Russia-Ukraine border: Why Moscow is stoking tensions
By Sarah Rainsford
BBC Moscow correspondent
When Russia wanted the US to sit up and take notice last April it sent tanks towards the Ukrainian border.
The show of force worked: President Joe Biden called Russia’s Vladimir Putin and in June the two men met in Geneva.
But whatever they agreed about Ukraine at their summit, something has since gone awry.
In recent weeks, Russian tanks have been moving west towards Ukraine once again, prompting fresh, even starker warnings from US intelligence circles that a cross-border offensive could be in the cards.
This build-up of Russian forces was spotted 185 miles from Ukraine.
Moscow insists that it is “anti-Russian” hysteria, and most analysts agree there’s no rationale for Russia openly entering – and massively escalating – the conflict in Ukraine, where it backs separatist forces but always denies a direct role.
Instead, they see the Kremlin sending a message that it’s ready to defend its “red lines” on Ukraine: above all, that it must not join Nato.
“I think for Putin it’s really important. He thinks the West has begun giving Ukraine’s elite hope about joining Nato,” political analyst Tatiana Stanovaya at R.Politik told the BBC.
“The training, the weapons and so on, are like a red rag to a bull for Putin and he thinks if he doesn’t act today, then tomorrow there will be Nato bases in Ukraine. He needs to put a stop to that.”
Ukraine’s desire to join the security bloc is nothing new, nor is Russia’s insistence on vetoing that ambition in what it sees as its own “back yard”.
But Moscow has been rattled recently by the Ukrainian military using Turkish drones against Russian-backed forces in eastern Ukraine; the flight near Crimea of two nuclear-capable US bombers was an extra irritant.
There’s also concern that the so-called Minsk agreements, a framework for ending Ukraine’s seven-year-old conflict that’s too contentious to actually implement, could be dumped for something more favorable to Ukraine.
In April, Russia found that demonstrative military deployment worked well so it’s repeating the trick.
“Our recent warnings have indeed been heard and the effect is noticeable: tensions have risen,” President Putin told Russian diplomats last week. He argued that tension needed to be increased to force the West to reckon with Russia, not ignore it.
“If the military movements [close to Ukraine] are explicit, then this is not about direct military action – it’s about a signal Putin wants to send,” Andrei Kortunov, head of a think-tank in Moscow, told the BBC.
The signal to Ukraine is not to try anything rash.
So how did we get to this point?
A little history.
APR 16, 2019 History.com
At the height of the 1932-33 Ukrainian famine under Joseph Stalin, starving people roamed the countryside, desperate for something, anything to eat.
The Ukrainian famine—known as the Holodomor, a combination of the Ukrainian words for “starvation” and “to inflict death”—by one estimate claimed the lives of 3.9 million people, about 13 percent of the population of Ukraine.
And, unlike other famines in history caused by blight or drought, this was caused when a dictator wanted both to replace Ukraine’s small farms with state-run collectives and punish independence-minded Ukrainians who posed a threat to his totalitarian authority.
“The Ukrainian famine was a clear case of a man-made famine,” explains Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University and author of the 2018 book, Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine.
He describes it as “a hybrid…of a famine caused by calamitous social-economic policies and one aimed at a particular population for repression or punishment.”
In those days, Ukraine—a Texas-sized nation along the Black Sea to the west of Russia—was a part of the Soviet Union, then ruled by Stalin.
In 1929, as part of his plan to rapidly create a totally communist economy, Stalin had imposed collectivization, which replaced individually owned and operated farms with big state-run collectives.
Ukraine’s small, mostly subsistence farmers resisted giving up their land and livelihoods.
In response, the Soviet regime derided the resisters as kulaks—well-to-do peasants, who in Soviet ideology were considered enemies of the state.
Soviet officials drove these peasants off their farms by force and Stalin’s secret police further made plans to deport 50,000 Ukrainian farm families to Siberia, historian Anne Applebaum writes in her 2017 book, Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine.
“Stalin appears to have been motivated by the goal of transforming the Ukrainian nation into his idea of a modern, proletarian, socialist nation, even if this entailed the physical destruction of broad sections of its population,” says Trevor Erlacher, an historian and author specializing in modern Ukraine and an academic advisor at the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Russian, East European, & Eurasian Studies.
