Insight
Why the West should deter a Russian attack on Ukraine by Ian Bond, 30 Novemberber 2021
Russian forces are massing near Ukraine’s border again. Putin hopes to win concessions from Kyiv without fighting, but more concessions will not bring peace. The West should focus on deterring Russia. For the second time this year, Russian forces are massing near Ukraine’s north-eastern and southern borders, flanking the areas of the Donbas region that they or their local proxies have controlled since invading Ukraine in 2014. In April, more than 100,000 Russian troops were deployed in regions near Ukraine, ostensibly for exercises. The Ukrainian Ministry of Defence claims there are now as many as 90,000 in the area again. The Kremlin has been conducting an information campaign against Ukraine for several months, questioning its sovereignty. Russia may be preparing to invade, or merely intending to intimidate. As NATO foreign ministers meet in Riga on November 30th and December 1st, they should consider how to deter Moscow, reassure Kyiv and minimise instability in Eastern Europe. Russian President Vladimir Putin has made no secret of his views on Ukraine. In 2008, when the Bucharest NATO summit meeting promised Ukraine and Georgia membership, Putin told US President George W Bush: “You understand, George, that Ukraine is not even a state!”. In 2013, questioned by Charles Grant about his attitude to Ukraine, Putin said: “We have common traditions, a common mentality, a common history and a common culture.… I want to repeat again, we are one people… [Ukraine] is part of our greater Russian, or Russian-Ukrainian, world”. This year Putin has returned to his theme. In a long article published in July, ‘On the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians’, Putin argued that modern Ukraine was “entirely the product of the Soviet era … shaped – for a significant part – on the lands of historical Russia”, and blamed the West for seeking to turn Ukraine into an “anti-Moscow Russia”. Former Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, currently the deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council, followed up in October with an article likening Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (who is Jewish) to German Jewish intellectuals who asked to serve in the SS; Medvedev’s conclusion was that there was no point in talking to Ukrainian vassals of Western masters. The Kremlin is using these narratives to convey different messages to different audiences. The Russian population is supposed to feel threatened by the West’s ‘puppet regime’ in Kyiv, and to believe that CER INSIGHT: Why the West should deter a Russian attack on Ukraine 30 November 2021
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