“Hey, what is really going on between Ukraine and Russia?” is a question that I have been asked often by friends and colleagues who are not as obsessed with the details of this geo-political struggle as I am.
So, here goes: Russia is not threatening an invasion. Russia is threatening a very serious escalation. Russia has ALREADY invaded Ukraine – in 2014 – and occupied 10% of Ukraine’s territory. Ukraine and Russia are ALREADY at war. Now Putin wants a MUCH BIGGER war.
Experts variously predict the chance of Putin actually escalating his war with Ukraine at 60/40 (yes/no), or higher, as well as lower, 30/70. However, nobody is saying zero.
In the West, leaders are weighing pros and cons on behalf of Putin: what he will he do/not do, should/should not do, can/can not do. Being the glory hound that he is – remember this is the guy who willingly posed half-naked year after year for photos while wrestling alligators and straddling horses – the Kremlin is all atwitter as Putin glows from all the attention. Score!
By all external appearances, Putin is preparing once again to try and break Ukraine, a country on the eastern border of Europe, the size of France, with a population of about 42 million people, none of whom, despite his claims, wishes to unify with him. Sure, right now Putin will say he just wants some security guarantees from NATO, as well as world peace, but what he really wants is Ukraine.
Putin is fixated on Ukraine, which is odd since Russia is the largest nation in the world. It’s not as though he needs the space. Yet, without Ukraine, Putin soon will be a leader of a country that is fast becoming irrelevant to most nations of the world, with the exception of Germany. Neither he, nor Russia, has any legitimate claim to Ukraine – to any part of Ukraine. Having once been a part of Russia’s empire is not a legitimate claim. Various parts of North America once belonged to the now defunct French, Spanish, and British empires. Maybe the Dutch want Manhattan back.
To bolster his fixation, one of Putin’s favorite disinformation themes is 'Ukrainians/Russians historic destiny – we are one people.'
If you do not buy into his historic destiny/one people drumbeat, then he can offer you the exact opposite: Ukrainians and Russians are not one people, so he “had to invade Ukraine to protect Russians living there.” Hmmm…. talk about a solution looking for a problem.
There is no evidence that anything bad was or is happening to the nine million Russians who live in Ukraine. There has been no mass migration of Russians out of Ukraine into Russia. Of the approximately 1.6 million internal refugees who fled the Ukrainian territories occupied by Russia during the 2014 invasion, territories whose populations comprised 30% or more ethnic Russians, 1.3 million of those refugees fled INTO Ukraine, away from Russia. Ooops. Sorry, Vlad. Bummer.
Depending on the time of day, and Putin’s mood, Ukrainians and Russians are either one people – soulmates forever – or they are not one people. Both versions of his reality are absurd. Yet he bounces back and forth between them – last summer he said eternal buds, this winter, buds no more. Ukraine loves me, she loves me not, she loves me. Not.
Now that Putin has the attention of the West with his massive troop build up, before he actually begins military action, during the next few weeks he will attempt to extort (under the guise of negotiations) the West to meet some of his demands and see how much of Ukraine he can get without using bullets. Poor Putin is actually quite exasperated that Ukrainians have continued to fight back for this long. If he can get his extortion demands met that would be super-duper. If not, then Putin is poised to escalate the current war into a really serious fight.
Putin has been building up for this fight, some say, to better judge the reaction and capabilities of the West. Reactions aside, in the end, you do not spend this kind of money and commit this amount of resources just to get attention. If he is going to back down, then he has to get something uber valuable in return. To date, in his opinion, there is nothing of value forthcoming either from the West, or from Ukraine. Quite the opposite. The West threatens economic stranglehold. Ukraine threatens not only hardware and fiercely committed, battle-trained soldiers, but volunteer insurgents to add to the resistance.
If Putin escalates the war,
the West has promised to punish: sanctions, closure of bank accounts, denial of visas to Russians, force Russia out of SWIFT, block needed imports, and send military aid to Ukraine.
However, Putin has been stashing billions into his war chest for years precisely to withstand such punishment.
As he sees it, he is not yet getting anything valuable in order to stay quiet; however, he is also hearing that there is no actual commitment of manpower from NATO. This is important to Putin. He is gathering info to make better calculations as to what he can get away with at what price, poking for soft spots and testing Western resolve, exploring what he can extort for a promise to not attack at all.
He is also trying to assess how much actual damage in terms of lives lost, loss of oligarch support, loss of popular support, loss of historical prestige he will suffer if his escalation plan does not go well – a multi faceted blitz shock and awe attack on Ukraine – land, water, air, cyber – is the most often predicted scenario. To be clear, Putin does not want all of Ukraine, only the very valuable, mineral-rich, agriculturally bountiful eastern regions and warm water southern coastline. Just the good stuff. You can keep those scrappy little mountains in western Ukraine that always suffer from spring mudslides.
Part two will be published in tomorrow’s Kyiv Post
An editor and journalist, Irena Yarosevych worked in Kyiv, 1991-1993, as the Foreign Media Liaison for Rukh, The Popular Movement of Ukraine.
