Russian President Vladimir Putin’s crackdown on domestic dissidents and military buildup along Ukraine’s border are driving relations between Moscow and the Western powers toward a perilous inflection point, according to U.S. and European officials.
“With Putin, we don’t have luxury to be naive,” a Baltic official said. “We don’t need to panic, we don’t need saber rattling, but we need to be very firm and consistent.”
A cascade of crises has erupted between Putin’s government and capitals across NATO, with the newest centered on Prague, where Czech officials decided to expel 18 Russian officials attached to the embassy in retaliation for an alleged Russian intelligence operation that destroyed an arms depot in 2014. That uproar only adds to the acrimony between Putin and the former Soviet satellite states, while President Joe Biden has imposed new sanctions on Russia in retaliation for Moscow’s interference in U.S. elections and a major cyberattack against American companies.
“There has been instability and unpredictability injected into this relationship, and that has been done by the actions of the Russian Federation and by President Putin,” State Department spokesman Ned Price told reporters Wednesday. “All of those things, of course, injected instability unpredictability and, frankly, danger, into a relationship that we would like to see predictable and stable going forward.”
US AND NATO WARN RUSSIA NOT TO BLOCKADE UKRAINIAN PORTS
NATO officials and the Ukrainian government view a military buildup in western Russia with growing alarm.
Russian fighter jets have been stationed in Crimea, according satellite imagery reviewed by the Wall Street Journal, heightening the potential threat to the peninsula that Putin seized from Ukraine in 2014 through the deployment of unmarked special forces. Secretary of State Antony Blinken condemned Russia’s parallel decision to restrict access to certain Ukrainian port cities as “yet another unprovoked escalation” late Monday.
“We cannot exclude any scenario,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba told reporters during a briefing from Kyiv on Tuesday. “We cannot know for sure whether Moscow will decide to begin a new stage of aggression against Ukraine, but it is certain that they will be prepared already to do so in few weeks.”
U.S. Ambassador John Sullivan is returning from Moscow to Washington, just days after Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov revealed that Putin’s advisers suggested that Sullivan should “travel to his capital and hold serious, detailed consultations” — an unusual request that nevertheless stopped short of an expulsion under diplomatic conventions.
“The ambassador has not been ordered out of the country,” Price told reporters. “The ambassador is returning now at an opportune time to undertake consultations here, to see his family, and again, I expect he’ll return to Moscow in the coming weeks.”
Some observers suspect Putin is stoking an international crisis in order to generate a rally-around-the-flag effect in the lead-up to Russia’s legislative elections, which are scheduled for September.
“Putin normally wants some kind of international adventure before an election,” said the Atlantic Council’s Anders Aslund, a former Swedish diplomat who was stationed in Moscow from 1984 to 1987. “I don’t believe that Russia would really go in and take territory in Ukraine, because the Ukrainians are good at fighting, and the Ukrainians have 250,000 troops.”
That’s a substantial increase since 2014, when Russian forces caught Ukrainian forces and Western diplomats by surprise.
“We’re not trying to say that we know, date and time, when Russia will cross the front line or will cause another wave of escalation on the ground,” Kuleba said. “But we certainly see strategic preparations of the Russian Federation, military preparations of the Russian Federation. And it is now in the hands of Ukraine and all those who stand for the respect for international law and sovereignty in Europe to demotivate Putin from making further aggressive steps.”
U.S. and European officials have not agreed on an effective plan for how to deter Putin, who has taken a series of provocative actions (such as the repeated use of a banned chemical weapon for assassination attempts, most notably the attack on a former double agent in the United Kingdom and dissident anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny) despite the imposition of numerous sanctions by the United States and the European Union.
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“The latest attack by the Biden administration against our country cannot go unanswered,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a public bulletin last week. “It seems Washington is unwilling to accept that there is no room for unilateral dictates in the new geopolitical reality. Meanwhile, the bankrupt scenarios for deterring Moscow that the U.S. myopically continues to pursue only promise to further degrade Russian-U.S. relations.”
Ukrainian officials hope the recent sanctions are just a small sign of greater things to come. “Sectoral sanctions are a matter of time and Russia’s behavior,” Kuleba told reporters. “From my recent interactions with German and French foreign ministers, I can conclude that they understand this reality.”