Collectivization in Ukraine didn’t go very well. By the fall of 1932—around the time that Stalin’s wife, Nadezhda Sergeevna Alliluyeva, who reportedly objected to his collectivization policy, committed suicide—it became apparent that Ukraine’s grain harvest was going to miss Soviet planners’ target by 60 percent.
There still might have been enough food for Ukrainian peasants to get by, but, as Applebaum writes, Stalin then ordered what little they had be confiscated as punishment for not meeting quotas.
“The famine of 1932-33 stemmed from later decisions made by the Stalinist government, after it became clear that the 1929 plan had not gone as well as hoped for, causing a food crisis and hunger,” explains Stephen Norris, a professor of Russian history at Miami University in Ohio.
Norris says a December 1932 document called, “On the Procurement of Grain in Ukraine, the North Caucasus, and the Western Oblast,” directed party cadres to extract more grain from regions that had not met their quotas. It further called for the arrest of collective farm chiefs who resisted and of party members who did not fulfill the new quotas.
Meanwhile, Stalin, according to Applebaum, already had arrested tens of thousands of Ukrainian teachers and intellectuals and removed Ukrainian-language books from schools and libraries. She writes that the Soviet leader used the grain shortfall as an excuse for even more intense anti-Ukrainian repression.
As Norris notes, the 1932 decree “targeted Ukrainian ‘saboteurs,’ ordered local officials to stop using the Ukrainian language in their correspondence and cracked down on Ukrainian cultural policies that had been developed in the 1920s.”
When Stalin’s crop collectors went out into the countryside, according to a 1988 U.S. Congressional commission report, they used long wooden poles with metal points to poke the dirt floors of peasants’ homes and probe the ground around them, in case they’d buried stores of grain to avoid detection.
Peasants accused of being food hoarders typically were sent off to prison, though sometimes the collectors didn’t wait to inflict punishment.
Two boys who were caught hiding fish and frogs they’d caught, for example, were taken to the village soviet, where they were beaten, and then dragged into a field with their hands tied and mouths and noses gagged, where they were left to suffocate.
As the famine worsened, many tried to flee in search of places with more food. Some died by the roadside, while others were thwarted by the secret police and the regime’s system of internal passports.
Ukrainian peasants resorted to desperate methods in an effort to stay alive, according to the Congressional commission’s report. They killed and ate pets and consumed flowers, leaves, tree bark and roots. One woman who found some dried beans was so hungry that she ate them on the spot without cooking them, and reportedly died when they expanded in her stomach.
“The policies adopted by Stalin and his deputies in response to the famine after it had begun to grip the Ukrainian countryside constitute the most significant evidence that the famine was intentional,” Erlacher says. “Local citizens and officials pleaded for relief from the state. Waves of refugees fled the villages in search of food in the cities and beyond the borders of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic.” The regime’s response, he says, was to take measures that worsened their plight.
By the summer of 1933, some of the collective farms had only a third of their households left, and prisons and labor camps were jammed to capacity.
With hardly anyone left to raise crops, Stalin’s regime resettled Russian peasants from other parts of the Soviet Union in Ukraine to cope with the labor shortage.
Faced with the prospect of an even wider food catastrophe, Stalin’s regime in the fall of 1933 started easing off collections.
The Russian government that replaced the Soviet Union has acknowledged that famine took place in Ukraine, but denied it was genocide.
In April 2008, Russia’s lower house of Parliament passed a resolution stating that “There is no historical proof that the famine was organized along ethnic lines.”
Nevertheless, at least 16 countries have recognized the Holodomor, and most recently, the U.S. Senate, in a 2018 resolution, affirmed the findings of the 1988 commission that Stalin had committed genocide.
Ultimately, although Stalin’s policies resulted in the deaths of millions, it failed to crush Ukrainian aspirations for autonomy, and in the long run, they may actually have backfired.
In the case of Ukraine it generated so much hatred and resentment that it solidified Ukrainian nationalism.”
Ukraine gained independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and has since veered between seeking closer ties with Western Europe and rejoining its alliance with Russia, which sees its interests as threatened by a Western-leaning Ukraine.
Europe’s second largest country, Ukraine is a land of wide, fertile agricultural plains, with large pockets of heavy industry in the east.
