For weeks, Russia has been gathering troops close to Ukraine in a military rally on a scale unseen since its 2014 invasion.
Analysts, as well as Ukrainian and Western officials, have struggled to understand what Russian accumulation means: is it simply a posture to send a message to Ukraine and the Biden administration or is it a genuine preparation for Russian military action or even a full-scale invasion of Ukraine? ?
At this point, only the Kremlin knows the answer. But most observers have so far concluded that highly visible build-up is most likely noisy, although the threat of escalation cannot yet be ruled out.
“In general, the situation is better now than it was a week before,” Oleksiy Semenov, a former adviser to the secretary of the National Security Council of Ukraine, said on Friday.
“I would say that, in fact, the percentage of a certain real war or even a medium-sized military conflict – whether it is on the line or on the border – is low,” he said. “It doesn’t mean the situation can’t change.”
The conflict in eastern Ukraine has been at a low intensity since 2015, when a peace agreement ended major fighting. This peace process has been blocked more or less since then, leaving parts of eastern Ukraine under the control of Russian-controlled separatists, who face the Ukrainian government’s front forces. The separatist zones are nominally self-declared republics, but in practice are effectively controlled by Moscow, which has so far ceased to recognize them.
Since the end of March, Russian social networks have been full videos showing train loads of armored vehicles and heavy artillery moving into the Crimea and close to eastern Ukraine. This was accompanied by a rain of warrior rhetoric on the Russian state media. At the same time, a ceasefire in eastern Ukraine collapsed between Russian-controlled rebels and the Kiev government, with an increase in firing.
Estimates of the number of Russian troops deployed near Ukraine now range from 60,000 to more than 100,000, although many of them are permanently stationed there. Russia’s defense minister said it had moved two armies and three air units to its southwestern border, saying the build-up was part of a “readiness check” in response to alleged increased activity by US and NATO forces.
Russia has set up a new large field base for hundreds of vehicles, visible on commercially available satellite images, and foreign journalists have been allowed to approach.
Most observers say that the highly visible nature of the Russian buildup means it is intended to be seen, suggesting it is a message, not a prelude to an invasion.
“We have been and are spectators of a show, which many have taken – and consider – for reality,” Dmitry Trenin, director of Carnegie Moscow Center, said in an interview with Russian website 47News.
Many observers believe that the show is intended to send signals to both Ukraine and the Biden administration.
For Ukraine, Trenin said, it is a warning against any attempt to use military force to reclaim its occupied territories and also to express its dissatisfaction with a recent change of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to a more assertive against pro-Russian groups in the country.
For the US, Trenin said the message is also a warning to maintain strict control over Kiev, which the Kremlin considers dominated by the US
Other analysts say he believes it was meant as an early test for the Biden administration and as a message from the Kremlin that it can revive the conflict at will, if its interests are ignored.
The movements managed to attract the attention of the West. President Joe Biden called Russian President Vladimir Putin and offered him a summit meeting in the coming months, which analysts say Putin is looking forward to.
Some analysts said they believed the Kremlin had recently adopted more assertive moves in Kiev to state its points. The escalation began when Zelensky banned three pro-Russian media channels and sanctioned a powerful oligarch, often described as Putin’s reference man in Ukraine. Zelensky also conducted military exercises close to the front.
“Even though the movements in Kiev at the time were not preparations for a military offensive,” Trenin wrote in a recent article, “the Kremlin has decided to seize them to raise the stakes.”
Trenin and other analysts have suggested that Russia is genuinely concerned that leaders in Kiev could confuse words of support from the US as support for an attempt to forcibly take over the occupied regions.
Such a view is unsettling, some observers have said, suggesting a dangerous disconnect between the Kremlin’s perspective on the conflict and the way it is viewed by Ukraine and Western countries.
“There has been no ongoing Ukrainian military effort that could justify Russia’s ongoing operations on Ukraine’s borders,” Gustav Gressel, a politician at the European Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in a recent article.
“While the Kremlin’s fears are based on illusions, he believes that these illusions entitle him to real offensive actions.”