Russian President Vladimir Putin’s team acknowledged the increasing likelihood of additional conflict in Ukraine, portraying it as a “civil war” even as Russian naval forces announced new military drills.
“All these statements may bring about a destabilization because some hotheads in the Ukrainian leadership may develop the delusion that they can try to restart the civil war in their country or try to handle the problem of the southeast using force,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Thursday in response to a question about President Joe Biden’s Wednesday press conference. “We feel certain fears on this score.”
Peskov pitched that remark at Biden’s promise to impose economic sanctions in response to a feared Russian invasion of Ukraine, but the statement dovetails with U.S. warnings that Russia might orchestrate a false flag incident within Ukraine. Putin has long portrayed the war in Ukraine as a civil war, although he admitted in a 2015 documentary that he ordered Russian special forces to seize Crimea “under the guise of reinforcing security for our military facilities” on the peninsula, and that 2014 annexation expanded into a conflict in the Donbas region north of Crimea.
“We might indeed be on the verge of kinetic war,” Germany’s Reinhard Butikofer, a member of German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock’s Greens party who leads the European Union’s China delegation in the European Parliament, told the Washington Examiner. “I believe the situation is as serious as it hasn’t been in many, many decades.”
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Butikofer’s assessment comported the tone of Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s message in a high-profile speech earlier Thursday in Germany.
“This crisis is not primarily about weapons or military base,” Blinken said at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences. “It’s about the sovereignty and self-determination of Ukraine, and all states, and at its core, it’s about Russia’s rejection of the post-Cold War Europe that is whole, free, and at peace.”
Russian officials claim that NATO is fueling the tensions, and they have cited that putative threat to justify a series of moves to expand Kremlin military clout against Ukraine and in Belarus, a country that, like Ukraine, gained sovereignty following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Belarus has been ruled for decades by a Kremlin client with a history of both embracing and irritating Putin.
The Russian Defense Ministry announced Thursday that “a series of naval exercises” will be held in January and February, including “in the Mediterranean and Northern seas and the Sea of Okhotsk, in the Northeastern Atlantic.” And while Moscow initially described a new deployment of Russian forces to Belarus as a military exercise, a prominent Russian official criticized NATO while portraying Belarus as all but part of the Russian state.
“We share the concerns of [our] Belarusian colleagues and allies that NATO has been beefing up its military presence along the external borders of Belarus. This is, after all, the common border of the Union State,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said.
Biden stunned trans-Atlantic observers on Wednesday by pairing his threat to impose sanctions over a major invasion with the admission that a “minor incursion” might not provoke the same kind of punishment. In parallel, French President Emmanuel Macron, who has long dreamed of developing “strategic autonomy” for the European Union, startled the European Parliament hours before Biden’s press conference by stating an interest in developing a “security framework,” without U.S. input, to negotiate with Moscow.
“We need to build it between us, Europeans, share it with our allies in NATO, and propose it for negotiation to Russia,” Macron said.
Biden’s off-the-cuff comment provoked a public rebuke from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, but Butikofer suggested that Macron’s prepared remarks hold more potential to backfire.
“I would consider the eloquent way in which the French president presented his perspective as more of a problem than the fact that Biden seems to have put his foot in his mouth because I don’t think that the Russian leadership has any good reason to underestimate the determination of the Biden administration to deter them,” Butikofer said. “On the other hand, the fact that President Macron laid out a couple of ideas that can not so easily be reconciled with the ideal of a real, united trans-Atlantic front — that troubles me a little more.”
Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, insisted it is Biden’s pledge to punish an invasion that could prompt bloodshed.
”We believe that [U.S. statements] by no means promote an easing of tensions, which have emerged in Europe,” he said, per state-run TASS.
Peskov’s suggestion that “hotheads” in Zelenskyy’s government might start a crisis in southeast Ukraine is consistent with Putin’s long-term effort to present himself as a mediator in that conflict, rather than the aggressor. Russian officials want Zelenskyy to implement a deal known as Minsk 2 in a way that would give Moscow’s proxies in Donbas a permanent influence over the Ukrainian central government’s political options.
“If Ukraine is left alone to its conscience, it will not do anything,” Lavrov said in December. “It must be pushed to act. This is what the Normandy format” — a diplomatic forum that includes Ukraine, Russia, Germany, and France — “was established for, but Berlin and Paris are neglecting their obligations. We are trying to attract their attention to the importance of doing this.”
More recently, Lavrov’s team has suggested the current crisis can be resolved only if the defense arrangements established by NATO’s acceptance of new members in Eastern Europe are “rolled back” — a more ominous demand, given its political impossibility. Bütikofer opined that recent Russian references to the Minsk process is a double-edged diplomatic maneuver.
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“On one hand, going back to Minsk implies a relative stabilization of the situation, which is not what the Russians want at the moment — they want to escalate,” he said. “I believe this is mixed signals, and it’s just part-and-parcel of an approach that tries to find out how nervous we are, whether we will blink.”
