Joe Did What? The Second Time Around

 

Imagery of a war scare.

Yesterday on NPR, when I was half asleep during an interview with the career diplomat John Herbst, who was ambassador to Ukraine from 2003 to 2006 and now runs the Atlantic Council's Eurasia Center, I heard a reference to something like "the last time Russian troops surrounded Ukraine and an invasion seemed imminent, in April 2021,"  and I was kind of wait, what?

Because that's less than a year ago, and I don't remember anything about it, and almost nobody else does either, as far as I can tell, and I really don't think it was widely reported in the US. When I finally got around to looking it up, Dr. Google sent me, not to The New York Times or Washington Post, but the Natsional'nyy Instytut Strategichnykh Doslidzhen' (National Institute of Strategic Studies, and I'm not sure I'm transliterating it right) in Kiyiv, which has an excellent report on "The Russian and Ukrainian Spring 2021 War Scare", in English, that tells me more or less what I needed to know: In March 2021 Ukrainian intelligence were alarmed by an unusual concentration of Russian troops and hardware forming along the Russian-Ukrainian border, and at the end of the month the US European Command raised its alertness leve from "possible crisis" to "potential imminent crisis". 

By mid-April, the number was between 100,000 and 120,000 Russian troops and military hardware to match, that's more than in the actual war-fighting period of 2014-15. Russian authorities insisted they had no belligerent purpose but were merely conducting regular exercises. Then, in June, the maneuvers ended and the deployment returned to its normal strength of about 87,000 troops (which is not that much less, as you'll note). The NISS did its careful study and issued its report at the end of September, with some valuable conclusions:

• First, statements on the number of Russian troops involved were misleading in certain respects—the majority of troops in question were already at Ukraine’s borders from past incursions.
• Second, Russian armed forces involved in these exercises practiced complex scenarios, including encirclement of the Ukrainian Joint Forces Operation in Donbas and blocking of Ukrainian access to the Black Sea.
• Third, Russian public justifications of the movement of troops and hardware near Ukraine’s border were unpersuasive upon closer look. It seems that a major driver of Russian actions was the desire to send signals to the new U.S. administration—namely that the Biden administration should not attempt to challenge the status quo vis-à-vis Ukraine by bringing it closer to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) or aid in the liberation of parts of occupied Donbas.
• Finally, though Russia might have succeeded in sending specific signals to the Biden administration, the intended effect backfired in the case of Ukraine.

(the backfiring being the fact that President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, like Petro Poroshenko before him, went from being a skeptic on NATO membership to an advocate—Russia just keeps making new enemies with these games).

And then of course in October-November the deployments started up again, the same phenomenon the second time around, it seems, only fiercer, and here we are, the day before the invasion was expected to begin, according to Jake Sullivan and President Biden (adding, as they always have, that they have no information as to whether Putin has made a final decision), even roping President Zelenskyy into the show: 

Breaking: CNN Reporting that President Zelensky of Ukraine said he was just informed that Russias attack will begin on Wednesday February 16th.

— Rex Zane (@rexzane1) February 14, 2022

Instead, some Russian troops have begun pulling back from the border, just as they did at the end of the war scare nobody remembers last spring, and Putin, at his press conference with Bundeskanzler Scholz, has announced his readiness to make a deal:

Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Tuesday he was ready to continue working with the West on security issues to de-escalate tensions over Ukraine.

"We are ready to work further together. We are ready to go down the negotiations track," Putin told a press conference following talks in Moscow with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

Putin said that "of course" Russia does not want war. But it "cannot turn a blind eye" to how Washington and NATO "freely interpret" the principle of the indivisibility of security -- that no country should strengthen its security at the expense of others.

If this holds, as I really think it will, then what we are witnessing is the closest we could have gotten to a satisfying outcome to this terrifying episode, with some kind of resumption of the security negotiations that fell apart around the time Putin kicked Dmitri Medvedev back out of the presidency in 2012, some kind of effort to build real security guarantees for Ukraine out of the Minsk framework, Ukraine itself inevitably closer to Europe and NATO than ever, and a small but significant loss of face for Putin himself, who should be seen as having blinked, although our press isn't going to see it that way, naturally.

