The war of nerves between Russia and the West over an eventual invasion of Ukraine continued in high tension on Thursday (3), with the United States accusing the Kremlin of crafting a pretext for the conflict, while Moscow conducted a major military exercise in Belarus. .
President Vladimir Putin has perhaps 130,000 troops on three fronts around Ukraine: Crimea, the neighboring eastern border, and the allied Minsk dictatorship to the north. A fourth point, with few forces, is in a separatist enclave of Moldova, close to the Ukrainian west.
With this move, the Russian wants a security solution for Eastern Europe that meets his imperative of not seeing Ukraine and other countries being encompassed by NATO, the western military alliance.
It goes back to 2014, when Putin annexed Crimea and backed pro-Russian rebels who now control parts of eastern Ukraine to prevent the new government in Kiev from encroaching on Western structures.
With fruitless exchanges of ultimatums and negative responses, the tension only grows, although there is a great diplomatic effort to avoid a war that in the end does not interest either party – apparently, in the Western view.
The US repeated the UK on Thursday, accusing without showing evidence the Russians of preparing a false pretext for the invasion they deny planning.
According to Pentagon officials quoted anonymously by The New York Times, US intelligence has information about a plan in which the Russians would make a fake video of a simulated attack by Ukrainians against Russia or against ethnic Russian civilian populations in the east of the country.
The idea would be to claim risk of genocide against the inhabitants, justifying an invasion at the request of separatist leaders. There would be Ukrainian military material, such as recently purchased Turkish drones, and actors posing as dead bodies in the reenactment.
The theme of genocide is frequent in the Russian press and social networks, which exaggerate the movement that exists in the Kiev government to try to curb the influence of its neighbor, having closed three Russian-speaking channels in 2021 and applying sanctions to businessmen accused of being linked to the rebels. .
About 20% of Ukraine’s population of 44 million is ethnic Russian, and more than a third of the country speaks the language of Putin – who shares his birthplace with Ukrainian and Belarusian.
The accusation leaked to the New York Times is factually fragile, as was the one made by the US and UK last week that there are Russian plans for “false flag” operations, when an attack against their troops is simulated to justify an action, and even the overthrow of Volodymyr Zelensky’s government.
On the other hand, there was no factual evidence of Russian infiltration of unidentified military “little green men” in Crimea in 2014, until it became clear that they ensured the holding of the referendum that chose the return of the territory to Russia – from where it had been uprooted in 1954, when it was all part of the Soviet Union.
There was no immediate comment from the Kremlin, which had earlier sharply criticized the deployment of 3,000 US troops to positions in Eastern Europe, a symbolic sign of an escalating crisis. On the previous occasion, the plan denounced in London was called delusional.
More tangible, however, was the action seen in Belarus, where 30,000 Russian troops participated with an undisclosed contingent of local military drills near Ukraine’s northern border. Advanced Su-35S fighters and Su-34 attack planes participated in the actions, which were personally supervised by the heads of the Armed Forces of the two countries.
Since Aleksandr Lukachenko’s dictatorship was challenged by protests against yet another re-election of the leader who has been in power since 1994, Putin has increased his political dominance over his neighbor, giving his ally unrestricted support. The two countries, which participate in a vague entity called the State of the Union, have unified military protocols and increased the frequency of joint exercises. In Putin’s ideal world, nations would merge.
Lukachenko has always circumvented this, playing a double game with Europe, which has a strong economic presence in his country. This ended the crisis that started in 2020, and now the Belarusian even admits to the deployment of Russian troops and nuclear missiles on its territory.
Since the dictatorship was involved in a border crisis with Poland, due to the influx of refugees, Moscow and Minsk have been flying patrols together in the country. Europe views this with just as much, if not more, fear that widely publicized exercises could become the prelude to an invasion of Ukraine, although there is precedent for this in the 2008 Russian-Georgia war.
The secretary general of NATO, the western military alliance, Jens Stoltenberg, said on Thursday that the action was worrying and constituted the biggest displacement of Russian troops to the neighbor since the times of the Cold War.
Also on Thursday, adding a few degrees to the boil, the Kremlin ordered the closure of the service of the German network Deutsche Welle in Russia, in retaliation for the sanctions on the Russian network RT in Germany.
Source: Folha
