Dangerous times…
The assumption now widely held about Vladimir Putin’s intentions concerning Ukraine are that his Spetsnaz infiltration forces, and the troops attached to Russian military intelligence (the old MVD), will continue to spread disorder and anxiety in Eastern Ukraine, encouraging pro-Russian separatists to go on seizing and fortifying municipal and other official buildings in eastern Ukraine towns.
Russian television will continue to promote the notion of a general rising in the region by citizens seeking reunion with Mother Russia, offering mass resistance to attack by the sub-standard Ukrainian army, now serving the “fascist” parliament installed in Kyiv and backed up by US Vice-President Joe Biden.
This will be followed by the rescue of these pro-Russian citizens of what Putin, imitating the tsars, now calls “New Russia,” by the 40,000-man Russian regular army that has been waiting at the Russian-Ukrainian frontier to be turned loose. It will reconquer the Russian-speaking Ukrainian regions that were once ruled by the tsars. Minor and rapid clean-up operations will follow to collect the Baltic States, Georgia, and possibly Armenia and Azerbaijan, with a few other lost territories, into the New Russia and its new Eurasian economic alliance.
This will all be done with dazzling speed and efficiency, while Barack Obama and the American Congress stand frozen by uncertainty, and Nato is able to rally only Poland, which is not enough. Sanctions will be tightened.
A plausible story? European Press reports say the eastern Ukraine’s cities seem to be functioning as usual, while the Spetsnaz and MVD “little green men,” as the population has nicknamed them, mingle with local enthusiasts occupying government buildings.
Thus far the only real action has been at the town of Sloviansk, under the control of local pro-Russian militants for the last two weeks. At a roadblock manned by militants, a gun battle took place with the occupants of two civilian vehicles. The three bodies of those found afterwards included two militia-men pulled from the nearby Donetsk River, one of which is reported to have borne marks of torture. On the front seat of one of the burned-out cars someone had left what is purported to be the personal card of the leader of Pravy Sektor, a right-wing political faction in Kyiv, together with papers and arms “of foreign manufacture.”
The Paris daily Le Monde reports that a “reliable” poll finds that 69.7 per cent of the inhabitants of the Russian-speaking southeast of Ukraine are opposed to attachment to Russia (15.4pc are in favour). However, 74pc are also angry about the “Maidan” coup in Kyiv that overthrew the existing government, and consider the new American-sponsored government illegitimate, hostile to them and to their aspirations. This seems consistent with other reports from the Russophone region, where the majority seems anxious to be left alone by both sides.
A correspondent of the conservative Le Figaroreports that what is taking place in the contested Russia-speaking areas resembles a “Potemkin” war, waged in the Press and social media and on wall posters, but which has yet to produce any discernible popular movement. A dozen or so people have been killed in random incidents, and the situation is explosive, as the Sloviansk episode shows, but so far the “war” itself remains virtual, and the old existing civic administrations go on as before, ignoring the pro-Russian takeovers of municipal buildings. He says that the Kyiv authorities have committed error after error, alternating belligerent statements with overdue concessions, and are blamed for the disorder, while the pro-Russians, who are really responsible, play victim and loudly call for help from Moscow.
In Crimea, meanwhile, The New York Times reports that all is chaos, and that Crimea’s people expect it will take two or three years before the Russian takeover is sorted out and people can live normal lives.
In all, it doesn’t seem quite the time for either side to turn this virtual war in Ukraine into a real one. One hopes that the advisers of both Presidents Obama and Putin have grasped that. But probably one group or the other has not. It’s an old army maxim, explaining disasters, that “there’s always 10pc that didn’t get the word.”