Is President
Putin planning further military action in Ukraine? That is a question being
urgently asked not only in Kiev, but in all western capitals. With maximum
publicity, Moscow has trumpeted accusations that Ukrainian saboteurs were
infiltrating Crimea and killed a Russian soldier and a policeman in the
Russian-occupied peninsula. This gave Mr Putin a pretext to issue unusually
belligerent threats, saying that Russia would not leave such attacks
unanswered. A nervous Ukraine has moved troops to the border with Crimea and
placed its troops on high alert.
Mr Putin’s threats are
part of a series of recent moves that have bemused and alarmed the West. His
enthusiastic rapprochement with Turkey, after the failed coup, looks like an
opportunistic attempt to offer a vengeful President Erdogan an alternative to
Nato, which Turkish politicians have accused of not supporting the government
in its crackdown on so-called subversive elements that supported the coup.
Luring Turkey from its Nato anchorings while it plays a crucial role in the
western fight against Islamic State and in stemming the flow of refugees to
Europe would be an obvious aim for the Russian leader.
Moscow has also been caught
red-handed hacking into Democratic party files in America. And its security
services have been exposed as serial cheats in organising the disgraceful
cover-up of the nationwide doping of Russia’s Olympic athletes.
Although Russia has a
record of aggressive action when the world’s attention is distracted, a new war
with Ukraine makes little objective sense when the Kremlin is still desperate
to avoid fresh sanctions and have the present ones dropped. What seems more
likely is that Mr Putin has manufactured an external crisis because he is under
pressure at home. He faces parliamentary elections next month, and although
there is little chance of any opposition to the ruling party making headway,
complaints are growing. Russians have stoically put up with a sharp drop in
living standards, a fall in the rouble and consequent curbs on foreign travel.
But they deeply resent the very high levels of corruption. They do not like the
unfettered power of Mr Putin’s cronies, although absolving the president himself
from blame. And they are embarrassed by the Olympic scandal.
As Mr Putin knows,
pre-emptive action is the smartest response. Last month he sacked four
provincial governors who were plausibly made out to be corrupt and replaced
them with former FSB security loyalists. This was presented as a commitment to
clean government in the provinces. New tensions with Ukraine can also be
presented as standing firm against outside provocations, and would allow Mr
Putin to cancel scheduled peace talks and the need to make concessions. The
last time he used a foreign crisis to rally support at home, the seizure of
Crimea two years after the protests against his re-election in 2012, he saw his
popularity rise to more than 80 per cent.
There may also be a
power struggle going on in the Kremlin, that bastion of inscrutable intrigue.
Mr Putin’s sacking of Sergei Ivanov, his chief of staff and a leading
hardliner, might be connected to a mooted reshuffle, in which Mr Putin
dismisses Dmitry Medvedev, his discredited prime minister, and replaces him
with the talented former finance minister Alexei Kudrin. He is known to want a
flexible hand if he is to take the job. Against a crisis backdrop, might he now
be offered one?
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