If you think you understand what Putin’s doing in Ukraine, you’re not paying enough attention

Vladimir Putin has won in Ukraine. Russia is on the verge of getting de facto control of eastern Ukraine, destabilising the remainder, and establishing its president’s cherished Eurasian Union. The West is nowhere — weak, disunited, and out-strategised by a master of geopolitics.

Hang on, that’s all wrong. Crimea was the high-water mark of Putin’s neo-imperialist vision. He lost control of all Ukraine when Yanukovych fell and most of it voted firmly to stay outside his control in the recent presidential election. He’s not even won the battle for eastern Ukraine, where the ‘separatists’ now meet a stronger Ukrainian military response. Poland’s foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, thinks this is partly because the West has been united in aiding Ukraine and opposing Russian aggression.

On the other hand, maybe all this just means that he’s winning more slowly. Ethnic Russians and Russophones are two thirds of the east’s population. They want continued political links with Russia, to which they are culturally linked for ever. Moreover, their ‘separatists’ control major eastern cities. And Russian troops are just over the border which, for practical purposes, has disappeared. It’s just a matter of time, especially since Putin made Russia invulnerable to western pressure by concluding the biggest energy deal in history — a 30-year, $400 billion deal to export Siberian natural gas to China.

Well, OK, the separatists control major buildings in eastern cities, and they have enough guns and clubs to prevent others from voting in the presidential election. But opinion polls show that two thirds of eastern Ukrainians want independence and a close relationship with Europe as well as links with Russia. They have started demonstrating too.

So the separatists are feeling nervous—and not just because the Ukrainian army is killing large numbers of them. They fear betrayal by Putin, who called on them to cancel their referendum on independence and to embark on ‘dialogue’ with the newly ‘legitimate’ president and the formerly ‘neo-fascist’ Kiev regime.