Russia escalated its aggressive rhetoric and action against Ukraine and the West on Monday.
After threatening Sweden’s Gotland Island in the Baltic Sea, Russian warships have entered the North Sea. Significant numbers of NATO air and navy assets are monitoring them. Also on Monday, Russia’s 1st Guards Tank Army began command staff exercises. Those exercises will help commanders prepare for any invasion of Ukraine. They come alongside ramped-up military deployments to Ukraine’s border. At the same time, Russia has now ruled out new talks with the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, describing it as an “amorphous structure that has no international legal status.”
Perhaps most notably, significant numbers of Russian troops and equipment have begun arriving in Belarus. Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko says these forces will join Belarusian forces in exercises come February. But the Russian arrivals would allow either Russia or a joint Russian-Belarusian force to attack Ukraine from the north. Russia’s compression of Ukraine from north, east, and south is nearing completion.
All of this takes place within a larger Russian strategy to disorient, demoralize, and divide Ukraine and Western powers. It’s a clever strategy, one that takes advantage of increasingly evident splits in trans-Atlantic attitudes over what sanctions countermeasures should follow if Russia does invade Ukraine. These divisions extend to the United States. Putin won a big victory with the Senate’s rejection last week of sanctions on his Nord Stream 2 energy pipeline.
At the same time, Russian offers of compromise are fleeting.
Moscow has, for example, now rejected the prospect of removing Iskander short-range ballistic missiles from its Kaliningrad enclave (sandwiched between Lithuania, Poland, and the Baltic Sea). This is a direct repudiation of NATO’s offer to restrict missile deployments in return for commensurate Russian action. The domestic clamor isn’t encouraging either.
Evincing Russia’s escalation mentality, a member of Putin’s party has suggested that Russia consider launching a nuclear strike on U.S. military test ranges in Nevada. This, Yevgeny Fyodorov suggested, would cause the U.S. public to pressure the White House into yielding to Putin’s demands. Fyodorov is an adherent to the Vladimir Zhirinovsky/Dmitry Kiselyov school of Russian nationalism: hyperbolic and delusional (nuclear war with the U.S. would not go in Russia’s favor). Nevertheless, his words evince how Moscow is upping the ante.
In the same vein, Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov used a Sunday CNN interview to warn that unless the U.S. commits to limit NATO’s expansion, “it’s a reason to be pessimistic” about the prospect of continued diplomatic talks. Considering that those commitments cannot be made without destroying the essence of NATO (democratic sovereignty), Peskov’s words indicate that Moscow is preparing to end talks.
Why the apparent rush to war?
First, Putin has an ideological obsession, emphasizing Ukraine but rooting back to the Muscovy expansion of the Middle Ages, with restoring periphery states under the Kremlin dominion. But it’s more than that.
A friend pointed me to Paul Goble’s apt observation of a November 2021 article by Vladislav Surkov. A close ally and former senior strategist to Putin, Surkov describes how Russia needs the “discharge of internal tension … through external expansion.” Surkov continues, “The Romans did it. All empires do this. For centuries, the Russian state, with its harsh and inactive political interior, was preserved solely thanks to the relentless striving beyond its own borders. … For Russia, constant expansion is not just one of the ideas, but the true existential of our historical existence.”
Surkov suggests that diplomacy with the West may be effective only after a major war. He observes that “the Munster Accords, the Congress of Vienna, and the Yalta Conference became possible and successful only after the chaos reached the level of hell.” He concludes that “Russia will expand not because it is good, and not because it is bad, but because it is physics.”
Surkov ignores the decline of the Roman Empire due to the rot of its political class and institutions alongside its overextended borders. Still, his philosophy of “expansion or die” carries heavy weight in the Kremlin security elite, Putin included.
But as Surkov’s misguided Rome reference suggests, his theorem carries risks.
In a response to Surkov, Moskovsky Komsomolets columnist Mikhail Rostovsky noted that Russians “now feel bad not at all because their ‘imperial instincts’ are seething, [but rather because] the authorities are doing nothing to satisfy them. The citizens of Russia feel bad because of the Covid … [and because] the incomes of the main part of the population are either falling or stagnating for several years in a row.” As I’ve noted, this real wage concern is now significantly exacerbated by domestic inflationary pressures. If Putin gets bogged down in Ukraine or faces widespread sanctions in response to an invasion, growing domestic resistance to his rule risks being catalyzed.
Regardless, the top line is clear: A Russian invasion of Ukraine looks ever likelier.