US: “we are releasing this intelligence bc we want to preempt Russian maneuvers in order to hopefully avoid a war”
Russia: “ugh fine, we’re gonna withdraw some of our troops then, which would give the US what it wants.”
Reporters: “wow what an embarrassment for Biden”

— Daniel Gilmore (@gilmored85) February 15, 2022

And no doubt there'll still be 90,000 Russian troops on the border, as there were in summer 2021, and they may well try another buildup in the fall, but the threats will have lost just a little bit more credibility than they had this time, and the same amount the time after that, as long as they continue.

If I'm right, Joe Biden in fact will deserve enormous credit for what he has achieved here, for his skillful management of the alliance in what you might call a four-cop routine  (where US is the tough cop. Germany the indulgent cop, France the by-the-book careful cop, and Britain the loony cop who might mistake his gun for his taser or sit on your neck), and for his skillful use of what they're calling "megaphone diplomacy", using public pronouncements to make the situation absolutely clear, in contrast to Putin's work to produce an atmosphere of literally unspeakable menace, as Ambassador Herbst told Rachel Martin:

HERBST: The - what you're referring to as megaphone diplomacy is quite unusual. But I think it's actually a very clever tactic on the part of the White House. I mean, it's clear Moscow has been pursuing this provocation of massing forces on Ukraine's border. Well, they did it first last spring. [That's the thing that woke me up yesterday morning.] And now they've done it again since October of last year. And Moscow wants to claim that it has no aggressive intent. But if you listen carefully to what commentators in Moscow are saying, what officials are saying, it is that, well, of course, they're not going to do anything. But if there's a provocation, if those crazy Ukrainians try to take back the territories in eastern Ukraine, which Moscow is currently occupying, then Moscow will respond. So the notion of a, quote-unquote, "Ukrainian provocation" is becoming the pretext for a launch of a major Russian offensive.

MARTIN: But just because the Biden administration, through the Pentagon or the CIA, would announce, hey, our intelligence says Russia is going to create this fake pretext for war, I mean, do you think that would really curtail, prevent Russia from just doing so?

HERBST: It makes the risk for Russia higher. It's not foolproof by any means, but then nothing is foolproof. But as a tactic, I think it makes sense. And, you know, it's clear the administration, as it picks up intelligence, has been putting it out there. So you know - so now we're hearing talk there may be something on the 16th...

By telling us so much about what Russia would do if it chose to act (and I think most of what Biden and the US personnel told us was really justified by the intelligence, which I'm afraid I can't say for British officials)—that they wouldn't proceed unless Ukraine did something to "provoke" them, or unless they could create a bogus provocation and blame it on Ukraine, and that tomorrow would be one of the last days they'd be likely to move (the week from 14th to 20th, really, after which the mud season will be under way)—but never claiming that they had so decided, he was able to frame the narrative in such a way as to bake in a happy ending:  

MARTIN: National security adviser Jake Sullivan says the administration is trying to avoid war by releasing this information to the public. Do you think this narrows Putin's options, though, because the world is watching? Or could this strategy backfire and make it harder for him to back down?

HERBST: I don't see this as backfiring. I mean, it's possible that everything the administration is doing will not prove enough to stay Putin's hand. But I don't see this as a problem because despite what some people think, Putin has the ability to retreat on a dime. He could turn around in a second. He controls the major media in Russia. He could explain this to his people. And the whole world will breathe a sigh of relief were that to happen.

Which is the sigh I feel we're sighing today, just a day later. It's certainly too early for me to start bragging about how I Was Proved Fucking Right, but I'm feeling pretty good at the moment about the predictions I made on Saturday. I hope we don't forget this war scare as quickly as we forgot the one last spring,