VISBY, A PORT on the Swedish island of Gotland, was patrolled by foot soldiers and a dog on the morning of January 14, noted Aftonbladet, a Swedish newspaper. Then, shortly after lunch, a dozen armored vehicles “ran into the harbor on rattling tracks.” On the same day, a transport plane landed with 100 soldiers. “An attack against Sweden cannot be ruled out,” warned Peter Hultqvist, Swedish Defense Minister, on January 15, pointing out that Russian landing ships had entered the Baltic Sea. “Sweden won’t be caught napping if something happens.”
Sweden’s move to fortify the Baltic island, which lies close to Russia’s European enclave of Kaliningrad, reflects wider fears that war is looming. Russia has mustered more than 100,000 troops near Ukraine’s borders, with others from the Far East, and says talks with America and NATO held last week were a failure . It also began to train and mobilize reserve forces.
The digital skirmishes seem to have already begun. On the same day Sweden sent its forces to Gotland, Ukraine was hit by cyberattacks that defaced government websites and possibly locked down some official computers. The White House said it had intelligence showing Russia was planning acts of sabotage against its own proxy forces in eastern Ukraine to provide a pretext to attack the country.
Western officials and experts still do not know if Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, has made up his mind yet. Some believe Mr Putin still hopes to wring concessions from the West by waving his sword rather than wielding it. There is reason to hope that the many negative consequences for Mr Putin, including Western sanctions, a lack of enthusiasm for a fight at home and the risk of a bloody nose could still hold him back. Unlike 2014, when state propaganda was busy stoking anti-Ukrainian hysteria for a military offensive, this time Ukraine is virtually absent from Russian news. Whatever decision Mr Putin makes in the coming weeks, he faces uncertainty over the public’s response.
Still, alarm bells are ringing. “The chances have now increased that there will be some sort of dramatic but limited military operation in Ukraine,” says James Sherr of the International Center for Defense and Security, a think tank in Tallinn, and a former longtime observer of Russia. for the UK Ministry of Defence. What such an operation would look like is the question occupying intelligence analysts across Europe.
One possibility is that Russia would simply openly do what it has done stealthily for seven years: send troops into the “republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk, breakaway territories in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine, either to extend their borders westward or to recognize them as independent states, as it did after sending forces to Abkhazia and South Ossetia, two Georgian regions, in 2008 (see map).
Another scenario, widely discussed in recent years, is that Russia could seek to establish a land bridge to Crimea, the peninsula it annexed in 2014. This would require seizing 300 km (185 miles) of territory along the Sea of Azov, including the Ukrainian key. port of Mariupol, to the Dnieper river. This would extend Russian control into an area known as the Novorossiya, or New Russia, a historical part of the Russian Empire along the Black Sea. It would have the more tangible benefit of alleviating the water shortage in Crimea.
Such limited land grabs would be well within the reach of the forces now gathering in western Russia. What is less clear is whether they would serve the Kremlin’s war aims. If Russia’s objective is to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO or cooperating with the alliance, it is unlikely that simply consolidating control of Donbass or a small strip of land in southern Ukraine brings the Kiev government to its knees.
That leaves three big strategies. One is to change the government in Kiev by force, as America did in Afghanistan and Iraq. Another is to impose enormous costs on Ukraine – whether by decimating its armed forces, destroying its critical national infrastructure or occupying territory – until its leaders agree to sever their ties with the West. . The third is to make this request to America and NATO, this time from a military position of command. All three roads would require a great war.
A tempting solution would be for Russia to use “ranged” weapons without ground troops, mimicking NATO’s air war against Serbia in 1999. Rocket and missile strikes would wreak havoc. These could be complemented by more innovative weapons, such as cyberattacks on Ukrainian infrastructure like those that disrupted the country’s power grid in 2015 and 2016. Punishing Ukraine from afar, without committing ground troops, would reduce the number of victims. Russia could scale the pressure up and down over time, “punctuated by pauses to repeat or escalate demands,” notes Keir Giles of Chatham House, a London think tank.
The problem is that these bombing campaigns tend to last longer and prove more difficult than they first appear. If war breaks out, ranged strikes are more likely to be a prelude and accompaniment to a ground war rather than a substitute for it. Russia undoubtedly has the raw numbers for that. A 2016 RAND Corporation study noted that Russia could take two out of three Baltic states with around 30 Battalion Tactical Groups (BTGs), a Russian formation of around 1,000 troops plus equipment. Russia now has about double that number balanced on Ukraine’s borders (although not all of them fully equipped), plus support units and other incoming ones.
“I don’t see much between them and Kiev that could stop them,” says David Shlapak, co-author of the RAND report. He says Russia could consider what the US military calls a “thunderclap”, a rapid and deep assault on a narrow front, intended to shock and cripple the enemy rather than occupy territory – the example par excellence is the American raid on Baghdad in April 2003.
If Belarus allowed Russia to attack from its soil, Kiev might even be approached from the west and surrounded; Alexander Lukashenko, the Belarusian leader, announced on January 17 that his country would hold joint exercises with Russia on its southern and western borders in February and Russian troops have started arriving in the country. Ukrainian soldiers are good fighters, Sherr says, but despite years of Western training, their armed forces lack Russia’s level of skill in combined arms maneuver warfare – the use of ground forces, special forces, attack helicopters and paratroopers both on the front lines and far behind the enemy forces.
Even with these advantages, Russia would struggle to occupy the capital, let alone all of Ukraine, a country about as large and populous as Afghanistan. Since 2014, more than 300,000 Ukrainians have gained some form of military experience, and most have access to firearms. US officials told their allies that both the Pentagon and the CIA would support an armed insurgency. Still, Russia probably wants to avoid a long occupation, and that might not turn out to be necessary. “Once they are within rocket range of downtown Kiev,” Mr. Shlapak asks, “is that a situation Ukrainians want to live with?” Even if Volodymyr Zelensky, the President of Ukraine, is willing to tolerate a siege, Russia can bet his government will simply collapse – and it can use spies, special forces and disinformation to hasten that. process.
Wars, however, are rarely as quick or easy as their planners envision. Russia has not waged a full-scale offensive involving infantry, armor and air power since the decisive battles of World War II. Countries under attack can just as easily stand firm as crumble. And installing a puppet regime and then leaving is easier said than done, as the Kremlin itself discovered after its own invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Ivan Timofeev of the Russian Council for International Affairs warns against a “long and slow confrontation” which would be prolonged by Western military aid and “loaded with the destabilization of … Russia itself”.
Even victory would be expensive. “The Ukrainians are going to fight and inflict significant casualties on the Russians,” says Peter Zwack, a retired general who was the US defense attaché in Moscow during the Kremlin’s first invasion of Ukraine in 2014. This is going to be difficult for Russia – and they are basically on their own.All of this could, even now, give Mr. Putin pause.
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