A winter war?
Is Russia preparing to launch the largest military offensive in Europe since the Second World War? The signs are ominous, said Alexander Vindman in The New York Times. This year, Vladimir Putin’s forces have massed an estimated 100,000 military personnel close to Russia’s border with Ukraine. It feels “like 2014 again”, when Putin annexed Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula, and started a separatist war in the largely Russian-speaking Donbas region. “Putin and his acolytes still view the world through a decidedly Soviet lens,” said Aliona Hlivco on CapX. They see Ukraine, which left the Soviet Union in 1991, as part of “Moscow’s sphere of influence”. One of their long-standing concerns is that it might join Nato: they claim to fear Western “encirclement”. But do the current manoeuvres “portend a full-blown war”, or are they just “strategic sabre-rattling”? Putin is certainly seeking concessions from the stand-off, said Patrick Wintour and Julian Borger in The Guardian. This month he’s met both President Biden and Boris Johnson, demanding talks that would end in “clear legal agreements” that Nato won’t expand eastwards. Russian officials have threatened to deploy banned intermediate-range nuclear weapons in Europe if Nato won’t engage.
The West should back off, said Marshall Auerback on UnHerd. Putin has a legitimate grievance about Nato’s “mission creep” on Russia’s doorstep. Declassified documents show that in 1990, US and European leaders promised the Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev not to expand Nato eastward; yet Nato has since mooted granting membership to Ukraine. On the contrary, we must not “appease” Putin, said The Independent. Ukraine is a sovereign state; Russia is not an imperial power that can dictate its policies. The free world should defend it from Russian aggression with a “show of collective strength”. Biden warned of devastating “economic consequences” if Russia should invade, but sanctions don’t deter “rogue states”. Instead, we should offer Ukraine “full Nato membership”.
That might be unwise, said Roger Boyes in The Times. Moscow seems to be actively searching for “an excuse for war”. Last week, Russian forces intercepted “a clapped-out 50-year-old Ukrainian vessel” 20 miles from disputed Crimean waters, claiming it was a “provocation”. My bet is that the military build-up is mostly a “bluff”. Russia wouldn’t mind a short conflict, to give Biden a “bloody nose” and assert Russian power. But Putin’s main aim is to extract more concessions: he wants Biden to treat him like an equal; he wants the Russian “sphere of interest” formalised; and he wants the Ukrainian leadership “to lose credibility”. Either way, the crunch point will come soon: keeping such a large force out of barracks on the border is expensive. “But ultimately Russia’s soldiers are more useful to him just looking tough, rather than losing their lives, bogged down in a winter war.”