Six years after it invaded Ukraine, Russia is at it again, menacing its neighbour and undermining the security of us all. The record build-up of 85,000 troops, plus thousands of tanks, missile trucks, armoured vehicles and long-range guns now deployed on Ukraine’s borders and in the territories that Russia prised away in 2014, are a formidable arsenal. But why are they there?
Russia tells western officials that this is just an exercise. The Kremlin’s media machine says it is a response to Ukrainian aggression. Both explanations are false. Russia has brushed aside inquiries about the nature, extent and duration of the build-up, which breaches arms-control rules about notification and transparency. Ukraine is not attacking anyone or planning to. It does want to regain the territories lost in 2014, but by force of example, not force of arms. Ukrainians reckon that their country will prove more attractive than living under the Kremlin’s thumb.
Western heads are puzzling over Russia’s intentions. Ukraine’s reform efforts have lately gathered pace, with a crackdown on Kremlin-friendly oligarchs. Military intimidation could be an attempt to derail them. A pandemic-hit economy and war-weary people need no extra problems. Russia may also be hoping to force concessions from Ukraine on Crimea, the prize it gained in 2014 and thus the showpiece of Vladimir Putin’s supposed geopolitical wizardry. Russia is pouring concrete on a huge scale there — building installations for nuclear weapons, some think. But the peninsula is parched and depopulating under Russian occupation. It faces water rationing this summer. Russia could entrench its grip by seizing the canal inside Ukraine that used to supply Crimea.
A more limited objective could be to put Russian troops on the contact line between the eastern separatist regions and the rest of Ukraine. Few outsiders would be fussed about that. The Kremlin would claim they were “peacekeepers”, though “piece-keepers” would be more accurate. Despite a supposed ceasefire, fighting has flared up lately, killing more than 20 Ukrainian soldiers this year, four of them in one 24-hour period.
To justify more military action, Russia could invent a Ukrainian provocation or claim that a humanitarian emergency necessitated military intervention. The Kremlin readily spins such storylines to justify its actions. Russia recently claimed that a Ukrainian drone strike killed a child. Its representative at the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), a Vienna-based talking shop, calls the water blockade “an attempt at genocide”. Russia regularly claims that Ukraine’s “fascist” regime is planning to massacre ethnic Russians (which would be odd, given that Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is himself a native Russian speaker, and Jewish to boot).
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Yet full-blown fighting does not seem imminent. Russia’s military doctrine involves extensive cyber-attacks, propaganda, subversion and other mischief before the shooting starts. None of that has featured so far. The recent deployments are ostentatious, whereas a real operation would prize secrecy. And war would be risky: Ukraine will fight back. The US has supplied advanced weaponry to Ukraine, such as Javelin anti-tank missiles, on condition they are kept away from the front line. Those rules could change. Britain already trains Ukrainian soldiers. We could teach them some extra tricks. The Russian public wants glory, not body bags.
A war would also underline long-standing warnings from other countries in Russia’s neighbourhood about its failure to accept that its former colonies are now properly independent. Given the chance, it destabilises them, seizes their territory and erodes their sovereignty. Yet more proof of that might puncture European complacency.
The Kremlin’s greatest asset, though, is that for now much of Europe is more scared of conflict than it cares about freedom. Our drippy Foreign Office seems only to want the issue to go away. The National Security Council has yet to meet to discuss the Ukraine crisis. France and Germany have ducked the challenge, urging both sides to de-escalate, as if the perpetrator and victim of aggression were in the same category, notes Orysia Lutsevych, an analyst at the Chatham House think tank. Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel last week discussed the crisis with Vladimir Putin — over the Ukrainians’ heads. That sends a demoralising message to the rest of Europe and an encouraging one to the Kremlin: when push comes to shove, Berlin and Paris pursue their own interests, not wider ones.
Policymakers in Washington are watching this unfold with a mixture of gloom and fury. The US has sent two warships to the Black Sea: a reminder of Biden’s determination to confront Russia’s foreign mischief-making. The Biden team had hoped to reboot the Atlantic alliance, offering Europe help against Russia in return for diplomatic and economic backing for US efforts to contain China. But the US cannot care more about European security than Europe itself does.
China is watching. If the West fails Ukraine, what price Taiwan? This summer’s Nato summit in Brussels will highlight our disarray. Ukraine has again appealed for a clear path towards membership. Turning that down would underline the alliance’s spinelessness; agreeing to it accentuates its divisions. Donald Trump was notoriously impatient with his European allies. We bemoaned that. But Joe Biden may soon come to share his view.