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Michael Tory at the Wall Street Journal, reveals how Ukraine shows up Russia … and why Putin cannot bear that humiliation.

Putin’s justifications for starting the war have been repeated so consistently that, in the absence of an alternative rationale, this narrative has even crept into the language of some Western leaders and analysts.

There is, however, a far more credible explanation, based on hard economic data, for Russia’s obsession with dominating Ukraine. The most serious threat to Putin’s regime is the vast disparity in prosperity between Russia and the nations on its periphery that have escaped Moscow’s rule.

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As a result, in a single generation, the combined economic weight of the countries that escaped Russia’s orbit now exceeds that of Russia itself, a stunning reversal of fortunes. As experience shows, such disparate economic performance among nations intimately linked by history and geography almost invariably leads to resentment.

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For Putin, the implications of Ukraine’s prospective economic success are dire. The Russian public is so conditioned to view Ukraine as ethnically and linguistically similar to Russia that its prosperity would raise difficult questions inside Russia. If the countries are so much the same, the only plausible explanation for a radical divergence in their economic success would be the political and economic fundamentals of Russia itself. Russians might then begin to doubt the viability of their country’s disproportionate dependence on extracting rent from fossil fuels, much of which is captured and then dissipated by corrupt elites in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Slava Ukraine!