Is it Vladimir Putin: The Sequel” or perhaps more accurately Putin’s re-run season? What’s occurring now in the eastern Ukraine looks like what played out in Crimea. But this time will Putin be able to effectively seize an area without an invasion? Suddenly, pro-Russian gunmnen are showing up to take over a police station, an incident that suggests the groundwork is being laid for Russian to come in to protect pro-Russian elements and/or provide stability:
Violence flared in eastern Ukraine on Saturday as pro-Russian gunmen occupied a police headquarters in a small city and attacked government buildings in several towns nearby.
The government convened an emergency meeting late in the day to discuss the unrest, which the country’s acting interior minister said was evidence of “aggression from Russia.
To Ukrainian officials it looked like the beginning of a replay of the Crimea takeover by Russia, which began with men in unmarked uniforms storming the regional parliament, then spreading their control throughout the peninsula.
Saturday’s action involved only a few dozen men, but the simultaneous assaults in various places — and the modern weapons the men were carrying — suggested a coordinated operation.
And just the body language of the men shown on the videos suggest these aren’t everyday citizens who jumped of bed and decided it looked like a nice day to try and take over a police station.
“We are very concerned by the concerted campaign we see underway in eastern Ukraine today by pro-Russian separatists, apparently with support from Russia, who are inciting violence and sabotage and seeking to undermine and destabilize the Ukrainian state,” said Laura Lucas Magnuson, a National Security Council spokeswoman, in an e-mailed statement. “We saw similar so-called protest activities in Crimea before Russia’s purported annexation. We call on President Putin and his government to cease all efforts to destabilize Ukraine, and we caution against further military intervention. We will continue to monitor the situation closely.”
A senior State Department official said that during a call Saturday with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Secretary of State John F. Kerry “made clear that if Russia did not take steps to de-escalate in eastern Ukraine and move its troops back from Ukraine’s border, there would be additional consequences.”
Here’s another video that Liveleak says was posted on Saturday:
The BBC’s report gives evidence that Russia is laying the groundwork to intervene again:
Amid mounting concern about the situation, US Secretary of State John Kerry called his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov.
Mr Lavrov said Ukraine was “demonstrating its inability to take responsibility for the fate of the country”.
He warned that any use of force against Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine would undermine the “potential for co-operation”, which included talks in Geneva next week.
It’s really an old tactic a)plausible deniability b)the concept that you have militants do something to provoke a reaction from the government and then due to the even that provoked the reaction that you have instigated, you intervene to save the day and — not incidentally — advance your own interests.
The Week’s Marc Ambinder predicted earlier this week what is happening now, noting that in this kind of subversion “activities are not covert because they are designed to grab attention. The hallmarks of non-linear warfare are operational confusion, mistaken identity, and a sense of brittleness and crisis. Eventually, the combination of agents provocateurs and real protesters blend together.”
And Ukraine is responding in a way that you can just see will give Putin an excuse to paint it as the bad guy for its responding to violence and intimidation from pro-Russian gunmen:
Ukrainian forces exchanged gunfire with a pro-Russia militia in an eastern city Sunday, according to Interior Minister Arsen Avakov.
The minister said one Ukrainian security officer was killed and five others were wounded. It was the first reported gunbattle in east Ukraine, where armed pro-Russia men have seized a number of law enforcement buildings in recent days.
Sky News reported that a group of up to 100 civilians gathered outside the police headquarters to express their support for the separatists. Sky also reported that gunmen also took control of a police station in the nearby city of Kramatorsk following a shoot-out.
Avakov said in a Facebook post that a Security Service officer was killed in Slovyansk, where the police station and local Security Service office were seized a day earlier by camouflaged armed men. He also reported an unclear number of casualties among the militia.
Avakhov wrote that “all security units” were involved in an “anti-terror operation” in an attempt to take back the building that had been seized Saturday and advised the city’s residents to stay indoors and away from windows.
“There were dead and wounded on both sides,” Avakov said in the post, according to Reuters.
Unrest has spread to several municipalities in eastern Ukraine, including the major industrial city of Donetsk, which has a large Russian-speaking population.
The Daily Beast’s Jamie Dettmer reports that a Putin adviser sounds confident Putin can take Ukraine without an invasion:
‘A former top advisor to Vladimir Putin says the Russian president probably thinks at this point he can whip Ukraine back into line without having to resort to a full-blown invasion. Although it appears no Western power is willing to take military action to defend Kiev, overt Russian military action would risk deeper and more disruptive Western economic sanctions. So Putin’s willingness to play a longer-term game rests on his “cynical recognition” that he has three years to accomplish his objective before there is a change of leadership in the White House and the possibility of a more resolute American response.
“Putin’s objective remains to regain control of Ukraine, but I suspect he now thinks he can do this without ordering in the tanks,” says Andrei Illarionov, a former Putin economic policy advisor and now an unstinting critic of the Russian leader.
Illarionov tells The Daily Beast he expects Putin to maintain an intimidating offensive build-up of Russian forces along the Ukraine border, nonetheless, and that there will be no let-up in the fomenting of separatist agitation in the eastern Ukraine towns of Donetsk, Kharkiv, Lugansk and now Sloviansk. The aim is to destabilize Ukrainian politics, weaken Ukrainian state institutions and help Putin’s political allies reassert their power in Kiev.
Illarionov has predicted accurately various stages in the current Ukraine crisis, including his early warnings that the Kremlin would grab Crimea after the February ouster of Putin ally Viktor Yanukovych as Ukrainian President. Speaking in his office in the Washington D.C.-based think tank the Cato Institute, where he is a senior fellow, Illarionov warns, “Putin will not leave Ukraine alone until he has achieved what he wants – pulling the country back in the Russian orbit. And he will do that one way or the other.”
It’s a long game based on evaluations about the U.S., President Barack Obama, Europe, and American and European policymakers’ response — or non-response.
But what if he’s wrong?
And what’s the realistic chance that on this analysis he could be wrong?
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.