Doomsday predictions by the US and UK that Russia is about to invade Ukraine are rejected by military experts in Kyiv, who deny that the Russian army has the numbers or the equipment to stage such an attack.
“What we currently have,” writes Andriy Zagorodnyuk, the former Ukrainian defence minister, and military specialists, in a report by the Centre for Defence Studies in Kyiv, “is the military threat posed by about 127,000 Russian servicemen along Ukraine’s borders, in the occupied territories of eastern Ukraine, and in Crimea. This number has not increased since April [2021], and is not enough for a full-scale offensive.”
The report states categorically that Russian forces are not in a position to invade in the next two or three weeks and are unlikely to be able to do so in 2022. It points to the absence of ammunition and fuel along with field hospitals and trained up-to-strength military units essential to a modern army going to war. This negative judgement about the prospect of a Russian offensive is confirmed by Ukrainian ministers and defence officials who politely downplay the war hysteria in Washington and London.
Nor are the Ukrainian military experts alone in saying that Russia has not taken the practical military measures necessary for an invasion. Senior French officials express similar doubts: “We see the same number of lorries, tanks and people [as before],” one official told Le Monde. “We observed the same manoeuvres, but we cannot conclude an offensive is imminent.”
Contrast this view that nothing much is happening with what British and American officials are telling the world. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman said on Wednesday that the United States sees “every indication that he [Russian President Vladimir Putin] is going to use military force sometime perhaps [between] now and the middle of February”.
An anonymous senior British intelligence official speaking three days later was even more specific, being quoted as saying that six Russian amphibious warfare ships could seize the Black Sea port of Odessa as part of a multi-front offensive aimed at occupying the whole of Ukraine. “It’s not just a negotiating tactic or an idle threat when you deploy this many troops with this capability,” he said.
On the contrary, this is precisely what Russia would do in order to give their unspoken threat of invasion substance so that it can be a powerful lever in any negotiations. Going by reports from Kyiv, the Russians have in reality done surprisingly little to make the prospect of their launching a multipronged blitzkrieg more credible.
But then they do not have to because the US and Britain are doing the Kremlin’s work for it. They compare the deployment of 127,000 troops – far too few to occupy Ukraine, which is larger than France – with the 11 million strong Red Army at the end of the Second World War. The intelligence official cited above sought to drive home the analogy by pointing to the transfer of Russian forces from the Far East, saying that this had not happened since 1941 and was “unprecedented in the modern era”.
If a grand Russian offensive is not in the offing, could they not stage a more economical attack, perhaps confining it to seizing big cities like Kyiv, Kharkov and Odessa? In practice, this would be a recipe for disaster since it would leave great tracts of Ukrainian territory unconquered, and capable of resistance, in the rear of Russian tank columns.
The only Russian advance that has military credibility would be in the far south-east of Ukraine between the Russian separatist self-declared republics of Donetsk and Luhansk and Russian-annexed Crimea. It would be possible for Russian troops to seize Mariupol on the Sea of Azov, a city with a population of 565,000 and two of Europe’s largest steel mills, which is only 15 miles from the separatist republics.
But analysts with good sources in Moscow tell me that the Russians would not do this, even if the crisis escalates dramatically. Seizing even a sliver of Ukraine would precipitate an avalanche of Western sanctions, halt the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Germany, and drive Ukraine closer to Nato – things which are the opposite of what the Kremlin wants to get…
(PONARS Eurasia Commentary) With warnings Russia will invade Ukraine growing louder by the day, it is common to hear that President Vladimir Putin has passed the point of no return. Having made public security demands that NATO considers non-starters, anything short of invasion will be seen as weakness and undermine Putin’s authority at home. In other words, Putin may have—intentionally or not—backed himself into a corner.
Such accounts overlook key sources of Putin’s domestic appeal, which is based much more on pragmatically providing stability, security, and prosperity than on aggressiveness. This gives him options for backing off that Western governments should not neglect.
