It is still too early to let our guards down when it comes to the border crisis in Ukraine, particularly given the cyberattack apparently carried out by Russia on that country's Defense Ministry and banks Tuesday night along. Nevertheless, the apparent trend over the last two days has been one of de-escalation.
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Should this trend continue, once could cautiously conclude Russia will not invade Ukraine in the coming days, that is if we are to assume Moscow did in fact initially intend to do so and was not merely sow panic in an attempt to extort the West.
We first saw encouraging signs the threats would dissipate on Monday. That was when Russian President Vladimir Putin met with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov while the cameras were rolling and asked him whether there was a chance for diplomacy to succeed. Making sure to first express his displeasure with the talks so far, Lavrov replied that there was "always a chance."
At the same time, Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov and his Belarusian counterpart Viktor Khrenin held warm talks and even agreed to send delegations to train with each other's militaries. This is particularly telling as Belarus, in a worst-case scenario, could have served as the base for another front ahead of a Ukraine invasion.
At the conclusion of their talks, Reznikov said there were no signs Russia was preparing to attack. Yet the most encouraging sign came Monday night, when the Russian Defense Ministry officially announced training in military districts adjacent to Ukraine had come to an end and the units involved would be returning to their bases. While it remains to be seen whether Russia will follow through with action, and there is, of course, the possibility the troop withdrawal is a diversionary tactic ahead of an operation, this is increasingly unlikely as time passes.
Nevertheless, the most important development Monday had nothing whatsoever to do with the front but rather Russia's parliament, the Federal Assembly. Members of the State Duma voted in favor of a bill calling to officially recognize the separatist "republics" of Donetsk and Luhansk. The legislation will be submitted to Putin but is unlikely to be passed: Russia, which annexed Crimea and later fostered the conflict in Donbas to undermine stability in Ukraine, prefers to present itself as a neutral observer. For the last eight year, it has argued Kyiv needed to promote legislative amendments that would confer special status to the separatist regions.
Ukraine, which was forced to sign the Minsk Protocol in 2014, is unwilling to relinquish its sovereignty or allow the existence of any federation on its land as doing so would allow Russia to gnaw at its territorial integrity. If Putin were to now authorize the legislation, he could present recognition of the separatist entities, which would pave the way for their annexation later down the line, as an "achievement."
Russia has issued over 750,000 identity cards to residents of the "republics" thus far.
Should Putin refrain from approving the legislation, he can use this to pressure Ukraine to fulfill its responsibilities. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, for his part, promised German Chancellor Olaf Schulz to advance the issue. He warned Putin on Monday that recognition of the "republics" would put an end to the Minsk Protocol, which was reached to end the fighting in Ukraine's Donbas region.
Any move to advance the status of the "republics" would be a ticking time bomb and would have the potential to undermine the Ukrainian political system.
By taking the legislative route, Russia has shown it has been pushed into a corner. It is now looking for a way to blur its miscalculations of the West, which under US President Joe Biden's leadership, responded to Russia's move with a highly aggressive intelligence-communication war and along with its allies provided vast amounts of weapons and united the North Atlantic Treaty Organization on the issue instead of sufficing with those infamous statements of concern.
None of this means Russia's strategic threat to Ukraine has been neutralized. For that, we will need to see Ukraine gain NATO membership, or at the very list, a figure who does not see themselves as someone who should have led the Soviet Union installed in the Kremlin.
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