Paul
Goble
Staunton, October 15 – Pavel Felgengauer,
one of Russia’s most widely respected independent defense and security
analysts, says that as a result of Moscow’s actions in Ukraine, a new Cold War
has begun and Russia, all of Moscow’s bombast notwithstanding, has “already
lost it.”
In remarks to a meeting of the
School of Civic Leaders in Barnaul this past weekend, the “Novaya gazeta”
commentator said that Russia today “is possibly in the most serious military
conflict it has been in since 1945” and that the result of that conflict does
not appear to be a successful one for Moscow (sibinfo.su/news/russia/1/53158.html).
“On the one hand,” he said, this war
has undermined relations with the West in general and the United States in
particular. And “on the other, the conflict has allowed for an assessment of
the results of modernization which has taken place in the country in recent
years.” That assessment must inevitably be a negative one.
One need not issue challenges to the
US, he said. The Americans “love challenges and respond to them.” Russia can’t afford to pay the price that
involves. Sanctions are already in place and they will be difficult to end
anytime soon. No one understands Russia in the West or understands the logic of
Putin’s actions.”
Felgengauer said that he does not
see “a way out of this crisis with [only] minimal losses” because ”the Russian
leadership has lost the trust of the West,” and Russia’s lag behind the West “will
thus only increase.”
The analyst devoted most of his
remarks to what he said were the four stages of Russia’s “campaign in Ukraine
in 2014. The first involved the
annexation of Crimea. Moscow had planned for “a Hong Kong variant” in which “Crimea
would be de facto Russian but de jure Ukrainian,” something many in Europe
would have “swallowed” without difficulty.
There wouldn’t have been any
sanctions, “but then Putin unexpectedly said that we will take Crimea
completely.” Because Moscow had strengthened its own military position there
and because it had thoroughly penetrated and compromised the Ukrainian command,
“everything went off successfully.”
The second “Novorossiya” stage was “unsuccessful
from a military point of view,” Felgengauer said. It presupposed the use of special groups of
forces to destabilize the situation in what the West now calls “hybrid war.” Moscow assumed that the Ukrainian army would
collapse, but “it turned out that [Ukrainian forces] were a little better
prepared.
The third phase involved “active
military actions,” the analyst said. “At
the end of August, the Russian counter-attack began. Russian regular forces
entered the territory of Ukraine, something that for Ukraine was unexpected.” This phase was also successful because of the
reorganization of Russia’s military and Moscow’s purchase of Israeli drones.
The fourth state, the one in which the two sides now are in, Felgengauer
said, is “the stabilization of the situation.” Russian forces have left, an
inevitable move given the approach of winter and the impossibility of fighting
more this year. But the bad news for Moscow is that Ukraine will use this to
modernize its forces. After a time, it too will have drones as well as “much which
doesn’t exist in Russia and which perhaps won’t” ever.
“What then will
Russia do?” Felgengauer asked rhetorically. “Organized modernization has not
been carried through to the end, there isn’t enough money for technical
re-armament,” and consequently, some in Moscow are talking about the one thing
it does have that Ukraine will not: nuclear weapons.
Moreover, he
concluded, “without the technical assistance and help of the West,” something
Russia isn’t going to get anytime soon but Ukraine will, “it will be impossible
to have any modernization of the Russian armed forces.”
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