Barbie Latza Nadeau, Allison Quinn, Noor Ibrahim
Mon, February 21, 2022
SERGEY BOBOK
Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered Russian “peacekeeping” troops to the pro-Kremlin regions of Luhansk and Donetsk after unilaterally declaring that the two chunks of Eastern Ukraine should be considered independent states.
The dramatic escalation, which many fear could lead to all-out war, followed an address to his nation on Monday, in which the Russian president formally announced “the immediate recognition” of the pro-Kremlin regions of Luhansk and Donetsk—which stretch over 6,500 miles—as independent of Ukraine.
In a decree released shortly after his speech, the president ordered Russia's defense ministry to “ensure ….. implementation by the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation of functions to maintain peace on the territory of the Donetsk People’s Republic.”
Before his formal recognition of the break-away states, Putin had spent the better part of his address lambasting Ukraine, NATO, and the U.S. for failing to address “security threats” raised by the Kremlin in recent months. He baselessly accused Ukrainian forces of perpetuating “genocide” and blamed Kyiv for any future “continuation of bloodshed” in those regions.
“If Ukraine was to join NATO it would serve as a direct threat to the security of Russia,” the Russian leader said. He undermined Ukraine as a country that has “never had a tradition of genuine statehood,” accused the U.S. of “blackmailing” Russia with threats of sanctions, and warned of Western efforts “to try to convince us over and over again that NATO is a peace-loving and purely defensive alliance,” adding, “we know the real value of such words.”
Though Putin did not directly address growing fears that Russia is planning to invade Ukraine, he appeared to be laying the groundwork for war by characterizing a potential Russian military offensive as an act of self-defense. Moscow “has every right to take retaliatory measures to ensure its own security,” he said. That is exactly what we will do.”
The move follows a spectacularly bizarre meeting by Russia’s Security Council, where Putin appeared like a mob boss testing his underlings, as officials, one after another, spoke out in favor of recognizing the self-proclaimed republics.
It was another grotesque spectacle on a day when the drum beats of war grew deafening. The aggressive and totally unjustified territorial claim followed a series of apparent false-flag operations where the Russians tried to blame Ukrainian forces for a number of attacks.
The Russian military claimed that five so-called “saboteurs” were assassinated early Monday after crossing into Russia from Ukraine.
The report mirrors almost exactly what the Biden administration warned could be “false flags” or trigger points that Russia will respond to as a pretext to launch its invasion.
“As a result of clashes, five people who violated the Russian border from a group of saboteurs were killed,” the Russian military said in a statement, according to Reuters. No Russians died in the alleged border infraction. Russia also said Ukraine had destroyed a border outpost used by the FSB (Federal Security Service) in early morning shelling.
Russia has also claimed in recent days that Ukrainian forces are staging attacks on Luhansk and Donetsk.
Ukraine has denied any such incursion or attacks took place. The Minister of Foreign affairs, Dmytro Kuleba, took to Twitter Monday to dismiss the claims with big red ‘X’s denying an attack on Donetsk or Luhansk, or that it sent saboteurs over the Russian border, or that it shelled Russian territory or border crossings.
After the latest round of supposed Ukrainian aggression, the leaders of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics published video appeals pleading with Putin to recognize their independence, as they claimed Ukrainian forces were preparing to attack.
Despite a flurry of last-minute attempts at diplomacy—including talk of a summit between presidents Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin—all hell seems soon to break loose in Ukraine.
Monday, Biden’s national security advisor Jake Sullivan warned that Russia’s imminent attack on Ukraine will be “extremely violent” and that it could begin literally at any moment.
“We believe that any military operation of this size, scope and magnitude of what we believe the Russians are planning will be extremely violent,” he told NBC Today show on a frenzied circuit of morning TV on President’s Day. “It will cost the lives of Ukrainians and Russians, civilians and military personnel alike.”
He told the network that new intelligence garnered in recent days suggest “an even greater form of brutality because this will not simply be some conventional war between two armies.” He went on to say Russia will target the Ukrainian people “to repress them, to crush them, to harm them.”
