Tag: Ukraine

by Dish Staff

The Russian aid convoy Ukraine believes to be a Trojan horse might just be a decoy. Journalists who had a chance to look inside some of the trucks said they did contain humanitarian supplies like buckwheat and sleeping bags, but suspiciously, some of them were almost completely empty. Meanwhile, a column of Russian armored vehicles was spotted crossing into Ukraine yesterday:

The Guardian saw a column of 23 armoured personnel carriers, supported by fuel trucks and other logistics vehicles with official Russian military plates, travelling towards the border near the Russian town of Donetsk – about 200km away from Donetsk, Ukraine. After pausing by the side of the road until nightfall, the convoy crossed into Ukrainian territory, using a rough dirt track and clearly crossing through a gap in a barbed wire fence that demarcates the border. Armed men were visible in the gloom by the border fence as the column moved into Ukraine. Kiev has lost control of its side of the border in this area.

The trucks are unlikely to represent a full-scale official Russian invasion, and it was unclear how far they planned to travel inside Ukrainian territory and how long they would stay. But it was incontrovertible evidence of what Ukraine has long claimed – that Russian troops are active inside its borders.

What’s more, Ukraine claims to have attacked and destroyed most of the Russian APCs:

Ukraine said its artillery partly destroyed a Russian armoured column that entered its territory overnight and said its forces came under shellfire from Russia on Friday in what appeared to be a major military escalation between the ex-Soviet states. Russia’s government denied its forces had crossed into Ukraine and accused Kiev of trying to sabotage deliveries of aid. NATO said there had been a Russian incursion into Ukraine, while avoiding the term invasion, and European capitals accused the Kremlin of escalating the fighting.

Kiev and its Western allies have repeatedly accused Russia of arming pro-Moscow separatist rebels in eastern Ukraine, and of sending undercover military units onto Ukrainian soil. But evidence of Russian military vehicles captured or destroyed on Ukrainian territory would give extra force to Kiev’s allegations – and possibly spark a new round of sanctions against the Kremlin.

But Anna Nemtsova remains suspicious of the convoy itself:

Authorities in Kiev and the International Committee of the Red Cross demanded the Kremlin present a detailed inventory of what was inside the glistening convoy. And Aleksander Cherkasov, director of the human rights center “Memorial,” laid out several problematic questions in an interview with The Daily Beast: “We would like to know why the military trucks were loaded not by the ministry of emergency affairs but at the base of Tamanskaya Motor and Rifle Division in Moscow region,” said Cherkasov. “And also, for what reason about 30 military vehicles that accompany the convoy have no plates on them.” This is a problem, since no traffic police can identify any of the trucks if they start to disperse once they enter Ukraine.

“This time the Kremlin is openly supporting separatists in Ukraine by sending in military vehicles,” said Cherkasov. “If the trucks cross the border without official permission from Kiev, it would be considered a pure invasion.”

by Dish Staff

Jason Karaian looks at how Putin’s counter-sanctions on EU produce imports stand to affect European farmers and consumers:

While it’s never a good time for farmers to lose a big market like Russia, now is particularly inopportune. Bumper crops have pushed down prices in recent months, which is bad for producers as well as policymakers—the euro zone has been flirting with deflation this year, and a glut of produce once destined for Russia but dumped closer to home could push prices down even further[.]

“We can only hope that European consumers eat more pears,” a Belgian fruit farmer told the Wall Street Journal (paywall). … To add insult to injury, the upcoming apple harvest in Europe will be one for the record books, according to an industry forecast published yesterday. “The same day it’s announced we have a big crop our largest customer, Russia, stops buying, so it’s like a Black Thursday,” the commercial manager of a French apple concern told FreshPlaza. “The producers will be hit,” an Athens fruit seller told Euronews.

And Alec Luhn measures the impact, as well as the politics, of the ban in Russia:

State-controlled television has been downplaying any effects of the ban. “Consumers will barely be able to notice any price increase…. Even if people have to travel abroad for some dishes, it will lead to greater profits for Russian tourist firms,” reporters on Rossiya 24 exclaimed during a newscast on Friday, Aug. 8. But analysts predict an overall rise in food prices that will further exacerbate inflation, which has already risen beyond the Central Bank’s predictions to 7.5 percent.

