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72 Opinion
bne December 2021
in addition to Nato’s Baltic realm already beginning just 600 km away from the Russian capital in the west. In both cases we are talking about distances smaller than that between Washington and Boston.
When it comes to this perceived threat, Putin knows he is being supported by a vast majority of Russians, given the country’s historical experience of various deadly menaces from the West and the resulting paranoia.
There are also more specific red lines, such as not allowing Nato vessels anything remotely similar to American “freedom of navigation” operations in South China Sea aimed at antagonising Beijing.
Ever since the Kerch strait incident in 2018, when the Russian navy shot at Ukrainian vessels which tried to pass into the Sea of Azov, Russia has been on high alert for any similar developments. It didn’t help that hawkish American experts, such as former US army commander in Europe Ben Hodges, were actively pushing for Nato’s active role in containing Russia in the Black Sea theatre after Russia has re-establish itself in the Mediterranean.
Putin played it cool when the British warship HMS Defender sailed through what Russia deems its territorial waters off the coast of the occupied Crimea. But when on October 20 two nuclear-capable US bombers flew near Crimea, followed by US warships entering the Black Sea, Russia once again began a very demonstrative military build-up on strategic directions pointing towards Ukraine.
Another likely cause of the escalation was Ukraine successfully testing a Bayraktar drone, of Karabakh war fame, against Russian-backed forces in Donbas.
All of these developments went in parallel with the US, Ukraine and several other European countries, notably including Poland, trying to derail Nord Stream 2 – a gas pipeline project that could potentially create a multi-billion-dollar gap in the Ukrainian budget by starving the country of gas transit revenues.
They pinned their hopes on the election success of the German Green Party, which positions itself as a vocal opponent of the NS2. The party showed strong support during the election campaign, but in the last few months it was overtaken by the Social Democrat Party, who proceeded to win the election.
Eventually Biden decided it was no longer productive to keep antagonising Germany, a key Nato ally, so he struck a deal with Merkel, promising not to apply sanctions against NS2 in exchange for Merkel’s promise that Russia would not try to suffocate Ukraine’s economy by depriving it of gas transit. But that does not mean the US wouldn’t use the period when Russia finds itself tied up by the Nord Stream certification process in Germany to push Putin’s red lines with regards
to Ukraine. Or, in an ideal scenario, lure Russia’s paranoid leadership into making a disastrous political mistake that
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would swing public opinion in Germany and derail NS2 altogether. That might explain all the moves in the Black Sea and elsewhere which are designed to provoke a knee-jerk reaction in Moscow.
Enter Lukashenko – a certified joker in this house of cards. The hawkish wing of the Western political establishments finds it convenient to brand him as Putin’s obedient puppet. But Russia’s failure to agree on deeper integration with Belarus, which became apparent this autumn, is larger than life evidence that Lukashenko is playing his own game by pitting Russia against the West.
The crisis he manufactured on the Polish border allows him to exert pressure on neighbouring EU countries, which don’t recognise him as a legitimate president after 2020 elections. But he is also blackmailing Russia, which coerced him into drafting a constitutional reform that envisages him resigning from the presidential post.
In his quest to raise the stakes by making the riot at the border resemble war, the Belarusian dictator is inciting Middle Eastern refugees to attack Polish border guards, arming them with wire cutters and stun grenades, and backing them with spotlights and laser beams to blind Polish soldiers.
Lukashenko made a conscious attempt to get Germans involved by threatening to block gas supplies via the Yamal pipeline that runs through Belarus and Poland before reaching Germany. That strategy paid off this week when he got a phone call from Angela Merkel, which amounted to the first Western leader talking to him as a legitimate ruler of Belarus since last year’s election.
But in doing so, he is becoming a major liability for Putin, who needs to get Nord Stream 2 up and running, not least because it would get untie his hands with regards to Ukraine and a plethora of other issues, if only to a limited extent.
Lukashenko is not the only one who is using the international policy conundrum, which Putin is facing, to advance his goals. On Tuesday, Azerbaijan renewed its aggression against Russia’s military ally Armenia, which now has every right under the joint defence treaty to request assistance from Moscow.
Alarmingly, this entire entanglement of conflicting interests and stealthy sabotage is beginning to resemble the years and months preceding two previous big wars in Europe. The fact that a few international actors are normalising war as part of their political vocabulary adds to the overall sensation of global political establishment entertaining itself with the game of Russian roulette.
Leonid Ragozin is an independent journalist based in Riga. He covers Russian and Ukrainian politics for a variety of Western media outlets. He co-authored multiple editions of Lonely Planet Guides to Russia, Ukraine and other countries. He tweets at @leonidragozin.