He then appeared on ABC Good Morning America, telling them that “all signs look like President Putin and the Russians are proceeding with a plan to execute a major military invasion of Ukraine.” That plan was bolstered over the weekend with Russian military hardware painted with an ominous white “Z” lettering rolling toward strategic points along the Ukrainian frontier. “We have seen just in the last 24 hours further moves of Russian units to the border with no other good explanation other than they’re getting in position to attack.”
Over the weekend, French President Emmanuel Macron invited Biden and Putin to a summit, which Biden signaled he would attend on the condition that Russian not invade Ukraine, but the Kremlin called reports of any such meeting “premature.”
As Sullivan reiterated that any attack on Ukraine would be met with the “full force of American and Allied might,” unsubstantiated news reports of ceasefire infractions along the border continue unabated. Video posted on Twitter showed a fuel station burning on the front line in Eastern Ukraine as civilians fled against a backdrop of gunfire.
The European Union, which will feel the impact of an eventual war first-hand, approved an emergency package with $1.36 billion to support Ukraine through loans, according to a statement by the European Union Council released Monday. “It intends to provide swift support in a situation of acute crisis and to strengthen Ukraine’s resilience.”
Nabih Bulos
Mon, February 21, 2022
A temporary refugee shelter in Taganrog, Russia, on Monday. (Associated Press)
In an almost-hourlong address that alternated between furious anti-Western rhetoric and the excoriation of Ukraine as a puppet nation, Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday recognized two Ukrainian breakaway republics as independent, a move certain to further incite animosities with the West and escalate fears of an invasion that could ignite fighting reminiscent of World War II and redraw the map of Eastern Europe.
Putin's speech to the Russian people drew swift rebuke and condemnation from Washington and across European capitals. President Biden and the European Union announced economic sanctions aimed at cutting trade and business with the breakaway enclaves. By day's end, with Moscow ordering troops into the republics, it appeared diplomacy was failing and the region was veering inexorably toward war.
Sitting back in his chair behind a wooden desk equipped with a bank of telephones and a computer, Putin began a speech that detailed Ukraine’s origins and its territorial evolution across history. He said, in essence, Ukraine was a Bolshevik-constructed amalgam created entirely by Russia.
"Ukraine was never a true nation," he said.
In his telling, Ukraine had now become a Western puppet, a corruption-riddled government that has delivered only "bankruptcy in a country that produced rockets and space technology" back when the country was one of the Soviet Union's republics. The blame, he said, lay with Western organizations and governments that had effectively plundered the country's resources and left the state with no power.
"There's just no independent Ukrainian state," he said.
Putin also touched on Ukraine’s geopolitical importance and was adamant that if Ukraine was ever granted NATO membership it would be a "direct threat" to Russia. He recited with growing fury — as if a speech out of the Cold War — the list of countries that had joined NATO and were now close enough to Russia's border to present a danger. He dismissed assurances that Ukraine’s membership was a far-away prospect, if it happened at all.
“OK, not tomorrow, but what about after tomorrow?” he said.
“What does that change for the change for the historical prospects? Nothing.”
For those reasons, he said, "I consider it necessary to make a long overdue decision: to immediately recognize the independence and sovereignty of the Donetsk People's Republic and the Luhansk People's Republic," Putin said, using the official name of the two Russian-created enclaves. He asked Russia's Federal Assembly to support the decision, and ratify the treaties "of friendship" and — critically — "mutual assistance" with both republics.
"And from those who seized and hold power in Kyiv, we demand an immediate cessation of hostilities," he said. "Otherwise, all responsibility for the possible continuation of the bloodshed will be fully and wholly on the conscience of the regime ruling on the territory of Ukraine."
Putin watched as separatist leaders Denis Pushilin and Leonid Pasechnik signed the decree. Putin then — with a slight smirk — scribbled his signature on the papers.
Waves of reproach and outrage came quickly, especially among European leaders for whom Putin’s words invoked the ghosts of some of the continent’s most bloody episodes, from World War II to the Balkans wars of barely a single generation ago.
