The news from Ukraine grows progressively more disturbing with dozens of deaths in recent days in the seaport of Odessa and in some Ukrainian cities near the Russian border.
Meanwhile, Russians forces, some at involving brigade-strength units of tank, motor-rifle and airborne troops, plus Spetnaz special forces, are taking up positions on the border of eastern Ukraine.
It is chilling to think how quickly and mysteriously this situation all came up. As a former Moscow correspondent for a U.S. magazine, I find some of the city names oddly familiar since I have visited them. I was in the eastern Ukrainian industrial city of Sumy and also in Rostov on the Russian side where I reported stories on privatizating Russian farms. Kiev was a regular destination.
The horrific assaults of 9/11 notwithstanding, Iraq and Afghanistan do not pose the immediate threat to the U.S. and the West as an out-of-hand conflict in Ukraine would with Russia. The parallels are simply too fantastic. Bosnia in 1914? The Sudetenland in 1938? Poland the following year? All helped spark world wars with phony calls for a Great Power to help fellow language-speakers who were being abused.
That seems to be Vladimir Putin’s obvious ploy. Each ratcheting up of pro-Russian rebels in Eastern Ukraine beats Putin’s drum. News reports keep noting that some of the rebels have serious background from the Soviet days, such as service as Spetznaz in Afghanistan. To be sure, there are plenty of reports that the CIA and other American operatives, private and government, are active in Ukraine, an area hardly unfamiliar to them.
There’s plenty of criticism of Barack Obama for not “standing up” to Putin but there’s not a lot he can really do militarily. He was wise not to suggest putting American troops in Crimea. He needs to keep his dialogue strong with our NATO allies, although it is true they haven’t really paid much of the burden of security since the late 1940s. If things really pop, and they may well do so soon, cool heads must prevail.
A few random observations:
- It seems rather obvious that Russia has really spiffed up its special operations forces but the jury’s still out on the regular army. Of course, that was true before. I remember in Moscow during an attempted coup against Boris Yeltsin in October 1993 that I covered, the Spetnaz guys were true pros. They were the ones who retook the rebel-held White House and put a stop to things. Of course, other special ops troops have really screwed up, leading to the deaths of hundreds during several hostage situations.
- Is it 1960? That’s what I wonder when I see the air show Putin is putting on as he prepares to visit Crimea. Some of the Russian warplanes thundering low overhead seem late model, but some are ancient Tupolev 95s that flew first in 1952 and still have propellers. Others are Ilyushin-76 jet cargo planes so ubiquitous that even I have flown in them. BTW, the Tu-95s have been active recently off of Alaska, Guam and Scotland forcing scramblers of U.S. and U.K. interceptors.
- One has to wonder where the nukes are. By some accounts, Russia has at least 1,800 strategic nuclear warheads available for launch on big mother ICBMs like SS-18s or more modern SS-27s. They still have some subs and aircraft that can launch them. How many are operational right now? Have they increased in number? Do we have more Trident subs at sea? Are our missile silos out in the Dakotas and Montana and other other places more active these days?
- What about Russian sabotage? Apparently, there was a Russian intelligence officer who had defected not long ago. He had been with the GRU, military intelligence, as opposed to the KGB. The man, Stanislaw Lunev, talked about how the Russians were thinking about placing hidden, suitcase-sized nuclear bombs called RA-115s in the U.S. They could be set to go off by radio code. Lunev apparently said one of his intelligence missions was to recon possible hiding places in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. This was before the Cold War ended. Why nuke Harrisonburg and its nearby turkey farms? That’s near where our leaders would take shelter during a nuclear war. Is Lunev some kind of nut? Or is this serious? Are the suitcase bombs out there?
- It looks like sanctions is all Obama and the West have. It doesn’t sound like much, especially since much of Europe is in Russia’s economic pocket already and are sharing the wealth legally or illegally. As Washington Post commentator Anne Applebaum notes, it is a little late to be discovering that rich Russians have inundated the global financial system. It’s also too late to discover that Putin may have his own huge but hidden personal slush fund.
- If the West really wants to punish Putin (and it isn’t really certain they do) the way to do so is to force a drop in world oil prices from $100 a barrel to something a bit lower. This could be accomplished by putting more oil or gas on the market perhaps by tapping strategic reserves. Talk about LNG exports is meaningless in the short term because building infrastructure would take several years. But oil prices do affect Russian behavior.
In the end, the battle now is one of wills. The problem is that Americans are truly tired of war, having just spent nearly 15 years in Iraq and Afghanistan. We have lost thousands of men and women. We haven’t even started paying for the efforts and one war, Iraq, wasn’t necessary. Meanwhile, we are stuck with security and diplomatic policies that are focused on Islamic terrorism and are woefully inadequate to deal with the current crisis in Ukraine.
On this point, a couple of weeks ago, I was in New York attending an awards dinner at the Overseas Press Club of America, an organization of which I have been a member for nearly 20 years. The keynote address was delivered by Ambassador Samantha Power, now the U.S. Rep. at the United Nations and a key member of Obama’s national security staff.
She is a highly intelligent and articulate government official and former journalist. But I kept on poring over her biography. She made her chops writing about genocide in places like the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. She has no military experience. What makes her qualified to deal with this bizarre new form of the Cold War that has extreme security implications?