Wounded Putin turns up the heat
VLADIMIR Putin is sending a chilling message to the world.
For this naked aggression threatens to re-ignite the conflict in the region – Europe’s only major war – which began in 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea and supported armed, Russian-speaking separatists in Eastern Ukraine with troops.
It is no wonder that Western governments are worried.
The US has deployed two warships to the Black Sea and sent its Secretaries of Defence and State to Nato headquarters in Brussels.
About 13,000 people have died in the conflict already. Soon, it is feared, there will be thousands more deaths.
The fact is that Russia has long struggled to accept that Ukraine, its vast and sprawling neighbour with which it shares many religious and historical links, is a sovereign state.
But there is more than Ukrainian independence at stake here. It is part of Putin’s grand plan, which has seen him flex Russian military muscle around the world in recent weeks.
Three Russian nuclear submarines broke through the Arctic icecap as the Kremlin deployed a new nuclear torpedo which, it claims, plausibly or not, could trigger a tsunami on America’s eastern seaboard.
Meanwhile, Russian fighterbombers have been pulverising the remaining Isis forces in Idlib province, Syria.
And, on March 29, Nato fighters including RAF Typhoons had to scramble to intercept six groups of Russian bombers in an area encompassing the Baltic to the Black Sea.
This multi-faceted show of force is quintessential Putin. As well as t ell i ng t he world t hat Russia mustn’t be messed with, it has been designed for a domestic audience. Photos of Russian tank transporters and troop trains feature prominently on social media.
In truth, the Russian leader has had an awkward few months. Covid-19 has been a heavy blow, forcing Putin to spend the last year in strict quarantine – hardly the image a world strongman wishes to present.
He only had a vaccine last month, seemingly reluctant to be seen as a vulnerable 68-year-old.
All the while, he has watched, infuriated, as opposition leader Alexei Navalny received worldwide press coverage after the Russian authorities locked him up in a penal colony.
The Russian people are suffering, too. There have been none of the pandemic support measures familiar across the West. The economy is stagnant.
And to top it all, US President Joe Biden tartly dismissed the Russian leader as a mere ‘killer’ and a man of no true importance in the new Cold War di vi di ng t he world between China and the US.
So where better for a wounded Putin to apply the heat than Ukraine?
It has been a characteristic of Putin, his country’s longest-serving leader since Stalin, to behave as if he was in sole control of a giant gas hob, raising or lowering the temperature at will.
However, Ukraine remains defiant. Last month, its young president, Volodymyr Zelensky, stripped a leading pro-Russian oligarch of three television stations which
Putin needs to make his case inside Ukraine.
Then, Zelensky intimated that Ukraine wished to join Nato, a move which would bring Western forces adjacent to Russia’ s heartlands – an absolute ‘nyet’ for Moscow. Never slow to tell outrageous lies, the Russian government has suggested that Ukraine plans to carry out a massacre of ‘ethnic Russians’.
In truth, there is no ethnic difference between Ukrainian and Russian speakers in the region. Most people are bilingual and they are all Christian.
But the Kremlin has no time for such details.
Meantime, the world watches the region with deep concern.
Bad weather and muddy conditions make a fresh invasion of Ukraine unlikely before May, but the threat is real enough – and deadly.
As ever, Putin is telling Washington and its Nato allies that they ignore Russia at their peril, however puny its economy.
Significantly, he is inviting the West to find an urgent resolution to a Ukrainian conflict which, in his heart, he realises that Russia can neither afford to pay for – or lose.
That would, of course, be a resolution that would be made on his own terms.
Part of Putin’s grand plan, flexing military muscle around the world