A day after shaking up the world with the recognition of the self-proclaimed ethnic Russian republics in eastern Ukraine and the deployment of troops to the region, Vladimir Putin’s government said it was ready to negotiate with the United States.
“Even in these very difficult times, we say: we are ready for negotiations,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on YouTube. She said her boss, Chancellor Sergei Lavrov, will go to Geneva to discuss the crisis with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Thursday.
Putin moved a vital piece in the dispute over the design of European security on Monday (21), when he recognized the so-called People’s Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk, home to some 4 million people, most of whom are ethnic Russians, 800,000 of whom hold passports. of the larger neighbor. He claimed risks escalating from the skirmishes of recent days into military action that Kiev denies.
With that, and an aggressive speech in which he basically denied that Ukraine is a state in itself, he put the West in check. Since November, Putin has been massing troops in military exercises around Ukraine — at least 150,000 of them, according to the US. He denied that he will invade the country, but after recognizing the rebel territories he ordered Russian troops to occupy it in a “peacekeeping” mission.
It is something that occurs elsewhere, such as in the Russian separatist enclave of Transnistria (Moldova), a relic of the 1991 dismantling of the Soviet Union, and in the two ethnic Russian areas that became autonomous after the 2008 Moscow-Georgia war, Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
In practice, this is what can happen to the Donbass (eastern Ukraine), autonomous since 2014 in the wake of the civil war fomented by the Kremlin after the annexation of the Crimean peninsula — which, in addition to being historically Russian territory, is home to its valuable Russian Fleet. Black Sea.
“Russia can intimidate Kiev into no longer acting militarily in the Donbass with action. But that’s pretty much the only advantage of reconnaissance. The negative consequences will be many and varied,” says Andrei Kortunov, director of the prestigious Russian Council on International Affairs, next from the Kremlin.
In addition to the innocuous sanctions against rebel areas announced by the government of Joe Biden in the US, this morning the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, of which Russia is a member, asked Moscow to rescind the recognition decrees. That won’t happen.
Beijing, Russia’s ally, issued a discreet statement, urging everyone involved in the confusion to be restrained.
As of Tuesday morning (22), there were no visible signs of troops arriving in Donetsk or Lugansk, although this could happen at any time. Military trucks and tanks were seen in both capitals, but it is uncertain whether they were already there and who they belong to, the rebels or the Russians.
According to Ivan Alexeiévitch, a taxi driver who makes his living working in cities in the border region and prefers not to use his surname, in recent days several convoys of army trucks have been seen heading from Rostov-on-Don to the border at Alivio-Uspenka, about 95 km northwest of the provincial capital Rostov.
“Nobody knows what it was about,” he said. On the other hand, in the same period he himself saw several freight trains bringing back armored vehicles and tanks from exercises in the border areas. Rostov-on-Don is the headquarters of Russia’s Southern Military District. “One day I stopped at the railroad signal and the tanks began to pass,” he said.
For Kiev, Washington and Brussels, the arrival of such peacekeepers already means a Russian invasion, but that’s just rhetoric. The real action that everyone fears would have another nature, targeting the Ukrainian capital.
There is a sign to watch out for: how far will the Russians settle, with military bases, in Donbass. Over eight years of dispute, there is a relatively established 430 km border separating the Ukrainian Ukrainian republics.
Putin has cleverly not said how far he will go, but any move beyond this so-called line of contact will set up a de facto invasion of Ukraine. The separatists want to restore for themselves the former borders of the provinces of Donetsk and Lugansk, of which they occupy about half of the pre-civil war territory.
A signal was given by a side actor, Senator Andrei Klimov, of the Federation Council’s Foreign Affairs Committee (Upper House of Parliament). To the channel Russia 24, this morning (night in Brazil), he said that the Russian plan only includes the current borders.
“Of course, we are talking about the territories that are within the borders established so far. The rest is beyond the framework of legal activity,” he said, giving a legalistic veneer to Putin’s unilateral decision.
Only reality, however, will tell what will happen and how Ukraine will react. If he just informally transforms the Donbass into a Russian region, without annexation, Putin could indefinitely prolong the dysfunctional status of the Ukrainian state, as he did with Georgia, thus preventing its membership of NATO and the European Union.
If that happens, he will be punished by sanctions that could alienate his regime with Russian elites, but that is a matter for later. With the US and NATO refusing to intervene militarily, fearing an unpredictable war, their most immediate strategic objective will be achieved.