What Russians Want
Surveys have long asked Russians what kind of foreign policy they want, and two things are clear. For one, Russians do see the United States and NATO as a threat. But when asked about how Russia should treat the West, majorities consistently favor a cooperative, soft-line orientation. In other words, Russians want to treat the West better than they think it is now treating them.
What Putin Tells His People
In his major appearances, Putin sells himself to his people in just this way, as a cool head of reason and pragmatism in the face of a West that he depicts as rash, hysterical, and full of double standards and zealotry. This rhetoric has been remarkably consistent since his famous 2007 “Munich Speech.”
This is also how Russians understand Putin. Rather than a hawk, most believe they are getting a foreign policy moderate with Putin. Moreover, it is consistently pro-Western Russians—not anti-Western ones—who support him. Russians who advocate a more aggressive foreign policy tend to back others, such as the Communist Party (which recently called on Putin to recognize the breakaway regions in eastern Ukraine) or the LDPR (whose leader, in turn, called for the whole of Ukraine to “become part of Russia”). These parties seldom risk overt conflict with Putin but allow Putin tactically to occupy a broad center, where majority opinion lies….
United States plans to weaken Russia by imposing punishing sanctions and bringing world condemnation on Moscow depend on Washington’s hysteria about a Russian invasion of Ukraine actually coming true.
At his press conference on Tuesday, Vladimir Putin said,
“I still believe the United States is not that concerned about Ukraine’s security, though they may think about it on the sidelines. Its main goal is to contain Russia’s development. This is the whole point. In this sense, Ukraine is simply a tool to reach this goal. This can be done in different ways: by drawing us into some armed conflict, or compelling its allies in Europe to impose tough sanctions on us like the US is talking about today.”
At the U.N. Security Council on Monday, Russia’s U.N. envoy Vassily Nebenzia said: “Our Western colleagues say that de-escalation is needed, but they are the first to build up tension, enhance rhetoric and escalate the situation. Talks about an imminent war are provocative per se. It might seem you call for it, want it and wait for it to come, as if you wanted your allegations to come true.”
The war mania being drummed up in U.S. and British media recalls even Zbigniew Brzezinski‘s warning that “whipping up anti-Russian hysteria … could eventually become a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
Without an invasion the U.S. seems lost. No sanctions, no world opprobrium, no weakening of Russia.
If the U.S. is trying to lure Russia into a trap in Ukraine, what might it look like?
Offensive on Donbass
Ukraine says it is not planning an offensive against the breakaway provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk, which border Russia in the east. But just ten days ago Ukrainian President Zelensky said:
Joe Biden has said a Russian invasion will come in February, when the ground freezes. But it could also be the time for a Kiev offensive to recover the two Donbass provinces. NATO nations are pouring weapons into Ukraine supposedly to defend it against the “invasion.” But the weapons transfers could instead be preparation for an offensive, on orders from Washington. Since the 2014 U.S.-backed coup the U.S. essentially runs the country and all Ukrainian leaders, including Zelensky, serve at the pleasure of the U.S. president.
The ground will also be frozen for Kiev’s forces in February, which was the month of the 2014 coup, while Putin was in Sochi for the Winter Olympics. He is now in Beijing for the 2022 Winter Olympics, away from the command center in Moscow. (The 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing was also the time Georgia instigated its war with Russia against its renegade provinces at the behest of the United States.)
When Kiev stepped up attacks against Donbass in March and October 2021, Russia both time increased its troop deployments near the Ukraine border, which this time is being interpreted by Washington as plans for an “imminent” invasion.
It is an invasion the U.S. absolutely needs to implement its plans to weaken Russia (and ultimately to replace Putin with a pliable leader in the mold of Boris Yeltsin.) As Moscow has never openly threatened such an invasion, the U.S. appears to be devising ways to get it.