And U.S. officials, who have for weeks been predicting such actions of conquest from Putin, announced they were imposing new sanctions designed to inflict pain on anyone attempting to do business with the enclaves — although it was unclear how many American businesspeople are investing in the region. The sanctions are more limited than measures the U.S. and Europe have been threatening if Putin invaded Ukraine.
While Biden administration officials huddled in consultations, the president spent more than a half-hour on the telephone with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the White House said, reassuring him of U.S. support. Zelensky confirmed the call and said he and Biden discussed "the events of the last hours" and that he'd also taken a call from British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
"Putin’s address tonight, together with the military forces around Ukraine, represents the most outrageous rejection of the rules based order for European peace we’ve seen since WWII," Henry Bolton, a British international security expert and former politician, said on Twitter. "He’s threatened Ukraine’s right to exist and may well fabricate the excuse for a full invasion."
In Washington, where the cause of Ukrainian sovereignty has attracted rare bipartisan support, a group of lawmakers who attended last week's critical Munich security conference vowed unity and resolve in opposing "Russian aggression."
"No matter what happens in the coming days, we must assure that the dictator Putin and his corrupt oligarchs pay a devastating price for their decisions,” the group said in a statement.
The independence declaration could have massive consequences: The separatists claim all the Donbas region as territory for their republics. But they control only part of it. If they intend to take the full territory with Russian help, it would lead to full-on clashes between Ukrainian and Russian troops, setting the stage for an escalation sure to embroil Western nations.
Putin's announcement came after a meeting with his security council, which urged him to demand independence for the republics. The meeting followed Russia’s assertion that Ukrainian army units had breached its border Monday, another in a series of claims the West fears will provide Russia with a supposed justification for an invasion of its neighbor.
Putin's new strategy would mean the end of the Minsk agreements, the much-reviled accords — signed after Russia-backed separatist forces surrounded several thousand Ukrainian soldiers — that have maintained a threadbare cease-fire in the Donbas since 2015. But more immediately, it could also provide the cover for Moscow to begin its blitz into Ukraine.
Russia’s forces seem poised to strike for just such a moment. Some 150,000 troops and a large-scale arsenal of Russia's top land, air and sea materiel is now assembled on Ukraine’s borders. Moscow has repeatedly denied it has plans for an invasion but has warned that Western failure to engage with its security demands, including a pledge never to allow Ukraine to join NATO, would trigger a “military-technical response." The Kremlin has not elaborated on what that would mean.
Frenzied shuttle diplomacy — chiefly from French President Emmanuel Macron, engaging in as diplomatic broker with President Biden and Putin — has failed to stop what appears to be an inevitable path to war.
The Russian leader has previously accused the Ukrainian government of pursuing "genocide" in Donetsk and Luhansk, the vast majority of whose populations are ethnic Russians. The U.S. and NATO have accused Moscow of planning so-called false flag operations in the area to justify an all-out invasion of Ukraine.
On Monday, Russia’s military said it killed five saboteurs crossing into its territory from Ukraine and destroyed two Ukrainian army combat vehicles. But the Ukrainian military dismissed those claims, which were reported by Russian state news agencies, as “completely fake.”
Since 2014, fighting between Kyiv's forces and the Russia-backed secessionists in Donetsk and Luhansk, which make up Ukraine's Donbas region, has killed more than 14,000 people. A cease-fire has been breached multiply by both sides. In recent weeks, as Russian troops massed near Ukraine's borders, Russian-aligned media and digital actors have churned out constant stories of Ukrainian atrocities against ethnic Russians as part of a disinformation campaign to paint the government in Kyiv as a cabal of violent far-right nationalists.
White House national security advisor Jake Sullivan said on NBC's “Today” show Monday that a Russian invasion of Ukraine would be "extremely violent" and appeared to be days, if not hours, away. The Biden administration has insisted for several days that a Russian assault was imminent.
"This will not simply be some conventional war between two armies. It will be a war waged by Russia on the Ukrainian people to repress them, to crush them, to harm them," Sullivan said. "We believe the world must mobilize to counter this kind of Russian aggression should those tanks roll across the border."
Sullivan said Biden remained open to a summit with Putin — which Macron has tried to broker — but downplayed the likelihood that one would occur. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken is scheduled to meet with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Thursday — as long as there has been no invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. says.
