On the day that the feared joint exercise between Russia and Belarus on Ukraine’s northern borders was due to end, the dictatorship government in Minsk announced that Vladimir Putin’s 30,000 soldiers and military equipment will remain where they are.
The announcement was made by the Ministry of Defense of Belarus, which cited “inspections” that would continue to be carried out on troops deployed for ten days due to the tension pointed out in Donbass (eastern Ukraine). The region, dominated since 2014 by Kremlin-backed separatists, saw a Sunday of mysterious explosions and exchanges of fire on the front lines with Kiev’s forces.
There are only two possibilities for maintaining the troops, a move that has been repeatedly denied by the Kremlin and by the Belarusian dictator, Aleksandr Lukachenko, who spent Friday (18) and Saturday in Moscow with Putin and watched a show of force with missiles with nuclear capability.
In one, the fear of the West is confirmed: the maneuvers were nothing more than a preparation for a direct attack on Kiev, as suggested on Thursday (17) by US President Joe Biden. The Belarus border is a mere 200 km from the Ukrainian capital by road.
In this scenario, the military escalation in the Donbass is nothing more than a poorly designed farce in order to provide a pretext for Russia to act – of the region’s nearly 4 million inhabitants, mostly ethnic Russians, about 700,000 have passports given over the years. years for Moscow. On Russian TVs, the headlines say “Kremlin denies invasion, but will protect citizens”.
There are other strange signs, starting with the exchange of fire in the 430 km line of contact between separatists and Ukrainians, which enters the realm of narrative dispute and unfathomable fake news. There were, says Kiev, more than 100 ceasefire violations on Sunday. Furthermore, examination of metadata from videos recorded by the separatist leadership in Donetsk and Lugansk shows that they were made before their release, including an alleged action against “Polish saboteurs” on a gas pipeline.
All of this flows into what British Prime Minister Boris Johnson called Europe’s greatest risk of war since 1945, when World War II ended. “We’re talking about war where there hasn’t been war for 70 years,” said US Vice President Kamala Harris, who was attending the annual Munich Security Conference.
The second hypothesis is the one that analysts close to the Kremlin say is most likely. All of the above is true, but the function is not to precipitate a war, but to force a diplomatic exit that pleases Putin and enforces his new stance of using military force — called by the secretary general of NATO (Western military alliance), Jens Stoltenberg, of “The New Normal in Europe”.
Putin speaks this afternoon (morning in Brazil) with President Emmanuel Macron, in what the French government called “the last possible attempt” to resolve the crisis without gunfire. Partial troop withdrawals, the keynote of the week in Moscow, stopped being announced.
It began last November, when Putin began deploying what the US says are 150,000 to 190,000 troops around Ukraine. Concurrently, he issued a dry ultimatum with his intentions: to end the advance of NATO, and by syllogism of the political-economic structure of the EU (European Union), in the former Soviet space.
Since the end of the Cold War, Moscow has lost areas separating Russia from Western forces, a historic problem for Moscow. From 1999 onwards, the alliance absorbed 14 countries that were communists, 3 of them part of the Soviet Union. Putin began his reaction in 2008, when he went to war in Georgia and avoided his entry into the club, moving on to the 2014 crisis.
That year, revolts backed by the West toppled the pro-Kremlin government in Kiev, which was under pressure from Putin not to sign an economic cooperation agreement with the EU. The Kremlin’s reaction was to annex the Russian-majority area of ​​Crimea and foment civil war in Donbass, which has killed 14,000 people.
But the Russian never wanted to absorb the Donbass, for the enormous cost that would have been — estimated at up to $25 billion, five times more than he spent in Crimea, just to begin with. His intention was to keep Ukraine divided and thus unable to enter the western club.
So far, it worked. When Biden says he will impose new sanctions on the Russians, Putin does as he did on Saturday, when he shrugged his shoulders in an interview with Lukachenko and claimed he was already dealing with several punishments. He counts on the US$ 640 billion of reserves, the eventual help of the ally China and, above all, on the European fear of seeing the supplier of 40% of its natural gas turn off the taps.
Still, Putin went ahead and established the current crisis, aiming to crystallize the situation. The risk, obviously, is that he will surprise those who believe in continuous pressure without going to an end and, as in 2014, act militarily.
A full-scale invasion of Ukraine seems difficult because of the human and political costs. But more limited action in the Donbass, perhaps recognizing the self-proclaimed rebel republics and flooding them with troops, would be less costly — in one of his proverbial verbal incontinences, Biden suggested days ago that Europe would be divided over how to react to a reduced military incursion.
As in the lead-up to World War I in 1914, triggered by a political assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, the mechanisms of the conflict are being armed by the hour. There, as now, there were advocates that logic would prevail and war would be impossible because of the financial damage they would do to the initial aggressor, in this case, imperial Germany.
Times are different, but Putin now seems to have in his hand the instruments to enforce the predictions of the West, which until now has only escalated the crisis in rhetoric, or to humiliate opponents if he extracts the concessions he wants from Kiev and forces the government of Volodymyr Zelensky to come to terms with his Donbas vassals.
Obviously, all this can go wrong and lead to war, even though the countries that lead NATO have already got the date wrong at least three times.
