While all agree that a line has been crossed, U.S and NATO officials prefer to speak of an “incursion,” the word used by President Barack Obama at a White House press conference yesterday. French and German leaders have warned President Vladimir Putin of further sanctions without defining what Russian forces have done.
“In the past 48 hours, we have tipped into a formal invasion,” Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group, said in a Bloomberg television interview. “Russia and Ukraine as sovereign countries are now at war and it’s going to be very difficult for the
United States and Europe to deny that reality.”
Calling it war or an invasion would force the U.S. and European Union to consider steps they’ve been unwilling to take, short of military action, Bremmer said. While sanctions have been imposed on some areas of the Russian economy, Europe continues to rely on Russia for natural-gas imports and Russian trade with the EU was worth about $390 billion last year.
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A Ukrainian inside the Youth Culture Center building that was hit by pro-Russian... Read More
Troop Buildup
Pro-Russian insurgents widened their attacks this week on Ukraine government forces, taking several towns outside their strongholds of Donetsk and Luhansk, including near the Sea of Azov. There are currently 20,000 Russian troops in the border region, with 1,000 operating inside Ukraine, a North Atlantic Treaty Organization military officer estimated yesterday.Latvia’s Foreign Minister Edgars Rinkevics said on Twitter that Russia’s actions amount to a “war” that should be taken up by the United Nations Security Council. The Foreign Ministry in Lithuania, another former Soviet satellite state that’s now one of the EU’s 28 members, said it “strongly condemns the invasion of Ukrainian territory by Russian Federation military forces, which has obviously begun.”
Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, speaking on Polish radio, said that the entry of Russian troops into Ukraine “violates a whole menu of international treaties.”
The conflict -- war or otherwise -- has cost more than 2,000 lives, and there’s no sign it is easing.
Bellicose Language
Further west, French President Francois Hollande said in Paris yesterday that it would be “unacceptable” if Russian troops were on Ukraine soil, without saying if they were. An adviser to Hollande, who asked not to be named because he isn’t authorized to talk to the press, said bellicose language from the west strengthens Putin’s narrative that it’s Russia’s former Cold War foes who created the conflict.German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has a claim to be the European leader with the best understanding of the Cold War after growing up in East Germany, also threatened more sanctions.
In Washington, Obama stuck to the word “incursion,” and said the latest Russian actions in Ukraine are a “continuation of what’s been taking place for months,” while Republican critics of his foreign policy lambasted the administration’s language on the issue.
‘Orwellian Universe’
“Russia’s ongoing aggression in Ukraine can only be called one thing: a cross-border military invasion,” Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham said in a statement yesterday. “To claim it is anything other than that is to inhabit President Putin’s Orwellian universe.”“The line between a proxy war and regular war has been crossed but this doesn’t matter because Putin is denying it and the West is unable to prove it with a watertight case,” Jan Techau, director of the Brussels office of the Carnegie Endowment, said in a phone interview.
Merkel wants to give Putin “a way out, a way to climb down without losing face,” Techau said. “I don’t see a willingness on the part of the West to get out of this narrative.”
Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said Aug. 27 that reports of Russian troops operating in Ukraine don’t “correspond with reality.” Peskov declined to comment yesterday on Ukrainian claims of an invasion or rebel comments about Russian soldiers joining the war.
The prime minister of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, Alexander Zakharchenko, said on Russian state television that any Russian military personnel in Ukraine were volunteers on leave.
For now, “the most likely scenario is a limited, targeted campaign, using Russian troops as necessary, under however thin a fig leaf of deniability, to resupply and bolster the separatists in key strategic locations,” said Emmet Tuohy, an analyst with the International Centre for Defence Studies in Tallinn, Estonia. “A full-scale war with Ukraine is not in Russia’s interests or plans.”
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