‘Putin’s grand plan” (Listener, February 4) suggested one of the main reasons for the unprovoked Russian invasion of Ukraine was a historical instinct to seek warm-water ports.
I have found little or no evidence in the most authoritative commentaries about President Vladimir Putin invading Ukraine last year that it had anything to do with warm-water ports.
Renewed speculation about a Russian/Soviet wish to seek warm-water ports principally dates to US national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who argued in 1979 that that was the main reason the Soviets had invaded Afghanistan. As an article in in 1993 and a National Security Archive briefing book of 2019 both demonstrated, there was no truth in this. The key reasons for the Soviet invasion of
