Russia and Ukraine: the threat of war is real
By Abel Riu
24/12/2021
In October 2021, the CIA began to issue alarm signals regarding a build-up of Russian troops, weapons, and military equipment in the border area with Ukraine. The situation is reminiscent of spring 2021, with the difference that this time the size of the troop mobilization is much larger, with 122,000 troops some 200km from the border and another 143,000 at 400km, according to Ukraine’s National Security and Defence Council. The current Russian military deployment includes large numbers of artillery pieces, armored personnel carriers, tanks, air defense units, missile systems, logistical equipment, and a long etcetera. At the same time, there has been a significant increase in cyberattacks against Ukrainian government and civilian computer networks in recent days. Moreover, in recent weeks, Moscow has been sending growing signs of a readiness to apply a “military-technical” reaction if what it considers to be aggressive NATO actions in Ukraine in recent months and years are not stopped.
Already at the June 2021 summit between Putin and Biden in Geneva, the Russian president put on the table the need to understand and respect Russia’s ‘red lines’ in regional security. These are of two different types. On the one hand, concerning NATO and its eastward expansion, Putin not only wants to ensure that Ukraine will never join NATO, seeking an explicit NATO renunciation of the declaration made at the 2008 Bucharest summit, where a commitment was made that Ukraine and Georgia would one day join NATO, without specifying a date. Moreover, it also wants to ensure that what it sees as Georgia’s gradual integration into NATO through the back door is brought to an end. Thus, since the historic rift between Moscow and Kyiv in 2014 following the triumph of the EuroMaidan , the Russian annexation of Crimea and the start of the war in the Donbas, and with Ukraine’s geopolitical shift towards the West after nearly four centuries of close ties with Russia, the military collaboration between Kyiv and NATO countries has multiplied exponentially. This includes several military aid packages worth hundreds of millions of dollars, the supply of weaponry, assistance, joint military exercises, and the use of Ukrainian bases in the Black Sea by US and British warships. Since 2018, the US began supplying the Ukrainian armed forces with weaponry , notably Javelin anti-tank missiles. In recent months, cooperation in the military sphere has increased, also including countries such as Erdogan’s Turkey, which has signed agreements with Kiev for the joint sale and construction of the famous Bayraktar TB2 drones, which have been decisive during the last two years in conflicts such as Syria, Libya or Nagorno-Karabakh. Growing Turkish-Ukrainian cooperation also includes the joint construction of missiles.
In this sense, even without full NATO membership, Moscow sees a Ukraine geopolitically oriented back towards the West and its allies as a severe threat to its national security. Thus, if the current trend of increasing military integration continues, it is feared that it could reach levels that reduce Russia’s military deterrence capability. To this end, Vladimir Putin has mentioned on several occasions in recent weeks the risk of US medium- and long-range missiles, such as those deployed in Romania or Poland, being installed on Ukrainian territory in the coming years, with the possibility of hitting Moscow in a matter of minutes. The Kremlin is concerned about the new strategic and power balance that is gradually taking shape in the region. Everything seems to indicate that before Ukraine becomes too powerful and integrated into NATO, and therefore, a greater threat to Russia, the latter wants to ensure a status of neutrality for Ukraine that guarantees Russian security, and thus end – or at least exponentially reduce – its military cooperation with the US and its allies.
Second, and closely linked to the previous point, is the issue of conflict resolution in the Donbas, which has been going on for years now. Ukrainian forces have already used the Javelin systems and Bayraktar TB2 drones mentioned above in this conflict, and Putin is fully aware of the effectiveness of Turkish drones against conventional forces after their achievements and devastating potential shown against Armenian troops in Nagorno-Karabakh in autumn 2020 or Al Assad’s troops in Syria in February 2020. Thus, the Kremlin fears that the current balance of power between the separatist rebels in Donbas and the Ukrainian government forces could tip in favor of the latter.
In this regard, the Kremlin is also frustrated by the lack of progress in implementing the Minsk II Agreements to resolve the conflict in Donbas, signed in January 2015. These stipulate the establishment of a ceasefire and a special constitutional regime for Donbas (with the necessary reform of Ukraine’s constitution) and the holding of elections in the currently rebel-held territories. In 2019, the Kremlin hoped that Volodymyr Zelensky’s victory in the presidential elections would change the agenda in Ukraine, making the Donbas peace process a priority compared to his much more nationalist and maximalist predecessor Petro Poroshenko. However, contrary to expectations, President Zelensky has shown no signs of wanting to make concessions in this regard and attempts to establish a permanent ceasefire regime in the Donbas in 2020 ended with a return to active military conflict as of last February. In parallel, Zelensky’s recent imposition of sanctions against Viktor Medvedchuk, Putin’s strongman in Ukraine, a member of the Ukrainian parliament, and co-chairman of the political party Platform of Opposition-For Life, was a further step towards reducing the Kremlin’s presence in Ukraine. Medvedchuk was subsequently arrested on several charges, including high treason, which is considered a grievance by Moscow.
