Russian President Vladimir Putin has denied for months that he was planning an attack on Ukraine, but on Monday he violated a peace agreement and ordered troops sent to two rebel regions in the east of that country.
Russia has deployed at least 190,000 Russian troops near the borders with Ukraine and recognized the independence of Donetsk and Luhansk, two cities in the Donbas region whose territory was seized by pro-Russian separatists in 2014.
What happens in the next few days could jeopardize the entire security structure of Europe.
1. Did Putin order an invasion?
Putin has ordered to send to Donetsk and Luhanks the calls “peacekeeping troops”but few believe that they are there for that purpose.
Australia’s prime minister said the idea made no sense, and a Ukrainian general said it was clear they would be regular forces.
the russian president scrapped a peace deal with Ukraine, recognize the independence of two eastern regions taken over and occupied since 2014 by Russian-backed rebels.
That was the year Russia first invaded Ukraine, a country of 44 million people, and seized and annexed the region of crimeain the south of the country.
The eight-year conflict in the Donbas region never ended. Russia could send more troops to those breakaway regions, but it could go further. Until this Tuesday, February 22, it has more than 150,000 soldiers deployed near the borders of Ukraine.
Putin has always said he did not want a war and was ready to negotiate, but ending peace deals with Ukraine and recognizing breakaway areas as independent makes future talks seem dead for now.
2. Why is Russia threatening Ukraine?
Russia has long resisted Ukraine’s rapprochement with European institutions in general, and NATO and the European Union in particular.
Putin now maintains that Ukraine is a Western puppet and was never a proper state anyway.
Their main demand now is that The West guarantees that Ukraine will not join NATOa defensive alliance of 30 countries.
Ukraine shares borders with both the European Union and Russia, but as a former Soviet republic it has deep social and cultural ties with Russiaand Russian is spoken almost everywhere there.
However, since the Russian invasion in 2014, the relationship between the two countries has frayed.
When the Ukrainians deposed their pro-Russian president in early 2014, Russia attacked Ukraine. The conflict in the east of the country has since claimed more than 14,000 lives.
3. Why is it dangerous for Russia to recognize the independence of the rebel areas?
Until now, the so-called people’s republics of Donetsk and Luhansk have been led by Russian representatives. According to Putin’s recognition decree, Russia can also build military bases.
By sending Russian troops into an area that is witnessing hundreds of ceasefire violations every day, the risk of open war becomes that much greater.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres on Monday condemned Russia’s recognition of independence as a violation of Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty. The West says it is a violation of international law.
Two Minsk peace agreements, signed in 2014 and 2015 and aimed at ending the conflict, would have given them a special status within Ukraine. The agreements were never fulfilled, but negotiations were still ongoing, with France and Germany fully committed to them. Now they seem doomed to fail.
Russia had already prepared the ground, with baseless accusations that Ukraine had committed “genocide” in the east.
It has also handed out some 700,000 passports in rebel-held areas, so it can argue that any action is aimed at protecting its own citizens.
4. What is Putin looking for in Ukraine?
Russia has said that it is the “moment of truth” to reformulate its relationship with NATO and has highlighted three demands.
First, you want a legally binding promise that the NATO does not expand plus.
“It is absolutely mandatory for us to ensure that Ukraine never ever becomes a member of NATO,” Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said.
Putin has complained that Russia “has nowhere else to retreat to. Do you think we will sit idly by?
In 1994, Russia signed an agreement in which it promised to respect Ukraine’s independence and sovereignty.
But last year, Putin wrote a lengthy article in which he described the Russians and Ukrainians as “one nation”and now he has said that modern Ukraine was created entirely by communist Russia.
He considers the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991 the “disintegration of historical Russia.”
Putin has also argued that if Ukraine joins NATO, the alliance could try to take back Crimea.
Their other main demands are that the NATO does not deploy “attack weapons” near the borders of Russia” and to eliminate the forces and military infrastructure of the member states that joined the alliance since 1997.
That means Central Europe, Eastern Europe and the Baltic countries.
Actually Russia wants NATO to return to its pre-1997 borders.
5. What does NATO say?
NATO is a defensive alliance with an open door policy to new members and its 30 member states are convinced that it will not change.
Even if Ukraine wanted to join NATO, there is no prospect of this happening in the short term, as the German chancellor has made clear.
The idea of any country that is currently part of NATO giving up its membership is impossible.
However, in the eyes of President Putin, the West promised in 1990 that NATO would not expand “an inch eastward”, but did so anyway.
However, that was before the collapse of the Soviet Union, so the promise made to then-Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev only referred to East Germany in the context of a reunified Germany.
Gorbachev later said that “the issue of NATO expansion was never discussed” at the time.
6. How far will Russia go?
Much of the attention is focused on eastern Ukraine, where Russian troops may soon be on the ground.
But US President Joe Biden warned on Friday: “We think they will target the capital of Ukraine, Kyiva city of 2.8 million innocent people.”
Although Moscow has previously insisted there is “no Russian invasion,” Russia could mobilize troops in Crimea, Belarus and around Ukraine’s eastern borders.
One possibility that experts warn of would be that Russia would try to enter Ukraine from the east, north and south and try to overthrow its government.
However, Ukraine has developed its armed forces in recent years and Russia would face a hostile population.
The chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, noted that the scale of the Russian forces would mean a “awful” scenariowith the conflict taking place in densely populated urban areas.
The Russian president has other options: perhaps a no-fly zone or blockade of Ukrainian ports, or moving nuclear weapons to neighboring Belarus.
could also throw cyber attacks. Ukrainian government websites went down in January and two of Ukraine’s largest banks were attacked in mid-February.
According to reports received by the BBC’s Ukrainian service, the authorities in the rebel regions of Donetsk and Luhansk have been recruiting civilians for military service, including those who do not have a Russian passport and who have not reached the age of 18.
7. Is there a diplomatic solution?
Germany has accused Russia of deliberately destroying a peace process covering eastern Ukraine for no apparent reason. There seems to be no way to restore that international peace agreement.
There was talk of a Putin-Biden summit, but that now also seems unlikely to happen.
Russia wants a treaty with the US that prohibits the deployment of nuclear weapons beyond its national territories.
The US has offered to start talks on the limitation of short and medium range missilesas well as on a new treaty on intercontinental missiles.
Source: Eluniverso
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