Crimea isn't enough for Putin. 
He wants half of Ukraine

Don't waste time trying to second-guess Putin, the Russian leader has made his intentions
on Ukraine quite clear, writes Tony Halpin

Today is Forgiveness Sunday for Russian Orthodox believers, the day when they ask forgiveness of each other for any hurt they may have caused. It’s safe to say that Vladimir Putin is not in the mood to take part this year.

With Russian troops already in Crimea and Putin receiving authorisation from a puppet parliament to send more into Ukraine, he stands on the brink of an unprecedented crisis in his relationship with the West.

In less than a week, Ukraine has indeed become the worst security issue facing the EU  and the US since the Balkan wars. 

Many Western leaders are scratching their heads in baffled amazement at his actions, but there are only two things anyone needs to understand about Putin.

First, Putin always means what he says and says what he means. He is famously blunt, even crude, in his comments at home and Russians never waste time analysing what lies behind his messages. In the EU and the US, however, whole armies of political and military analysts try to divine the “true” meaning of his words and the implications for western policy.

But Putin made clear in his request to the Federation Council to send troops into action in Ukraine that he wants to send them not just to Crimea -  where the crisis was first triggered - but also to the largely Russian-speaking east of the country. This means that he will send Russian troops into eastern Ukraine as soon as the opportunity presents itself and he said as much in his 90-minute telephone conversation with President Obama yesterday.

Some commentators are already kidding themselves that the crisis can somehow be contained in Crimea. In their argument, Crimea's status is hazy, so  the West should not overract if Russia reclaims it, but rather seek to limit the damage. 

They’re not listening to Putin.

Pro-Russian demonstrations are already being stirred up in eastern cities in Ukraine, where crowds are raising Russian flags over local government buildings. Russia’s Federal Migration Service today declared a “looming humanitarian catastrophe”, caused by an alleged flood of 140,000 refugees from Ukraine into Russia in the past two weeks, and 675,000 in all so far this year. 

Except that nobody has produced any video or photographs to prove the existence of this apparent tidal wave of people fleeing to safety in Russia.

Thousands marched in Moscow in support of Putin’s “humanitarian” intervention today. Many appeared to have been government employees bused in for the event, which lasted little more than an hour, to allow state television to give the impression of strong public demand for military action in Ukraine. Meanwhile, those same television stations are broadcasting that people in eastern and southern Ukraine refuse to recognise the legitimacy of the authorities in Kiev.

So the ground has been set for a broader intervention in Ukraine, a country that Putin reportedly described to George W. Bush in 2008 as “not even a state”. At that meeting in Bucharest, he went on: “What is Ukraine? Part of its territories is Eastern Europe, but the greater part is a gift from us.”

This leads to the second essential point to understand about Putin. He no longer considers himself simply as a politician, but as a man of destiny with a mission to restore Russia’s greatness. Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, even proclaimed before Putin’s re-election in 2012 that he had been "sent by God" to rule Russia.
A year after deriding Ukraine’s statehood, Putin made a very public visit to lay a wreath at the grave in Moscow of Anton Denikin, a commander in the White Army who fought the Bolsheviks after the Russian Revolution.

Putin recommended journalists in attendance to read Denikin’s diaries, saying: “He has a discussion there about Big Russia and Little Russia - Ukraine. He says that no one should be allowed to interfere in relations between us; they have always been the business of Russia itself.”
Putin and Kirill at Denikin grave May 2009
Patriarch Kirill with Putin at the Donskoy Monastery cemetery in May 2009
The context was Ukraine’s efforts at the time to join Nato, an ambition thwarted by Russia’s war with Georgia, which was also seeking membership. With a pro-Western leadership again in charge in Ukraine, Putin fears that Nato membership will become an issue once more, and with it the question of removing Russia’s Black Sea Fleet from Crimea - both of which are anathema to the Kremlin.

As he made clear in 2009, Putin believes Russian-Ukrainian relations are an internal family matter, not a question for international diplomacy. Now he is acting on that belief to reclaim “Little Russia”, even at the risk of a partition of Ukraine into its eastern and Europe-facing western halves.

Putin has made the cornerstone of his third term as president the creation of a “Eurasian Union” uniting the former republics of the Soviet Union into an economic and, ultimately, political entity to rival the EU. Ukraine, as the largest republic outside Russia, is critical to that vision, but the overthrow of the pro-Moscow Viktor Yanukovych as president and the determination of Ukraine’s new leadership to seek ties with the EU have wrecked its prospects.

Ukraine’s industrial base is overwhelmingly in the east -  the area, along with Crimea, that Putin regards as Russia’s “gift” to its neighbour. Both regions are suddenly up for grabs and Putin’s sense of historical mission gives him every motivation to try to redraw the map.

One more thing many western leaders fail to understand about Putin is that, unlike them, he does not think in terms of the next election but on a timescale of 20 years. 

He believes Western anger over Ukraine will eventually fade and, when it does, he’ll still have Crimea and maybe all of “Little Russia”.

©Tony Halpin, 2014
moscow march
Thousands march through Moscow to support the Ukraine invasion. They were bused in and didn't stay long. Picture: Paval Golovkin/AP
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Halpin on Ukraine

Putin has demonstrated his willingness to play rough to secure his objectives. Washington and Brussels have shown little sign so far that they have the political and financial will to deter him from doing so in Ukraine.
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