"Every indication we see on the ground right now in, terms of the disposition of Russian forces, is that they are in fact getting prepared for a major attack on Ukraine," Sullivan said. "We will go the extra mile on diplomacy, but we are also prepared with our allies and partners to respond decisively if Russia attacks."
The Russian army’s Southern Military District — which operates in areas neighboring Ukraine — said Monday that troops and border guards had prevented an incursion of what it called a “sabotage and reconnaissance group” coming in from Ukraine into Russian territory.
"Five violators of the Russian Federation's border from a sabotage and reconnaissance group were eliminated in an armed clash," said a statement from the army, according to the Russian news agency Interfax. The statement said the incursion occurred around 6 a.m. near Mityakinskaya, a Russian border village about 22 miles east of the city of Luhansk.
During the clash, a pair of Ukrainian army vehicles entered Russian territory but were destroyed by Russian military units using anti-tank systems, the statement said, adding: "No Russian Armed Forces and Federal Security Service members have been hurt."
A spokesman for the Ukrainian military's Joint Forces Operation rejected the Russian allegations, saying that “all information about a possible incursion by a reconnaissance group is false. We haven’t done any assault operations. It’s completely fake.”
In Moscow, the deputy chairman of the security council, Dmitry Medvedev, told Putin that if Russia went ahead and recognized Donetsk and Luhansk as independent republics, it would face "unprecedented pressure" internationally but that there was no choice. He said Russia's previous recognition of the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia had been a lesson to the West that Russia could not be ignored, according to a translation of Medvedev's comments by the Al Jazeera news channel.
Putin said the use of Ukraine "as an instrument of confrontation with our country poses a serious, very big threat to us." Moscow's priority, he said, was "not confrontation, but security."
Times staff writers Erin B. Logan, Jennifer Haberkorn, Eli Stokols and Tracy Wilkinson in Washington and Henry Chu in London contributed to this report.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Max Fisher
Sun, February 20, 2022
A protester throws a Molotov cocktail at riot police near Independence Square in Kiev, Ukraine, Feb. 20, 2014. (Sergey Ponomarev/The New York Times)
Moscow, in another escalation toward a possible invasion of Ukraine, is issuing a growing drumbeat of accusations, all without evidence, that center on a single word.
“What is happening in the Donbas today is genocide,” President Vladimir Putin of Russia said Tuesday, referring to Ukraine’s east.
Senior Russian officials and state media have since echoed Putin’s use of “genocide.” Russian diplomats circulated a document to the United Nations Security Council accusing Ukraine of “exterminating the civilian population” in its east.
On Friday, Russia-backed separatists, who control parts of Ukraine’s east, claimed that Ukraine’s military was about to attack, and ordered women and children to evacuate. Extensive coverage on Russian state media portrayed Russian minorities as fleeing a tyrannical Ukrainian military, and President Joe Biden called such incidents ploys fabricated as pretext for a Russian invasion.
The Kremlin has long asserted that Ukraine’s government persecutes ethnic Russians and Russian-speaking citizens. The charge, backed by lurid and false tales of anti-Russian violence, served as justification in 2014 for Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its invasion of eastern Ukraine.
The recent resurgence of such language, now voiced directly by Putin, indicates what analysts and Western governments say may again be a prelude to invasion.
But invocations of genocide represent more than just a superficial casus belli. They reflect Moscow’s sincere belief that, in a world dominated by a hostile West, it is the rightful protector of Russian populations throughout the former Soviet republics.
In that worldview, any break from Moscow’s influence within its sphere constitutes an attack on the Russian people as a whole — particularly in Ukraine, which Putin considers effectively Russian.
Claims of genocide, then, are a way to assert Russia’s sovereignty throughout an ethnic Russian empire that extends well beyond its formal borders — and a right to control that empire with force.
Clashes of Civilizations
“There’s a long history of use and abuse of genocide rhetoric in post-Soviet countries,” said Matthew Kupfer, an analyst based in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, who has studied Moscow’s use of such claims.
Since the Soviet Union fell, and with it the ideological basis of its constituent states, those countries have reorganized their identities around the memory of World War II.
