The West is hearing Russia’s footsteps
U.S. signals hope for resolution dying while Ukraine accuses Americans of ratcheting up fear
The diplomats turned nasty, the negotiators couldn’t agree, and the Russian military went on the move.
Three highly visible incidents occurred this week that could lend credence to Friday’s alarming American prognosis that hope of resolving the Ukrainian crisis is dying.
The White House has brought the world to this existential precipice before, warning an invasion was imminent in the final weeks of January.
The Ukrainian government itself accused Washington of a fear-mongering so intense it risked killing the country’s economy before Russian bombs, tanks or bullets could do their destructive work.
In the ensuing two weeks, Kyiv and Moscow have been bombarded with telephone calls and visiting government jets.
Turkey, Britain, France, Germany, Hungary, Lithuania, Spain and Holland have done the rounds, leaving warnings for Russia, weapons and kind words for Ukraine. Canadian Defence Minister Anita Anand even managed a quick visit.
The plan is for German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to fly into Kyiv on Monday and Moscow on Tuesday. But this can only happen if the airspace is not yet infested with Russian bombers and missiles softening up Ukrainian defences for the ground invasion.
Such a scenario was laid out by U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan, a man whose job is to stare down the worst the world has to offer and give cool-headed advice.
As Russian military analyst Pavel Felgenhauer sees it, the Americans jumped the gun last month but are right to sound the alarm about a likely Russian incursion, be it a fullscale incursion or something more limited in scope.
“The chips are falling into place,” Felgenhauer told the Star. “A big war is a big war. It’s not something like just calling an Uber. It requires enormous logistics and lots of preparation, the movement of thousands of soldiers with millions of tonnes of heavy weapons and ships and planes and all.”
The Russian army has been moving its pieces into place slowly and steadily since October.
Currently, it has Ukraine surrounded in a sort of pincer grasp, with more than 100,000 troops stationed to the east, south and north of a country that aspires to European Union membership and a seat in the NATO military alliance.
On Thursday, Russia and Belarus, which sits on Ukraine’s northern border, began a more intensive phase of Allied Resolve, a longplanned military exercise simulating the defence of Belarus’s western and southern borders against a hostile attack.
In the current political context, even France, which is trying to play peacemaker with Putin, condemned the drills as a “very violent gesture.”
Military observers say such drills could serve as cover for real-life offensive military actions.
In addition, six Russian warships reportedly arrived in the Black Sea this week as part of planned Russian naval drills.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said Friday he has demanded Russia comply with an Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe treaty meant to reduce the risk of military confrontation by revealing the reasons and details of its unplanned activities. Under the OSCE treaty, Moscow has 48 hours to explain itself.
But communication between Moscow and its western adversaries has become noticeably more complicated in the past few days. French President Emmanuel Macron left his meeting with Putin this week in Moscow with a sense of hope.
Then Russia, Ukraine, France and Germany met Thursday in Berlin to negotiate a middle ground on the so-called Mink Agreements, hoping to end an eight-year civil war between Ukrainian forces and Russian-backed separatists in the eastern region known as Donbass.
The agreements call for a certain autonomy or self-governance in Donbass. Russia says this is the only way to resolve the conflict. Kyiv is loath to give up power to an enclave that is loyal to Russia and has cleaved the country apart.
A previous meeting of the four nations on Jan. 26 in Paris went well enough that they agreed to meet again this week.
But after nine hours, negotiators walked away Thursday with nothing. In lieu of a final statement, there was a note of desolation from Putin’s deputy chief of staff, Dmitry Kozak: “Today it wasn’t possible to overcome these differences.”
And then the tone shifted rather jarringly. British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss came to Moscow to meet with Sergey Lavrov, her veteran Russian counterpart.
At a post-meeting news conference, Truss stuck to her lines, telling Lavrov that Russia would face western sanctions if it did not pull back its troops.
Lavrov’s response wandered far off the measured, moderate path such high-level envoys adopt when paying and accepting visits.
He likened the talks to a meeting between the dumb and the deaf.
“We seem to listen,” Lavrov said, “but we do not hear.”
But world leaders seems to have heard something that the rest of us can’t see yet. Something that makes this “imminent” invasion somehow more serious than Washington’s previous sounding of the alarm.
The list of countries that have pared down their diplomatic staff to the essential grows by the hour: Israel, Norway, the Netherlands, Denmark, Latvia, Japan, South Korea and the European Union. U.S. Embassy staff in Ukraine are making personal calls to registered citizens telling them to get out of the country while they can.
And the Kyiv Post reported that 46 Americans working for the Special Monitoring Mission of the OSCE, which oversees the uneasy truce between Ukrainian troops and separatist fighters, are also being pulled out of the country.
If it is true, that there will soon be no peace to keep, no ceasefire to oversee, only combatants coming from both sides of Ukraine’s jagged front line, it would be folly to do otherwise.