A new phase of war in Ukraine is imminent
A referendum in occupied territories on joining Russia, Putin address to the nation to presage Russian military escalation
The seven-month-old war in Ukraine is about to be taken to a new level by Russia after months of steady but relatively slow progress and some recent gains by Ukrainian forces. Serial multi-billion-dollar weapons packages from the US and its NATO allies have started to bite. Unlike Russia’s earlier withdrawal from areas around Kiev, which, despite portrayals otherwise in Western media, was not a retreat but a tactical withdrawal to focus on the east, recent Ukrainian gains represent actual success on the ground, forcing Russian redeployments and consolidations.
So far, Russia’s official response to these events has been muted, asserting that everything was still going to plan and that no major re-think was necessary. Putin’s reported response was, essentially, we’ll see how it turns out for them. But whether pre-planned or not, a series of rapidly unfolding events today make clear that a new phase is in the offing. Political changes in the form of referenda on joining the Russian Federation in various Russian-occupied territories look to play the same role that Russia’s recognition of the self-declared Donbas republics did at the beginning of the conflict: to provide a pretext for major military developments.
To see it in context, it’s useful to look back at what got us here. NATO, the US, and western Europe ignored an initiative by Russia late last year to get them to take Russian security interests seriously. Russia’s proposal for a drawback of NATO offensive weapons from near their borders and commitments on Ukrainian neutrality were met with arrogant dismissal. Russia was the Cold War loser and it was high time they recognized that. The US and NATO weren’t about to abandon their decades-long efforts to pick off countries from Russia’s traditional sphere of influence one by one. The days of treating Russia as a major world power with legitimate security interests was part of ancient history, even if the Russians themselves didn’t understand that.
It followed a pattern of at least seven years during which Russia had tried to get the West to enforce the so-called Minsk accords. Those agreements required Ukraine to stop waging war on its largely Russian ethnic population in the east of their country and grant the regions a degree of autonomy in exchange for their political reintegration back into the fold. They had rebelled, with Russian covert assistance, following the 2014 Western-sponsored Maidan coup in Kiev in which a duly elected Ukrainian government deemed insufficiently hostile to Russia had been overthrown and replaced with a Western-friendly regime. Ukraine had intermittently shelled and otherwise terrified the population of those regions in the intervening seven-year period, and Russia alleged they were preparing to finish the job by assaulting the Donbas region to fully conquer it. Regardless of whether that’s true or not, there was certainly no peaceful end in sight for the beleaguered Donbas people long ignored by the West. Russia finally determined that the only available course of action to protect its interests and those of ethnic Russians in Donbas was to invade.
The “special military operation” provoked a furious response from the West, intent on portraying Russia as some kind of unique threat to the world, ignoring the parallels of the United States’ and its allies’ illegal acts of war across the globe in recent decades, from the bombardment of Serbia in 1999 to the invasion and widespread destruction of Iraq beginning in 2003 to the campaign of drone assassinations in multiple countries that accelerated to unprecedented heights during the Obama Administration, the latter of which were targeted in many cases solely on cell phone signals from SIM cards believed to be associated with terrorists.
As part of the West’s temper tantrum over a nonaligned country having the gall to act just like they do in the world, waves of economic sanctions have emanated from these countries in an attempt to isolate Russia and weaken its economy. It doesn’t seem to matter that the primary effect of the measures thus far has been to weaken the economies of the very countries enacting them while increasing profits for the Russian energy sector. That may be because the so-called “defense” industry in the West is profiting handsomely from what’s going on. And the imperialists who run American think-tanks are realizing their wildest wet dreams of having the best possible excuse to carry out a proxy war against Russia using conscripted Ukrainians to defeat them (It’s the least the Ukrainians can do after we, ahem, “helped them gain their freedom” in 2014 and what-not).
In addition to repeating and amplifying the sometimes laughable propaganda being issued by Ukraine’s SBU security service, Western media and government talking heads have been quick to point to any apparent Russian battlefield setback as proof that the country’s military is weaker than expected and not to be feared. What they intentionally fail to mention about that is this: by design, this has been a limited military operation by Russia — one in which they’ve used only a fraction of their available forces to this point. Those who are fighting for Russia in Ukraine are volunteer military personnel and contract soldiers, many of them from the various ethnic republics that make up part of the Russian Federation. There are a lot of Chechens fighting for Russia in Ukraine. Ukraine is using a lot of contract soldiers too, but many of them are mercenaries, not being from Ukraine, and many of them are regretting their participation after captured mercenaries have been given death sentences (so far not carried out) by the self-declared eastern republics.
Until now, there’s been no full-scale mobilization of the Russian military that would see conscript soldiers sent to Ukraine in a fully committed war. But that appears to be about to change. Whether it’s due to changing circumstances on the ground, pressure from Russia’s allies to move faster toward their goals in order to retain support, or just a natural progression and part of the plan all along, a series of events that are crystallizing even as I write. The Russian-held areas that constitute parts of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson regions are all reportedly planning referenda for the September 23-27 in which their populations will vote on whether to join the Russian Federation as integral parts of Russia. This mirrors the Crimean referendum of 2014 that paved the way for full Crimean reintegration with Russia.
Already in the occupied zones Russia has started the transition to long-term control. Occupied regions have had their international calling code changed from Ukrainian to Russian, a conversion to Russian currency has been initiated, and Russian curriculum has replaced Ukrainian. Local officials in these regions have been talking about conducting referendums on joining Russia for months, but only now do those efforts seem to have the full endorsement of the Kremlin to move forward. And now local officials are saying they will include areas of those regions not yet under Russian control.
The biggest affect Russian political annexation of these territories will have is to provide the legal justification under Russian law for full mobilization and deployment, to include sending Russian conscript forces to the battlefield. Unlike how it’s often portrayed, Russia is not a dictatorship. Putin can’t just do what he wants whenever he wants. The Duma, Russia’s elected parliament, while dominated by Putin’s party, the conservative United Russia, is not ideologically monolithic and is not a rubber stamp. Procedure has to be followed. Russian law makes it difficult to use these kinds of forces on non-Russian territory. Thus, political annexation paves the way for significant military escalation.
And so it’s been announced that Putin and his defense minister Sergei Shoigu are poised to address the Russian public this evening, while France’s Macron reportedly seeks an urgent meeting with Putin. Exactly how events will play out is of course uncertain. But what now looks all but certain is that the slow grind of the last weeks and months is about to be replaced by something big. Russia can’t afford not to see its objectives through, and the US and NATO appear to be willing to do everything in their power short of direct confrontation to thwart those objectives down to the last Ukrainian.
The coming winter may be a cold one for a Europe bound and determined to deprive themselves of affordable, reliable energy sources in a thus-far futile attempt to dent the Russian war machine. But things are about to heat up to their east.
Richie Graham is based in Little Rock Arkansas USA and writes from a free-market libertarian, anti-interventionist perspective.