For weeks, Russia has been massacring troops near Ukraine in a military buildup on a scale not seen since its 2014 invasion.
Analysts, as well as Ukrainian and Western officials, have struggled to understand what the Russian build-up means: it is merely a position intended to send a message to Ukraine and the Biden government, or is it true preparations for Russian military action or even a full-scale invasion of Ukraine?
At the moment, only the Kremlin knows the answer. But most observers have so far concluded that the visible build-up is most likely saber-rattling, although the threat of escalation still cannot be ruled out.
“In general, the situation is now better than a week ago,” Oleksiy Semenov, a former adviser to the secretary of the Ukrainian National Security Council, said in an interview on Friday.
“I would say that the percentage of an actual war or even a medium-sized military conflict, whether on the line or on the border, is low,” he said. “That does not mean that the situation can not change.”
The conflict in eastern Ukraine has been low in intensity since 2015, when a peace deal put an end to the great fighting. That peace process has since more or less stalled, leaving parts of eastern Ukraine under the rule of Russian-controlled separatists facing a front line with Ukrainian government forces. The separatist territories are nominally self-proclaimed republics, but in practice are effectively controlled by Moscow, which has so far ceased to recognize them.
Russian social media has been full since the end of March videos showing train cargo armored vehicles and heavy artillery moving to Crimea and near eastern Ukraine. This was accompanied by an avalanche of war-like rhetoric on Russian state media. At the same time, a ceasefire in eastern Ukraine between Russian-controlled rebels there and the Kyiv government collapsed, with a resurgence in the shooting.
Estimates of the number of Russian troops deployed near Ukraine now range from about 60,000 to more than 100,000, although many of them are permanently there. The Russian defense minister said he had moved two armies and three air units to its southwestern border, saying the build-up was part of a “readiness check” in response to alleged increases in activity by US and NATO forces.
Russia has set up a large new field base for hundreds of vehicles visible on commercially available satellite imagery, and foreign journalists have been allowed to come close.
Most observers believe that the very visible nature of the Russian build-up means that it is meant to be seen, indicating that it is a message and not a prelude to an invasion.
“We were and are spectators of a show that takes many people to reality and still does,” said Dmitry Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, in an interview with Russian website 47News.
Many observers believe that the show is intended to send signals to Ukraine and the Biden government.
Regarding Ukraine, Trenin said, it was a warning against any attempt to use military force to retake its occupied territories and also to express dissatisfaction with a recent move by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the direction of a more assertive attitude towards the Russian groups in the country.
To the US, Trenin said the message was also a warning to maintain strict control over Kiev, which the Kremlin considers US-dominated.
Other analysts say they believe it was intended as an early test for Biden’s government and as a message from the Kremlin that it could ignite the conflict at will if its interests were ignored.
The moves succeeded in attracting the West’s attention. President Joe Biden called Russian President Vladimir Putin and offered him a summit in the coming months, which analysts are eagerly seeking.
Some analysts have said they believe the Kremlin has recently used more assertive actions by Kiev to make its points. The escalation began when Zelensky banned three pro-Russian media channels and approved a powerful oligarch, often described as Putin’s point man in Ukraine. Zelensky also conducted military exercises near the front.
“Although the actions of Kiev at the time were not preparations for a military offensive,” Trenin wrote in a recent article, “the Kremlin decided to take action to increase the game.”
Trenin and other analysts have suggested that Russia is genuinely concerned that the leaders of Kiev could misjudge the words of US support in support of an attempt to take back the occupied regions by force.
According to some observers, such a view is disturbing, suggesting that there is a dangerous disconnect between the Kremlin’s perspective on the conflict and how it is viewed by Ukraine and Western countries.
“There has been no Ukrainian military effort to justify the operations that Russia is now conducting on the borders of Ukraine,” Gustav Gressel, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in a recent article. .
“Although the Kremlin’s fears are based on illusions, it believes that these illusions give the right to take real offensive action.”