Putin’s ultimate goal? Divide Ukraine and install a “domesticated” leadership

The Russian invasion of Ukraine appears designed to take Kiev and create a land corridor south to the Black Sea, dividing the country in two, military analysts and former officials have said, echoing the view of Ukrainian generals.

President Vladimir Putin could still continue to seek some form of control over the entire country, they said, as he works hard to prevent Ukraine from joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), but victory is not guaranteed either.

A senior US defense official said on Friday that Russia was facing more resistance than it expected, particularly in its push toward Kiev.

The tactics of the advancing Russian troops point to a “flanking move” from the weakest points of Ukraine: its northern border with Belarus, and in the south Crimea, which Russia annexed eight years ago and where it has a huge naval base.

The strategy, if successful, could allow Moscow to directly control eastern Ukraine, including its coastline, while reducing western Ukraine to a vassal state, while reducing the financial costs of long-term occupation, experts say.

“I think now (the Russians) intend to create a land bridge to Moldova”, said Konrad Muzyka, director of the consultancy Rochan, which is based in Poland.

Russian tanks and forces began their invasion on Thursday through the eastern Kharkiv and Donetsk regions, and from the south in Taurica, while missile strikes and shelling from Belarus opened an advance towards Kiev from the north, according to the Ukrainian Army.

According to a broadcast from the Ukrainian Defense Ministry posted on Facebook on Thursday, military moves so far suggest the Kremlin’s goal is “blockade Kiev, create a land corridor to the occupied Crimean peninsula and self-proclaimed Transnistria”.

In 2014, Russia not only seized Crimea, but also backed rebels who set up breakaway administrations in Donetsk and Lugansk, in the majority Russian-speaking Donbass region of eastern Ukraine.

It also has troops in Transnistria, a breakaway province of Russian-speaking Moldova.

Joerg Forbrig of the German Marshall Fund in Berlin said Russian troops could “attempt to gain control of a very large part of Ukraine, which will include those territories that would make a land corridor between the three territories they already control”.

The Ukrainians would resist

The Ukrainian armed forces have so far denied Putin a quick advance on Kiev. “As long as the Russians don’t have control of the airspace, they won’t be able to really assert their armored push in Ukraine,” said Jamie Shea, a former NATO official who now works at the Friends of Europe think tank.

Russian missiles bombarded Kiev on Friday. Moscow claimed to have captured the Hostomel airfield, northwest of the capital, a possible foothold for an assault on Kiev.

US officials believe that Russia’s initial goal is to overthrow Ukraine’s pro-Western president, Volodymyr Zelensky.

“Putin does not want Donbas or Donetsk. He wants all of Ukraine, but he doesn’t have to occupy the whole country to achieve that goal. His goal is to behead the Ukrainian state”, said retired German general Hans-Lothar Domroese.

Defense experts pointed to the enormous cost to Russia of a military campaign in Ukraine, a former Soviet state of 44 million people slightly smaller than Texas.

“The Soviet Union spent a lot of money having its troops in Eastern Europe and they were engaged where there were communist regimes. Ukrainians would resist any Russian government”, said Elisabeth Braw, of the think tank American Enterprise Institute in Washington.

It is also unclear how a long war with heavy Russian casualties would be perceived at home, even with Putin’s intolerance of dissent. Police on Thursday arrested more than 1,800 anti-war protesters across Russia.

Putin could seek a deal for western Ukraine – where most people speak Ukrainian rather than Russian as their first language – similar to the one Moscow has with Belarus, where Russia has helped veteran President Alexander Lukashenko suppress opposition and dissent.

Carlo Masala, a professor of international politics at the Bundeswehr University in Munich, said Russia had so far not tried to send troops to western Ukraine in large numbers.

“The Russian military buildup, no matter 160,000 or 200,000 soldiers, is not enough to occupy Ukraine for a long period”, he explained.

“I remain certain that Putin’s main goal is to seize Donbas and a land corridor to Crimea, severing these areas from Ukraine and establishing a tame government in Kiev.”