Ian Traynor writes: In his 14 years in power grieving the loss of the Soviet empire, Vladimir Putin has launched three wars against Russia’s neighbours and territories formerly under the Kremlin’s domination. As a newly appointed prime minister in 1999, before becoming president on New Year’s Day 2000, he began with a war in Chechnya, brutally suppressing an armed insurrection against Moscow’s rule in the north Caucasus and razing the provincial capital, Grozny.

In 2008, the former KGB officer ordered a blitzkrieg against Georgia, partitioning the country in five days. He remains in control of 20% of Russia’s Black Sea neighbour: the territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The Russian military also controls a slice of Moldova known as Transnistria in a frozen conflict dating from the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In the Crimea and Ukraine, however, in the event of full-scale war, Putin has opted for a game-changer with the potential to be Europe’s worst security nightmare since the revolutions of 1989 and the bloodiest since Slobodan Milosevic’s attempts to wrest control of former Yugoslavia resulted in four lost wars, more than 100,000 dead, and spawned seven new countries in the Balkans. Ukraine is a pivotal country on the EU’s eastern and Russia’s south-western borders. Territorially it is bigger than France. Its population is greater than those of Poland or Spain at 46 million. It has a proper military and is well armed. Ukraine was the Soviet Union’s arms manufacturing base; it remains in the top league of global arms exporters.

Ukraine’s military machine is no match for Russia’s. It has around 130,000 troops compared to around 850,000 in Russia. Its forces in Crimea are no match for the 15,000-plus men serving with the Russian Black Sea fleet in Sevastopol. Russia has more men in its western military division than there are in the entire Ukrainian armed forces. Ratios of fighter aircraft, attack helicopters, special forces units and Black Sea warships are similarly one-sided.

But Ukraine’s forces could inflict a lot of damage if forced to defend their country. With this in mind, three broad scenarios suggest themselves: [Continue reading…]

The Washington Post reports: While Russia flexes its military might at its Black Sea naval base in Crimea, Moscow has another weapon that it has wielded against Ukraine in the past: natural gas supplies.

Russia provides more than half of Ukraine’s natural-gas needs and since 2006 has twice curtailed supplies in disputes over politics, price and late payments. Those supply cuts rattled countries across Europe that depend on the Russian pipelines that run through Ukraine.

But changes in the global trade in natural gas have blunted Moscow’s weapon, forcing the Russian pipeline monopoly Gazprom to cut prices worldwide and giving Ukraine slightly more bargaining power.

The boom in U.S. shale gas has left gas-exporting countries shopping for other customers. Europe, as it adds terminals to handle liquefied natural gas, will be able to offset its own declining production with supplies from countries such as Qatar. And in 2012, Norway’s Statoil sold more gas to other European nations than Russia’s Gazprom.

“Since the Russian supply cuts in 2006 and 2009, the tables have totally turned,” said Anders Aslund, a fellow at the Peterson Institute of International Economics who has advised Russia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan. Aslund said Ukraine once rivaled Germany as Gazprom’s biggest customer. Now, he said, “Gazprom’s challenge is to stay in the Ukrainian market.”

In December, Gazprom said it would discount the price paid by Ukraine, cutting it from about $11.50 per thousand cubic feet to $8.10. But that only brought Ukraine’s prices roughly in line with those being paid in other parts of Europe. Gazprom said it would review the price every quarter, meaning a new reset is possible at the end of March.

As clunky Soviet-era factories and mines have become more efficient or gone out of business, Ukraine’s domestic gas consumption has dropped nearly 40 percent over the past five years, cutting its imports from Russia in half, according to a report by Sberbank Investment Research. [Continue reading…]

Oleg Kashin writes: Russia and Ukraine split up 23 years ago. A whole generation has grown up in each country since then. Ukrainian children have studied the poetry of the nationalist Taras Shevchenko and they have internalized a heroic narrative about a country that has spent centuries fighting for its freedom. Russian children have spent summer holidays in Crimea and have grown up with a sense that today’s Russian-Ukrainian borders are merely temporary and notional. The Russian public views the Ukrainian state with a sense of irony and even contempt. This attitude is often unfair, but it is see Ukraine as a culturally heterogeneous patchwork. Travelling from a place like Lviv or Lutsk to a place like Kharkiv or Odessa, it is often hard to believe that these cities are part of the same country: Post-Soviet Ukraine is like Austria-Hungary—an empire made up of incongruous parts. In the mind of the Russian public, the justification for a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine settled into place many years ago: Russia has been unable to shake off the view that eastern Ukraine is Russian territory.

