Resistance from the population in Kyiv could prove a serious thorn in Moscow’s side.
Talks between Russia and the West have failed. Moscow has described the situation in Ukraine as “intolerable” and “a matter of life or death”. The US President, Joe Biden, has predicted the Kremlin “will move in” to Ukraine. The impasse was reached when the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, insisted that the armed conflict in eastern Ukraine “looks like genocide”, adding massive pressure to his diplomatic demands. Russia insists it is prepared to deploy unspecified but alarming sounding “military-technical” means to pursue its ends. The signals are more than clear: after annexing Crimea in 2014 and sponsoring separatist movements in the Donbas, in the country’s east, Moscow is directly threatening a third incursion into Ukraine’s territorial sovereignty, massing troops on the Ukrainian border and also in Belarus, officially for “joint exercises”. Beyond Ukraine, Russia is putting pressure on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Union and attempting to change the international order with this latest round of power politics. Is Moscow bluffing – or is an escalated military conflict likely in Ukraine? If so, what are the chances that Kyiv can resist its more powerful neighbour? A concerted campaign of disinformation deployed through Russian-language media aims to foment unrest in Ukraine. But eight years of war have considerably diminished the power of pro-Russian propaganda and Kyiv took further steps last year by banning pro-Russian media outlets. Ukraine’s security services have also revealed that several thousand cyberattacks have been conducted from occupied Crimea since 2014. In mid-January, a message calling on Ukrainians to “ be afraid and expect the worst ” – purporting to be from Poland, one of Ukraine’s strongest supporters – was revealed by Ukraine’s information ministry to have probably been devised by Russia. Energy security is another important part of this crisis. Moscow’s plans for Nord Stream 2 – a pipeline that is supposed to directly reach Germany through the Baltic Sea – could deny energy to Ukraine, which has already lost control of its coal deposits in the conflicted Donbas.
