Putin is redrawing an iron curtain across Europe: Russia analyst

Countries and markets awoke to the stunning news of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine on multiple fronts Thursday morning, launching a conflict that several leaders have warned will be the biggest in Europe since World War II.

After months of Russian military buildup along Ukraine’s borders with troops numbering more than 100,000, and a fiery speech that denied Ukraine’s statehood, Putin’s offensive against the European country of 44 million has ripped up the international status quo.

“This is a globally systemic event. Putin is redrawing an iron curtain across emerging Europe,” Timothy Ash, emerging markets strategist at BlueBay Asset Management and a longtime Russia and Ukraine analyst, told CNBC on Thursday.

“We have to totally take a fresh look at how we look at European and Western security, the role of Russian oligarchs, Russian business, and Russia Inc. in Western markets.”

Putin’s own words reveal his nostalgia for Russia’s more imperialist past, describing many times over the past several years the disintegration of the Soviet Union as a “tragedy” and one of the “greatest catastrophes” in world history.

Now some regional analysts and historians say that the so-called “iron curtain,” a term popularized by former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in 1946 to describe the political, military, and ideological barrier erected by the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin to seal itself off from the West, is back — albeit in a different form.

“The former KGB colonel, who has been in control of Russia in one form or another since 1999, does want to reconstitute the geopolitical power and territorial reach of the Soviet empire in Europe and reestablish its prestige and influence worldwide,” Pierre Atlas, a political scientist and senior lecturer at Indiana University–Purdue University, wrote in an op-ed earlier this month.

The Kremlin has rejected that there will be an occupation, claiming it is “demilitarizing” Ukraine and “protecting” people from Ukrainian government aggression, which Ukraine and NATO members deny. Russian missiles and artillery strikes have reportedly hit multiple Ukrainian cities on Thursday.

Putin has vowed to protect Russia’s “security” despite no evidence that Ukraine poses a threat to it, and has stated Moscow’s aim to neutralize the country’s military. Putin similarly rejected for weeks Western assertions that he would launch an invasion of Ukraine at all.