Vladimir Putin wants to be a conqueror

SoME MAY say that Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was to be expected. There had been signs after Russia illegally annexed Crimea in 2014 that its president had ambitions beyond the Black Sea peninsula. But data show that Mr Putin’s war of conquest defies an international trend. Since 1975 no country has wholly gobbled up and held onto another.

Warfare remains common across the world, as the invasion of Iraq, war in Afghanistan and many civil wars in sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere attest. But in scale and objective Mr Putin’s war is different: by launching an invasion to conquer another country, Mr Putin is dragging the world back to a bloodier time.

The number and scale of conquest attempts has long been in decline. In data collected for a forthcoming book, Dan Altman, an academic, has recorded every attempt at seizing territory through military might since the end of the first world war. It is an exercise fraught with difficulty because combatants’ intended objectives are not always easy to establish. Very small incursions may go unrecorded and large conflicts in which states seize and counter-seize territory are difficult to track. We decided to exclude conflicts with no deaths in battle, as well as countries reclaiming territory temporarily seized during conflict. The data then tell a clear tale.

The number of attempted conquests has sharply declined in the past 50 years (see chart) and invaders’ ambitions have changed. What Mr Putin tried to do in Ukraine—to seize the territory of an entire country—was last attempted when Saddam Hussein tried to take over Kuwait in 1990. He failed. In 1975, Indonesia conquered East Timor, but East Timor returned to independence in 2002. Going back even further, the only comparable attempts were those to reunite Korea in 1950 and Vietnam in 1974. And despite 11 attempts since 1946, seizing and holding a major city or province for at least ten years has only been accomplished three times: Turkey (parts of Cyprus, 1974), Israel (Sinai and Gaza, 1967) and India (Goa, 1961).

Mr Putin could yet buck this trend. But the war in Ukraine is going poorly for him. Early on he had to abandon his plans to take Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, and in September a Ukrainian counter-offensive regained Kharkiv province. Mr Putin does not look destined to be remembered as a conqueror. He may instead enter the history books as the man who sacrificed the lives of tens of thousands of Russians and Ukrainians to his own ambition. ■

Read more of our recent coverage of the Ukraine crisis.