Biden threatens Putin with sanctions and ‘other measures’ if Ukraine is invaded

The United States has threatened Russia with new economic sanctions and “other measures” if the Kremlin begins its invasion of Ukraine, which the White House calls imminent.

The alert was made by President Joe Biden to his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, during a videoconference that lasted 2h05min this Tuesday (7), according to previous reports made by White House advisers.

“President Biden expressed the deep concern of the US and our European allies about the increase in Russian forces around Ukraine, and made it clear that they will respond with strong economic and other measures in the event of a military escalation,” he said. White House.

The tone is predictable, because the American has been telegraphing his intentions. First, press leaks about a Russian military build-up near the Ukrainian borders. Then, with successive confirmations that the danger was real and, to stop it getting worse, almost immediate. Finally, with Biden himself saying that he should prepare retaliations.

The “other measures” were not voiced, although there was speculation about more military support for Kiev. In practice, it doesn’t seem to mean much.

Regarding the impression of such statements on Putin, the limitation stems from the fact that Russia has already faced sanctions since 2014, when it annexed Crimea from Ukraine and roped off ethnic Russian separatist rebels to start a civil war now frozen in the east of the country, taking away Kiev’s effective control over the Donbass region.

Of course, the tourniquet can always be tight. Bloomberg and other Western media have speculated that Russian banks could be left with no way to convert their rubles into dollars. “That doesn’t make sense, and it’s impossible,” replied German Gref, a liberal allied with Putin who runs Russia’s biggest bank, Sberbank.

At this point, however, perhaps only more concrete measures against the infrastructure for the sale of Russian natural gas to Europe, notably the new Nord Stream 2 pipeline, could have some deterrent effect. But then it is necessary to agree with the Germans, who even put the certification of the project completed in September on suspension due to technicalities, but they have every interest in its functioning.

It would be up to Biden to really raise the bar by promising direct military support to Kiev in the event of war. So far, that hasn’t come through, and it’s consistent with the leader’s record. But for all the bravery that the ever-indecisive president tries to show when dealing with Putin, that would mean risking a European, perhaps global, conflict between the two nuclear superpowers.

The American reaffirmed his commitment to defending Ukrainian sovereignty, but it is one thing for a NATO country to be attacked, which would force a reaction from the other 29 members of the US-led alliance. Another is Kiev, who would like to join the club, suffer the invasion.

That said, the US and other European countries have increasingly been supplying Kiev with sophisticated weapons, which has spawned Kremlin accusations that the West is looking for the clash. Biden’s harsh rhetoric against Putin, whom he once called a murderer, also contributes to distrust.

The knot of confusion is the latest Russian military move into regions relatively close to the Ukrainian border. There are fewer than 100,000 men involved, although the US and Ukraine say there is a coordinated invasion plan on three fronts, with 175,000 troops.

It’s not enough to devastate the Ukrainian forces, but maybe it’s to take the Donbass for good. The problem is that this, in addition to the aforementioned possibility of an apocalyptic war, would be extremely costly: Putin has already disbursed more than $5 billion in infrastructure in Crimea, for example, in non-repayable terms.

This is the second time this year that Putin has moved his pieces. In March, he reacted to President Volodimir Zelenski’s deployment of forces near the Donbass, and after weeks of tension, he withdrew his troops as he considered the situation to have stabilized.

“We never wanted to attack anyone, but we have our concerns and our red lines,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov said before the virtual meeting.

By red lines we mean the integration of Ukraine into the political-military framework of Europe, NATO membership card above all. Geopolitically, it is unacceptable for any Russian leader not to have Ukraine at least as neutral.

A look at the map explains: the vast Ukrainian plains are, like the terrain of Russian ally Belarus, roads to invasions — which occurred successively in the 18th (Swedish), 19th (French) and 20th (German, twice) centuries. It is imperative for the Kremlin to maintain buffer areas, as in the times of the tsars and the Soviet Union.

This explains Putin’s determination, in addition to cultural factors, given the common origin of these three countries and the strong Russian ethnic presence in the two neighbors.

Obviously, the current government in Kiev does not agree and wants to be accepted by the West. For the Russian president, maintaining the status quo has been good business, but recent moves suggest he wants a resolution to the instability.

Theoretically, this would happen with the implementation of the Minsk accords, which in the second round in 2015, with the consent of Germany and France, established a peace based on great autonomy for ethnic Russians, but on Ukrainian territorial integrity. Kiev does not agree.

Putin even asked, in the conversation, for a guarantee that Ukraine would not be accepted into NATO. It was not successful, despite the fact that in practice membership is virtually impossible under current rules, which prohibit the entry of countries with active territorial conflicts.

If the stalemate and Western fear of an invasion are maintained, Putin buys time and may extract some concessions, as the US has focused on China since leaving Afghanistan. This, on the other hand, is causing European trepidation, something Biden worked on in calling the leaders of Germany, the UK and France before and after the summit.

There is a chance that the Russian actually wants to resolve the situation by force, despite all the risks. Or at least appear believable in your threatening acts.

“I bet he’s bluffing. But I wouldn’t bet everything on it,” George Friedman, the owner of consultancy Geopolitical Futures, wrote on Tuesday. A Russian analyst always skeptical about Western narratives about his country, Ruslan Pukhov, said in a message that “there is a big chance of war, not now, but later”.

That had been the ever-present danger of error. This week, for example, the American destroyer USS Arleigh Burke is in the waters of the Black Sea in exercises with allied forces, including Ukrainian ones. In response, Russian naval aviation in Crimea conducted ship attack training with Su-24M bombers and Su-30SM fighter jets.

Officially, the virtual dome, with the Russian in his home in the resort of Sochi and the American in the White House, at least serves to try to detension the atmosphere. “We want everyone to have a cool head,” Peskov said, citing other European tensions such as the refugee crisis on the Belarus-Polish border.

Indeed, the greetings between Biden and Putin were quite cordial and gracious, with smiles and mutual promises from a meeting like the one in June in Geneva, when the two leaders agreed to disagree on several issues. Since Biden’s inauguration in January, they have also spoken three times on the phone.

In the European environment, however, heads are quite hot, especially in the more exposed ex-communist east. Latvian Chancellor Egards Rinkevics, for example, said that NATO had to respond hard and quickly if something happened in Ukraine. On pain, he said, of losing its meaning, “the glue that unites us”.