Excerpt
Here's Why Putin's Not-Quite-All-Out War on Ukraine Has Gone from Simmering to Explosive
MOSCOW— Why did Ukraine decide just now to challenge Russia’s growing presence in a small body of water near Crimea? Why did Russia turn its guns on Ukraine’s little gunboats on Sunday and seize three of them along with their crews?
Could this be the prelude to a wider war?
How far will Russian President Vladimir Putin push the confrontation? What will he say when he meets Donald Trump and other leaders at the G20 summit at the end of the week? What will Trump say to him? And why on earth is Trump equivocating when his top diplomats are denouncing “aggressive Russian actions” and “reckless Russian escalation”?
"Either way, we don't like what's happening, and hopefully, it will get straightened out," Trump told reporters Monday, more than 24 hours after the incident. "I know Europe is not—they are not thrilled. They're working on it too. We're all working on it together."
"Either way"?
The answers to these questions are not always clear. But a bit of history is required if we’re going to begin to understand the tense, potentially explosive confrontation developing between Russia and Ukraine—one that has NATO worried and rumbling while Trump falls back on his “both sides” brand of reasoning.
We now know, because Putin would later admit it on state television, that in 2014 at the height of Ukraine’s revolution, on the very day in February when Putin’s ally, President Viktor Yanukovych, fled the country, Putin ordered his commanders “to begin work on returning Crimea to Russia.”
It had been part of Moscow’s empire under the czars, and then under the Soviets, who had transferred it to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic — an administrative move that suddenly took on huge strategic and nationalist importance after 1991 when the Soviet empire collapsed and Crimea remained part of independent Ukraine.
As the Maidan revolution in Kiev moved the country into the orbit of the European Union and potentially of NATO in the winter of 2013-2014, a common refrain among Russian politicians became, “If Ukraine escapes to the West, then Crimea should come back home.”
And within days of Yanukovych’s departure, the peninsula was full of “little green men”—in fact burly soldiers wearing masks and unmarked uniforms—with the newest communication equipment and Russian weaponry. They controlled a hasty referendum in Crimea, and unsurprisingly a majority of voters supported merging with Russia.
By March of 2014, 445 out of 446 Russian Parliament members voted in favor of Russia’s annexation of Crimea. In the process, Ukraine lost about 80 percent of its navy and only about 6,000 out of 20,000 Ukrainian army soldiers, sailors and members of the coast guard, police and special services returned to the Ukrainian mainland from the annexed peninsula. The rest defected to Russia.
Other people fled into mainland Ukraine. Today at least 40,000 Ukrainian citizens cannot return to their homes on the Crimean peninsula, including thousands of Crimean Tatars.
A few weeks after Crimea was annexed, masked men in new green uniforms appeared in the largely industrial region of eastern Ukraine known as Donbas, and a war began between Ukrainian and Russia-backed rebel forces, including Russian recruits and Russian army officers who officially were “on holidays.”
What happened on Sunday was one more milestone—and potentially the most dangerous—in this now five-year-old, undeclared war.
Former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine John Herbst, now with the Atlantic Council in Kiev, calls this “a significant escalation.”
“Before, Moscow always denied in real time that its soldiers were involved,” Herbst said in a conference call. There were no “little green men” this time around. “Here in the light of day Russian naval vessels attacked Ukrainian naval vessels.”
Herbst said the engagement was “unprovoked.”
But nothing is ever quite that simple in the Ukraine conflict. Read more.
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