Alex Massie Alex Massie

The clock is ticking for Vladimir Putin in Ukraine. He has missed his best chance of victory.

Tick tock. Tick tock. Time is running out in the Ukraine. Time passes and cements the “facts on the ground”. Russia controls the Crimea and, one way or another, we should probably expect the province’s referendum to endorse a return to Moscow Centre. Whether Crimea’s plebiscite can or will be conducted honestly is a different matter but that, in the end, is not the most important issue.

Indeed the fate and future of Crimea is, if hardly an irrelevance, a question of secondary importance. It is not the major front in this struggle. Russia’s actions in the Crimea are plainly illegal and unjustified but they were supposed to be the catalyst for action elsewhere.

As John O’Sullivan says in his admirable article for this week’s magazine, what has not happened is even more important than what has occurred. Eastern Ukraine has not risen. At least not yet. There has been no insurrection, no repudiation of the new government in Kiev. No great clamour for partition.

These facts on the ground are being cemented too. With each passing day it becomes more, not less, difficult for Russia to force a confrontation in eastern Ukraine. The stakes increase with each day of relative calm; the costs of such a confrontation become ever clearer and ever greater.

Calm, even of a relative and tense kind, is Russia’s enemy. Perhaps Moscow will gain the Crimea but only, at least for now, at the expense of its own long-term ambitions in its near abroad. Indeed Moscow’s aggression may prove counter-productive, effectively ensuring Russia cannot achieve its own goals. Heckuva job, Vladimir.

If the east were to rise, best it rose quickly. But it has not risen and time is not on Russia’s side. Each day that passes without a fresh confrontation is time Moscow loses – time, too, that it can scarcely afford to lose.

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