The import ban doesn’t only affect luxury goods. Almost one-third of Russian families don’t obtain the minimum amount of calories and nutrients designated by the Health Ministry, according to the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, and they will likely have even more difficulty as cheap products from Ukraine are taken off the shelves.

Bershidsky highlights the ban’s potential impact on Putin’s shaky Eurasian Economic Union project, which the Russian president still wants as part of his legacy:

Putin has not given up. Rebuilding at least a smaller, narrower version of the Soviet Union remains at the center of his agenda. He wants it to be part of his legacy. Armenia — dissuaded by Moscow from EU association — and Kyrgyzstan are on track to join the EEU this year. As of 2015, the member states will harmonize their tax systems.

The other members of Putin’s union, however, don’t have the same interest in imposing or enforcing a ban on imported food. Belarus and Kazakhstan have nothing to retaliate against: Only Russia faces Western sanctions. “This is our domestic matter,” Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko said yesterday. “If we need Polish apples, we buy them, but for our domestic market, not for Russia.” Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s press service clarified after he talked to Putin on the phone that the food embargo was “Russia’s unilateral measure that doesn’t involve” other EEU members.

In Anne Applebaum’s view, the trade angle of this conflict puts to rest the “McDonald’s theory of international relations”:

This week, as Russia, a country with 433 McDonald’s, ramps up its attack on Ukraine, a country with 77 McDonald’s, I think we can finally now declare the McPeace theory officially null and void. Indeed, the future of McDonald’s in Russia, which once seemed so bright—remember the long lines in Moscow for Big Macs?—has itself grown dim. In July, the Russian consumer protection agency sued McDonald’s for supposedly violating health regulations. This same consumer protection agency also banned Georgian wine and mineral water “for sanitary reasons” at the time of the 2008 Russian-Georgian war, and it periodically lashes out at Lithuanian cheese, Polish meat, and other politically unacceptable products as well. …

This week—as Russia bans most American, European, Canadian, Australian, and Japanese agricultural goods—globalization suddenly began to unravel a lot faster than anybody imagined. Vladimir Putin knew sanctions were coming and openly declared that he didn’t care. He also knows that a trade war will hurt a wide range of his countrymen, but he didn’t mind that either.

by Dish Staff

As Ukrainian forces surround Donetsk and prepare for what they say is a final advance on the separatist stronghold, NATO has reiterated its warning that a Russian invasion is likely:

NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said there was no sign Russia had withdrawn the troops it had massed at the Ukrainian frontier. Asked in a Reuters interview how he rated the chances of Russian military intervention, Rasmussen said: “There is a high probability.”

“We see the Russians developing the narrative and the pretext for such an operation under the guise of a humanitarian operation, and we see a military build-up that could be used to conduct such illegal military operations in Ukraine,” he said.

Jeremy Bender observes that if Russia decides to invade, it is prepared to do so on multiple fronts:

According to The Interpreter, there has been a sharp increase in Russian troop movements in Belarus. Belarus borders Ukraine to the north, and the border crossing between the two countries is located less than 150 miles from Kiev. Belarus and Russia share close relations. Russia maintains military bases in the country, and Russia recently announced plans to build an airbase in the west of Belarus.  A YouTube video, thought to have been taken today in the Belarusian city of Vitebsky, shows a large number of Russian troops and equipment. The city is located approximately eight hours due north of Ukraine.

A second YouTube video, shot on August 10, depicts another large armored convoy in Novoshakhtinsk, by the Rostov region of Russia. This convoy is less than 20 miles from the Ukrainian border, and it is less than 150 miles to either of the separatist-held cities of Luhansk or Donetsk. Simultaneously, a Russian aid convoy is set to enter Ukraine in the north east through the city of Kharkhiv, according to a document translated by The Interpreter. The convoy is said to contain humanitarian cargo for the east of Ukraine and it will fly under the signal of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) once it passes into Ukrainian territory.

