Paul
Goble
Staunton, August 30 – Whether Vladimir
Putin will launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in the near future or simply
continue to engage in destabilizing sabre rattling to undermine Kyiv and distract
Russians from their problems at home in advance of the Duma elections and the
international community from his actions is far from clear.
One
survey of regional experts found no agreement on what the Kremlin leader may do
next, instead concluding that with Putin, “it is possible to expect almost
anything” given that he has made surprise and unpredictability the centerpieces
of his approach to policy making (inforesist.org/ekspertyi-o-veroyatnosti-nastuplenii-ot-rossii-mozhno-ozhidat-chto-ugodno/).
But in the last 24 hours, three
developments represent a further ramping up of tensions by the Kremlin, adding
to those it has already put in place as a result of the new military maneuvers
and the involvement of large parts of the civilian authorities in them. They thus deserve to be taken seriously even
if they do not necessarily point to an expanded war.
First of all, the Kremlin’s favorite
polling agency, VTsIOM, reported today that ever fewer Russians are paying
attention to events in Ukraine and ever fewer back the regime’s support for the
DNR and LNR, with some Russian analysts saying that Russians no longer view
this conflict as “’the victory of good over evil’” (sobkorr.ru/news/57C542BC8CE56.html).
Given how central that trope has
been in Putin’s propaganda effort, it is entirely possible that he might think
that a new round of aggression would refocus Russian attention on Ukraine and
mobilize support for himself. It is unthinkable, given his nature, that he
would back down and even implicitly acknowledge his errors and crimes.
Instead, this result almost
certainly pushes Putin in the direction of redoubling his bets either in
Ukraine or somewhere else.
Second, Sergey Markov, a Russian
analyst with close ties to the Kremlin, says that the US is planning to commit
aggression in Ukraine both to undermine the G-20 summit in Beijing and to help
Hillary Clinton defeat Donald Trump (politobzor.net/show-104462-sergey-markov-ssha-gotovy-nachat-predvybornuyu-voynu-na-donbasse.html).
Accusing Russia’s opponents of
planning to do what Moscow in fact is planning to do is standard operating
procedure in the Orwellian world of Kremlin propaganda. And Markov is
consistent not only with that trope but with another: he says that “Russia’s
fate and to a large extent the fate of the world” is being decided in the
Donbass.
That also points to a dangerous
trend in Russian thinking: It reaffirms what many Kremlin backers have insisted
on, that Russia is not fighting Ukraine in Ukraine but fighting the United
States or even the West as a whole. That
position makes it even more difficult for someone like Putin to back down.
And third, the Russian media are
giving enormous play to reports from Kyiv that the Ukrainian army is mobilizing
and that secret orders to that effect have already gone out to regional
commanders (polit.ru/article/2016/08/29/mobilization/ picking up on vesti-ukr.com/strana/163738-prikazano-gotovitsja-k-mobilizacii-chto-pravdivo-iz-sluhov-o-prizyve).
Kyiv “is afraid of provocations.
Where one will take place, in Crimea or in the Donbass is still not clear,”
according to sources in the Ukrainian defense ministry cited by the Ukrainian
media and replayed in the Russian media and a Ukrainian response that the
Russian outlets are treating as suggesting that Ukrainian forces may advance.
That is part and parcel of the
Markov line, but there is another aspect to this report that Moscow is playing
up. The Polit.ru portal quotes Georgy Zhizhov of the Center for Political
Technologies as saying that there is no need for Ukraine to mobilize because there
is no threat, exactly the kind of calming message that an aggressor would put
out before acting.
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