Stop the charade about Russian meddling in Ukraine
KYIV, Ukraine — As western convictions about Ukraine begin to wobble, Russian President Vladimir Putin continues to toy with his biggest Slavic neighbour.
Putin has been playing one of the oldest games in international brinkmanship: He created dangerous problems in Ukraine and then generously offered to play peacemaker.
That is what Putin did again on the weekend when he promised to tighten control over Russia’s border with Ukraine so that “volunteers� and weapons that have been crossing the frontier in large numbers to join the separatist uprising against Kyiv would be prevented from doing so. This begs the question: How is it that so many of these men and their weapons been able to easily leave Russia until now when, if nothing else, Moscow is famous for keeping a stranglehold on its border areas and of having extremely thorough exit procedures?
And why is Putin promising to stop a practice that the Foreign Ministry in Moscow was reported by the Financial Times to have vehemently denied ever existed, saying that such accusations were “the work of the devil.�
Putin denied Russian troops took an active part in the annexation of Crimea, only to later admit that in fact they had. He now claims that Russian forces have nothing to do with what is going in eastern Ukraine.
It is true that Russia’s hand has not been so obvious in eastern Ukraine as it was in Crimea, where several Russian soldiers told me without much prodding that they had been flown in for the operation. But the latest self-styled prime minister of the self-proclaimed People’s Republic of Donetsk, Alexander Borodai, is a Muscovite whom I saw on a street in Crimea two months ago when he was advising the self-proclaimed government there before Russia formally annexed the peninsula.
Those giving orders to the ragtag Moscow-friendly militias who are causing so much grief in cities such as Luhansk and Slavyansk have been very open that they are “volunteers� who have come from Russia to help out. It is probably no coincidence that their numbers have grown greatly in recent weeks after Putin finally began to make good on a promise he made — three times — to withdraw the tens of thousands of troops he had dispatched to the border areas.
Another tidbit is that the French are reported to have said that Putin privately admitted to them at last week’s D-Day anniversary celebrations in Normandy that Russia had influence over the separatists in eastern Ukraine.
So, stop the charade in the West that there is no firm proof that Russia is involved in eastern Ukraine. Of course it is, up to its eyeballs.
Lost in all this noise is that the original question that triggered the cataclysms in Ukraine was whether the country should look to the East or look to the West. Ukraine’s elected leader, Viktor Yanukovych, was ousted from the presidency in a bloody street coup in Kyiv for reneging on a deal with the European Union and making a separate, last-minute deal with Russia. Russia lopped off Crimea and menaces Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine, where there is much animosity toward Kyiv but considerable ambivalence about closer ties with the Russia, let alone a formal union.