Leonid
Bershidsky
Biden
May Catch Putin in His Own Ukraine Trap
The West’s warnings about a
Russian invasion of Ukraine have acquired a life of their own.
Who’s
cornering whom?
Photographer:
Peter Klaunzer/Keystone via Getty Images Europe
By
January 27, 2022,
8:00 AM GMT
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Leonid Bershidsky is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation team based in
Berlin. He was previously Bloomberg Opinion's Europe columnist. He recently
authored a Russian translation of George Orwell's "1984."
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Bershidsky
The current conventional wisdom, echoed by
U.S. President Joe Biden, among
others, is that his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin intends
to re-invade Ukraine in the near future. Military experts who have weighed in
on the matter — notably Rob Lee at
the Foreign Policy Research Institute and Michael
Kofman of the Center for Naval Analyses — have speculated
that the Russian military posture points to plans for a ground invasion toward
Kyiv, meant to compel Ukraine toward a pro-Russian course or a change
in government.
All these
predictions are premised on the same foundation: the Russian troops massed
on Ukraine’s border. Why would they be there if Putin wasn’t planning some
kind of assault?
Let me lay out a scenario that
defies this seemingly unshakable logic and plays out as a media phenomenon
rather than a hot war. It doesn’t exclude a re-invasion — since 2014,
that possibility can never be ruled out. It does, however, allow more
leeway for a de-escalation than the professional wargamers’ predictions.
One of the reports that got the world worrying about Russian
troops and equipment parked near the border with Ukraine last fall appeared in
the New York Times on Sept. 1. Citing “senior Biden administration
officials,” it said that Russia had only withdrawn a few thousand
troops since the previous invasion scare, which had spread in the spring of
2021. The article in the NYT put the number of troops in the border
regions at some 80,000.
Since those early days of September, warnings coming from the
U.S. and often echoed by official Kyiv have grown louder and more
urgent, with bigger and bigger numbers of Russian troops named in media reports
sourced to the Biden administration and the U.S. intelligence community. In
early December, the Washington Post reported that
Russia was preparing to attack with 175,000 troops. This would assume massive
reinforcements: The most frequent number bandied
about these days is 100,000 or “more than 100,000.”
If that latest number is correct, the Russian military presence on
the border, heavier than usual throughout last year, hasn’t changed
dramatically — at least not in terms of troop numbers — since last
spring, growing again in the fall after ebbing slightly during the
summer. Some heavy equipment, including various missile
launchers, was shifted toward Ukraine back in the
spring of 2021, although the movements have intensified in
recent months since Ukraine has been boasting about buying, and using,
Turkish-made TB2 drones against Russian-backed forces in the east of the
country.
Russia, in other words, appears to have gradually shifted its
military might toward Ukraine in 2021 and is carrying out more exercises
near the border — as it did near Georgia in the years preceding
the Russo-Georgian war of 2008. Then, Putin and his strategists
successfully baited a
trap for hotheaded Georgian leader Mikheil Saakashvili, who
finally made a disastrous first move. Conceivably, Putin has been
hoping for a similar development that would give him what he considers a
legitimate casus belli. Like Saakashvili’s Georgia, Ukraine has been rearming
and restructuring its military, gaining confidence that it won’t be routed
as painfully as it was in 2014. If
Ukraine moved to recapture lost territory in the east, Putin could take
advantage of such a moment.
The Biden
administration, however, has managed to turn the tables with its wolf-crying
campaign. It has succeeded in whipping up a media frenzy. According to
Google Trends, news search interest in Ukraine now is the highest it has been
since 2015, although not as high as it was during the 2014 Revolution of
Dignity.
Suddenly, Putin was in the hot seat. He
couldn’t simply wave off Washington’s alarmist messaging, since his troops were
demonstrably massed on the border. His knee-jerk reaction was a burst of
angry U.S.-trolling, including the rollout of a spate of impossible
demands like a NATO withdrawal from Eastern Europe.
If this was meant as an attention-grabber, it only worked
to a degree. The unproductive diplomatic meetings that followed
can be spun as Russian successes only with difficulty (the Carnegie
Endowment’s Dmitri Trenin attempted that in a recent interview, saying the
meetings signified the first discussion of European security involving Russia
since German reunification). As an attention-deflector, it failed
miserably. The U.S. had enough media firepower, far more than Russia,
to maintain a focus on the re-invasion possibility.
Meanwhile,
the expectation of a big war and the hellish sanctions that would accompany it
has crashed Russian stocks: The
MOEX Russia Index hit the last 12 months’ low on Jan. 24 and is down more than
20% from its October high. The ruble
has lost 10% of its value versus the U.S. dollar over the same period,
despite Russia’s impressive currency reserves.
At the same time, the publicity campaign has provided
justification for increased Western arms supplies to Ukraine. The U.K. has
stepped up deliveries as its embattled prime minister, Boris Johnson, seized on
the Russian invasion threat to distract voters
from his scandals. Putin, who had publicly singled out the weapons
shipments as an irritant,
suddenly found himself facing a version
of the Saakashvili trap himself.
“He has to do something,” Biden said of
Putin. You could read this statement as an assessment that Putin the macho man
cannot back down now — or as a sign of White House anticipation
that Putin has been pushed into a corner
where he’s likely to make a stupid move.
The
latter is, of course, a possibility. Putin is known to be emotional about Ukraine.
He is, however, also experienced and crafty; he hasn’t made a statement on the
crisis in weeks. It's almost as if he’s decided to wait out the invasion
hysteria and then go on calmly weighing his options — and waiting for
pro-Western Ukrainian governments to run out of rope as they struggle
ineffectively with the country’s seemingly incurable corruption.
If Putin needed a way out, he could play a card he’s long held up
his sleeve: the recognition or even inclusion in Russia of the puppet “People’s Republics” of eastern
Ukraine. These gray areas are already integrated into Russia in many
ways. Their residents have been supplied with Russian passports, many of
them work in Russia or send children to Russian universities. Links to Ukraine
are more tenuous and revolve around smuggling.
The Russian military presence along the border would likely deter any Ukrainian
kinetic response, and in a practical sense, a Russian takeover of the
regions would remove a problem for Ukraine rather than create one: The
Minsk agreements of 2015 would finally be off the table and Ukraine’s
victimhood would not be marred by any broken promises made under those
deals.
The idea of the takeover recently has been aired in the docile
Russian parliament by the nominal Communist opposition — and the Kremlin
publicly asked its
proponents not to rock the boat. But once diplomacy with the U.S. and NATO runs
its course, Putin could easily say that no better solution has been found.
In that case, he’ll hardly lose face at home: Inviting the Russian-speaking
population of the “People’s Republics” into the motherland’s fold likely would
be a popular move.
In this
scenario, there’s no massive invasion — not in the near future. Waiting
out this crisis would have the extra advantage for the Kremlin of
undermining U.S. credibility. Will the world believe it a year from
now if it turns on its invasion sirens again?
I’m not saying the military experts are wrong. Putin
can launch the strike they expect, and he has strategic reasons to do
it at some point. Ukraine has been living on a powder keg since 2014. It’s
strange, however, that Western observers of the crisis aren’t paying more
attention to the calm
behavior of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and his
closest aides. You could write it off to fatalism — but, more likely,
it stems from a different reading of the situation than one can pick up from
Western media. Zelenskiy appears to be betting that Putin won’t be manipulated
into an angry, careless move. I’m not a betting man, but I hope so too.
This
column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or
Bloomberg LP and its owners.
To contact the author of this story:
Leonid Bershidsky at lbershidsky@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story:
James Gibney at jgibney5@bloomberg.net
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