Will the US-Russia war on Ukraine gas Europe?
The comment by Gianandrea Gaiani, director of Defense Analysis
Little has been leaked about the contents and possible agreements that emerged in the conversation between Vladimir Putin and Joe Biden who certainly does not seem to have resolved the crisis on the Ukrainian borders but could have stopped its escalation.
Biden again threatened "never-before-seen sanctions" against Moscow if Ukraine were attacked but emphasizing economic reprisals helps to exclude military ones, defined as "not an option" by Biden. The message, even for the Kiev government, seems to be clear: the US is unwilling to go to war with Russia.
Indeed, Biden seems to have accepted the problem posed for years by Russia and related to the threat to its security represented by the extension to the east of NATO, by the presence of US and allied military advisors in Ukraine (which will receive another 300 million dollars in aid for the security from Washington) and Kiev's claim to be accepted into the Atlantic Alliance. "It would be criminal to passively observe the developments of Kiev's possible accession to NATO," said Putin, a circumstance that would see the forces of the Atlantic Alliance deployed just 500 kilometers from Moscow.
This is demonstrated by the announcement by the White House of possible "high-level meetings" between the United States, Russia and at least four NATO allies: that among these there are France, Germany and the United Kingdom seems certain, it is desirable that it has been taken into consideration. considering the presence of Italy, it is possible that Poland will participate, an “iron ally of the USA” on the so-called “East Flank” which with the Baltic republics shares the greatest concerns about the risks of a military confrontation with the Russian Federation.
The objective that Biden has certainly achieved is to see the main allies of NATO, an alliance in search of symbolic redemptions after the Afghan disaster, lined up alongside him.
On the British position) there have never been doubts (London has just added a billion pounds to the 2.5 billion already allocated to support Kiev) while the French foreign ministry has threatened "very serious strategic consequences if Ukraine's sovereignty is not respected and in Berlin, the new Chancellor Olaf Scholz reiterated that "Ukraine's borders are inviolable" threatening reprisals on the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, which will double the flow of Russian gas to Europe.
Moreover, it is as strategic for Russian energy exports as it is for German and European gas supplies.
On December 1, Putin had asked for negotiations to be established to define "binding and concrete guarantees" to stop NATO's expansion to the east and exclude the deployment of weapons that threaten Russia in the vicinity of its territory.
READY TO INVASION?
The impression is that the party game between the Russians and the Americans continues to be successful, leaving the Europeans the role of mere extras. In recent weeks, Washington has raised the alarm for an imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine with the Washington Post which saw a properly declassified intelligence report that fears for January 2022 a full-scale Russian attack conducted by 100 battalions, half armored and artillery, with 175,000 soldiers equipped with hundreds of tanks, artillery and armored vehicles.
An alarm that doubled the threat that just a few days earlier had been denounced by the Ukrainian government, which assessed the presence of 90,000 Russian soldiers within 270 kilometers of the border.
In Washington they seem to be fond of these media operations aimed at denouncing the aggression and the imminent threat of the bad guy, even if after the Iraqi "smoking guns" no one should take them too seriously anymore. After all, since the revolution (or coup, depending on your point of view) of the "Maidan" of 2014 which brought Ukraine out of Russian orbit to bring it closer to NATO and the EU, the alarms launched by Kiev, Washington or the Atlantic Alliance for a possible Russian offensive they periodically come back to the fore.
Moscow has every interest in flexing its muscles to obtain negotiations that offer guarantees for its safety, but the concentration of military forces in an area between the Ukrainian border and a few hundred kilometers inside Russia is not unusual given the proximity to Moscow and the large winter exercises held in this period in the Western District.
However, the new tensions seem to have been artfully created to impose further pressure (and sanctions) on Moscow and help to dig a deep furrow between Russia and Europe by leveraging gas pipelines and European energy dependence on Russia.
Since the "Maidan revolution" of 2014, the gas issue has always been at the center of the crisis in Ukraine and at the time President Barack Obama did not hesitate to ask Europeans to stop imports of Russian gas which are a significant part of the currency income of the economy of the Russian Federation.
