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bne December 2021
Opinion 73
MOSCOW BLOG
Is Russia’s build-up of troops on Ukraine’s border a new Cuban Missile crisis?
Ben Aris in Berlin
Russia has clearly been building up forces close to Ukraine’s border but as bne IntelliNews has reported experts are convinced that Russia will not actually attack. So what is really going on?
This is not the first time that Russia has built up its forces on Ukraine’s border. In April the Russian army also built up its forces on Ukraine’s border in a very public and obvious way that also created a major scare.
That confrontation only ended at the end of April when Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu ordered the men back to barracks at the end of the month.
At the time analysts speculated the gesture was designed to improve Russia’s hand ahead of a one-on-one summit between Russian President Vladimir Putin and US president Joe Biden in Geneva on June 16. The idea was to show the US that Russia had the ability to cause serious trouble in the conflict in Ukraine, which the Kremlin turned on or off at will.
Now there is another build up and a second Putin-Biden summit is being planned to happen sometime before the end of the year. Could the same thing be happening again? Some analysts think so.
Part of the puzzle is that the Kremlin is increasingly unhappy with what Putin called a de facto membership of Ukraine
into Nato, even if the country is not being offered formal membership. The US has increased its military aid to Ukraine this year from the approximately $250mn it got in the last two years to $400mn. US navy vessels just delivered a reported 80 tonnes of arms and ammunition to Ukraine and the UK has also closed a $1.3bn naval upgrade deal earlier this year. UK Defence Minister Ben Wallace was in Kyiv earlier this month to discuss a follow-up deal.
Putin has taken all this badly and said that the west is ignoring Russia’s “red lines” when it comes to arming Ukraine. To make matters worse Ukraine used its new Turkish-made drones
There was a big build-up of Russian troops in April ahead of a Putin-Biden summit that the Kremlin used to put pressure on the US. Is the same thing happening again?
against a rebel artillery unit in Donbas this month and fired a US-supplied Javelin missile for the first time as well.
Moscow has protested loudly, claiming that the US is whipping up “hysteria” about the troop movements and escalating the situation in Donbas with these arms sales.
All these moves could be taken as both sides playing a game of “multi-dimensional chess” ahead of the next summit between the two presidents.
Putin's re-positioning of troops closer to Ukraine is part of a Russian push to secure and frame the terms of another summit with Biden, two sources close to official Russian foreign policy circles, told Reuters; The other big aim is to signal to the West that it should stop helping Ukraine upgrade its military and that Kyiv should avoid escalating a grinding conflict with Russian- backed separatists in eastern Ukraine, the two sources added.
"Putin needs another summit meeting with Biden," Andrey Kortunov, head of RIAC, a foreign policy think-tank in Moscow close to the Foreign Ministry, told Reuters. "Apparently he now believes that the Europeans cannot really do much without the Americans and that the U.S. President has the final decision on European security measures on behalf of the Western alliance."
In response to the western complaints Putin has complained about aggressive Nato troop movements, including naval exercises in the Black Sea and nuclear exercises that involve bombers flying within 20km of Russia’s border.
Nato admits there has been a significant build up in its own forces facing off against Russia since before the current crisis started, but dismiss this as an innocent reinforcement against potential Russian aggression.
In an interview with CNN Nato Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said: “Nato has implement the biggest reinforcement since the end of the Cold War. For the first time in our history we have combat ready troops in the eastern part
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