Yesterday, Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed that Russian forces had withdrawn from the Ukrainian border and urged separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk to postpone a referendum on autonomy scheduled for Sunday (a call they rejected today). Marc Champion is cautiously optimistic that Putin is starting to see reason:
Here is what I hope his statement signifies: First, that Putin doesn’t want to invade Ukraine. It has always seemed unlikely that invasion was his goal, but with forces ready on the border, it could never be ruled out. (Indeed, although Putin said today that Russian troops had withdrawn from the border, NATO officials said they had not.) …
I hope, secondly, that having decided not to invade Ukraine, Putin also doesn’t want to trigger a civil war there. Putin will be well aware that a disputed status referendum can act as a trigger for conflict. The spark for the war in Bosnia, for example, was a 1992 referendum on independence from Yugoslavia that Bosnian Serbs were bound to lose, because they were less numerous than Bosnian Muslims and Croats.
But Ioffe doesn’t buy it:
Putin isn’t really hiding a very good reason for postponing the referendum.
He asked “representatives of southeast Ukraine and supporters of federalization to hold off the referendum scheduled for May 11, in order to give this dialogue the conditions it needs to have a chance.” (emphasis mine) Because eastern and southern Ukraine is not Crimea, and it is not at all clear that, were a referendum held in just four days, the results would come out in Russia’s favor. The unpopularity of the new government in Kiev here has not translated to favoring he idea of independence or joining up with Russia. Polls put the number at just 30 percent of people in the region supporting annexation. To get the right result, Russia would have to pull off a stupendous amount of fraud, thereby risking a massive backlash—and further violence—in these regions.
New numbers from Pew back her up:
The poll, from Pew Research’s Global Attitudes Project, shows that a vast majority — 77 percent — of those polled want the country to remain united, compared to only 14 percent who want to allow regions of the country to secede. The split between attitudes in the east of the country, where most of the Russian-speaking population resides and has faced unrest from pro-Russian separatists for the last two months, and the Kyiv-backing west are readily apparent in the breakdown of the question: 93 percent of western Ukrainians want to keep the country together, compared to 70 percent in the east. That number dips lower to 58 percent when Russian speakers are split out, but still constitutes a majority.
Daniel Berman suspects Putin is actually trying to call attention to the referendum:
[D]espite having specifically scheduled their own referendum for May 11th, two weeks before national elections, neither Western governments, nor the media have taken the bait. The obsession has remained on Ukraine’s own elections on the 25th; accusations against Putin have focused on his efforts to disrupt those elections. No one seems to have expected much from this Sunday’s vote, or feared much from its aftermath. The idea that a 99% or so vote for union with Russia would immediately be followed by annexation has not seriously been raised. In such a circumstance, Russians troops following up such a vote with an occupation of the Oblast would be seen as an invasion, no different than a move on Kiev.
Clearly therefore the referendum gambit was not working for Putin, and this explains his request for a delay. At best, not only does Putin come across as a reasonable figure working towards a settlement; rescheduling the referendum will provide another opportunity, along with additional time to build up expectations about its significance. In the worst case, if he fails to achieve the delay, he has still refocused international attention on it, increasing its importance, and hopefully its significance.
Bershidsky doubts the separatists will be able to pull off a credible vote anyway:
The referendum, and a similar one planned in the neighboring region of Lugansk, was a ridiculous idea from the start. The rebels do not have the skills, the numbers or the control necessary to organize a real vote. All they have managed to do is to print some highly ornamented ballots. With the Ukrainian military, police and national guard conducting a bumbling “anti-terrorist operation” in the rebellious regions, not even the semblance of peaceful balloting is feasible. Russia recognized the farcical secession referendum in Crimea in April, because a high degree of local support was there for all to see. In Donetsk and Lugansk, the referendum is such a bad idea that even Russia won’t touch it with a barge pole. …
Putin’s move is not being offered as a trade for concessions. His gambit is, more likely, meant to open an important line of questioning about what exactly the West needs from him if Russia is to avoid serious economic sanctions.
Keating downplays the other part of Putin’s statement, about moving the Russian troops away from the border:
[G]iven that the existence of these troops, where exactly they’re located, and what they’re doing have been matters of dispute throughout this crisis, Putin’s latest assurance may not mean very much. It would also seem to contradict earlier statements suggesting that the military units in the area had already returned to base or hadn’t been there in the first place, though all of these statements have been somewhat ambiguously worded.
I’m not sure how much the location and composition of these troops will really matter. Russian may not need to actually use them—at least in the short term—given that pro-Russian separatists likely assisted by Russian special operations forces seem to be doing a perfectly fine job resisting Ukrainian government efforts to regain control over the country’s southeast.
The Dish 