It is not surprising that Biden, Obama's former deputy, is aiming for the same goal to consolidate a new "Iron Curtain" that isolates Russia from Europe.
On the other hand, it is more difficult to understand how this escalation with Moscow could fall within the interests of Germany and of a Europe that is already having to deal with a heavy energy crisis and that should have everything to gain from detente with Moscow by "freezing" the Donbass front and the demand by the pro-American government in Kiev to join NATO.
The European High Representative for EU Foreign and Defense Policy, Josep Borrell, said in recent days that In the event of a crisis, the European Union will be with Kiev. "We work to avoid the crisis but in the face of any eventuality, the EU will be firmly behind Ukraine", he said, inviting everyone to "reflect on the consequences". Phrases that do not seem to contemplate the EU's willingness to send troops to fight the invading Russians of Ukraine.
The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky said that the Ukrainian army is a highly organized structure and is capable of "destroying any aggressive plan" of the enemy but, despite having long been supported by US, Canadian, British and other military advisors of the NATO, the Ukrainian armed forces would be swiftly defeated by a massive Russian offensive, the implementation of which is however completely unlikely.
THE RUSSIAN MILITARY OPTIONS
Putin is well aware that invading Ukraine is a very different thing from sending an expeditionary force with a few thousand soldiers and a few dozen planes and helicopters to Syria.
Unleashing a war in Europe would be a military and economic hazard, the operation would risk leading to a confrontation with NATO and would have prohibitive financial costs by requiring massive forces to invade and then maintain the occupation of the former Soviet republic: a conflict that it would also definitively block the export of Russian gas to Europe.
It is better to remember that Russia spends one seventh of the United States and one tenth of NATO on defense, although this does not exclude that the Kremlin may evaluate, under certain critical conditions, the war option in Ukraine.
As already highlighted, the first and most important condition would be Ukraine's membership of NATO or the deployment of American and allied combat troops on Ukrainian soil: scenarios that would constitute a definite threat to the security of Russia that it has already seen in the timi. 20 years the Atlantic Alliance will expand widely to the east.
After all, how would the United States react if the Russians opened military bases in Canada or Mexico? Just think of Washington's reactions to the Cuban crisis of 1962 and subsequently when Russian bombers and ships frequently took risks in Venezuela.
A second further scenario that could trigger the risk of a Russian offensive is represented by a Ukrainian attack which, with the help of NATO, sought to recapture the Donbass. Moscow's response in this case would probably be on a limited scale, perhaps with the use of "irregular" forces, without the insignia of the Russian Federation such as those that took control of Crimea in 2014.
An operation that could have the objective of repelling the attack on the pro-Russian eastern provinces or a counter-offensive aimed at conquering Mariupol, on the Sea of Azov, to achieve territorial continuity between the Donbass and Crimea (annexed to Russia in the 2014 with a referendum disputed by the West) punishing Kiev with further territorial abductions.
Still remaining in the field of military options, in the event of a higher-intensity conflict with Kiev, Moscow could aim to reach the Dnieper River with its troops, effectively splitting Ukraine in two, gaining strategic depth and stabilizing the crisis on a border. precise geographic: pro-Russian Ukraine to the east, pro-Western Ukraine to the west.
A scenario that would therefore see the birth of "two Ukrainians" allowing Moscow to recover (with the use of a non-impressive number of soldiers) the eastern provinces inhabited mostly by citizens of Russian origin (10 million Ukrainians, a quarter of the population , had the double passport in 2014) which could at least partially welcome the troops of the Federation.
Certainly such an operation would not be painless: it would determine very strong international repercussions and would put Putin's internal consensus to the test, especially if the losses on the battlefield were to be high.
However, a war in Ukraine would also undermine the strength of NATO (fresh from the burning humiliation suffered by the Taliban in Afghanistan) and of the EU, forced to concretely demonstrate support for Ukraine but without being able to express real deterrence due to the absence of any willingness to send troops to "die for Kiev".
Moreover, Ukraine is not (yet) part of NATO and there would be no obligation for its members to go to war to defend it. Putin is also perfectly aware of this.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/guerra-ucraina-russia-nato-europa/ on Sun, 12 Dec 2021 07:09:31 +0000.