The Crimea crisis has come
from nowhere but the Russian president has form for military adventures in
Olympic years, says Luke Harding
The situation in Crimea looks
ominous. Russia’s FSB spy agency said on Wednesday that it had foiled a series
of attacks by armed Ukrainians on the peninsula. Minutes later, Vladimir Putin
accused Kiev’s pro-western government of choosing terror over peace. Meanwhile,
largely unnoticed by the outside world, Russia has been stealthily shipping
military vehicles to Crimea, which Putin annexed in the spring of 2014.
What is going
on? As ever in the opaque world of neo-Kremlinology, nobody quite knows. But
two years after Putin sent “little green
men” – actually undercover Russian special forces
soldiers – to overrun Crimea, another military offensive seems distinctly
possible. Crimea’s “parliament” said Ukraine had already launched an undeclared
war. Ukraine says the supposed plot is FSB fiction.
The new Crimea
crisis has come from nowhere. Over in the east there have been daily clashes
between pro-Russia rebels and Ukrainian government forces in Donestk and
Luhansk, with a spike in recent weeks. But the Perekop isthmus, the rustic
sliver of territory between Crimea and
Ukraine’s southern Kherson province, has been quiet. There was no fighting here
even in 2014, when Putin staged his land grab.
All of this
leads to the suspicion, voiced by Carl Bildt, Sweden’s former prime minister
and others, that Russia may be
about to invade again.
When it comes to
the month of August, Putin has form. His previous invasions have coincided with
Olympic Games, a time when the international community is distracted or on
holiday - Georgia in 2008 after
Beijing, and Ukraine in 2014 (after the Winter Games in Sochi.
There are other
propitious circumstances this summer. The presidential election is paralysing
the US, and the Republican candidate, Donald Trump, has hinted that as
president he might recognise Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
He seems uncertain
as to where Ukraine actually is. Europe
meanwhile is in disarray in the wake of the Brexit vote and an ongoing
migration crisis.
Seizing Crimea
seemed a good idea in 2014, and it was achieved with remarkable ease. As the
Russian writer Leonid Kaganov put it, however, it was a bit like stealing an
expensive phone without its charger. Once a peninsula, the region is now
effectively an island. Putin has announced plans to build a bridge across the
Kerch Strait, connecting it to the Russian mainland, but he has entrusted the
job to a childhood friend, Arkady
Rotenberg, and it is unlikely to be finished any time soon.
In the meantime,
Crimeans, most of whom still support Russia, have suffered a series of
electricity blackouts and other indignities. Last November Ukrainian activists
blew up energy pipelines to Crimea, plunging homes into darkness. People ate
dinner by candlelight, factories shut down and for the first few days even
traffic lights stopped working. The peninsula’s water supply is also
vulnerable. It gets all of its water via the north Crimean canal, currently in
Ukraine.
At this point
there seem to be three possible scenarios. One is that Putin will try to
leverage this latest crisis to persuade EU countries to drop the sanctions
imposed over the Ukraine conflict. Another is that he is preparing a limited
military incursion, possibly to set up a security corridor, which doubtless
would include the electricity station in the nearby Ukrainian city of Kherson.
A third is that he is planning something bigger.
In spring 2014
there was speculation that he would seek to carve out a land corridor
connecting separatist Donetsk and Luhansk with Crimea. That would involve
over-running Ukrainian forces in the port city of Mariupol and advancing along
the coast. The Kremlin also floated the idea of Novorossiya, a historical
pseudo-entity encompassing Ukraine’s southern and south-eastern
Russian-speaking regions.
None of this
happened, but a land corridor would certainly be an attractive solution to
Crimea’s current woes, and would at a stroke solve Russia’s short and long-term
infrastructure problems. There would be political dividends too. From the
Kremlin’s point of view, a further Ukraine adventure would conclusively
demonstrate the west’s weakness and incapacity.
At a time when
US swimmers are openly taunting their Russian rivals in the pool, it would also
be payback for the doping scandal and international attempts to ban Russian athletes
from the Olympics. Putin cares deeply about sport. The Wada report on
Russian state-sponsored doping has been presented inside Russia as a western
conspiracy. Putin may be showing
who is boss.
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