Russia announced that it had destroyed two Ukrainian tanks that would have crossed the border between the countries on Monday morning (21), killing five soldiers. Kiev denies that the incident took place.
Thus, with the presentation of immiscible versions that have marked the conflict between Vladimir Putin and the West, centered on the situation of his neighbor, the picture is complete for the Russian president to put into practice some type of military action in the region.
The script had been sung by Western authorities since the beginning of the year. The seriousness of Monday’s incident is that it is the first time that Russians say they have faced what they call a “provocation” from Kiev.
Since last Thursday (17), those making such an accusation were separatists from the self-proclaimed people’s republics of Donetsk and Lugansk, the autonomous areas resulting from the civil war fueled by the Kremlin in 2014.
With that, in the Western design, the pretext for an invasion or military incursion against the Ukrainians by Putin is given. Adding to the drama, the Russian president himself summoned the members of his Security Council to a carefully broadcast meeting after it ended on TV.
In it, Putin expressed irritation. “I did everything I could to resolve the crisis with Ukraine peacefully,” he said. He and ministers such as Chancellor Sergei Lavrov revisited the themes of the ultimatum issued by Russia to the United States, which was rejected by the White House and NATO (Western military alliance).
In short, Putin wants an end to the expansion of NATO and, by extension, the European Union. The symbol of this would be the commitment that Ukraine would never be a member of the military alliance, bringing Western offensive forces to Russian borders — the presence at the other point of contact, the Baltic States, is modest enough precisely to not provoke Moscow too much.
Distrust was in the air. Lavrov said that “we talk to the US because NATO says what the US says”.
The Security Council reported both the actions of the last few days and the alleged incident this Monday. “We’re going to do an investigation. There were 40 ceasefire violations tonight alone. [de segunda]. Ukrainians are using heavy weapons against civilians. There are 325 tanks, 880 guns, troops,” Russian Defense Minister Sergei Choigu said.
According to Russian news agencies, the action took place when armored personnel carriers crossed the border between the so-called Republic of Lugansk and the Russian region of Rostov, in Mitianskaya. In addition to the dead, there is one captured, according to the Kremlin. Earlier, a police station had been hit by a projectile, according to the Russians.
There is still no evidence of what would have happened in the most serious episode, but the response of the Ukrainian Defense Minister, Oleksii Reznikvo, was immediate: he denied that there had been any skirmish, let alone with dead. And he denied the Russian accusation that the tanks carried saboteurs operating in Lugansk.
Truth, lie or something in between, what matters is that the pretext for Putin is given. Muscovite analysts are betting he will use this to further pressure the West and Kiev to agree to negotiate, or even force Ukrainians to settle with separatists under the rules of the Minsk Accords.
In the Kremlin’s view, this would solve the problem because Ukraine would be federalized, and the rebels would have the power to veto decisions such as embracing the institutional framework of the West. But today that seems a long way off, even though President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government is terrified at the prospect of being left alone to face Putin.
The US and European countries have promised several sanctions against Moscow, but President Joe Biden has said several times that he will not send troops to defend Kiev. That’s the password for Putin: he doesn’t necessarily need to shoot, but demonstrate that he can do it.
Also on Monday, the leaders of the two rebel republics asked Putin to recognize them and provide them with military and financial aid. At the Security Council meeting, the issue was left unfinished. “This situation will have to be dealt with. There are about 800,000 Russian citizens in those regions, we cannot ignore that”, said the number 2 of the entity, Dmitri Medvedev.
He was referring to people who received Moscow passports in recent years. There are altogether about 4 million people living in the breakaway areas. Medvedev cited the situation in Georgia in 2008, when he was president and had Putin as a mentor and prime minister, who ended up in a war to guarantee rights and recognition for ethnic Russians in that country.
All this comes after a Sunday (20) in which President Emmanuel Macron of France appeared to have managed to arrange a summit meeting between Putin and Biden. Earlier on Monday, the Kremlin had already said that this would be premature.
At the meeting, Lavrov suggested to Putin that he should go ahead with a meeting scheduled for Thursday (24) with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Switzerland or Finland. On the more hawkish side of the meeting, Choigu warned of Zelensky’s speech at the Munich Security Conference over the weekend, in which the Ukrainian suggested that his country might seek to have nuclear weapons.
Ukraine is surrounded on three sides: Crimea annexed by Putin in 2014, a large swath in its east and north, by the roughly 30,000 Russian military in Belarus. In addition, there is a small Russian military presence in the pro-Kremlin separatist enclave of Transnistria in Moldova, west of Kiev.