Genocide, as a symbol of the Nazis, became shorthand for anything deemed “absolute evil,” Kupfer said, making opposition to that evil a national imperative.
In the turmoil of 1990s Russia, nationalist writers like Sergei Glazyev won large audiences by calling Western policies an “economic genocide” against the Russian race.
And when relations between Moscow and some of its former satellites broke down in the mid-2000s, charges of genocide became the language of confrontation.
Pro-democracy uprisings in several former Soviet republics installed new governments, which championed their newly dominant non-Russian majorities.
Ukraine’s leaders, for instance, moved to elevate the Ukrainian language’s official status starting in 2004 and to label a devastating famine in the 1930s as a deliberate Soviet campaign of genocide.
Some Russian nationalists returned the charge, accusing those new governments of plotting to marginalize or even exterminate the Russian minorities within their borders.
As Russian nationalists rose in influence — in 2012, Putin appointed Glazyev as a senior adviser on regional matters — a view took hold in Moscow that any threat to its influence over former Soviet republics imperiled the Russian race as a whole.
In 2014, Ukrainians again revolted, initially over their president’s decision to reject a trade deal with the European Union, in favor of one with Russia.
The protests snowballed into demands to turn away from Russia and embrace a fully separate Ukrainian identity, which confirmed Moscow’s worst fears of a threat to Russian influence. Kremlin allies again leveled accusations of genocide, at first mostly as a generic expression of condemnation.
This became more than rhetorical as Moscow exploited Ukraine’s demographic divisions, in which Russian speakers were, at first, wary of Kyiv’s moves toward Europe.
Russia invaded the mostly Russian region of Crimea and backed militants in Ukraine’s mostly Russophone east, presenting itself as protecting populations to which it held a special responsibility.
Sectarian division served Moscow’s agenda, which meant that so did the specter of Ukrainian atrocities against the Russian minority.
State media saturated Russian homes with false stories, including ones about mass graves filled with Russian minority civilians and a 3-year-old boy crucified by Ukrainian forces that had retaken a separatist-held town. Russian citizens’ support for Moscow’s incursions surged.
The Russian World
Putin, seizing on Moscow’s successes acting as protector of Russians in Ukraine, began energetically championing what he termed the “Russian world.” In his telling, it is a sphere of influence rooted in ethnicity — an ethnicity that faces continuing threats of genocide.
This new mission solves several problems for Putin. It presents Russia’s interventions in neighboring states, typically to weaken unfriendly governments or prop up friendly ones, as defensive.
It tells Russian citizens, who have suffered under eight years of Western-led sanctions in retaliation for Russia’s aggression toward Ukraine, that they are sacrificing for a heroic struggle akin to World War II. It gives them a great empire to once more feel pride in.
And, maybe most important, it provides an ideological justification for a government, otherwise associated with corruption, that offers citizens fewer rights or opportunities.
As Moscow’s challenges have grown, so have its claims of a great struggle to protect the Russian race, often centered on Ukraine.
In 2015, as Russia’s economy cratered, Putin criticized Ukraine’s efforts to isolate Russia-backed separatists: “It smells of genocide,” he said. His government pledged to investigate the “genocide of the Russian-speaking population” in Ukraine.
And, in 2018, amid diplomatic crises that left Russia internationally isolated, a Kremlin-allied lawmaker accused Ukraine of seeking “a genocide against Russian people in the Donbas” while Russia’s foreign minister warned of “genocide through sanctions.”
The claims were hardly bluster alone. Many coincided with a military escalation in Ukraine, either by Russian armed forces or pro-Moscow separatists.
But each round also revealed a Kremlin growing steadily more paranoid and confrontational as its sphere of influence has come under greater pressure from crisis in Belarus, an uprising in Kazakhstan and an increasingly hard-line stance toward Moscow in Ukraine.
An Uncertain Escalation
In December, with Russia’s military beginning to build up on Ukraine’s borders, Putin repeated a familiar justification, saying the situation in Ukraine’s east “looks like genocide.”
