The White House said this week that Russia now has more troops near the border with Ukraine than ever since 2014 – when the Crimean peninsula was annexed. Further south, military intelligence reports estimated that about 4,000 heavily armed Russian forces were moving to Crimea, a U.S. defense official told CNN.
Moscow also speaks the game. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu has called for military inspections. The Kremlin’s envoy in the conflict, Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration Dmitry Kozak, said that Moscow, as has always been implied, would defend the eastern population of Ukraine if necessary. And he said that the beginning of a conflict would be the ‘beginning of the end of Ukraine’. Russia’s statements are quite loud.
Of Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky has moved a few units closer to the Donbas and on Thursday undertook a very special trip to the area. Like Russian leader Vladimir Putin, Zelensky’s local ratings are not that healthy. He spoke the language of peace. He tried to be close to the troops, aware that US President Joe Biden had said he would stand by him.
The White House said it was “increasingly concerned about recent escalating Russian aggression in eastern Ukraine” and U.S. officials also indicated that they could send warships to the Black Sea, a sign of increasing involvement, although U.S. planes frequent the area watched. . German Chancellor Angela Merkel has asked Putin to withdraw his powers during a call on Thursday. Everyone gets very excited, very fast.
Speculation about what comes next in the biggest land war in Europe in two decades is as plentiful as the Kremlin would surely hope. Meanwhile, the only cost so far is the fuel bill to move many tanks around.
The most important question that has not yet been answered is what Russia’s goal would be in a military intervention. Some analysts have speculated that it could flood the separatist territories and adjacent conflict zones with a huge Russian ‘peacekeeping force’, designed to enforce the will and rules in the area and effectively annex the Donbas.
Yet it would almost guarantee a Western response, probably only in the form of sanctions. It would also have essentially the same control for Moscow as it has now in these areas, although there is a lot of expensive Russian skin and hardware at stake. That’s all the pressure, with none of the juice, and therefore probably not so favorable to the Kremlin.
The second option, driven by analysts, involves the creation of a gangway between separatist Donbas in the east and Crimea, the annexed peninsula in southern Ukraine. Water has been a scarce resource in the Crimea for many years, a crisis that a senior Ukrainian official warned me two years ago could reach a critical stage in the summer of 2019. This continues, coupled with the broader challenge for Moscow to maintain acceptable enforcement. standard of living in the Crimea through sea supplies, and over a small, new bridge that made it across the Kerch Strait. This is not a sustainable state of affairs for Russia’s latest acquisition in the long run.
But a runway – a strip that runs through the Ukrainian city of Mariupol and to the Armiansk area above Crimea – would also be extremely vulnerable to any occupying Russian forces. They would be caught between the Sea of Azov and a very fierce, better-equipped Ukrainian army than before. To keep the corridor effective, they must penetrate Ukraine more deeply and then again resist the Ukrainian army and the local population. The hope from 2014 has passed that Russian soldiers will be seen as ‘liberators’ of a corrupt government in Kiev. Hostility is much more tangible.
The task before the Russian army, therefore, is to do so little that the inevitable Western sanctions are apparently imposed for minimal profit. Or do so much (too much) that you have to occupy large parts of Ukraine for years. It’s a mess in both directions.
In Moscow’s eyes, a perhaps much better option is to rally its forces, make loud noises about Ukraine’s war desire, give a tip for diplomacy and use its heavy metal glove hand across the border for a better, forced negotiated solution. This, of course, assumes that the head of the Kremlin always makes the best decisions. Putin is also capable of reaching out or being foolish.
A third invasion of Ukraine in 2021 is also a much more dangerous gamble for Putin than he took in 2014-15. US President Biden has made it clear that he will offer “unwavering support” to Kiev. Washington’s attitude is irrevocably hardened by the idea that Russia is a threat. And Ukrainian leader Zelensky, as politically and militarily inexperienced as he is, will undoubtedly benefit domestically from being dragged into a conflict he has not yet begun.
Yet there are two lasting, non-quantifiable risks. The first is that Putin, despite all the chaos of the next few weeks, can see a moment of opportunity to strike, and will simply decide to deal with the consequences later. The second is the inevitable danger of the accumulation of angry forces on both sides of an already active front line. An unexpected mistake or upsurge by one of the parties could lead to a bigger war.
If Moscow hopes that its build-up means that its phones will start ringing more frequently and take over diplomacy, it will be better soon.