On the eve of the date announced by Western intelligence services with a possible invasion of Ukraine by Russia, the government of Vladimir Putin announced the beginning of the withdrawal of part of the troops that were exercising close to the borders of the neighbor.
The announcement, made to Russian news agencies by the Ministry of Defense, does not specify how many soldiers are involved in returning to their permanent bases, only that they are part of the Western and Southern military districts, in areas adjacent to Ukrainian territory.
Since November, Putin has concentrated at least 130,000 troops around his neighbor and issued an ultimatum seeking to establish a new security concert in Eastern Europe more to his liking, after 30 years of expansion by NATO (Western military alliance) and the EU (Union European Union) on Moscow’s former communist satellites.
The West rejected the idea. Since last week, the United States has led an alarmist wave, citing until Wednesday as the date of an invasion, which it has called “imminent” since the beginning of the year. The Kremlin denies having such an intention, and so an eventual withdrawal is politically salable by Putin as a matter of course.
But there is nothing casual about the ad. It occurred when the Chancellor (premier in the German and Austrian definition) of Germany, Olaf Scholz, arrived in Moscow on his first visit to Putin since taking the chair that was for 16 years from Angela Merkel.
Under intense domestic pressure from President Joe Biden, who visited Washington, Scholz will appeal to his Russian counterpart for a de-escalation of military activity. He has the most powerful card, except when considering the possibility of nuclear weapons being used in a European war: his market for Russian natural gas.
Germany, but also France and other European nations, have strong investments in energy infrastructure with Moscow. About 40% of the continent’s natural gas consumption is supplied by the Russians.
Last September, the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline was completed, which will double the amount of gas sent directly from Russia to the Germans, thus taking income from transit made through former Soviet routes through Ukraine — annually, Kiev takes something like US$. 2 billion from that toll. Berlin postponed the start of its operation citing bureaucratic details.
Biden has already said that Nord Stream 2 will not be operational if Russia attacks Ukraine, but Scholz has not fully backed him, which has led to criticism within the ruling coalition in Berlin. This Tuesday, the head of EU diplomacy, Josep Borrell, repeated the threat, but with a conciliatory tone.
“The EU is ready to discuss Russia’s security concerns,” he told BBC 4 radio. He followed Putin himself, who on the eve allowed himself to be filmed listening to his chancellor, Sergei Lavrov, recommend the path of negotiation and the defense minister. , Serguei Choigu, said that the situation was tense, but that the withdrawal of troops would happen “naturally”.
At the same time, Moscow has flexed its military muscle with week-long exercises in the Black Sea that include six amphibious landing ships. There are still joint maneuvers with 30,000 Russian soldiers in the allied dictatorship Belarus, which borders Ukraine’s north.
On Monday, leaving military options open, Parliament began to discuss recognition of the two self-proclaimed pro-Russian breakaway republics in eastern Ukraine.
In 2014, these two territories began a civil war with support from Moscow, after Putin annexed the ethnic Russian-majority Crimea region. The motive was to retaliate against Kiev for overthrowing the pro-Kremlin government and to prevent the new management from joining the EU and, above all, NATO.
The war killed more than 14,000 people and is pending on a mambembe ceasefire, established by the second version of the Minsk Accords, from 2015. Putin wants to see the text implemented, because it is vague and allows the interpretation that the rebels will remain autonomous, as if Ukraine were federalized—thus never allowing entry into Western structures by a presumed veto power.
Kiev does not accept this, but it is being pressured by France to do so. Scholz did not go as far as President Emmanuel Macron did last week, but said Monday in Kiev that the question of Ukraine’s membership of NATO “was not put into practice”.
All this verbal juggling will be a victory for Putin if the status quo in eastern Ukraine remains unchanged at the end of the crisis. The Russian showed, with his military mobilization, that he could carry out his veiled threat. Europe, sidelined in the conflict by Moscow’s prioritization of direct contacts with Washington, blinked rapidly.
Biden continues with his fiery rhetoric, and is in danger of emerging from the crisis with a reputation as an alarmist. He will try to sell, in turn, that the denunciation of the Russian rival’s movements as an effective instrument of deterrence. In Russia, for now, Putin’s talk seems to have convinced the public; in the USA, the parliamentary elections in November could give the measure of the tactics of the American president.
Of course, everything will still depend on the assessment of the eventual Russian withdrawal. In April of last year there was a similar, more discreet move, and Moscow military analysts say that much of what was deployed ended up being consolidated at bases closer to the Ukrainian border, despite the troops themselves having returned home.
If in fact we are facing a cooling off of the crisis, an accidental beneficiary will be President Jair Bolsonaro, who arrives this afternoon (lunchtime in Brasilia) in Moscow. He has been criticized for the timing of his visit to Putin, who had invited him in December, and a less tense environment could make the decision to keep the trip less onerous.
The presidents meet on Wednesday (16), the day according to US and British spy agencies of the potential invasion. This became a joke among people with access to the Kremlin: a businessman asked the report to leave a meeting until after Wednesday, so “to be able to watch the invasion on CNN”.
