The Russian Defense Ministry announced on Wednesday that it had ended military exercises taking place on the Crimean peninsula, annexed by Moscow in the wake of the fall of the pro-Kremlin government in Kiev eight years ago.
To prove what it said, the folder published a video with images of military trucks and trains carrying tanks and armored vehicles passing the bridge inaugurated in 2018 by Vladimir Putin that connects the peninsula to the mainland – Crimea is physically isolated from Russia.
It is not clear, however, whether such demobilization is part of what had been announced by the Putin government the day before. According to the ministry, some forces from the South and Southeast military districts would return to their bases after the end of maneuvers.
It was a retreat calculated by Putin to give credibility to his speeches that mix geopolitical challenge to the West and willingness to negotiate, which were summarized in the meeting he had on Tuesday (15) with German Prime Minister Olaf Scholz.
The announcement was well received by the German, otherwise a leader interested in maintaining good economic contact with Russia because of its dependence on the country’s natural gas, but viewed with skepticism elsewhere. US President Joe Biden said for example that he welcomed the move but that it still “needs to be verified”.
It will not be with a video posted on YouTube that this will be resolved, of course, but the Russian initiative is to give more transparency to its ads, symbolically. Whether this will be bought in the West is another story. Biden, in the same speech Tuesday afternoon in the US, said Putin already has 150,000 troops around Ukraine.
On Wednesday, Canadian Defense Minister Anita Anand said on a visit to NATO headquarters in Brussels that the evidence is that there is still an increase in the number of Russian forces. In the Black Sea, which borders the conflicted area, Russian ships are doing live-fire maneuvers throughout the week.
On the other hand, the government of Belarus said, in an interview with its foreign minister Vladimir Makei, that “there will not be a Russian soldier left” in its territory after the 20th, when the feared joint maneuvers between the two countries end. There are 30,000 Putin men in the country, prompting the West to announce that an invasion was imminent, given that the position of forces to the north of Ukraine added to those to the south and east.
The pressure from the Russian, who can always say he denied wanting to invade Ukraine all along, began in November. It appeared to refer to an old problem, from 2014, which is the status of the Russian-majority areas in the east of the country, the Donbass, which became autonomous in the hands of separatists after a civil war erupted with the help of the Kremlin in the wake of of the annexation of Crimea.
It soon became clear that Putin wanted more: a solution that would prevent the expansion of NATO (Western military alliance) to its borders, namely with the proposed 2008 accession to Ukraine and Georgia.
The Russian has a diplomatic letter, which are the Minsk Accords, the second version of which was signed in 2015 and guaranteed a somewhat mambembe ceasefire in the region. But Kiev did not want to fully implement it because, according to Moscow, it federalizes Ukraine and gives a voice to separatists — hence, no NATO membership.
In addition to the military issue, which involves the historical Russian fear of invasions via Europe, there is an underlying political issue that Ukraine also wants to enter the EU (European Union). It was the pressure exerted by the Kremlin against an agreement between Kiev and the bloc in 2014, by the way, that precipitated the overthrow of the Putin-allied government in the country.
Since they were separated with the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine and Russia have lived a ballet. Sometimes Kiev is closer to Moscow, with which it shares its cultural and linguistic background, and sometimes to the West — centered on the country’s western elites, as opposed to ethnic Russian areas of the east and south.
In 2004, Ukraine experienced a “color revolution,” a Western term for pro-democracy protests that are seen in Moscow as Western-stimulated blows to its influence. It didn’t work out, and the country went back to orbiting its bigger neighbor, until it reached the 2014 crisis.
Putin does not want a Ukraine in the Western sphere, particularly in NATO but also in the EU, not least because it could enliven the Russian opposition he has systematically crushed over the past two years. Thus, geopolitical issues converge with domestic ones in the crisis, although security issues in Eastern Europe obviously overlap.
