Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government is making diplomatic and military preparations for a new invasion of Ukraine in an apparent bid to exert pressure on Kyiv, perhaps even through violence.
“All options are plausible from Putin’s view,” a Baltic official told the Washington Examiner, on condition of anonymity. “The current status quo is not satisfactory for him because he sees that Ukraine is getting stronger, military, [and] … Ukraine is getting more and more [oriented] towards the West.”
U.S. and European observers acknowledge uncertainty about Putin’s intentions despite the observable Russian preparations for conflict. And the logistics of a winter war could postpone any clarity until the first months of 2022.
“That’s a long time for troops to be deployed in the field without doing anything, but it’s doable,” former U.S. Ambassador to NATO Kurt Volker, the most recent U.S. special envoy for Ukraine, told the Washington Examiner. “The reason for that is if they wanted to actually roll heavy armor, [the ground would] be frozen nice and solid by then. Right now, it’s beginning to snow, and it’s beginning to be cold, but it’s still probably a little messy if you’re going to roll with armor.”
WHITE HOUSE: US PREPARED TO PROVIDE MILITARY ‘REASSURANCE’ TO NATO ALLIES IF RUSSIA INVADES UKRAINE
Russia denies involvement in the Ukraine crisis, maintaining that it is a civil war between ethnic Russian citizens of Ukraine and the central government in Ukraine. Yet Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has signaled that the recent mobilization is an attempt to spook Western European governments into pressuring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to make key concessions in the so-called “Normandy Format” process that was launched in 2014 in a bid to end the conflict.
“If Ukraine is left alone to its conscience, it will not do anything. It must be pushed to act,” Lavrov said Sunday, a remark highlighted by a brief foreign ministry press release. “This is what the Normandy Format was established for, but Berlin and Paris are neglecting their obligations. We are trying to attract their attention to the importance of doing this.”
Russian officials claim that Ukraine has refused to implement a pair of agreements to end the conflict, known as the Minsk agreements, but the two sides have very different interpretations of those agreements. Putin said in February 2015 that “the essential, deeper meaning” of the Minsk deals is contained in a provision that calls for a Ukrainian constitutional amendment to increase the authority of the local governments in Russian-controlled territories known as Donbass — and his proxies soon proposed that this constitutional overhaul impose a “neutrality clause” on the Ukrainian central government while empowering the regional authorities to make deals with foreign governments.
“Implementation of these measures would in effect destroy Ukraine as a sovereign country,” Chatham House associate fellow Duncan Allan observed last year. “A neutrality clause in the constitution would rule out NATO accession. Yet the [Donbass proxies] would be able to sign agreements with other countries (i.e. Russia), perhaps establishing Russian military bases on their territories.”
Putin’s desire for political influence within and over Ukraine is plain, and Western analysis of how his pursuit of that goal will lead to wider war is clouded by recent history — Russian forces approached the vicinity of Ukraine earlier this year without launching an invasion — and a broad sense that his Ukraine policy is incoherent.
“If it’s a rational decision, he won’t invade,” said former Ambassador William Taylor, who led the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv from 2006-09 and then returned to the post during the Trump-Ukraine impeachment scandal in 2019. The problem is that Putin “doesn’t understand Ukraine,” in Taylor’s view. “When Putin invaded Ukraine … Ukrainian people united against Russia, overwhelmingly, and so I don’t think he gets that,” Taylor said. “He still thinks he can go in there and get support.”
Putin has created his own constituency within Ukraine by giving Russian passports to approximately 600,000 people in Donbass. In that context, Russian diplomats have renewed their claim that the people of Donbass are at risk of the direst human rights abuses at the hands of the Ukrainian military.
“The majority of people in Donbass were killed or tortured to death by the Ukrainian military and government-supported nationalists from the volunteer battalions during the worst part of the conflict in 2014 to 2015,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Friday, before accusing the Ukrainians of leaving land mines in cemeteries. “This is more than ordinary cynicism or humiliation — this is extermination.”
Those allegations amount to an argument that an invasion of Ukraine would be appropriate under provisions of the Russian Constitution, revised last year, that claims for Russia the right to protect ethnic Russians and Russian citizens in other countries.
“This is just another argument that the Russians use to tell themselves that they should invade, that there’s a rationale for invasion,” said Taylor.
Taylor isn’t alone in that assessment. “The Kremlin is preparing its own citizens for, maybe, some war or military action,” the Baltic official said, adding that it remains uncertain whether Putin will see it through. “My thinking is that Putin himself doesn’t know what his moves might be in January. He is raising [the] stakes, and he is moving things — and he probably doesn’t have a decision himself. He wants to see how things are moving.”
Taylor underscored that any invasion would carry “very high costs” not only in the form of economic and diplomatic punishments but also in Russian casualties.
“The Ukrainian military is much stronger than it was [when Russia seized Crimea] seven and a half years ago,” Taylor said. “They’re no match for the Russian military — that’s clear — but they will fight hard, and many Russian soldiers will die. Many Russian soldiers will die. And the Russian people are not supportive of that kind of war.”
The threat of those costs might enable Biden and his European allies to deter Putin from pulling the trigger, but that doesn’t mean he’ll take the gun off the table anytime soon.
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“How long can this go on?” Volker mused. “My answer to that would be: as long as Putin wants. He thrives on creating divisions and strains and then acting opportunistically from them, and so this is just part of the way he does things.”