In this regard, Putin proposes a change in the format of negotiations to implement the Minsk II Agreements. After seven years of stalled talks in the framework of the so-called Normandy Format between Ukraine, Russia, France, and Germany, Moscow would now seek to transfer responsibility for conflict resolution and implementation of the Minsk Agreements directly to the United States. Putin believes that there is no longer any need for European countries to play a leading negotiating role in the issue. He believes that they will eventually accept what is negotiated bilaterally between Russia and the US.
Indeed, as Ukraine’s leading political and military supporter at present, Washington would probably be far more effective than Berlin and Paris in convincing the Ukrainian government to accept such an agreement. However, this would be extremely difficult for Kyiv to do mainly due to the maximalist, anti-Russian rhetoric that has pervaded Ukrainian politics and media in recent years. A recognition of political autonomy for the areas of the Donbas currently under pro-Russian rebel control would have very high costs, with the potential for a serious political crisis in Ukraine, especially given the social and political strength that various extremist groups and battalions have gained in recent years.
Against this backdrop, and in the face of what it sees as a succession of faits accomplis by NATO and Ukraine in changing the balance of power in the Donbass and Eastern Europe, Russia is showing that it is prepared to go to war, and to carry out a “military-technical” response, in the words of the Russian president himself, to force Ukraine and the Western countries to negotiate. In other words: the Russian authorities do not want to attack Ukraine. Still, they are projecting a growing willingness and readiness to do so as an element of pressure and to strengthen their negotiating position in order to achieve their political objectives through diplomatic channels. If Carl von Clausewitz in his work On War stated that “War is nothing but a continuation of politics,” in this case, it could be argued that Russia is making use of the threat of war to try to achieve its means through political means.
In terms of the type of operation, a classic military territorial invasion could result in very high costs for Russian forces, as there could be significant local resistance, especially given that Ukraine currently has some 900,000 reservists, 300,000 of whom have experience on the Donbas front. Therefore, it is likely to seek to exploit its superior ballistic and air force capabilities to inflict as much damage as possible on Ukrainian forces and strategic infrastructure, seeking to force Kyiv to capitulate and accept Russian conditions for an end hostilities.
In the face of this situation, Western reaction in recent weeks has made it clear that neither the US nor its allies are willing to go to war over Ukraine. In this sense, despite harsh condemnations of Russia’s actions, several NATO members have stated that they will not send troops to prevent an attack. The US has limited its response to trying to reinforce Ukraine’s defensive capabilities and to threatening to apply a “comprehensive deterrence package” against Russia in the economic and financial sphere, an economic response that would increase the costs of a military operation for Russia, trying to influence the Kremlin’s cost-benefit analysis. In this sense, beyond new sanctions, the main development could be to disconnect Russia from the global interbank payment system SWIFT, used by more than 11,000 banks in 200 countries, as well as financial institutions. Despite the dire consequences this decision could have for the Russian economy in the short term, it seems increasingly clear that for Russia, the issue of regional security, and also maintaining its status as a power, takes precedence over all other considerations. Moreover, in such a scenario, China’s growing financial support for Russia would again play a key role, further deepening Moscow’s increasing dependence on Beijing in this area. It would potentially accelerate Russian-Chinese plans for a new global payments system alternative to the US-controlled SWIFT, accelerating global multipolar trends in the economic sphere. Moreover, given Europe’s heavy dependence on Russian oil and gas, sanctions would exclude Russia’s primary source of wealth: its hydrocarbon exports.
However, in parallel to threats of sanctions and other economic measures against Russia, there has been a growing willingness in Washington in recent days to open negotiations to address US-NATO and Russian security concerns. On Wednesday, 22 December, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announced that bilateral Russia-US and Russia-NATO talks, including the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), will begin in early 2022. Moscow has recently issued a list of demands. It proposes demilitarisation of Central and Eastern Europe, a de facto return to the status quo before NATO’s eastward expansion that began in the late 1990s. This demand has been rejected outright by the West.
