Odds of in va sion below 50 per cent: analysts
Unable to annex the country, Putin puts the economic squeeze on the region
MOSCOW/ KYIV — It took Vladimir Putin just three weeks to annex Crimea. Figuring out what to do with eastern Ukraine might take him longer.
Lacking the ground swell of support and direct military presence Russia had near the base of its Black Sea Fleet in Crimea, the probability of an outright invasion is below 50 percent, according to Eurasia Group and Teneo Intelligence.
With Russia at risk of the full force of economic sanctions, Putin will be content to choke Ukraine’s economy and snarl its politics in the run- up to May 25 presidential elections.
“An operation in eastern Ukraine would be very costly from the military point of view and its success is not guaranteed,” Ruslan Pukhov, an adviser to the Defence Ministry in Moscow and head of the Centre of Analysis of Strategies and Technologies, said by phone.
“It will be a much more complicated task than the Crimea operation. Crimea is a peninsula and almost an island which is easy to close and defend. Eastern Ukraine is a vast territory with transparent borders.”
In a test of wills across Russia’s 1,720- kilometre land border with Ukraine, Putin’s government hasn’t tipped its hand on whether a military intervention is an option even as pro-Russian protesters stormed administrative buildings in Donetsk, Kharkiv and Luhansk and asked Russia to send in troops.
After star ing down U. S. and European sanctions to annex Crimea, Putin has so far focused on turning the economic screws on Ukraine, imposing bans on goods from cheese to chocolate and raising the natural gas price by 80 per cent. Putin has parliamentary approval to deploy troops in Ukraine to protect the rights of Russian- speakers and those of Russian heritage.
Additional sanctions targeting Russia’s energy, bank ing and min ing in dus try are “all on the table” if Russia intervenes further in Ukraine, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told a Senate committee in Washington on Tuesday.
“A Ukrainian invasion would leave Russia mired in conflict,” said Nikolay Sungurovsky, director of military programs at the Razumkov Centre for Economic and Political Studies in Kyiv.
“The optimal case scenario for the Kremlin will be to help destabilize the political situation in the three eastern regions to enable them to deploy troops in Ukraine with out any resistance.”
Russia has up to 40,000 soldiers stationed along the frontier, according to the U.S. and NATO. Putin says they are conducting military exercises and will with draw afterward.
While Russia’s military is stronger, it won’t be able to take eastern Ukraine with out a fight, said Svante Cornell, research director at the Central Asia- Caucasus Institute and Silk Road Studies Program in Stock holm.
“I think there will be serious blood shed should Russia decide to intervene militarily,” he said. “The situation is very different from Crimea.”
Even with out moving into the east, Russian troops’ presence across the border has “major psychological impact” that encourages separatists and intimidates the Ukrainian government, said Marcin Zaborowski, director of the Polish Institute of International Affairs in Warsaw and adviser to NATO secretary general Anders FoghRasmussen.
“We won’t see a classical military operation or the appearance of regular units anytime soon, and if things get worse, you might see un marked units like those in Crimea,” Zaborowski said by phone from Brussels.
“There’ll be a lot of pressure on the defence and security establishments in Kyiv not to let east Ukraine go. I don’t think there will be in action the way we saw in Crimea.”
Days after unidentified gunmen occupied Crimea’s regional parliament on Feb. 27, armed troops wearing uniforms without insignia secured control of the Black Sea peninsula. After a hastily organized referendum on March 16, Putin put his signature to legislation to absorb the region and its port of Sevastopol from Ukraine.
In the east, 61 per cent are definitely or rather opposed to Russia’s decision to send its army to protect Russian speakers in Ukraine; in southern Ukraine, 67 percent are against it, according to a poll by the International Republican Institute. The survey of 1,200 permanent residents of Ukraine, conducted March 14 to 26, has a margin of error within 2.8 percentage points.
Russian speakers make up about 77 percent of Crimea’s population of more than two million, but only 44 percent in the Kharkiv region, 2001 census data show.
The east’s “ethnic Russian popula tion is significantly smaller, there is no direct Russian military presence and the local elites are on the side of the Kyiv government,” said Otilia Dhand, vice- president at Teneo Intelligence.
“That is a combination that significantly curbs Russian prospects of an easy take over.”