But Ukrainian authorities now say they won’t let the aid convoy cross the border:

Russian news agencies reported that hundreds of white trucks were being packed with supplies and sent to the eastern Ukraine border, but a spokesman for Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, Andriy Lysenko, said Ukraine would not allow the trucks to cross into the country because the aid was not certified by the Red Cross. “This convoy is not a certified convoy. It is not certified by the International Committee of the Red Cross,” Lysenko said, according to the Associated Press. Another Ukraine presidential aide, Valery Chaly, told reporters that the supplies would be loaded onto other transport vehicles before they crossed into Ukraine territory held by separatists, Reuters reported.

Ed Morrissey worries that things are on the verge of getting out of control:

The convoy doesn’t even have to include military supplies to produce the kind of provocation Putin has clearly desired for months. They can set themselves up as “observers” once inside Ukraine and block Kyiv from further military action against the rebels. If the Ukrainian military does proceed, then Putin can send in his troops in order to protect his “humanitarian” mission. Whatever happens, it’s going to happen quickly. The West had better be prepared to shut Russia down economically when it does — and it would be best to “telegraph” that intention to Putin now, as the WaPo’s editors advise, in order to avoid the situation altogether. If Putin wants to donate aid, let him work through the Red Cross. Anything else is a thinly-veiled provocation for a European war that only the Russian media would miss.

Paul Huard flagged another troubling sign late last week:

“The probability of invasion is much, much higher than it has ever been,” James Miller, managing editor of The Interpreter, told War is Boring in an e-mail. The Interpreter translates media from the Russian press and blogosphere into English for use by analysts and policymakers. The Russians reportedly have moved military vehicles with “peacekeeping” insignia to the border—a first since the crisis in the Ukraine began. Earlier this month, NATO warned that the Russians could mount an incursion into Ukrainian territory under the guise of a peacekeeping mission. The Interpreter reports that it has found several pictures and a video showing Russian armored vehicles bearing the insignia “MC,” an abbreviation of the Russian words mirotvorcheskiye sily or “peacekeeping force.”

Meanwhile, Josh Kovensky highlights Putin’s ever loopier propaganda, featuring Mickey Rourke and Steven Seagal:

Russians saw a familiar face on television last night, when Seagal appeared at a show in honor of the “reunification of Crimea with Russia.” Seagal did not appear alone; a Russian-nationalist motorcycle gang called the Night Wolves accompanied him. At the show, the bikers reenacted Russia’s version of the past eight months of Ukrainian history. An idyllic Slavic scene is interrupted by marching Ukrainian Nazis, whose swastika formation bizarrely matches that of “Springtime for Hitler.” The swastika-shaped Ukrainian Nazi junta is controlled by a pair of massive hands emblazoned with symbols of the U.S., holding huge cigars.

The Nazi-Ukrainians go on a reign of terror until a bunch of Russians with AK-47s show up, duking it out with the Kievan Fourth Reich until the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics solidify, with many evil Ukrainian-Nazi-Fascist-Junta members set on fire in the process. At the end of the show, a massive Mother Russia statue appears along with the Soviet national anthem, heralding the reunification of Crimea with Russia.

In retaliation for US and EU sanctions, Putin issued an executive order yesterday banning or restricting food imports from countries that imposed sanctions on Russia. Bershidsky predicts that the counter-sanctions will hurt the Russian economy more than the countries they target:

In all, Europe’s biggest economies plus Poland, Norway, the U.S., Canada and Australia stand to lose some $6 billion in the next year from the Russian food sanctions. That is far from deadly for them. The Russian Micex stock index has lost a third of that amount in capitalization since the food sanctions were announced, because they are expected to hurt retailers such as the discounter Magnit, which has called itself the biggest food importer to Russia. More upscale retailers will need to reconsider their entire sales matrices, shifting to Asian and Latin American imports. That cannot but have an effect on their bottom lines.

Putin appears to care little about the effect of the sanctions. His focus is, as ever, domestic. He is showing his voters in the most tangible way possible that Russia doesn’t need the West to survive. The Kremlin’s propaganda is already playing up this message. “I can survive perfectly well in a world without polish apples, Dutch tomatoes, Latvian sprats, American cola, Australian beef and English tea,” Yegor Kholmogorov wrote on Izvestia.ru before it became clear that tea or cola would not be sanctioned. “Especially if this results in a substituting expansion of Russian agribusiness and food industry.”