The threat of war will not cease until Moscow considers that a significant portion of its stated security demands has been met. And the fact is that, in the face of Putin’s historic thump on the table, there are no good options for Joe Biden, but instead he is navigating between bad and dire options, all of which involve high costs. Since the start of his presidential administration in early 2020, Biden has signaled that he does not consider Ukraine and the confrontation with Russia as his top foreign and security policy priority, seeking not to escalate tensions with Moscow in order to focus his military efforts on containing China’s rise, especially concerning the Indo-Pacific. Indeed, an increase in hostilities between Russia and the US would deepen Moscow’s dependence on Beijing and increase the strategic convergence of these two powers to the detriment of Washington’s interests.
The US is thus caught between its strategic vision and priorities of the 1990s and 2000s and those of today. A US response to Russia in defense of Ukraine that can be interpreted as tepid could again send the signal that the US is not a reliable ally when it comes to the security of its allies, with very negative consequences, especially concerning key US allies in Eastern Europe (Baltics, Poland, Romania), while at the same time representing the second US geopolitical failure in less than a year, a few months after the historic withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Taliban’s recovery of power in that country. The alternative is an open Russia-US military confrontation, a scenario that would be ruled out from the outset.
As for the timing, or “why now?”, Moscow probably understands that the current context increases Russian leverage over the US and NATO, amid the sixth wave of the pandemic in Europe, with the formation of a new government in Germany, with the US immersed in a domestic political crisis, and with the ability to exert additional pressure from Moscow through the reduction of gas supplies to Europe, at a time of historically high electricity prices.
Eight years after the EuroMaidan, the Russian response is also an attempt to redress Russia’s own miscalculations in 2014 when millions of ethnic Russians were removed from Ukraine’s jurisdiction by the annexation of Crimea and the revolt in the Donbas, with a knock-on effect of millions of voters of political forces that advocated good relations with Moscow being prevented from participating in the Ukrainian parliamentary and presidential elections, thus eliminating their chances of ever being able to aspire to hold power in Kyiv again, with Russia’s capacity for domestic influence in Ukraine plummeting. As a result, Moscow sees the threat of force as the only card it has left to influence political developments in Ukraine.
On the 30th anniversary of the fall of the USSR, Russia is pressing ahead with the design of a new security architecture in Europe that, unlike that built under the NATO umbrella since the end of the Soviet Union, also takes into account Russia’s national security interests. In this sense, as Mikhail Gorbachev tried unsuccessfully three decades ago, Moscow seeks to enhance the role of the OSCE as the new security reference framework in Europe, to the detriment of NATO.
A fundamental defining factor in international relations is how important an issue is to an actor and, consequently, what he is willing to do and how far he is ready to go for it. Clearly, for Russia, Ukraine is a much greater priority than for the US, and therefore Moscow is willing to go much further. The loss of Ukraine from 2014 is one of the most painful foreign policy chapters for Putin, symbolically, politically, economically, as well as in the military sphere, given the close ties the two countries had maintained in this area as a Soviet legacy, including in terms of joint arms production. Thus, if it cannot integrate Ukraine into its geopolitical space as part of the Eurasian Union or the Collective Security Treaty Organisation , Moscow seeks at least not to have it at odds with Russia, with a status of neutrality and good neighborliness. Even with a hypothetical resolution of the Donbas conflict, the Crimea issue has in this regard been a significant added impediment since the Russian annexation in 2014.
Given that for Moscow, its pre-eminence as a major player in the post-Soviet space is a condition sine qua non for playing a role as a global power, it considers that a large part of its position and reputation in the world is at stake here. That is why, with its approach to the Ukrainian issue, it wants to make clear the limits of the possibilities of military integration with NATO to all former Soviet republics, apart from the Baltic states.
Russia’s worldview is increasingly that of a concert of global and regional powers, such as the US, China, India, Turkey, Iran, or Russia itself, empowered and legitimized to decide regional and international security issues. By upping the ante, Russia has crossed its own red line and staked its credibility as a power willing to use force if necessary. For Moscow, therefore, it is no longer just a question of what the cost of war would be, but also what the cost of not going to war would be, should it fail to achieve its goals through diplomatic means. In this sense, an essential part of Russia’s status as power is at stake in the Ukrainian question. Bluffing on such a priority issue for Moscow would have dire consequences for its ability to exert power and influence in the future, not only on this issue but probably in other scenarios as well.
Abel Riu is an analyst and President of the CGI, interested in Russia and post-Soviet affairs.
The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the CGI or its contributors. The designations employed in this publication and the presentation of material therein do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of the CGI concerning the legal status of any country, area or territory or of its authorities, or concerning the delimitation of its frontiers.
