Vladimir Putin has taken a decisive step on the road to conflict with Ukraine and the West. According to the Kremlin reported on Monday (21), the president of Russia informed the leaders Emmanuel Macron (France) and Olaf Scholz (Germany) that he will recognize the autonomous areas resulting from the civil war in the east of the neighbor.
With that, the arrangements that barely sustained the balance in the region, the Minsk Accords (2014-15), die. Russia becomes an active actor in the conflict, no longer a presumed judge.
“The president said he plans to sign the relevant decree in the near future,” the Kremlin statement said, noting that Macron and Scholz expressed disappointment with the decision and indicated the need to maintain diplomatic contacts.
The signature would be made official in a speech by Putin on Russian TV later this Monday night – afternoon in Brazil.
It was unclear, however, whether Putin recognizes the current borders of breakaway areas or accepts their demand, including portions of the former Lugansk and Donetsk provinces. If it does, the path to war in eastern Ukraine could be assured.
He made the decision — something that has been on the table since the Russian parliament made such a request last week, and nothing like that happens without an agreement with the Kremlin — after a choreographed meeting of his Security Council.
The move comes on the day that Russia said it had clashed with the Ukrainians, announcing that it had destroyed two of its neighbor’s armored vehicles and killed five soldiers, who allegedly crossed its border. Kiev denies that such an incident took place.
The meeting was televised after it took place, and the top ministers of the Russian government in a coordinated way suggested the measure to Putin – who led the meeting from a table far from his subordinates, reflecting again his fears about Covid-19, in the Grand Palace of the Kremlin.
Also on Monday, the leaders of the two rebel republics had asked Putin to recognize them and provide them with military and financial aid. The most elaborate speech was by Dmitri Medvedev, number 2 on the council. “This situation will have to be dealt with. There are around 800,000 Russian citizens in those regions, we cannot ignore that,” he said.
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.
This signals a path towards the feared military action of Putin, who since November has concentrated forces around Ukraine in military exercises that total between 150,000 and 190,000 troops, according to the United States.
Putin showed irritation and signaled, or feigned, warmongering intent. “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 US, 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.
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.
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. Moscow analysts are betting he will use this to further pressure the West and Kiev to agree to negotiate or 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 recognition of the republics opens the way for a militarization of the region with Russian forces, without technically being an annexation like the one that took place in Crimea.
Putin said this clearly. “We are discussing the independence of the regions,” he said, being urged to unify them with the Russian Federation. There is a practical consideration: an annexation is estimated to be no less than $25 billion, something Moscow cannot afford to spend.
The conflict between Vladimir Putin and the West then gains a new element, which puts pressure on Zelensky — it seems unlikely that he will try to stop the Russians militarily.
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.
Shortly before the Kremlin’s official announcement of recognition of the rebels, notes of disapproval were already circulating in the West. German Olaf Scholz called the act a “unilateral break” with the Minsk Accords, seconded by a UN spokesman and EU diplomacy chief Josep Borrell, who once again put the economic sanctions letter on the table.
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.
