Ukraine appears to be faring well in its fight against Russia. Explosions have rocked a Russian military base in Crimea and the country’s president Volodymyr Zelensky is confidently stating that the war must end with the liberation of Crimea. Aid is also pouring in from the West. But Ukraine has been here before – and Putin’s Russia could, once again, be preparing to up the ante. Any talk of Ukraine’s triumph looks dangerously premature – particularly as we approach the month of September.
In the summer of 2014, Ukraine was managing to fend off Russian advances and making significant gains. Then, at the end of August, everything changed. As Ukraine celebrated its independence day on 24 August, marking its escape from the Soviet Union in 1991, there was a dramatic shift. Russian commanders inflicted a major defeat on Ukraine at the battle of Ilovaisk.
It was a pivotal moment. Russian troops poured into the Donetzk region, occupied it, and moved closer to the harbour city of Mariupol. The rest is history: the defeat forced Ukraine to the negotiation table in Minsk for ‘peace talks’ about east Ukraine. They were meaningless: Russia did not allow Ukraine any discussion of what it had done. The West closed ranks with Russia. It, too, acquiesced in Russia’s blatant land grab, hoping that its aggression would quickly evaporate like an unpleasant smell. The parallels here with Sudetenland in 1938-39 are painful and plentiful.
What was it about the 24 August that made the difference in 2014 and why does it matter today? It was hardly the fact that it was Ukraine’s independence day. As far as the Kremlin is concerned that day is a joke: no one in Moscow pays attention to it. Since 2007, members of Putin’s inner circle have made it clear that it is current state policy to consider the borders of the Russian Federation to be those of the Soviet Union of 1922 and extended by Stalin in 1939-1945. Never mind that the ideological thrust of the USSR was the ‘union’ of the international proletariat and Putin’s ‘federation’ is one based on the polar opposite: Russian nationalism. Both were straight from Moscow rules invented by Catherine the Great.
Ukraine’s hands are tied behind its back in another way, too
But there are two things that do matter about the last week of August. The first is that it is the beginning of election season in Russia. 11 September is polling day in Russia’s rolling regional elections. These are the type of ‘elections’ that Stalin would recognise. It is not the people who vote who matter but those who count the votes. Since 2000, Putin has made sure it is the Kremlin that does the counting.
Even so, like the team of Coriolanus Snow in the Hunger Games, one needs to put together a good show. Such optics justify Putin’s United Russia party winning yet again, as they have done for more than two decades. A ringing military victory and a defeated underling would be helpful for Putin. Again, this has happened before: election day in 2014 was on 14 September. Right on cue, the Kremlin forced Ukraine to agree to a ceasefire on 5 September in Minsk. In 2020, Alexei Navalny, a serious threat to Putin celebrated in the West, was poisoned. The date? 20 August.
But there is a far more important moment ahead, one that makes everyone in the Kremlin shake with fear. That day is 7 October, Vladimir Putin’s birthday, when a roll call of the president’s magnificent achievements are wheeled out.
In previous years, the Kremlin has gone above and beyond to mark the occasion. Putin’s birthday has coincided with the killing in cold blood of opposition journalist Anna Politovskaya in 2006 (followed weeks later by Putin’s former KGB underling of the same rank, colonel Alexander Litvinenko). This year is particularly special: it is Putin’s 70th birthday.
Everyone in the Kremlin is aware that the ‘show’ for this September’s election day in the weeks before Putin’s birthday had better be spectacular. An announcement about a major victory will need to be made by hook or by crook. Whatever form it takes, it must make the Kremlin and Russia itself look all-powerful to the electorate. This feeling will have to hold throughout the month of September for that all important roll call of the president’s achievements (достижений dostizhenii) on Putin’s big day.
A major military campaign such as that waged during the 2014 battle of Ilovaisk is the obvious answer. An offensive like this may well be imminent in the weeks ahead. Britain’s Ministry of Defence has warned that Russia is about to form a major new ground forces unit, the 3rd Army Corps of up to 15-20,000 troops.
One could point out that the difference between now and 2014 is that Ukraine has an army of up to one million troops and that many Russian-speaking Ukrainians today now hate Russia with a vengeance. While these are previously unthinkable developments, it would be naïve to think that Russia is incapable of doing great damage to Ukraine. Kyiv is, after all, still fighting an uneven war. The Russian navy in the Black Sea may be old and tired, but Ukraine effectively has no navy at all. This means all those superannuated Russian battle ships can still obliterate Ukraine’s coastline without anyone standing in the way – as they did so successfully in Mariupol.
Ukraine’s hands are tied behind its back in another way, too. Its army is almost entirely dependent on foreign military aid, guns and ammunition, which can only be used for very specific purposes. Ukraine cannot use this equipment to launch cross-border attacks as Russian troops on Russian territory are off-bounds. It’s hard to win a war if all your opponent has to do is cross the border and move behind an invisible shield.
Then there is the fact that traditionally such military aid always favours a certain outcome. It’s enough to stop the aggressor, but not enough to force removal from territory gained. That certainly was the case in 2014 in Minsk and the interminable empty accords that followed. Today Ukraine needs far more to win.
The big question for Zelensky in Kyiv then is this: what will our allies do if Russia does launch a major assault? Will we get enough aid to humiliate Russia and rout such an all-out attack to avoid an Ilovaisk II? The same question must be alive in Western capitals, but seen from the other side. Western leaders will be asking themselves whether they can risk antagonising Putin by inflicting a ringing defeat on him that will puncture the Kremlin’s balloon? If they do, what will he do next?
In 2014, the fear in the West was largely confined to uncertainty about Russian gas and pipelines which had been switched on and off by way of threat. Today talk of retaliation goes well beyond such commercial interests. But whatever does unfold over the coming weeks, Nato countries – and that includes Ukraine’s Black Sea neighbour Turkey – need to realise this: each time you give a dictator a pass you magnify your own problems in the future. If you worry, say, about a mystery explosion of the nuclear reactor at Zaporizhzya nuclear power plant by way of retaliation for a defeat, think about what you will have to worry about in the foreseeable future when Russia’s ally Belarus is fully up and running as the 10th nuclear power in the world. Moscow can then act as if it has nothing to do with Belarus’s nuclear decisions or ‘mistakes’.
Whether we like it or not, Zelensky’s headache must count as our own.
Comments