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more. The dialogue with France, always superficial, has definitively stalled. At the same time, co-ordination between US and European policies on Russia has substantially increased under Biden.
The self-proclaimed people’s republics in the Donbas have been in limbo throughout these years. They are increasingly distancing themselves from Ukraine and integrating ever more closely with Russia. The ruble is the currency; Russian is the only official language; and 10% or more of the population of 3.6mn have already acquired Russian citizenship. Yet their future is unclear. Still wedded to the Minsk peace process and unwilling to sever its remaining ties with Europe, Moscow will not formally recognise the republics or allow them to accede to Russia. Frustration is mounting.
Behaviour
It was Zelenskiy who moved first. He dealt a serious blow
to the Russophone opposition by closing down its TV
stations and charging its leaders with high treason. From
a staunchly nationalist position, he advanced into the political territory of former president Petro Poroshenko. He took on the legal system head-on and elevated the National Security and Defense Council to the top position in the Ukrainian government. Most recently, he also demonstrated his willingness to stand up to Russia.
In February, Zelenskiy ordered troops (as part of the rotation process) and heavy weapons (as a show of force) to go near
to the conflict zone in Donbas. He did not venture out as far as Poroshenko, who dispatched small Ukrainian naval vessels through the Russian-controlled waters near the Kerch Strait in
“The special relationship with Germany is no more. The dialogue with France, always superficial, has definitively stalled. At the same time, co-ordination between US and European policies on Russia has substantially increased under Biden”
late 2018, but it was enough to get him noticed in Moscow. The fact of the matter is that even if Ukraine cannot seriously hope to win the war in Donbas, it can successfully provoke Russia into action. This, in turn, would produce a knee-jerk reaction from Ukraine’s Western supporters and further aggravate Moscow’s relations, particularly with Europe.
One way or another, the fate of Nord Stream II will directly affect Ukraine’s interests. Being seen as a victim of Russian aggression and presenting itself as a frontline state checking
Opinion 69 Russia’s further advance toward Europe is a major asset of
Kyiv’s foreign policy.
Even though Kyiv’s moves at that time were not preparations for a military offensive (Dmitry Kozak, Russia’s senior
official responsible for dealing with Ukraine, said he saw them as a PR stunt), the Kremlin decided to seize upon them to raise the stakes. Given the current state of Russian-US relations, Moscow felt it had nothing to lose and something to gain by acting boldly and on a larger scale. Russia decided not so much to test the new US president as to warn him early on of the dangers involved regarding Ukraine.
The Russian military massed troops along the entire Russo- Ukrainian border, from the north to the east to the south.
It did so visibly and made sure that Western observers could analyse the manoeuvres and conclude that they might not necessarily be a drill. Some reports, for example, spoke of field hospitals being brought to the border. In making its move, Moscow was pursuing several objectives:
To intimidate and deter Ukraine’s leaders, whom the Kremlin regards as inexperienced and irresponsible (in Kozak’s disparaging words, “children with matches”);
To send a message to the United States urging Washington
to take better care of its wards, lest they get America itself
into trouble (there were repeated references to the Mikheil Saakashvili syndrome, referring to the then Georgian leader launching an attack in 2008 against the Russian-protected breakaway region of South Ossetia in the belief that he would be supported by a US military intervention, which never came);
To convince the Germans and the French that supporting everything that Ukraine says or does carries a cost for Europe;
To reassure the people of Donbas that Russia will not abandon them to the Ukrainian army should it attack the two enclaves.
During the crisis, Kozak, who is also the Kremlin’s deputy chief of staff, essentially repeated President Vladimir Putin’s earlier stern warning that a Ukrainian offensive in Donbas would spell the end of Ukrainian statehood.
Having made their points by means of actions on the ground, the Russians were then available to discuss the situation, both with German and French political leaders and the top US military commander. In those conversations, they dismissed out of hand all European criticisms about the troop movements on their own territory and only engaged
in a detailed professional discussion with the US chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, simply to help him avoid
a dangerous miscalculation.
Results
It appears that in the short term, President Zelenskiy got what he was aiming for. Having burnished his patriotic
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