“Claims of ‘genocide’ of Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine have been a constant background hum on Russian state propaganda channels” ever since, said Alexey Kovalev, a Russian journalist who heads a fact-checking organization.
But, unlike in 2014, Kovalev has written, Russians do not appear to be responding. There has been little of the past groundswell of outrage or sympathy.
Russian views of Ukraine, once fiercely hostile, are 45% favorable and 43% negative, a recent poll found. Although Russians widely backed the 2014 invasions of Ukraine, they express little enthusiasm for another.
“People are kind of burned out from Ukraine being on TV all the time,” Kupfer said. Although state media has pushed some tales similar to those in 2014, it has done so more sparingly.
“It may simply be that they recognize war will not be popular with the public,” Kupfer added of the Kremlin.
Tellingly, Russian claims of genocide during this crisis have often been aimed abroad, rather than at home, and come from figures with diplomatic weight.
In a Facebook post Thursday, Russia’s ambassador to the United States cited long-debunked “atrocities” in Ukraine to accuse the United States of abetting “a policy to force the Russian-speaking population out of their current places of residence.”
Thomas de Waal, a Russia expert for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, called such high-level comments “worrying” and said they indicated an “official rhetorical escalation.”
As with so many of Russia’s recent provocations, de Waal said, it is difficult to say whether such statements are intended to telegraph, or merely feint at, a Russian invasion of Ukraine.
In either case, the escalation may reflect the national mission increasingly central to Putin’s Russia: a strong, defiant protector of Russians abroad who will never be safe without it.
© 2022 The New York Times Company
Putin may launch invasion of Ukraine in Donbas, analysts say
In two ominous signs that Vladimir Putin may be readying an invasion of Ukraine, the Russian president on Friday signed a decree calling Russian military reservists to active training, while pro-Kremlin leaders in two breakaway “Russian-occupied” territories in eastern Ukraine ordered mobilization of men ages 18 to 55 to fight against their fellow Ukrainians.
Ukraine’s Donbas region, which holds the two Russian-controlled territories — Donetsk and Luhansk — has been the site of intensified shelling as well as gas line explosions and a car bombing on Friday. Women, children and the elderly in the area have been ordered to evacuate to Russia. Kremlin-backed separatist leaders in Donbas dubiously assert that the Ukrainian army is to blame for the open hostilities, while the U.S. believes they are so-called false flag operations committed by the separatists themselves that Russia may use to justify actively invading Ukraine’s East.
Former Russian Deputy Minister of Energy Vladimir Milov, now an opposition politician living in Lithuania, views eastern Ukraine as key to Putin’s strategy.
“I believe Putin’s ultimate aim, or one of his ultimate aims, is to formally put the Russian flag in the occupied territories of Donbas,” he told Yahoo News. “It would be a relatively low-cost exercise that would be presented as another geopolitical victory.”
Unlike many other analysts, however, Milov thinks Putin may not venture further than Donbas. “To occupy a large part of Ukrainian territory, including major cities like Kyiv, Putin would need 300,000 to 400,000 full-scale combat-ready troops,” he said. “Russia does not have that amount.”
Ian Bond, a former British diplomat in Russia and current foreign policy director of the think tank Centre for European Reform, told Yahoo News that if Putin’s goal is to seize Donetsk and Luhansk, it “would significantly damage Ukraine’s economy because they’ve got a lot of heavy industry there.” But given Russia’s influence over the region already, limiting an invasion to those areas of Donbas would be “a bit of a consolation prize,” Bond said, that might not “justify the impact on the Russian economy that Western sanctions might have.”
Further ratcheting up tensions, on Saturday Russia’s military conducted drills for its strategic nuclear arsenal across various parts of Russia and in the Black Sea. Meanwhile, shelling continued in Donbas, where several members of Ukrainian President Volodymry Zelensky’s party, including the minister of the interior, were forced to take cover in shelters, according to Ukrainian media.
Like the pro-Russian separatists, Putin has baselessly accused Ukrainians in Donbas of committing genocide in the eastern part of the country. Military analyst Gustav Gressel of the European Council on Foreign Relations said Putin will likely try to use that as a pretext for invading the region.