The Russian ‘Plot’
On Thursday U.S. intelligence leaked what it says is a diabolical scheme by Russia to stage a provocation in Donbass or even on Russian territory itself to provide a pretext for an invasion. The New York Times reported the lurid details of this supposed plot:
“The plan — which the United States hopes to spoil by making public — involves staging and filming a fabricated attack by the Ukrainian military either on Russian territory or against Russian-speaking people in eastern Ukraine.
“Russia, the officials said, intended to use the video to accuse Ukraine of genocide against Russian-speaking people. It would then use the outrage over the video to justify an attack or have separatist leaders in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine invite a Russian intervention.
“The video was intended to be elaborate, officials said, with plans for graphic images of the staged, corpse-strewn aftermath of an explosion and footage of destroyed locations. They said the video was also set to include faked Ukrainian military equipment, Turkish-made drones and actors playing Russian-speaking mourners.”
Of course unsaid is that the U.S. can get Kiev to launch an actual attack, even inside Russia, and then say it was the false flag event, to try to prompt the Russian intervention.
As usual, the U.S. “intelligence officials” refused to provide any evidence for such a plot. “Officials would not release any direct evidence of the Russian plan or specify how they learned of it, saying to do so would compromise their sources and methods,” the Times reported.
That prompted AP State Department Matt Lee to have this exchange with spokesman Ned Price on Thursday. Because Price was unable to produce any evidence he resorted to smearing Lee as taking “solace” in Russian information.
So if the offensive comes this month, with or without a false flag, how will Russia respond?
Options for Russia
If a major offensive begins to regain Donbass (likely downplayed by Western media) there’s no reason to doubt Russia would continue supplying arms, ammunition, intelligence and logistical support to the militias there.
However if those defenses begin failing the Kremlin would have a major decision to make: intervene with regular Russian units to save the inhabitants, most of whom are Russian-speakers, or abandon them to avoid giving Washington the invasion it seeks to prompt the harsh U.S. response.
If Russia did not intervene it would see massive refugees, destruction of the Minsk agreements that would give Donbass autonomy and a hostile Ukrainian force at its borders. Putin would also have hell to pay from the Duma that has been moving legislation to annex the provinces to Russia, a move resisted so far by Putin. If they became part of Russia, Moscow would argue it was no invasion at all.
Political analyst Alexander Mercouris told CN Live! on Wednesday that he thought an offensive unlikely because of the low morale of senior Ukrainian military. But, he said:
“If there were an offensive in eastern Ukraine, Russia would back the militia … and if there were a chance of a Ukrainian breakthrough, I think the Russians would respond, and respond decisively. I don’t think this is speculation. If you look at the statements that Russian officials have made, including by [Foreign Minister Sergei] Lavrov, including to a great extent Putin himself, I think it’s absolutely clear what the Russian response would be.”
But that as long as Donbass remains part of Ukraine that would be the invasion Washington has been screaming about. And it would mean that Russia had taken the bait and fallen into the U.S. trap.
Precedents for a Trap
There are precedents for this. One is the clear signal given to Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein by April Glaspie, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, in 1990 that the U.S. would do nothing to stop him from invading Kuwait. She told Saddam that the U.S. had no “opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait.” But it wasn’t just Glaspie that left the door open to Kuwait. The Washington Post reported on Sept. 17, 1990:
“In the same week that Ambassador April Glaspie met a menacing tirade from Saddam with respectful and sympathetic responses, Secretary of State James Baker’s top public affairs aide, Margaret Tutwiler, and his chief assistant for the Middle East, John Kelly, both publicly said that the United States was not obligated to come to Kuwait’s aid if the emirate were attacked. They also failed to voice clear support for Kuwait’s territorial integrity in the face of Saddam’s threats.”
Following the 1979 Islamist revolution in Teheran that overthrew the U.S.-backed Shah, the United States sought to contain Iran by supplying billions of dollars in aid, intelligence, dual-use technology and training to Iraq, which invaded Iran in 1980 spurring an eight-year long brutal war. The devastating conflict ended in a virtual stalemate in 1988 after the loss of one to two million people.