Julia Ioffe speculates that the move might backfire:

This is the thing. If the ban really does go through and is as wide-sweeping as the Russian blogosphere fears, it will hurt not America and not the E.U., but the class of people who are well-educated, well-paid, and well-traveled, who know the difference between a Nero d’Avola and a Nebbiolo, and between prosciutto and jamón serrano. That’s a relatively small set of people, and it’s also the people who went out into the streets in the winter of 2011-2012 to protest against Vladimir Putin: the urban middle class, or, as the Kremlin derisively dubbed them, the creacles (from the words for creative class). Still, it will have a wider effect, too. Most restaurants in the country these days serve something from the E.U., things like Czech or German beer (a favorite of Russians of all stripes) and cheap Italian and French wines. Not to mention that much of the beef in Russian restaurants comes from Australia, which has already threatened to ban entry to Vladimir Putin. The ban won’t go unnoticed outside the creative class.

Tyler Cowen still finds it worrying, though:

Commentators are criticizing the economics of such a move, but I think of this more in terms of Bayesian inference.  Long-term elasticities are greater than short.  Under the more pessimistic reading of the action, Putin is signaling to the Russian economy that it needs to get used to some fairly serious conditions of siege, and food is of course the most important of all commodities.  Why initiate such a move now if you are expecting decades of peace and harmony?  Or is Putin instead trying to signal to the outside world that he is signaling “siege” to his own economy?  Then it may all just be part of a larger bluff.  In any case, Eastern Europeans do not take food supply for granted.

With thousands of troops amassed on the border and talk of a “humanitarian intervention”, NATO warns that it might be:

“We’re not going to guess what’s on Russia’s mind, but we can see what Russia is doing on the ground – and that is of great concern. Russia has amassed around 20,000 combat-ready troops on Ukraine’s eastern border,” NATO spokeswoman Oana Lungescu said in an emailed statement. NATO was concerned that Moscow could use “the pretext of a humanitarian or peace-keeping mission as an excuse to send troops into Eastern Ukraine“, she said.

Ian Bremmer doubts this is a bluff, although it’s not really what Putin wants:

Sustained intervention is Putin’s current and preferred approach, where he can foment enough instability through the separatists that a unified Ukraine cannot pull away from Russia. The “long game” is more Russian arms provisions and economic pressure until Kiev is forced to accept a deeply Russia-influenced federal system. Direct invasion would come with a much more staggering price tag. First and foremost, the Russian people are opposed. …

But even though Putin still prefers the intervention route, it makes sense for him to brace for invasion. The mere threat has strategic benefits: it’s primarily a deterrent against Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, demonstrating the consequences for a siege of Donetsk and Luhansk. In addition, it makes the West focus on the question of ‘Will Russia invade or not invade?,’ drawing attention away from the blurrier forms of intervention that Putin is already engaging in.

Emile Simpson urges Western governments to give Putin a way out of this mess:

If the West is serious about stopping naked Russian aggression against a sovereign state, but nonetheless recognizes Moscow’s own interests in this conflict, it should put its money where its mouth is by reconfiguring its sanctions to be a deterrent rather than a punishment, and look to the U.N. or OSCE to seek a real international peacekeeping or monitoring force that gives Putin a face-saving way out. Otherwise Western policymakers will be left with two unsavory options, should Russia intervene further in eastern Ukraine: either effectively to accept a fait accompli, as in Crimea, or react with half measures that only further provoke a Russian president who feels he can only fight his way out of the corner he’s been boxed into.

Meanwhile, Anna Nemtsova reports on the growing humanitarian crisis in eastern Ukraine, where government forces are still battling pro-Russian separatists:

At a United Nations emergency meeting in New York on Tuesday, John Ging of the Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs warned the Security Council that the worsening situation in eastern Ukraine caused “an increase in numbers killed” and put millions of people at risk of becoming victims of violence. On Wednesday, Ukrainian officials urged Russia to stop Grad rocket fire from across the border, while Russia accused Ukraine of carrying out artillery and air strikes. Local medical personnel and volunteers struggling to help the increasing number of victims complained about two key issues:  the shortage of medicine and their own security. In the past two months of combat in and around the cities, seriously injured people often have been left lying on the ground for hours waiting for medical help to arrive. Donetsk had very few volunteers; and after gunmen stormed the office of Doctors Without Borders (Médecins sans Frontières MSF), not many foreign professionals are willing to work on the ground.

