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Why Moscow Would Use Overwhelming Force Against Ukraine

Russia appears to be on the verge of launching a major military operation against Ukraine. It has amassed an unprecedented number of troops on the country’s border, and Russian-led forces in the Donbas region of Ukraine have sharply escalated their attacks along the line of contact. Leaders of the Luhansk People’s Republic and the Donetsk People’s Republic, the breakaway regions of Ukraine that Russia has propped up since 2014, have blamed Ukraine for a series of explosions and attempted acts of sabotage, such as a supposed attack on a water treatment facility, that seem to be staged provocations. It appears as if Russia is engineering a pretext to invade Ukraine by conducting a false flag attack—blaming Kyiv for actions Moscow in fact instigated—and alleging that the government of Ukraine poses a threat to Russian speakers in the country’s east. U.S. President Joe Biden is convinced that Russian President Vladimir Putin has directed the military to move in.

A sense of helplessness and dread hangs in the air over the Western leaders gathered here at the Munich Security Conference as the expectation grows that Russian President Vladimir Putin will unleash a military attack on Ukraine within days, if not hours.

Almost exactly eight years to the day since he first ordered the invasion of Crimea, Vladimir Putin struck another blow in his war against Ukrainian statehood on February 21 by officially recognizing the two so-called separatist republics of eastern Ukraine as independent states.

Weeks of dire Western warnings began to bear out on Monday when Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered Russian troops into the two separatist regions of eastern Ukraine after recognizing their independence. Europe’s post-Cold War security order now hangs in the balance as many wonder whether those troops will stop at the contact line separating the breakaway republics from Ukrainian government-controlled territory.

Only a Comprehensive Pact Can Avoid War

Vladimir Putin has the world on edge. The Russian president has deployed more than 100,000 troops on Ukraine’s borders and threatened “military-technical” measures if NATO continues to cooperate with Kyiv. He unilaterally drafted two extraordinarily aggressive treaties in December designed to constrain the organization and its members. They contain demands that are such nonstarters—most centrally, closing NATO’s open door to Ukraine and prohibiting organizational forces and weapons in nations that joined after May 1997—that they read more like predicates for war rather than sincere overtures for negotiations.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Friday that the U.S. will sell 250 M1A2 Abrams tanks to Poland, giving a key NATO ally that borders Russia a substantial boost in firepower.

Adding the tanks to the Polish arsenal will ensure more equitable security burden-sharing in NATO, he said, although he noted that no delivery date has been set.

The Ukrainian Government and Russian-backed separatists in Luhansk and Donetsk are currently trading accusations of each shelling the other, further escalating tensions within the Ukrainian border. Ukrainian and United States officials say that these Russian-backed separatists are only pursuing these allegations of shelling as a pretext to invade Ukraine.

President Biden claimed at a brief press conference yesterday that Russian President Vladimir Putin has already decided to invade Ukraine in the coming days. He reportedly received information that Russia has Ukraine completely surrounded and that the Kremlin would be targetting Kyiv. This is a sudden turn-around for Biden, who had just stated 72 hours ago that no final decision from Putin had been made to invade Ukraine. This follows an earlier prediction made by the White House that Russia would invade Ukraine on February 16th.

Seventy presidents and prime ministers from Europe and Africa are gathered today in Brussels for a long-awaited European Union-African Union summit, the sixth such summit between the two blocs. But ahead of that gathering, Europe’s 27 leaders huddled together for an emergency meeting to discuss the ongoing crisis in Ukraine.