Ukraine: The West’s worst fears

Will he or won’t he? Reading Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin’s mind has never been easy. And that’s just how he likes it. In his standoff with the West over Ukraine, the Russian president has taken the guessing game to a whole new level, however. Depending on whom you ask, Putin is about to plunge Europe into its most serious military conflict since World War II or is staging an elaborate bluff to show the West that he’s as dangerous as ever. If attention is what he’s after, he’s got it. At stake is not just the future of a free and democratic Ukraine, but Europe’s entire post-Cold War security architecture. After amassing more than 100,000 troops and military equipment along Ukraine’s border at strategic points from Belarus to Crimea, Putin has put Russia in a position to attack and occupy its southern neighbor within weeks. Ukraine’s armed forces, however determined, would be no match for Russia’s well-equipped and battle-tested military. The question is not whether Ukraine could repel an attack, but rather how long it could keep the Russians at bay — and what happens next.

“The Russians might not have much difficulty declaring victory after a few weeks, but that’s when the real war will begin,” said Maximilian Terhalle, a German war studies scholar and visiting professor at the London School of Economics. “The difficulty would be to hold it and the Russians could very quickly be looking at a brutal guerrilla war.” Despite such risks, a set of maximalist demands that Kremlin negotiators delivered to American officials at a meeting in Geneva this month suggests Putin isn’t looking for a diplomatic settlement. Moscow’s conditions for pulling back — a ban on further NATO expansion, the end of cooperation between the alliance and nonmembers and a halt to NATO activity on the territory of its Central and Eastern European members — were obvious nonstarters. One theory is that with his unrealistic wish list, the Russian leader was simply trying to create a fig leaf for the history books, in the hope that he won’t be the only one blamed for what comes next. “About the only thing not on the list was a request to return Alaska,” said Michael Kofman, a leading expert on the Russian military and director of the Russia studies program at CNA, a Washington-based think tank. “I think he wants a U.S. refusal to justify a use of force and for the historical record.”