Putin's Shuffle Step
As soon as I put up the last post, Vladimir Putin went and delivered a speech decrying Ukraine's role in its own self defence. He then declared Donetsk and Lugansk as independent People's Republics, which is a bit like declaring the Eastern Suburbs and North Shore of Sydney as 'independent people's republics'. With that he proceeded to move troops into the Eastern parts of Ukraine which have been in dispute since 2014.
Ukraine decried - because decrying is the verb of the day - that Russia's declaration was verbatim the one they used when Russia invaded Georgia.
Mr Kyslytsya says the Russian statements of independence for Donetsk and Luhansk are word-for-word copy and pasted from Russia's statement preceding it occupation of Georgia in 2008.
"The United Nations is sick. It has been hit by the virus spread by the Kremlin. Will it succumb to this virus? It is in the hands of the membership.
"Who is next among the members of the United Nations?"
Pretty funny if you have a dark sense of humour. I can hear Vladimir's evil laugh all the way from the Kremlin.
By Mid-morning over here, Russian troops were finally on the move and arrived in the freely declared peoples' republics of Donetsk and Lugansk. Surely that's war, now that Russian troops were officially inside Ukraine. Even the secretary of Health in the UK thought it was an invasion:
The UK Health Secretary Sajid Javid says "the invasion of Ukraine has begun".
Speaking with Sky News UK, Mr Javid said people were "waking up to a very dark day in Europe".
"President Putin has decided to attack the sovereignty of Ukraine," he said.
But no. Joe Biden demurred and said the Russians were merely in territories they had taken by subterfuge already. He's ready for his summit. t's enough to make one wonder how many more hairs he intends to split with Putin. The script is supposed to show this is the bit where Biden and Boris impose heavy sanctions on Russia. The fact that hasn't seems to indicate that Biden wants to have the threat of sanctions as a bargaining chip that is still alive. One tends to think that perhaps Putin does not care about the sanctions. Putin has had to hold still while the Olympics rolled on in Beijing. now that they're over, he has a free hand.
Does Biden really think the threat of sanctions is still a viable negotiation card?
Maybe This Is Just A Dance?
Going back about 10 days, it appeared that Putin was readying his army to march into Ukraine en masse on the 16th February. When the news broke from America that their intelligence apparatus had identified that date, it quickly became a joke that Putin would do exactly as predicted. For whatever reason - probably many - the Russian army did not invade that day. In the six days since, Vladimir Putin has essentially had two endure the speculation of when exactly he would order his army into Ukraine. If he started out trying to bluff Zelensky, he might have over-reached already. Instead he found himself being goaded by the world's press into invading Ukraine.
Consider for a moment the troops Putin has amassed is about 190,000. The Ukrainians have 200,000. It's not like they have a significant advantage over the Ukrainians. While they are spread right across the north and eastern border, they don't have the best lay of the land to take on 200,000. If I were running this on a computer game, I don't think I would want to be sending in my 190,000 against 200,000 who know I'm coming.
I also covered the general low discipline and low morale of the Russians army in Belarus in the previous post. They're not exactly the best, even on their best days. If you add in the general lack of desire to engage in a fratricidal war amongst the Russian officer corps, maybe invading Ukraine is not an action they want to take. While Putin might rant on about how Ukraine belongs to a Greater Russia because they share slavic roots in ancient Rus, it sort of rings hollow when you have your troops on the border trying to put together a Russian Anschluss.
It's all enough to make you wonder if Putin in fact wants to follow this trajectory. Maybe, just maybe this has become all too much. So yesterday I had this thought that what Putin might go for was a quick PR victory for his own people, declare a 'Mission Accomplished' moment for himself and just send his troops home after all. How could he do that? Well he might just send his army into Donetsk and Lugansk, declare the crisis over and make himself appear victorious. So far, he seems to have gone in that direction.
Shadow Boxing History
I've also been thinking there's something of a re-run of the Cuban Missile Crisis in all of this. It essentially starts because Russian generals get this idea that maybe JFK is a very weak President because he's so young, and America could be pushed around with the threat of an all out nuclear war. So they send missiles to Cuba and of course the CIA spots the missiles and this precipitates a blockade of Cuba by the Americans.
This time Vladimir Putin has got it into his head that maybe Joe Biden is a weak President because he is so old, and so perhaps he could be pushed around. Putin could try throwing his weight around and re-annex Ukraine with the threat of World War III on the European continent. So he amasses his troops on the border with Ukraine and of course the CIA spotted it and told the world.
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, it turned out Khrushchev himself did not want to go to a Mutually Assured Destruction scenario, and so back-channeled his desire to defuse the crisis to the White House. This is not to say somebody in the Kremlin today is definitely back-channelling to the White House, but it seems likely that somebody on the Russian side with some influence might want to de-escalate this mess.
Here's something for Vladimir Putin to think about. He's already one of the richest men on the planet. He's been running Russia across 3 decades. For better or worse, he's even had an Olympics in Sochi, he's run a few wars, and he's still standing. He might be looking for a big win that would put him in the history books as some kind of national hero, but he's already in the history books as another strong man leader of Russia to rival Stalin. Does he really want to risk going down like Hitler, fighting the Americans and the British and the assorted countries of Europe? Or worse still, lose access to his bloated Swiss bank accounts over all this Ukraine business? Is Ukraine really worth risking all of it?
I'd be a bit leery of losing all of it over Ukraine. I'd also be leery of a coup.
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