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We Can Eliminate Ukraine’s Land And What’s In It As A Motive For Putin’s War

A desire to settle an internal conflict between Ukrainians and Russians in Donbas, Ukraine seems a more plausible motive.

ScottCDunn
5 min readApr 3, 2022

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There’s an argument floating around that says that Russia really, really wants what’s in the ground in Ukraine. The motive put forward by some is that Russia wants to profit from the gas and minerals from Ukraine. You know, greed.

I don’t believe that Russia needs much of anything else from anybody else. I think with some effort, Russia could become self-sufficient if it wanted to. The sanctions imposed by the West are giving Russia a crash course in self-sufficiency.

Let’s talk about those land assets. Does Russia want natural gas in Ukraine? Ukraine has 1 trillion cubic meters in proven reserves. Russia has 37 trillion cubic meters of natural gas reserves. Russia has the largest natural gas reserves in the world by a huge margin. They really don’t need Ukraine’s gas.

Note also that before the war, Ukraine was earning $7 billion a year from transit fees from a pipeline from Russia through Ukraine to Europe. And that was just one pipeline. Russia wanted to build another one before the war. They didn’t seem to miss the transit fees or they…

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