, as the administration has just done in the United Nations. This is not a proxy conflict. This is not aggression by the United States or NATO. This is not a righteous effort to counter some great historic wrong, as President Putin says. This is an act of post-colonial revisionism on the part of Russia. Ukraine's been an independent country for more than 30 years. Many other countries, as you have said, Chairman Cardin, and other members have said, find themselves in similar predicaments today, also threatened by territorial assaults from their neighbors or having their sovereignty threatened. Senator Wicker also made this reference before he left, and we need to keep making it very clear that any further invasion of Ukraine is unacceptable.
