The Kremlin believes it gains much more from the threat of war than from war itself, says a former close adviser to Vladimir Putin
isn’t used to playing down the idea of a Russian advance into Ukraine. As the Russian army veteran who led the first major armed group into provincial Sloviansk in April 2014, in effect he started the war in the Donbas region. Once there, he spent the next few months urging Vladimir Putin, with increasing desperation and belligerence, to back him the whole way: to link Russian-speaking people in eastern Ukraine from Kharkiv to Odessa and recently-annexed Crimea.
The former commander is one of many in Moscow who are dismissing talk of an invasion. If a big war in Europe does follow—the sort that many Western analysts believe flows logically from the deployment of a large conventional force, along with supporting infrastructure on three sides of Ukraine—most Russians will be caught off-guard. Official propaganda is not gearing up for it. The elite isn’t predicting it.
For now, Russia and America continue talking, while the hardware continues to arrive. A state of “permanent negotiation”, routine talks and top-table recognition could be a goal in itself, Mr Pavlovsky suggests. What the Kremlin is not yet doing is overtly selling the idea of an invasion to its people. Officially, the country only ever fights “peacekeeping” operations. In 2008, officials said it had “compelled Georgia to peace”.
Officials, however, said much the same thing just before the annexation of Crimea in 2014, when Mr Putin stole that long-sought jewel and boosted his approval rating to 89% . Many of the same local experts failed to predict that Mr Putin would launch that operation and risk international ostracism. And knowledge of how Russia’s leader of 22 years makes his decisions has, if anything, worsened since then.
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