The Russian obsession with Ukraine, Putin’s real intentions and the hesitation of the West
Although the winds of war are sweeping the European continent with increasing force, it is hard to believe that Putin can launch a grand invasion against Ukraine. An action of this type would involve enormous risks not only in terms of image (the Kremlin has little to lose in this area) but also in practice, as it could not fail to provoke a blunt response from the United States. It is one thing that NATO (read Washington) has no desire to be involved in a conflict for Ukraine, it is quite another to accept the occupation of a sovereign, strategically central country that looks to the West.
So what are 120,000 Russian soldiers, hundreds of armed vehicles and several ballistic missile batteries doing on the border? The opinions of experts and Kremlinologists diverge on Moscow's real intentions but two could be the most likely answers: on the one hand, keeping the threat alive, guaranteeing Putin the advantage of the surprise factor, on the other preparing not so much an offensive as a counter-offensive. in the event of a Ukrainian reaction to a possible declaration of annexation of the Donbass provinces. The key could be to try to repeat the Crimea case with the so-called " rebel republics ", which would be followed by Zelenskij's military response and consequent war escalation . In that case, Putin could present himself as the attacker in the eyes of his own, but above all he could count on a more dubious attitude on the NATO front: moving to defend Kiev is different from doing it to defend Lugansk.
The Moscow Times explicitly spoke of annexation plans a few days ago , considering it one of the options that has always been on the table in the Kremlin, also supported by the so-called systemic opposition. To support this hypothesis there would be the proposal for formal recognition of the self-proclaimed republics of Lugansk and Donetsk – where the separatist guerrilla of pro-Russian rebels has been underway since 2014 – presented by the Communist Party and on which the Duma should rule in the coming days. A tactical movement that could herald subsequent developments on the ground, with the aim of further internal destabilization of Ukraine: the East of the country would find itself also formally dependent on Russian protection , institutionalizing its hostility towards the central government . This would be the de facto overcoming of the spirit of the Minsk agreements, which guaranteed ample autonomy to the republics of Donbass within the Ukrainian state system.
Certain speculations, however, which move in the wide spectrum of possibilities opened up after Putin decided to raise the stakes with a series of inadmissible requests from the counterpart: written guarantees on the end of the expansion of NATO to the East, dismantling of the presence of Alliance in the countries of the former Warsaw Pact, restoration of Moscow's sphere of influence over the former satellites and withdrawal of American nuclear weapons in Europe. Obviously Putin is fully aware of the impossibility of any agreement on the points indicated but he has aimed at the big target to get what really interests him and which he evidently considers a realistic goal, namely that Georgia, Belarus and above all Ukraine never escape the sphere of Russian geopolitical influence. We are faced with the re-proposal on a small scale of that doctrine of limited sovereignty that the Soviet Union imposed on satellite countries and which had fallen into disuse since 1991, buried by the ruins of the former communist empire. The brief conflict of 2008 in Georgia, the annexation of Crimea and the war in the Donbass that began in 2014 and is still ongoing, Lukashenko's own internal repression authorized by Moscow, are to be read as a vindication of what the Kremlin considers a vital space “ Threatened ” by the enlargement of the Atlantic Alliance. In the Ukrainian case, there are also considerations of a historical and above all ideological nature (Kiev as the cradle of the Russian nation), fueled by the nationalist revanchism characteristic of the Putin era.
For Moscow, therefore, the expansion of NATO in Eastern Europe is the original sin of relations between the West and Russia in the post-Soviet era. A pity that Putin has made it his mission to amend, apparently by all means available. It matters little that this version is little more than a propaganda device to disguise the real Russian imperial ambitions. In the first place, NATO's aggressive intentions towards Moscow do not exist nor have ever existed, if not in the paranoia of encirclement of the Kremlin and its apologists, too: if something can be attributed to the United States and its allies in recent years it is instead it is precisely the shyness in facing Putin's offensive actions against other sovereign states; secondly, the feared accession of Ukraine to the Atlantic Alliance is not a topic on the agenda nor will it be in the coming years, as the American secretary of state also hastened to reiterate on the sidelines of the multilateral meetings of recent days: it is quite another to demand written guarantees which, in fact, would formalize its abandonment to Russian ambitions; finally, the " promises " of non-enlargement following the fall of the socialist bloc that would be at the basis of the great disappointment of Moscow have never actually been formulated, and certainly not in the official form that those who attribute responsibility for the conflict to the aforementioned expansion today would expect looming ( Stefano Magni wrote about it extensively in his article yesterday ).
But even if we want to consider the Russian demands legitimate and their grievances based on Western " arrogance " grounded, we should nevertheless agree that the narrative underlying the threat of invasion against Ukraine is leaking from all sides. The expansion of NATO to the East did not take place through an act of force or through imposition from above which the nations involved could not escape, but on the basis of the free will of membership of fully sovereign states. The claim that Kiev cannot decide its political or military alliances independently belongs, yes, to the typical Cold War mentality that Putin is taking on the task of reviving in Europe. With good results, however, if it is true that the rifts between Western allies are already evident, with a Germany prisoner of its contracts, a France in perennial search for an alternative geopolitical role to the American excessive power and with hosts of Putinians scattered almost everywhere, ready to fight for their Tsar. It is easy to predict that we will soon see a curious mix of nostalgics for Soviet communism and red-brown populists of various backgrounds, united in the defense of Putin's Russia from Western " provocations ". The first sirens of the No to one-way war (the anti- imperialist one, where imperialism is always stars and stripes) have already made themselves felt in Spain: here the government coalition risks an internal diplomatic crisis on the possible participation of the country in the operations warfare.
The director of the Carnegie Moscow Center , Dmitri Trenin, in a recent interview with the Russian newspaper Kommersant stressed that, from a strictly military point of view, even a presence of NATO troops in Ukraine would not represent a substantial change in terms of security for Russia. The perceived " threat " of a Ukraine within NATO (which, we repeat, at the moment is purely speculative) would be above all of a " geopolitical and geocultural " character, as it would cause changes on a social level that would definitively distance it from Russkij Mir . It is this decisive step that Putin cannot afford, to go down in history as the Russian president who lost Ukraine. Perhaps the 120,000 soldiers awaiting an order from Moscow are not preparing for a large-scale invasion but they are certainly there to remind everyone that there is a job to be finished, that the war and annexation operation that began in 2014 it is destined to be completed, in one way or another, with a reconquest or a reunification. Faced with this prospect, on which Putinian Russia will not compromise (it is good to be aware of it), stands the uncertainty of a West weakened by the virus and internal divisions, of an American superpower that has shown its side in the disastrous withdrawal from ' Afghanistan and a China waiting to reap the benefits of a potentially disastrous clash on European territory.
As the tam-tam of war begins to roll intensely even in the Western media , the conflict looming over Ukraine seems like the classic self-fulfilling prophecy: there is no logic behind a possible Russian invasion, no coherent reason not to talk about possible justifications. He argues about it as if it were inevitable but no one really knows why. Europe observes with amazement for the third time in just over a hundred years the approach of a conflict that it has not been able to foresee, interpret, prevent. The United States, under Biden's pale leadership , more distant than ever from any international police role, is being pulled by the jacket by Putin's obsession. Because this is what it is: Moscow's eternal obsession with imposing itself on what it does not consider a sovereign state, but a simple available territory, on which to vent its frustrations of halved power. A useless, absurd and dangerous war. To be avoided.
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This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL https://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/lossessione-russa-per-lucraina-le-reali-intenzioni-di-putin-e-i-tentennamenti-delloccidente/ on Thu, 27 Jan 2022 03:48:00 +0000.