Putin Marches Ahead: He Plays Merkel and Obama for Naifs as he Grabs More of Ukraine.
http://online.wsj.com/articles/putin-marches-ahead-1409270718?mod=Opinion_newsreel_3
Say this about Vladimir Putin. The Russian strongman has taken the measure of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Obama. He knows they dread a showdown over Ukraine, so he is ignoring their rhetorical protests and moving to carve out even more of Ukraine for Greater Russia.
That’s the meaning of the Kremlin’s decision this week to move Russian forces into the Ukrainian coastal town of Novoazovsk while shoring up Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine. A NATO official said “well over” 1,000 Russian troops, backed by heavy armor, have joined the separatists in fighting Ukraine’s military.
The Kiev government is calling this an “invasion,” while NATO clings to “incursion,” but that’s a distinction without a difference. Russia invaded Ukraine in February by grabbing Crimea. It has since escalated its military intervention in multiple ways, including with special forces and by firing artillery at Ukrainian positions from both Russian territory and inside Ukraine. If Spanish-speaking men in army garb grabbed El Paso and Mexican artillery fired at the Texas National Guard, Americans would call it an invasion.
The strategy behind Mr. Putin’s move into Ukraine’s southern coast is to open a land bridge between Russia and Crimea. The goal is to reduce Crimea’s isolation so Russian military garrisons can be reinforced by land instead of by air, and the peninsula’s economy can be knit more closely to Russia’s.
The escalation also opens up another front for the Ukrainian military as it tries to regain control over the east. Ukraine’s military has been making progress against the separatist forces occupying Donetsk and Luhansk, and Mr. Putin may figure he had to act now to prevent the rebels from being overrun. Kiev’s forces will now have to fight on a third front against Russian soldiers and armor.
The timing is notable, but not surprising, on the heels of the much-ballyhooed Tuesday meeting between Mr. Putin and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. Western Europeans, in their desire to have this crisis go away, had hoped the meeting would yield progress toward a negotiating solution.
But Mr. Poroshenko can’t concede territory to Russia without betraying his country, and Mr. Putin can’t be seen inside Russia to have abandoned his separatist proxies in Ukraine. When Mr. Poroshenko wouldn’t yield, Mr. Putin decided to improve his leverage by creating more military facts on the ground.
The Russian advance is a particular humiliation to Mrs. Merkel, who more or less invited Mr. Putin to escalate. Last weekend she visited Kiev with a public message that there had to be a negotiated solution and Europe had no plans for further sanctions against Russia. That was ample incentive for the Russian to refuse any compromise. His latest grab for territory follows the familiar Putin pattern of responding to every concession with a new provocation.
Mrs. Merkel is supposed to be a formidable statesman but she has been soft clay in Mr. Putin’s hands. Every time she backs away from tough sanctions, the Russian advances. He knows Mrs. Merkel’s government includes a Social Democratic foreign minister who is soft on Moscow’s depredations.
He also knows that she and her fellow European leaders will go to great lengths to avoid imposing sanctions that might harm their own weak economies. Russia also has economic troubles, but Mr. Putin is an autocrat willing to gamble a weak hand for what he considers to be long-term strategic gain. The West Europeans won’t take any risks for anything.
On Thursday Mrs. Merkel and Mr. Obama said they will discuss imposing more sanctions this weekend. But if they follow form in this crisis, they will stomp their feet, sanction a couple of more banks and oligarchs, and then beg Mr. Putin to “negotiate in good faith.” This would be risible if the consequences for Ukraine, and for the future of Europe, weren’t so grim.
Mr. Putin’s escalation is also a slap at Mr. Obama, who has pleaded with the Russian that people don’t act this way “in the 21st century.” Oh, yes, they do. Mr. Obama’s refusal to help Kiev with even small arms and antitank and antiaircraft weapons was also a signal to the Kremlin that the U.S. would prefer to look away. The U.S. President has subcontracted out this crisis to the Europeans, which means doing little or nothing.
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A serious response to this serious challenge to Europe’s political order remains now what it was when we first suggested it six months ago. Arm the Ukrainians so they can defend themselves. Impose punitive sanctions on Russian energy and finance that will damage the economy and raise the domestic political costs for Mr. Putin. Deploy arms and soldiers to Poland and the Baltic states, and demonstrate the political will to rearm NATO.
Alas, Mr. Putin has concluded that the chances that Mr. Obama and Mrs. Merkel will do this also remain the same—zero.
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