Paul
Goble
Staunton, September 3 – The statement
by Daniel Fried, the US State Department’s coordinator on sanctions policy,
that Washington has prepared a plan on how it would respond to a new round of
expansion of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has generated speculation among
Moscow experts about what that plan includes.
The American ambassador said that
the US has “discussed it with Europe,” including Germany, France, Poland and
the UK, but does not want to get into details about “a hypothetical situation.”
But he added, “if the worst happens and [he] has in mind a full-scale invasion
in Ukraine we have a plan worked out.”
That has sparked discussions in
Moscow about what that plan might consist of beyond additional sanctions, and
those discussions among the expert community there are important because any
anticipated response by the West is likely to be an important factor in the
Kremlin’s decision to adopt this or that policy.
On the “Svobodnaya pressa” portal,
Dmitry Rodionov interviews three Moscow experts about what they expect and
equally important what, on the basis of past practice, they do not expect the
US and its Western allies to do in the event of expanded Russian military
action in Ukraine (svpressa.ru/war21/article/155742/).
Stanislav Byshok
of the CIS-EMO Organization, says that any Western response would involve “above
all economic and political measures.”
Military ones, he suggests, would be “secondary” at most. Sanctions
would be increased. But one military response might be an American attack on
Russian military bases abroad and above all “in Syria.”
Former Ukrainian president Viktor
Yanukovich might have asked Moscow to intervene in 2014, Byshok continues, but
the Russian government almost certainly would have abstained from any major
steps precisely because that Ukrainian leader had completely lost control of
the situation there and Ukraine could have been pacified only with extreme
difficulty.
Asked why Moscow did not repeat the
Crimean scenario in the Donbass and annex it, the Russian analyst says that it
did not do so not because it couldn’t have but because it would have been far
more difficult to deal “with the sharply pro-Ukrainian population of the Donbass,
the percent of which while small was much higher than in pro-Russian Crimea.”
Consequently, Moscow limited itself
to the dispatch of volunteers and “humanitarian convoys. It could only make
more overt military moves after the Donbass population ceased to feel loyalty
to Ukraine because of the attacks on pro-Moscow positions by Ukrainian military
forces, he argues.
Bushok suggests that “some compare
the current crisis with the start of World War II. In reality, at that time
varioius European countries concluded among themselves a mass of technically
unfulfillable agreements about mutual military assistance in the event of
foreign aggression which they feared from Germany.”
As a result, he says, “feeling
themselves defended by these agreements, certain countries began to conduct themselves
in an extremely sharp way toward Germany … because they were certain that they
would be defended by their partners.
What happened after that,” Byshok adds, “we all know.”
According to the Moscow analyst, the
US is “completely comfortable with an unstable Ukraine continuing in a state of
‘no peace but no war’ with Russia. They will not fight for Ukraine against
Russia although this doesn’t mean that they will not continue to use this
conflict to contain Russia both in this region and in others.”
Aleksandr Eliseyev, a historian and
political analyst, dismisses Fried’s coments as “propaganda,” as an effort to
play on fears in the hopes that the US will spend more money on arms. At the
same time, he suggests, while the US won’t send its own troops, it and other
Western countries already have “mercenary volunteers” on the ground there.
If pro-Russian forces kill one of
these, he says, Hillary Clinton will use it in her electoral campaign against
Donald Trump.
Eliseyev also dismisses Fried’s
statement that the West would increase sanctions against Russia in the event Moscow
were to launch a large invasion of Ukraine.
That too is simply “propaganda,” he says. Russia simply needs to keep calm in the face
of this “war of nerves” the West has unleashed.
Nikolay Dimlevich, a security expert
at the Russian Foundation for the Development of Advanced Technology, agrees,
saying that the West will seek to make use of mercenaries and collaborationists
not only in Ukraine but in other former Soviet republics against Russia in the future.
Talk about anything more is simply “propaganda.”
The possibility that the US would
intervene directly is microscopically small as Moscow knows Western intensions
quite well, Dimlevich says. The US is
seeking to provoke Russia into acting because it has as its goal the expulsion
of Russia from its position as a permanent member of the UN Security Council.
The US, he says, is following the
model used against the USSR in 1939 when following Soviet intervention in
Finland, “the West excluded the USSR from the League of Nations. If Russia goes
into the territory of Ukraine, the UN would,” under this plan, “would deprive
Russia of permanent membership in the UN Security Council.”
Dimlevich adds that a softer version
of this tactic would be a dilution of Russia’s role there by adding more
permanent members, including perhaps, Germany, India, Japan, Brazil and South
Africa.”
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