Clearly, this sentiment could have remained dormant for many decades. But Viktor Yanukovych’s rule in Kiev crumbled at the very point that President Vladimir Putin decided that he is at the pinnacle of his power. He vanquished his opposition, he hosted an Olympics, he triumphed in Syria, and he even kept Edward Snowden out of American custody. The 61-year-old Putin had achieved so many of his dream; the only thing he had yet to do was to become what the tsarist history books called a “gatherer of Russian lands.” The perfect opportunity presented itself, one that Putin couldn’t resist. And risks don’t really enter into his calculus anymore.

So if one is to make comparisons, then it shouldn’t be with 1968 Czechoslovakia, but with Serbia in 1914. Back then, the Russian tsar felt that he was the protector of all the Slavic people of Europe and entered into World War I, which ended with the collapse of his empire. Can Putin see that historical parallel now? I doubt it. In the 15 years of his rule, he has grown used to the fact that irrespective of their rhetoric, Western countries have generally approved of the Russian authorities. Putin genuinely believes that his “western partners” are cynics and hypocrites. Playing the role of “bad guy,” he believes, actually insulates him from far graver risks. This formula may sound paradoxical, but it has worked.

Oxana Shevel writes: [E]ven if diplomacy fails and the Russian military seizes Crimean territory with the intention of controlling it permanently, it will be much harder for Russia to establish control of Crimea than it was in South Ossetia, Abkhazia and Transnistria. The main reason for this is the Crimean Tatars. The Tatars — a Muslim group that was deported en masse from Crimea by Stalin in 1944 and that for decades has waged a peaceful struggle for the right to return — have been coming back in droves since 1989. According to the latest Ukrainian census, from 2001, 243,433 Crimean Tatars account for 12.1 percent of the Crimean population of 2,033,700. They represent a highly mobilized and unified constituency that has consistently been pro-Ukrainian and opposed to pro-Russian separatism on the peninsula. Going back to the 1991 independence referendum, the narrow vote in favor of Ukrainian state independence in Crimea may have been thanks to the vote of the Crimean Tatars. Since then, the Crimean Tatars and their representative organ, the Mejlis, have cooperated with the pro-Ukrainian political parties. Leaders of the Mejlis such as Mustafa Dzhemilev and Refat Chubarov have been members of the Ukrainian parliament elected on the party list of Ukrainian nationalist parties such as Rukh in the 1990s and later from Our Ukraine party. On Feb. 26, the day before the Crimean parliament was taken over by the armed men, Crimean Tatars held a large rally near the parliament that was larger than a simultaneous pro-Russian rally. There has been no comparable local mobilized group opposed to Russian takeover in any other of the breakaway regions.

Although the group has been a staunch ally of the Ukrainian government against pro-Russian separatism on the peninsula, the Ukrainian central authorities, while benefiting from this support, have also been suspicious of the Crimean Tatars, who consider Crimea their historical homeland and have advocated measures such as changing the status of Crimean autonomy to make it the national-territorial autonomy of the Crimean Tatars as opposed to simply territorial (and de facto ethnic Russian autonomy given that ethnic Russians constitute more than 50 percent of the population in Crimea). The law on the status of the Crimean Tatars as indigenous peoples of Ukraine that the Tatar leaders have been pushing for many years remains unadopted.

Whatever the Tatar grievances against the Ukrainian state may be, when faced with the choice of being under either Russian or Ukrainian control, the Crimean Tatar leadership has consistently and unequivocally chosen Ukraine. [Continue reading…]

John Lough writes: Moscow’s readiness to escalate the crisis in Ukraine reflects panic at what it undoubtedly sees as a potentially dramatic loss of influence in the country as a result of the “Maidan” revolution. It has calculated that the risks of not intervening in Ukraine are greater than those of intervening, even though those risks include the danger of provoking widespread violent conflict and a serious breakdown in relations with the West.

Regardless, Russia’s earlier strategy is in shreds. It bet heavily on the survival of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, in effect offering him late last year a $15 billion bailout package and other sweeteners in return for not signing an association agreement with the European Union.

Russia looked to have outmaneuvered the European Union and to have kept Ukraine firmly in its sphere of influence. After all, the association agreement with the EU, if implemented, would have laid the foundations for anchoring Ukraine in the west.

Since then, however, Moscow has been stunned by the speed at which Yanukovych’s rule collapsed. It blames the West for fomenting the revolution and seems to believe that it needs to counter an unprecedented surge of Western influence in Ukraine and prevent the consolidation of the revolution.

By signaling its readiness to support the secession of Crimea, Moscow is opening the door to further unraveling of Ukraine by encouraging supporters of closer ties with Russia in Ukraine’s eastern regions to call for Russian protection and not to recognize the authority of the interim government in Kiev. All this could easily make it impossible to hold the presidential election scheduled for May 25 in those parts of the country that identify strongly with Russia.

The scenario of Ukraine’s partition has moved significantly closer.