At a time when the US president talks about the risk of world war involving Russia due to tensions on Ukraine’s borders and warmongering drums are being played across Europe, Oksana Antonenko is not shaken.
“I see Western authorities saying there is a risk of an imminent invasion. I don’t see any signs of that,” she said via video from Cambridge (UK). She is the director of global political risk at Control Risk, a British consultancy that advises companies and governments.
Antonenko is Russian and, as her surname implies, is of Ukrainian descent. “I’m a product of the Soviet Union. My father came from Ukraine from a Belarusian family, my mother is half Russian, half Polish,” says the 56-year-old who studied international relations at Harvard and political economy at Moscow State University.
A critic of Vladimir Putin’s government, he sees the deployment of more than 100,000 Russian troops around Ukraine’s borders as “no cost and no risk” for the president. “He can keep that for a long time, six or eight months,” he says.
But wouldn’t that weaken him internally? “The public has already bought into the idea that it’s the West who wants to wage war in Ukraine. It’s on Russian TV all day. It dominates the narrative.”
According to Antonenko, it is more business for the Kremlin to keep the West on permanent alarm. “He counts on the increasing distance between the American and European positions. Everyone says that Putin has united the West, but the reality is different”, he ponders.
She points to the Germans, who with their new leader, Chancellor Olaf Scholz, are giving mixed signals as to what to do with Moscow. The reason is trivial: Russian natural gas, vital for heating German homes in winter. “Furthermore, if you disconnect the Russians from the mainland, many German companies, which invest in joint energy projects, will suffer.”
In fact, so far, President Joe Biden spoke with Scholz last Wednesday (9) that the Nord Stream 2, the Russia-Germany gas pipeline that symbolizes Putin’s power in the sector and is awaiting authorization to operate, would “end ” if there was conflict.
“Scholz was silent on this point”, points out the expert, who from 1996 to 2011 was the head of the Russia and Eurasia program at the prestigious International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.
She also cites Emmanuel Macron, the French president who sought prominence by traveling to Moscow and Kiev, but eventually found the role of a veiled supporter of Putin’s pretensions, in defending the terms of the so-called Minsk Accords.
There are nuances: Macron will face elections in April and the image of a negotiator suits him well, in addition to the fact that France has not yet swallowed having had a multibillion-dollar contract for the sale of submarines to Australia thrown away when the US offered a military pact that included nuclear models for the island-continent.
Signed in 2014 and 2015, the Minsk Accords aim to end the now-frozen civil war in eastern Ukraine, where pro-Russian separatists dominate a large swath of swathes — inspired, unsuccessfully, by Putin’s annexation of Ukraine eight years ago.
The Russian wanted to prevent the new government in Kiev, which had overthrown the previous one closest to the Kremlin, from joining NATO (Western military alliance), as the club does not admit members with significant territorial disputes.
“That’s why I say there is no point in Putin making a limited invasion, in the Donbass [áreas rebeldes no leste]. He needs the Donbass in litigation to keep the Minsk Accords alive. If he went in and annexed it, he would lose a trading asset,” argues Antonenko.
And a total invasion? “People have no idea when they talk about it. In Georgia stocks [2008]in Ukraine [2014] and in Syria [2015], he used a lot of indirect force, to avoid photos of Russian coffins. Now thousands of soldiers would die, it would be impossible to hide.”
She also recalls the historical ties, as her own surname records, that go back to the time when Kiev was the mother of all Russian cities. “To be effective, Putin would have to bomb Kiev from above. How many would die?” she asks her.
For Antonenko, Putin takes advantage of the weakness he attributes to the Biden administration. “In April, when he concentrated troops around Ukraine, he got the summit in June. [em Genebra, com o americano]. At that meeting, Biden drew his red lines, especially in cybersecurity. Now Putin has spelled out his own,” he said.
She refers to the ultimatum made by the Russian in the crisis. While denying an invasion, he leaves his forces ready for one and says he doesn’t want to see Ukraine in NATO – and calls for the withdrawal of troops from the alliance of ex-communist countries he absorbed in 1999.
Biden still faces parliamentary elections this year, and could see his party lose control of both houses of Congress. “That’s why I believe he wants to get this Ukraine issue out of the news as quickly as possible,” he said.
But that doesn’t contradict US militaristic and alarmist rhetoric, always a tone above NATO’s European counterparts, with the exception of the UK. “He seems to me to want to scare Putin, as he knows that any Russian military action would have a bad impact on his image,” he said.
In the midst of it all, Ukraine. Antonenko sees Volodymyr Zelensky’s weak government at the mercy of forces far beyond its capabilities, and considers it a “tragedy” for Kiev to have Biden announcing that American citizens must leave the country.
“What company or investor will put money there? The trade will end this way”, he points out. In fact, Zelensky has alternated denouncing Russian threats with accusations that the West is acting to sow “unnecessary panic” in the country.
In the medium term, the crisis may end up becoming perennial, believes the expert. For her, the key is how much support Putin will have while it lasts. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he keeps some of the troops deployed, not in Belarus, but along eastern Ukraine.”
With that, of course, the risk of an accident remains, a shot fired at the wrong time, a naval skirmish in the Black Sea.
In Antonenko’s view, the close line of contact that the Russian established with Xi Jinping’s China, formalized in an agreement between the two last Friday (4th), was a diplomatic goal by Putin, but its effects need to be relativized.
“The statement does not name Ukraine by name, despite Xi’s clear support for Russia, which was great for Putin. But it does cite Taiwan and Aukus.” [o pacto militar EUA-Reino Unido-Austrália], that is, a Chinese agenda. Even the vaunted energy deals for now haven’t gone far off plan,” he says.
Antonenko also relativizes Putin’s isolation, sold as a liquid in the West. He recalls that he has already received Macron and some important regional actors, will receive Scholz. Even Jair Bolsonaro will be there from Tuesday (15) to Thursday (16). “Why should the Brazilian go now?”, she asked, somewhat incredulously.
