Taking the crisis between the West and Russia a step further, the United States has told its European allies that President Vladimir Putin is ready to have Ukraine invaded if he so chooses.
Such an operation could take place in January or February, according to a report made last week by US intelligence and leaked to Bloomberg.
It coincides with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s allegations that the US fears a repeat of 2014 — when, reacting to the coup that toppled the pro-Moscow government in Kiev, Putin annexed Crimea and fueled the civil war it wrecked eastern Ukrainian a land ruled by separatists.
The new wave of accusations throws water at the mill of the crisis, which has other aspects underway, such as the dispute between Belarus, an ally of Putin, and Poland, a member of NATO (Western military alliance) over refugees and the suspension of certification of the latest Russian pipeline.
The alarm is based on the movement of Russian troops in regions around 300 km from the Ukrainian borders, since the beginning of the month. Kiev says there are around 100,000 soldiers deployed.
The Kremlin does not deny and says that how it positions its forces is its problem, but this Monday it again denied that it intends to attack its neighbor. Echoing Putin’s hard-line speech last week, spokesman Dmitri Peskov accused the West of playing war drums by supplying weapons like Javelin anti-tank missiles to Ukraine.
For its part, the government of unpopular President Volodimir Zelenski has been carrying out military exercises around Kiev since Sunday (21), simulating airborne attacks in the Jitomir area. Last week, he used live ammunition in maneuvers near the Crimean border.
All this movement is stirring diplomatic circles, out of real fear of a confrontation that could test NATO’s degree of commitment to Kiev. Ukrainians want to be part of the military club, which is unacceptable for Russia.
“With or without NATO membership, seeing Ukraine as a US-controlled unsinkable aircraft carrier, stationed a few hundred kilometers from Moscow, is no more acceptable to the Kremlin than was Cuba [com mÃsseis soviéticos] for the White House nearly 60 years ago,” wrote Dmitri Trenin.
Director of the Carnegie Center in Moscow, he says in an article that “any Russian leader would seek to prevent this anchorage, using any means at their disposal”.
Trenin, however, is one of those who do not know whether Putin is willing to go to blows or is just bluffing with his military might, which today faces a streak of friction with NATO from the Black Sea to the Baltic.
Others, like Ekaterina Zolotova, from the American consultancy Geopolitical Futures, are more assertive. “Russia understands its capabilities, limits and goals better than anyone, and those goals do not include the chaotic destabilization of Ukraine,” he said.
“Moscow prefers a controlled destabilization, by economic means or using rebels in the east, which will lead to the implementation of the Minsk accords”, he added, referring to the 2015 accords that aim to end the civil war that has now been frozen.
The conflict has already killed more than 13 thousand people. According to Minsk’s text, Kiev would regain control of the east, but in practice the separatist areas would be autonomous, which for the Ukrainian government is unacceptable for keeping the country divided.
Both Trenin and Zolotova agree that an invasion would put the arrangement, which is at hand and was endorsed by the West back there, at risk. “Direct military action is probably not even on the Kremlin’s radar,” says the consultant.
The Carnegie director, on the other hand, has doubts, noting that Putin may want to resolve the situation with Ukraine once and for all in order to put an end to the neighbor’s viability as a functioning state. As the status quo stands, the situation in any case favors Putin, as NATO only accepts countries without territorial conflicts as members.
Earlier this year, Zelenski tested Putin by moving troops close to the border and signing contracts to receive American weapons and Turkish attack drones. The answer was 100,000 men exercising around their country, a maneuver that only ended when it became clear that Kiev would not attack the separatist areas.
The game is different now, however. There are no announced military exercises, and experts see the deployment of armored divisions as a threat of invasion for the coldest months of the year, when the terrain freezes and is more easily transposed.
There is, of course, the Western interest in painting Putin as a villain. “In every spring or fall since the Minsk accords, Kiev goes to the media and its allies to say that Russia is preparing for the next war,” says Zolotova.
There are other factors. Zelenski has support from only a third of the population, according to surveys, and may seek some kind of national mobilization. In 2008, then-Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili did something similar in trying to retake the ethnic Russian enclave in South Ossetia, and was ultimately defeated by Moscow.
Everything indicates that both sides are screaming wolf, to use the fabled metaphor. The problem is that the animal has already appeared in the recent past and nothing prevents a miscalculation from taking it out of the woodwork again now.
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