Photo: Supplied
When Professor David Marples joined the show earlier this month he said he believed there would be a Russian attack on Ukraine within the next few weeks, as Putin had reached a ‘point of no return’.
With a full-scale invasion of Ukraine now underway, Putin has claimed the attack is “a special military operation” to defend the populations in the breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk from a “genocidal” regime.
Marples, a professor of Russian and East European history at the University of Alberta, says few people in Russia care about the republics, leaving the question: what is Putin’s true motive?
Marples is the editor of the recently published The War in Ukraine’s Donbas: Origins, Contexts, and the Future.
Photo: AFP
