MOSCOW — Ukraine becomes more of a tinderbox by the day.
Thousands
of Russian troops are maneuvering along the border, with Russian
fighter jets entering Ukraine’s airspace. Ukrainian leaders have warned
that border crossings by any soldiers will be considered an invasion,
even while the country pursues military operations against a pro-Russian
rebellion in the east. Washington and Moscow hurl ever more heated
pronouncements. The first casualties lie in fresh graves.
No less an authority than Gen. Philip M. Breedlove of the United States Air Force, NATO’s supreme allied commander in Europe, has said Russia could overrun eastern Ukraine in three to five days. In other words, Russia could basically achieve its goal of creating a neutral, weak Ukraine almost instantly.
But will it?
At first glance, the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin,
seems to have strong reasons to dispatch his tanks: shaping the Ukraine
he wants well before elections scheduled for May 25 put a new,
legitimate government in place; reclaiming an area that was historically
part of Russia; gaining direct access to natural resources and
factories that have been crucial to Moscow’s military-industrial complex
since Soviet times. And his land grab of Crimea in March made him wildly popular at home.
Yet
the reasons for Mr. Putin to refrain from further military adventurism
make a longer, more tangled list: the cost of a huge occupation force
and the responsibility for the welfare of millions more people; the
effect of new, more severe Western sanctions on an already weak economy;
the possibility of significant Russian casualties caused by an
insurgency in eastern Ukraine; a new, implacably anti-Russian western
section of Ukraine; and likely pariah status internationally.
On balance, the negatives would seem to outweigh the positives, analysts said.
“Military
intervention from Putin’s point of view is Plan B,” Mark Galeotti, a
New York University professor and expert on Russia’s security forces
currently doing research here, said recently. “It is not off the table,
but it is not the ideal outcome.”
Mr.
Putin would rather feed the insurrection from afar, analysts said,
never quite allowing the calm that would give Ukraine the opening needed
to join the European Union,
or worse, NATO. It is a tactic Russia has deployed successfully in
previous attempts by former Soviet republics to shift westward.
However,
any conversation or briefing paper about Russia’s next moves,
particularly its military moves in Ukraine, begins with a broad caveat.
Few expected that Mr. Putin would seize Crimea in a matter of weeks.
“Nobody,
including Putin, knows what he may do next as the situation changes,”
the Royal United Services Institute, a military and security research
organization in London, said in an analysis this month.
There are signs that Russia seems poised to invade.
On Thursday, Ukraine started tentative armed operations to dislodge
pro-Russian militants from government buildings in 10 eastern towns.
Russia countered with extensive military maneuvers along the frontier,
including what the Pentagon said were a half dozen violations of
Ukrainian airspace in 24 hours. Russia denied that.
Mr. Putin used historical arguments to claim Crimea. He recently inaugurated a similar discourse on southeastern Ukraine, noting how huge parts of it were called Novorossiya,
or New Russia, when first captured in czarist times. The rights of
ethnic Russians still living there need to be protected, he said.
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Significant
Russian military assets, including intercontinental ballistic missiles,
Navy ship gears, and jet and helicopter engines are all produced in
eastern Ukraine. Vladislav Zubok, a Russian Cold War expert teaching at
the London School of Economics who has been researching the 1991
collapse of the Soviet Union, said senior Soviet officials were panicked
at the prospect of losing both Crimea and Ukraine’s industrial
heartland. So the current crisis has deep roots.
But nothing is that straightforward.
Perhaps
a more significant precedent, Professor Zubok said, are the
high-profile military maneuvers, without an invasion, long recommended
by the K.G.B. to destabilize restive neighbors. Russia deployed that
tactic in Berlin in 1958, and in surrounding Poland during the 1980-81
Solidarity uprisings, for example. If Moscow is following that strategy,
no invasion is imminent, he said.
The main factor arguing against invasion is the risk to Russia’s prosperity, which Mr. Putin restored.
“Putin
will have to explain why he is risking war and sanctions and how he
will improve the lot of seven million people there,” Professor Zubok
said. “How to do that and still maintain the standard of living of all
Russians? He would really be saying: ‘Guys, it is all for the Russian
motherland now. It is time to tighten your belts.’ ”
The
economic fallout from Crimea has already shoved Russia toward
recession, with huge capital flight and skittish foreign investors.
Russia’s credit rating was cut Friday by Standard & Poor’s to just
one notch above “junk” status, pushing up the cost of much-needed loans
abroad.
Mr.
Putin and his closest advisers and allies have brushed off the Western
travel and banking sanctions imposed on them after the seizing of
Crimea. But the threat of a major economic blockade, sanctions against
entire sectors of the economy that would probably be set off by a
Ukraine invasion, are another matter.
“The
scenario is like what happened to Iran,” said Igor Korotchenko, a
member of a civilian board that advises the Russian military and the
editor in chief of National Defense Magazine. “The Russian Federation is
not interested in bringing troops into eastern Ukraine.”
Although
the Ukrainian Army is weak, it numbers 70,000, and the country has a
long history of partisans attacking invaders. The specter of Slavs
killing Slavs would soon sour the public on the invasion, unless the
Russian Army was dispatched as a peacekeeping force after mass
casualties caused by the Ukrainian military.
In
eastern Ukraine, regional polls have found that at most one-third of
the population, depending on the city, supports joining Russia.
In
Crimea, Russian soldiers were greeted warmly, and needed to hold only
the Isthmus of Perekop, three miles wide, to sever Crimea from Ukraine.
In eastern Ukraine, if the 40,000 Russian troops now estimated to be
camped along the border crossed over, it is likely they would be
attacked. Russia would also be responsible for a flood of refugees.
“You
cannot occupy this region only with these small green men,” said
Alexander M. Golts, an independent Russian military analyst, referring
to the anonymous soldiers in Crimea whom Mr. Putin later admitted were
elite Russian soldiers. “So you beat those poor Ukrainians. What then?
You will have to establish a new border. You will not need 40,000
troops, you will need 140,000.”
Ultimately,
analysts said, it is much more advantageous — and far cheaper — for
Russia to manipulate a low-grade mutiny with occasional flare-ups.
That
will achieve the goal Mr. Putin wants: keeping Ukraine just
destabilized enough that it remains an unattractive partner to the
European Union or NATO. Russia played out the same script before in
Georgia and Moldova.
“It
would be a tank-free invasion,” said Cliff Kupchan, an analyst at the
Eurasia Group in Washington. “That is his long game. I think he will try
that before he invades.”
end quote from:For Russia, Negatives Seem to Outweigh Positives of an Invasion
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