What happens now?
A seismic shift in the Ukraine status quo as Russia raises the stakes
Putin’s much-anticipated address was delayed 12 hours, but when it came, he pulled no punches. He announced a partial mobilization to bring new bodies into the fight for Russia, mostly made up of military reservists. It also included others with combat experience or particular expertise needed by the military. Putin’s defense minister Sergei Shoigu followed up with a media interview to provide details. 300,000 would be called up, which he said was only one percent of the full mobilization potential of 25 million. Students would be exempt. Later, hundreds of fighting-age protesters were handed mobilization orders after their arrest.
Putin left no doubt as to the outcome of the coming referenda in four Ukrainian regions to be completed next week (two of them self-declared independent republics since 2014). They will vote to join Russia, he said, and Russia will accept them into the fold. Once that happens, they will be considered integral parts of Russia, just as Crimea has since the referendum and annexation there in 2014. An attack on Russian forces or civilians in those territories will be considered an attack on Russia, and Russia reserves the right to use any and all weapons in their arsenal to respond to such an attack, including nuclear if they so choose.
Putin alluded to statements he said had been made by certain high-level officials of NATO countries threating Russia with nuclear weapons, saying the ultimate goal of the West was to dismember the Russian Federation in a similar manner as the Soviet Union had been dissolved.
I would like to remind those who make such statements regarding Russia that our country has different types of weapons as well, and some of them are more modern than the weapons NATO countries have. In the event of a threat to the territorial integrity of our country and to defend Russia and our people, we will certainly make use of all weapon systems available to us. This is not a bluff.
Western leaders were quick to react, saying the mobilization and referenda were signs of weakness, moves of desperation after Ukrainian battlefield gains. They asserted that nothing would change, either in their support for Ukraine or in that country’s ability to win back territory. While the former part of that may have been true, the latter part was spin. This move will fundamentally change the balance of power on the battlefield, a balance that already favored Russia in the areas they’re most intent on holding.
The number of Russians being mobilized to add to their forces is about the same size as the entire Ukrainian armed forces before the war started. Russia claims nearly half of Ukraine’s force has been removed from the fight — either killed or wounded — while claiming Russia has suffered only about 6,000 dead thus far. While the casualty numbers are hard to verify, the number being mobilized and Ukraine’s overall fighting strength from the beginning of the war are not. These numbers will be a game-changer.
NATO has already sent Ukraine tens of billions worth of weapons systems. There’s no doubt those figured into the gains Ukrainians were able to make a few weeks ago. But those attempted advances failed in the south and have stalled in the north, with forces digging in to attempt to hold positions they’ve already taken from the Russians. Throwing in more weapons only goes so far. At some point they become mere chunks of metal if you don’t have sufficient trained forces to use them. So far NATO has been willing to use only Ukrainians in their fight against Russia, trying to pretend this is really a Ukrainian fight. It isn’t. This has been a proxy war between NATO and Russia from the start. Russia is calling it what it is. The West is not yet willing to. They seem to have been left somewhat flat-footed by this turn of events, at least temporarily.
The US announced it would never accept the results of any referenda conducted in Russian-held territory in Ukraine, claiming they would be a sham. If Russia does rig the votes, that would indeed be a sign of weakness. But what if the majority of people in southeast Ukraine really do wish to be under the jurisdiction of Russia? Russia claims polling they’ve done shows they do. Of course Western media sources claim they don’t and that any poll held in military occupied areas is bound to be under duress. Because of that, and because the votes won’t be sanctioned by Ukraine’s government, we’re told they’ll be illegitimate.
While it’s impossible to know in the current environment what most people living in Russian-occupied Ukraine think, there are reasons to believe Russia and its separatist proxies might not have to rig anything to get the results they want.
Ukraine is virtually a tale of two countries and has been from its inception. While the north and west is almost wholly ethnically Ukrainian, Ukrainian speaking, and culturally much closer to western Europe, the south and east has far more ethnic Russians, an even greater number of Russian speakers, and is culturally much more tied to Russia than the northwest.
There’s also the matter of Ukraine’s intermittent shelling of civilian areas of Donbas since 2014. In the last weeks and months, such shelling has become almost constant in the city of Donetsk, even though the city has no military strategic value. Russian and local media have been awash with reports of civilian casualties in Donetsk from indiscriminate Ukrainian shelling, as seen here and here. This, combined with Ukrainian threats to officials and civilians who participate in the referenda — threatening jail time, according to Russian media — just might be an indication of why a large number of Ukrainians in the south and east might vote for Russian citizenship in the coming days.
Crimea voted overwhelmingly to reintegrate with Russia in 2014 in the wake of the US-sponsored coup in Kiev, a sentiment that was echoed in polls of Crimeans conducted by American polling firms, both before and after annexation. They and the rest of southeastern Ukraine had also voted by large margins for Victor Yanukovych in the 2010 election, the last election in Ukraine before the coup. Yanukovych was overthrown and forced to flee to Russia during the violent 2014 Maidan demonstrations in which both protestors and police were shot from high-rise buildings in mysterious, disputed circumstances that are unresolved even to this day.
If people living in these regions really do want to become part of Russia after living under a regime imposed on them by the United States eight years ago, why is it a vital American national interest to try and block that? Because not doing so would threaten tens of billions in profits for Raytheon, Boeing, and other manufacturers of war materiel? Because it would mean conceding something to Russia and recognizing we’re no longer living in a unipolar world? Because thwarting Russia and Russians is an almost religious obsession with certain American elites who grew up during the Cold War? Because Putin is Hitler and threatens the security of Europe? (He isn’t and he doesn’t, however wrong and ill-advised his reactive war may be).
American Ukraine obsessives who hang flags from their porches seem not to be aware how hypocritical it is for the US to lead the charge against Russia’s invasion. No modern state has invaded more countries and overthrown more governments than the United States. Most of those were halfway around the world from us, not in our back yard in regions with ethnic, linguistic, and cultural ties to us. As recently as the past decade the United States and its allied forces have militarily devastated cities and civilian populations in places like Mosul, Iraq and Raqqa, Syria, both of which were almost leveled. The US bombed seven Muslim-majority countries in the last year alone of Nobel Peace Prize recipient Barack Obama’s presidency. The big difference, though, as far as American and European elites were concerned, was that those bombs weren’t dropping on the heads of Europeans. A cynical and morally depraved distinction if there ever was one.
Perhaps the most likely result of all this will be a new Iron Curtain descending across the continent, this time farther to the east. Based on the raw numbers, Russia is likely to prevail in taking whatever territory it wants in Ukraine’s southeast. And the West is likely to keep fighting them, even if over time the fight increasingly becomes an economic one, with the physical war a cold stalemate. That may be the best we can hope from this. Both sides to this conflict feel like they have everything to lose, and both are armed to the teeth with weapons easily capable of wiping out most life on Earth. Surely they’ll stop short of using them or provoking their use? Surely?
Richie Graham is based in Little Rock Arkansas USA and writes from a free-market libertarian, anti-interventionist perspective.