‘They’re trying to provoke us’
Flashes of war occurred as a series of glowing orange dots over the shoulder of Ukraine’s national security chief. Updated on a big screen in nine-minute intervals, incidents of shooting and shelling in pro-Russian zones in the east of the country appeared along the map of the frontline in his Kyiv office.
‘‘They’re trying to provoke us into a massive response so they can accuse us – as if we had started this thing – and hold the situation at a peak of maximum tension,’’ said Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defence Council, as the day’s tally of ceasefire violations crept up.
The sudden rise in violence over a 48-hour period across an area of Ukraine where lowintensity warfare is common is unparalleled since a previous similar escalation in July 2018.
In the context of the buildup of Russian troops around Ukraine’s borders, it has convinced London and Washington that the intensifying violence is a prelude to a fullscale Russian invasion of Ukraine. Kyiv reads it differently.
Danilov, second only to President Volodymyr Zelensky in the security council, sees neither the war, nor the possibility of invasion, through the same paradigm commonly understood by his country’s leading Western supporters.
The diverging views have complicated a shared response to the crisis, even as Nato warnings of imminent attack reach their peak.
‘‘The Russian Federation
wants us to declare a state of emergency,’’ said Danilov. ‘‘In order to break us, the Russians want internal destabilisation. Panic is the sister of a defeat . . . that’s why our nation is in a calm and balanced mode.’’
Danilov expressed disdain at the international community’s readiness to condemn a potential invasion while it failed to acknowledge that, as Kyiv insists, Russian artillery crews were already at work shelling government positions in the east of the country.
‘‘These personnel are not ‘proRussian’
– they are Russian,’’ he said.
‘‘The Russians are trying to present this as if it is our own internal conflict. Yet the weapons are coming in from the Federation, the soldiers have come in from the Federation, and the shells, too.
‘‘Yet the world doesn’t really want to see that because the world is afraid of Russia.’’
He described Russia’s hybrid war against Ukraine as an anaconda-like constriction. He suggested that Russian cyberattacks on the country’s
infrastructure, the strangulation of coal imports, gas pipelines and electricity supplies were, in combination with the pressures of shelling, a more likely strategy than a full-scale assault.
‘‘The war is already here,’’ Danilov said. ‘‘The cyberwar is a constant presence. The Russians use it to attack our infrastructure.
‘‘They’re restricting our transport routes. Coal from Kazakhstan cannot be transported through the Russian territories to Ukraine.
‘‘The work is quite simple for
Russia. The war is not just about tanks and shelling.’’
Even the definition of invasion, and the international response it should elicit, are perceived differently between Kyiv, London and Washington.
Refusing to be drawn when asked if he shared the view of United States President Joe Biden that a Russian invasion was ‘‘imminent’’, Danilov expressed his incredulity, widely held by Ukrainians, over the question’s moral relevance.
‘‘Let’s put it another way,’’ he said. ‘‘The world tells us, ‘Dear Ukrainians, in a short time the Russian Federation will destroy you. Please be aware and if they do that, we will punish them with sanctions’. That’s how [we] perceive the message from the world.
‘‘We are not in Putin’s head. We can’t know what kinds of decisions are there.’’
Ukraine’s analysis of the crisis may be different from that of Nato, but even in the calm of the security chief’s headquarters lay an acknowledgment that the worst may yet befall the country.
‘‘All will be revealed,’’ Danilov said. ‘‘We don’t have much reason to laugh, but we aren’t going to run away like some embassies.
‘‘If the Russians come here, they will face a resistance of millions.
‘‘The difference of strength between us is that we will be protecting what is ours, and they will have come to steal what isn’t theirs. If it goes that way, then we’ll be a bone stuck in their throats and the throats of their successors.’’