While Ukraine and Russia share common historical origins, the western part of the country has closer ties with its European neighbors, particularly Poland, and nationalist, independence, sentiment is strongest there.
However, a minority of the population wants to rejoin Russia and uses Russian as its first language, particularly in the cities and the industrialized east.
An uprising against pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014 ushered in a new, Western-leaning government, but Russia used the opportunity to seize the Crimean peninsula and arm insurgent groups to occupy parts of the industrialized east of Ukraine.
So bottom line, Ukraine used to be a part of the Soviet Union, but when the USSR collapsed, Ukraine sought, and is still seeking its independence.
Sarah Rainsford was expelled as BBC Moscow correspondent at the end of August after being designated a security threat.
Russian military buildup puts Washington on edge
BY ELLEN MITCHELL – 11/25/21
The Hill website
So this brings us back to the present situation.
Washington is on edge as Russia’s military buildup threatens a confrontation, with fears escalating following reports that U.S. intelligence shows Russian forces preparing to push into Ukraine.
Over the Thanksgiving holiday, the Biden administration received reports that nearly 100,000 Russian troops are stationed at various locations on the country’s western border, with no sign of those numbers waning.
Tensions have grown so high that the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine on Wednesday warned of “unusual Russian military activity” near Ukraine’s eastern border and in the annexed peninsula of Crimea, telling U.S. citizens not to travel there.
The new warnings come as Ukraine this week began to publicly declare that Russia could invade as soon as January or early February, much like when it annexed the Crimean Peninsula in 2014 and backed an insurgency in eastern parts of the country. More than 14,000 people have since been killed in that conflict.
A similar land grab, which would be the second in less than 10 years, has global implications and could trigger a massive military conflict as well as geopolitical strife between Russia and Western nations.
“Our concern is that Russia may make the serious mistake of attempting to rehash what it undertook back in 2014, when it amassed forces along the border, crossed into sovereign Ukrainian territory and did so claiming — falsely — that it was provoked,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said earlier this month.
But U.S. officials are determined not to be caught off-guard by such a military operation, with Blinken on Saturday indicating the administration was preparing for any aggressive Russian maneuver.
Reports also emerged this week that the Biden administration is mulling its options to deter the Kremlin, including sending military advisers and new weapons to Kyiv.
Such an aid package could include helicopters, mortars, air defense systems such as stinger missiles and new Javelin anti-tank and anti-armor missiles.
U.S. officials have also reportedly talked with European allies about forming a new sanctions package that could go into effect should Russia invade.
State Department officials have not publicly mentioned any new weapons or sanctions package, but one official told The Hill on Tuesday that the administration has “demonstrated that the United States is willing to use a number of tools to address harmful Russian actions and we will not hesitate from making use of those and other tools in the future.”
Also in an effort not to be caught flat-footed, administration officials have shared intelligence with allied countries.
Pentagon officials have also kept in close contact with their counterparts, with Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley speaking by phone with the Lt. Gen. Valeriy Zaluzhny, the commander in chief of Ukraine’s military, on Monday.
Milley also spoke via telephone on Tuesday with Russia’s top military officer, Gen. Valery Gerasimov.
In addition, the administration has sent U.S. Navy patrol boats to help theUkrainian navy counter Moscowin the Black Sea.
But even with its threatening stance, one that numerous NATO nations have publicly noted, Russia continues to deny it has any intention to invade its neighbor like it did nearly eight years ago.
Russian spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Tuesday that its amassing of forces and equipment don’t “pose a threat to anyone and should not cause concern to anyone.”
He instead blamed a “targeted information campaign” from Western nations as the cause for “building up tension” and said should the U.S. send additional military assistance to Ukraine, it could lead “to a further aggravation of the situation on the border line.”
So, there you have it folks. Should we get involved in this mess?
Keep in mind that while all this is happening, China is threatening Taiwan in much the same way that Russia is threatening Ukraine.
Is this a result of the US showing weakness on the world stage or was this bound to happen anyway?
What about Russia’s position? Are they reacting in a similar way to what America did during the Cuban Missile Crisis?
If Ukraine joins NATO, the west could install missile systems there with just a 10 minute flight time to Moscow.
Food for thought.