Defence: the Bear moves

10/04/2021

While the British media, largely, is preoccupied with other matters, yesterday saw a significant development in Moscow, as the Kremlin responded to concerns about troop movements near the Ukraine border, and its military build-up in occupied Crimea.

Recorded by Deutsche Welle, Kremlin and Foreign Ministry representatives claimed that its moves were a response to "provocations" from Kiev, citing fears of a civil war or even the possibility of a genocidal attack on Russian-speaking minorities in Ukraine.

Spokesman Dmitry Peskov repeated a common Kremlin refrain, that Russia had the right to move troops within its borders as it saw fit, and asserted that: "If a civil war - a full-scale military action - resumes near our borders that would threaten the Russian Federation's security".

Peskov, Russia's top negotiator with Kiev, expressed fears of a massacre similar to that in Srebrenica in 1995 during the Bosnian War. He claimed that nationalist rhetoric in Ukraine was inflaming hatred against the Russian-speaking population of the east.

However, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas was unmoved, branding the actions as "unilateral Russian provocation". US Secretary of State Antony Blinken conferred with fellow foreign ministers, including Maas and Jean-Yves Le Drian, discussing "the need for Russia to end its dangerous and irresponsible rhetoric [and] its military build-up".

Earlier on Thursday, Angela Merkel had spoken directly over the phone with Russian President Vladimir Putin, calling for "the removal of these troop reinforcements in order to achieve a de-escalation of the situation".

To back this up, State Department spokesman Ned Price has "emphasized the importance of supporting Ukraine against unilateral Russian provocations". Separately, the United States has notified the Turkish Foreign Ministry that it will be sending two warships through the Bosporus to the Black Sea next week to monitor the situation.

The US vessels will enter the region on 14-15 April and leave on 4-5 May as per the terms of the 1936 Montreux Convention, which regulates passage of foreign warships through the Bosporus and Dardanelles straits and seeks to demilitarise the Black Sea by limiting their presence to 21 days. This US activity is said to be "not unusual".

Whether or not the Russian activity is simply "sabre rattling", or Putin has darker motives is near impossible to tell. Some analysts point to the Turkish plans to build a controversial new canal to alleviate the notoriously congested Bosporus straits.

Also intervening yesterday was Putin, who phoned Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to urge him to preserve the Montreux agreement, as any new canal would not fall under the existing agreement.

"In view of the Turkish plans to build the Istanbul Canal, the Russian side emphasised the importance of preserving the existing regime of the Black Sea straits in accordance with the provisions of the Montreux Convention of 1936 in order to ensure regional stability and security", the Kremlin added after the Friday call.

Moscow is also perturbed by Ukraine's attempts to bolster ties with the West, with its ongoing relations with the EU and its stated desire to join NATO. Picking up on this, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova warned that joining NATO, "would not only lead to a massive escalation of the situation in the southeast but could also entail irreversible consequences for the Ukrainian state".

A third element of the jigsaw is the increasing frequency of ceasefire violations in the Donbass region, where much of the fighting has taken place since 2014. Though combat has decreased in recent years, we are told that more than 14,000 people have died in the conflict and efforts to negotiate a political settlement have proved unfruitful.

Yet none of the broader strategic considerations would explain the immediacy and scale of the Russian military moves. These have the New York Times speculating on the real reasons, even to the extent of suggesting that Putin is seeking to shift attention from the imprisonment and failing health of his political opponent, Aleksei Navalny.

There is also a suggestion that Putin is testing the Biden administration, to see how it might respond, although the paper does concede that the moves could be preparation for actual cross-border military action, anticipating that the West will do nothing beyond issuing strident press statements.

Despite the many different motivations for the Russian action, though, there is a reasonable case to be made that a full-blooded military intervention is in the offing. What points in this direction is not only the scale of the build-up, but the quality of the assets being deployed.

The Russian forensic investigative group, Conflict Intelligence Team, for instance, points to the presence of T-72B3s, one of the latest upgrades of this venerable tank, the latest deliveries dating back only to 2017. As well as improvements to its main gun, it is modified to include an advanced fire control system and a new thermal sight, plus new radio systems which enable encrypted digital voice and data transfer.

CIT released photos and official travel logs, showing the arrival of the elite 76th Guards Air Assault Division from Pskov, one of Russia’s most combat-ready units. It has travelled by rail to the Russia-occupied Crimea. The presence is revealed by their BMD-3 air-portable Infantry Combat Vehicles, equipment which is issued exclusively to airborne forces.

The deployment of elite forces is in accord with current Russian military doctrine. Breaking away from former Soviet doctrine, when quantity was king, with the professionalisation of the Russian military, the preference is for actions by relatively small packages of well-trained and equipped troops.

Adding the sense of unease is Russia recent reinforcement of its Black Sea fleet, based in Crimea, with ten landing ships and what are termed "small artillery ships" (Buyan-class corvettes) from its Caspian flotilla. The corvettes are relatively modern warships – the latest of the Caspian fleet commissioned in 2014 – which are armed with a potent combination of guns and missiles. Analysts have called the transfer of these naval assets "unusual", even during military exercises.

That is not to gainsay the scale of the deployment, which has even the Moscow Times conceding that largest concentration of troops on its border with Ukraine since the eastern Ukraine conflict first erupted in 2014, based on an evaluation by CIT, on its website.

This has the Ukraine military convinced that the Russians are "not waiting but preparing", with it only being a matter of time before we see large-scale border incursions. The parallels with 2014 are all too clear. It just needs the appropriate pretext.

Another piece of the jigsaw, reported in yesterday's Guardian is an observation from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE).

It claims to have seen increased GPS jamming in the conflict zone. For the first time since October 2014, a long-range UAV was unable to take off from its base due to "dual GPS signal interference assessed as caused by jamming". Overall, it says, UAVs had been "experiencing increased levels of GPS signal interference on take-off and landing” since 21 March, the approximate start of the Russian military build-up".

With this type of report, it is very hard to be reassured that Putin is merely sabre-rattling. From Chechnya, Georgia, Ukraine and others, each time the Russians have deployed their military, the West sits and watches. Putin has little to lose and retains the initiative. And the bear is on the move.

Also published on Turbulent Times.