Michael McFaul views the Russian president as a failed statesman:

Putin’s failed proxy war in eastern Ukraine also has produced a lot of collateral damage to his other foreign policy objectives. If the debate about NATO expansion had drifted to a second-order concern before Putin’s move into Ukraine, it is front and center again now. Likewise, the strengthening of NATO’s capacity to defend its Eastern European members has returned as a priority for the first time in many years. Russian leaders always feared U.S. soldiers stationed in Poland or Estonia, yet that might just happen now. In addition, Putin’s actions in Ukraine have ensured that missile defense in Europe will not only proceed but could expand. And after a decade of discussion without action, Putin has now shocked Europe into developing a serious energy policy to reduce dependence on Russian gas and oil supplies. As a result of Putin’s actions in Ukraine, the United States is now likely to become an energy exporter, competing with Russia for market share. Some call Putin’s policies pragmatic and smart. I disagree.

Approaching the Ukraine conflict from a strategic studies perspective, Joshua Rovner outlines what scholars in that field can learn from it:

Ukraine raises at least two issues that may inspire new thinking on strategic theory. One is the problem of recognizing success when it involves something less than victory.

Ukraine has been on the offensive against the separatist fighters, rapidly driving them back into a handful of strongholds. But it’s unlikely the government can destroy them, given pro-Russian sentiment in the east and the possible existence of a large sanctuary for committed separatists across the border. Moreover, any durable settlement will require making concessions to groups that are extremely hostile to Kiev, as well as tacit promises to the Russian regime.

This might be a reasonable outcome, especially if Russia is badly bruised and if Ukraine comes away with increased Western economic and political support. But some Ukrainian leaders will bridle at any settlement that leaves their perceived enemies in place, especially after having lost Crimea. Not everyone will learn to live with Russian President Vladimir Putin and his proxies, and their unease may cause them to underrate important strategic gains. Such a scenario should resonate with American observers.

In an interview with The Economist published over the weekend, Obama got in this little dig at Russia:

Russia doesn’t make anything. Immigrants aren’t rushing to Moscow in search of opportunity. The life expectancy of the Russian male is around 60 years old. The population is shrinking.

But as Mark Adomanis points out, none of these statements is factually accurate. So why, then, did the president make them? Zenon Evans wonders:

It’s bizarre that Obama criticized Russia on these fronts when there’s plenty of legitimate issues – like Moscow’s crackdown on civil rights, the pro-Western political opposition, and independent media – that he could have addressed instead. These, of course, don’t have much bearing on the war Russia is waging against Ukrainian sovereignty or the mass killing of civilians on a Malaysian plane, but whether it’s due to a lazy team of fact-checkers or deliberate rah-rah nationalism to boost the U.S. by comparison, dubious talking points don’t help the Obama administration resolve the current crises.

Hearing the president say “Russia doesn’t make anything” will only inflame anti-American sentiment among Russian civilians, thereby reinforcing Putin’s own ballooning cushion of popular support. And, there’s need for healthy debate about the U.S.’s actions against the Kremlin throughout this war, but by spouting some easily-debunked information, Obama effectively invites skepticism of the accuracy of other White House claims about Russia.

But Dylan Matthews figures he was playing up the overall idea that Putinist Russia has no future:

[T]he fact that Obama felt compelled to say this — inaccuracies and all — is interesting. The implicit argument being countered here is the idea that, as TIME magazine recently put it, a “Cold War II” is afoot and Russia might present a real rival to the US. But one crucial thing that made the Soviet Union a plausible rival was that, for much of the world, Communism was an extremely attractive ideology, one embraced by guerrilla and resistance movements across the globe and thus capable of pulling numerous countries into the Soviet orbit. As Obama points out, there’s nothing so attractive about 2014′s Russia, which profoundly limits how successful it can be as a world power.