“I’d keep a close eye on that front,” Gressel told Yahoo News. “My guess is the Russians will try to provoke an escalation.”
Brussels-based analyst Roland Freudenstein, vice president of the think tank GLOBSEC, has been observing with increasing concern Ukraine’s divided Donbas region, site of a Moscow-backed proxy war that’s killed 14,000 over eight years, as a possible site of a Russian invasion. Freudenstein points to indicators such as the vote last Tuesday in the Duma, the Russian Parliament, calling upon Putin to recognize Donetsk and Luhansk as independent from Ukraine as well as the “increase in genocide propaganda by the Russians saying that Ukrainian military is attacking Russian-speaking civilians in Donbas.”
But with the world waiting to see what Putin will do next, some analysts believe Russia may not be content to limit its military strike to Donbas.
While stressing that he’s “not a military man,” Bond said he was looking at the possibility of an attack on Kyiv. Russia might also “make amphibious landings along the Black Sea coast near Odessa,” he added, thereby “effectively cutting off Ukraine from the sea.” Cities along the Black Sea, where over 30 Russian warships have been conducting military exercises over the past week, are seen as vulnerable by other analysts as well.
Andrii Klymenko, a defense analyst with Ukraine’s Black Sea Institute of Strategic Studies, told Yahoo News via a translator, that he also views Odessa as a potential target. He sees it as a possible site of a false flag operation “that would distract attention” from what he sees as the likely first moves of a Putin offensive: declaring independence for the Donetsk and Luhansk occupied areas, and securing more territory, with the help of amphibious troops, in Donbas and the Sea of Azov, including perhaps the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol, which is crucial to Ukrainian maritime trade.
Robert, a European military and cybersecurity expert focused on Russia, who requested that his real name not be used for this article, also sees the Black Sea as a high-risk zone. “This idea of tanks rolling through Ukraine to me is a bit like movies of the Second World War,” he told Yahoo News. “Things could look very differently now — with an attack coming from the Black Sea trying to take Mariupol.”
Like others, including Bond and Gressel, Robert sees Kharkiv, a northeastern Ukrainian city of 1.4 million sitting 22 miles from the Russian border, as another potential site of invasion. If Russia took the city that is a center of industry, science and technology, “it would be a severe blow to Ukraine,” he said. Like Gressel, he suspects that Russian infiltrators are planning to stir up anti-Ukrainian protests or false flag operations there, giving Russia a reason to invade.
On the other hand, notes Centre for European Reform’s Ian Bond, Putin might use diplomatic pressure from France and Germany, who helped engineer the controversial ceasefire agreement called the Minsk Protocol, which Ukraine and Russia interpret differently, to try to whip Ukrainians into a frenzy, when all reports are they are calm and ready to fight Russia.
“If I’m Putin, I want to get people panicking and thinking there’s no point in fighting because they’re just going to get steamrolled.” Putin, he said, “could use the next few next days to ramp up diplomatic pressure, and get the French and Germans telling Zelenksy, ‘You’re not going to get any help from NATO, you need to fulfill the Minsk Agreements the way Russia wants them fulfilled.’”
“I’m sure,” Bond added, “Putin would rather achieve his objectives without having to go to war. But to do that, he’d have to increase the level of threat to the point where the opposition surrenders without having to fight.”
Former NATO analyst Edward Hunter Christie, now senior fellow at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, thinks that the West should skip the talk about diplomacy at this stage. “Western nations should probably start to impose sanctions already,” he told Yahoo News.
Zelensky agrees. “We don't need your sanctions after the bombardment will happen and after our country will be fired at or after we will have no borders, or after we will have no economy,” the Ukrainian president told CNN on Saturday. “Why would we need those sanctions then?”
Waiting around for Putin to reveal his next move only plays into Russia’s hands, Christie said.
“It's much better to make clear to the Russian Federation that we don’t believe anything they say, we don’t want to do business with them, we will cancel many projects, we will not start new commercial projects with them, we will deliberately reduce economic exchanges with them as much as possible. And we should minimize diplomatic exchanges with them,” Christie said. “Engaging in diplomatic discussions with Russia is a waste of time.”