Though neither side won the war, Saddam’s military remained strong enough to be a menace to U.S. interests in the region. The trap was to allow Saddam to invade Kuwait to give the U.S. a reason to destroy Iraq’s military. For instance, retreating Iraqi soldiers were essentially shot in the back in the massacre on the Highway of Death.
The ‘Afghan Trap’
Another U.S. trap was to lure the Soviet Union into Afghanistan in 1979. In a 1998 interview with Le Nouvel Observateur, Brzezinski admitted that the C.I.A. essentially set a trap for Moscow by arming mujahiddin to fight the Soviet-backed government in Kabul. He said:
“According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahiddin began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan on December 24, 1979. But the reality, closely guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.
He then explained that the reason for the trap was to bring down the Soviet Union, (much as the U.S. today would like to bring down Putin’s Russia.) Brzezinski said:
“That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, essentially: ‘We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.’ Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war that was unsustainable for the regime, a conflict that bought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.”
Brzezinski said he also had no regrets that financing the mujahideen spawned terrorist groups like al-Qaeda. “What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?,” he asked.
So if the U.S. setting a similar trap in Ukraine for Moscow, will it work?
“I think the Russians are smarter than Saddam,” said military analyst Scott Ritter. “Any Ukrainian incursion into Donbas would be handled by the pro-Russian militias, backed by Russian forces. I don’t think Russia would move on Ukraine unless NATO membership was invoked.”
It remains to be seen whether Russia steps into a U.S. bear trap.
As tensions continue to escalate between Russia and Ukraine, the Ukrainian government’s actors in Washington have kicked their influence efforts into overdrive.
New analysis from the Quincy Institute’s Ben Freeman found the Ukrainian government hired just under a dozen firms registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), shelling out about $2 million last year to firms who lobbied on their behalf. Freeman described the Ukrainian lobby as “small but mighty” in a phone interview with The American Conservative, and said their efforts to influence Washington and America’s political apparatus are intense relative to their modest budget.
While Ukraine’s lobbyists have primarily focused on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline given Russia’s buildup along the Ukrainian borders, they have also spent time on Ukrainian security issues and promoting support for Ukraine’s political system. The completion of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline would allow Russia to export natural gas directly to the core of Europe via Germany. The pipeline would cut out Ukrainian middlemen, who would continue to rake in hundreds of millions of dollars annually in energy-transit fees if the pipeline’s completion were prevented. In the beginning of his tenure, Biden waived sanctions against Nord Stream 2 construction.
FARA disclosures show Yorktown Solutions, one of the lobbying firms hired by the Ukrainian government to work behind the scenes, received nearly $1 million from the Ukraine Federation of the Employers of the Oil and Gas Industry (UFEOGI) between Dec. 1, 2020 and Nov. 30, 2021. UFEOGI members include the state-owned Naftogaz and several other joint-stock and subsidiary energy enterprises. In that same period of time, UFEOGI’s Yorktown lobbyists made more than 11,000 connections—meetings, emails, and phone calls—with representatives in government (from Congress to the State Department and the National Security Council), think tanks (such as the Atlantic Council and the Heritage Foundation), and media outlets (like Foreign Policy, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and NBC News). Freeman told TAC he’s “never seen something so expansive” as Yorktown’s efforts in his decade-plus of analyzing FARA disclosures.
In some ways, the two sides appear to be negotiating over different things. Russia is talking about its own security, while the West is focusing on Ukraine’s. This switch in focus looks to Russia like an attempt to turn the conversation away from the issue at hand toward less important details. Yet for the West, the security problems it has created for Russia didn’t even exist until very recently. One important consequence of Russia’s actions in articulating its demands is that the West has been forced, albeit unwillingly and cautiously, to recognize that there is even anything to discuss.
