Paul Wood

Will Putin now roll on to Kiev?

The window for diplomacy has closed

The White House told us with absolute certainty that there would be an invasion of Ukraine this week — instead Vladimir Putin bit off a chunk of Ukraine without firing a shot. Perhaps it seemed to him that recognising the two breakaway territories of Luhansk and Donetsk was a clever move: he had not, after all, ignored the warning that — in Boris Johnson’s phrase — one Russian soldier putting a toe-cap over the border would make sanctions inevitable. But sanctions will come anyway — the issue is only about how severe they will be — imposed because, as Johnson says, there has been a clear breach of international law.

More than that, the Kremlin has announced that there will be ‘peacekeeping operations’ in Donetsk and Luhansk — that is, at some moment very soon, Russian troops will officially and undeniably enter Ukraine. Perhaps these were the plans the White House had received intelligence of. The question now is whether the Russian leader will declare victory and leave things at that, or if this speech is the justification to send the tanks all the way to Kiev. Either way, the window for diplomacy has all but closed. We wait now for Western punishment and Russian reaction.

I thought that Putin was — is — bluffing because actually invading Ukraine would be a crazy act of self-destruction

It was a dark, bitter, and at times paranoid speech. Putin seemed almost to snarl at the camera as he went through a litany of historic injustices perpetrated by the West against Mother Russia. Meanwhile, the Ukrainians were ungrateful — Russia had taken $250 billion (£180 billion) of Soviet debt off their hands — and had put themselves under the control of Russia’s enemies abroad. They even wanted to get tactical nuclear weapons. Russia couldn’t allow that.

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