by Dish Staff
Just one day after Vladimir Putin and Petro Poroshenko met in Belarus to discuss a resolution to the Ukrainian conflict, the NYT is reporting that Russian forces have invaded southeast Ukraine near the city of Novoazovsk:
The attacks outside this city and in an area to the north essentially have opened a new, third front in the war in eastern Ukraine between government forces and pro-Russian separatists, along with the fighting outside the cities of Donetsk and Luhansk. Exhausted, filthy and dismayed, Ukrainian soldiers staggering out of Novoazovsk for safer territory said Tuesday they were cannon fodder for the forces coming from Russia. As they spoke, tank shells whistled in from the east and exploded nearby. … A Ukrainian military spokesman said Wednesday the army still controlled Novoazvosk but that 13 soldiers had died in the fighting. The behavior of the Ukrainian forces corroborated assertions by Western and Ukrainian officials that Russia, despite its strenuous denials, is orchestrating a new counteroffensive to help the besieged separatists of the Donetsk People’s Republic, who have been reeling from aggressive Ukrainian military advances in recent weeks.
The Interpreter’s live blog rounds up reports of other incursions:
The ATO press centre has announced that reports have been received of a column of up to 100 Russian military vehicles, including tanks, armoured personnel carriers, infantry fighting vehicles and Grad rocket launchers, on the move towards Telmanovo along the road from Starobeshevo, which reportedly fell to Russian or Russian-backed forces earlier. According to Ukrainska Pravda, the ATO press centre noted that the vehicles were marked with white circles or triangles. A battalion task force of the Russian Armed Forces has reportedly set up headquarters in the village of Pobeda, just to the south of Snezhnoye. Russian or separatist reinforcements have been sent to Amvrosievka, where they are fighting Ukrainian forces, claims the ATO press centre.
In Max Fisher’s interpretation, Putin’s stealth war strategy is now paying off:
That lesson is this: the Western world can set all the red lines it wants — don’t use chemical weapons, don’t invade sovereign countries — but if you cross that red line just a little bit at a time, inching across over weeks and months, rather than crossing it all at once, then Western publics and politicians will get red-line fatigue and lose interest by the time you’re across. … Russia’s meddling in eastern Ukraine became a stealth invasion, which has become an overt invasion. But it was all done just gradually enough, and with just enough uncertainty around each incremental escalation, that Russia has managed to invade a sovereign European country, in the year 2014, without sparking any larger war or the credible threat of any substantial response beyond sanctions.
That’s because, as Thomas Graham underscores, Russia cares a lot more about Ukraine than we do:
Tellingly, throughout this crisis, no prominent Western leader has seen it fit to make a major address to explain what is at stake in Ukraine and to request significant sacrifices to advance Western goals. Indeed, it was the upsurge of public outrage over the downing of Flight MH17 and the desecration of the crash site that compelled reluctant European governments to accede to the more stringent sectoral sanctions against Russia. But with that outrage subsiding, the preference remains to focus on what both governments and publics see as their more salient domestic political and economic challenges rather than divert resources to either punish Russia or help Ukraine. Putin knows all this, even if many armchair generals in Washington do not. This balance of interests, resources, and sacrifice means that the West and Kyiv will have to accommodate Russia to some extent, especially on the question of Ukraine’s geopolitical orientation and Russian influence in Eastern Ukraine, to resolve the crisis.
The Dish 