Previously, it was the West’s firm position that there could be no threat from market democracies, states governed by the rule of law, and open societies approaching Russia’s borders. If Russia is not a rogue state, what does it have to fear from this? Now, as a result of the ultimatum issued by Russia as it massed its troops on the Ukrainian borders before Christmas—that NATO must pledge never to admit Ukraine into its ranks, and scale back its presence in Eastern Europe—cracks in this position have appeared. The West still believes that it does not pose a threat to anyone, but is now willing to concede that others may view its expansion toward Russia differently, and is prepared to enter discussions in order to prevent such misconceptions from creating very real problems.
So what is the source of Russia’s fears? The modern Western view of security is based on the principle that democracies and autocracies do not pose equal threats. Free market democracies supposedly cannot be a source of aggression or pose a threat of war because their politicians have to answer to voters, and voters do not want to fight and die for their government in an aggressive war, while autocrats can send their people off to die for the regime. Autocrats, therefore, suspect—and not without reason—that until their countries become free market democracies, they will never be afforded equal security rights. The security of people living in autocracies is considered secondary to their freedom.
The question of whether Russia had any concerns for its own security was considered a bad joke: after all, not only was it stronger than its western neighbors, those neighbors were both richer and more advanced in terms of their legal and institutional development. Accordingly, there could be no threat from such neighbors. Yet in the last two hundred years, Russia has been attacked by European armies three times—by countries that were wealthier and more developed, both at a domestic and sometimes institutional level. Soldiers from countries that see themselves as perfectly harmless, such as the Netherlands, Denmark, Italy, and Sweden, all waged war on the Russian army and civilians on Russian territory during the last world war, centuries after any Russian soldier had set foot on their land, if ever. So if the generational trauma and fears of Poland, the Baltics, Czechia, and Ukraine can be seriously taken into account as part of their political motivation today, so can Russia’s.
The many months of speculation of an imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine are in sharp contrast to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s usual method of a swift, covert, and unexpected special operation. It looks, therefore, as though Russia wanted to use Western fears over Ukraine’s security to achieve its broader aims. As those fears grew, so did Russia’s ambitions. Now, with tensions reaching boiling point and the world watching, it’s hard for either side to back down.
But it’s also hard to keep an army mobilized and in field conditions indefinitely. The threat of the use of force is very effective in the short term, but loses value the longer it is drawn out. This explains the deadlines set by Russia in its negotiations with the West. If the West steps out of rhythm with Russia and stops reacting within the given timeframe, Moscow will have to take action to show that it is serious or run the risk of not being listened to next time. It looks like Russia is indeed prepared to take action, even if it is not necessarily the action anticipated right now by foreign observers.
Moscow’s goal is clear: it wants the world to listen to it and to realize that the country speaking is not the same as the one that once lost the Cold War. Russia has a new confidence that has inspired it to revert to the language of the Soviet superpower.
That confidence springs from several sources. The first is Russia’s modernized army and new weapons. Judging by some of Putin’s statements, he is confident that Russia has a temporary technological advantage in some types of weapons, and that the West knows it. Secondly, modern Russia is not the Soviet Union, and did not lose anything to anyone. Finally, the Soviet Union might have had its own military bloc behind it in the form of its Warsaw Pact allies, but Russia likely feels stronger than the Soviet Union ever did, thanks to its partnership with China. Beijing may not be Moscow’s formal military ally, but it’s a reliable source of support with elements of a second anti-Western front. China is also an alternative market and supplier, including of high-tech goods. These are all things that Russia lacked both during the Cold War and in the turbulent 1990s.
In its negotiations with the West, Russia is behaving not like a country preparing to wage war, but like a country that, if necessary, can afford to do so. The aim of the West, on the other hand, is to avoid war. Consequently, Russia can exploit Western fears of war—without actually using force.
Another important asset at Putin’s disposal is the resilience of the Russian people, most of whom remember worse times, though they would of course prefer not to see their return. With the further sanctions it is threatening, the West is capable of worsening the current living standards of ordinary Russians, but so far, nothing it has proposed could make life harder for Russians than it was in the 1990s, when the West was considered a friend of their country. In other words, Russia is better prepared to be cut off from the SWIFT international payment system than Europe is to be cut off from Russian gas supplies.
