How serious is Vladimir Putin about launching a major Ukraine offensive?

After a week of diplomatic talks in Geneva, Brussels and Vienna, the question remains: how serious is Russian president Vladimir Putin about launching a major offensive against Ukraine?

There are 100,000 Russian troops massed at Ukraine’s border, and Moscow has warned of “the most unpredictable and grave consequences” for Europe’s security if its demands are not met.

Though western officials are unsure whether Russia has decided on a renewed invasion, Putin may never have a better time to do so. These are the key reasons why.

Putin has nurtured grievances against Nato for years — particularly over Ukraine.

Early in his presidency, Putin wanted to align Russia more closely with the west: in one interview, he even claimed to have floated the idea of Moscow joining the alliance in the early 2000s.

But after clashes with US president George W Bush’s administration over the Iraq war and Nato’s eastward expansion, Putin began to see the alliance as a western smokescreen for attempts to contain Russia.

“We have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended?” Putin said in a famous speech in Munich in 2007.

Ukraine has always been central to Putin’s fear that the west wants to undermine Russian sovereignty.

The Kremlin saw Ukraine’s 2004/05 Orange Revolution, when huge crowds in Kyiv helped a pro-western leader overturn a disputed electoral win for Moscow’s candidate, as a dress rehearsal for US-backed regime change in Russia.

Then Ukraine and fellow Soviet state Georgia pushed to be admitted to Nato. Putin saw this as an existential threat. In 2008, he told Bush: “You don’t understand, George, that Ukraine isn’t even a country!”

At a Nato summit in Bucharest that year, the alliance decided against formally beginning a membership process for Ukraine and Georgia. Nevertheless, the alliance’s secretary-general told a press conference that the two countries “will become member nations”. That prospect was remote: Nato did not name a timeline, and any such move would have to overcome opposition from member states like Germany. But the fudged compromise appeared to convince Russia that Nato was set on containing it.

Months later, Russia invaded Georgia and seized two breakaway territories in a devastating four-day war. The invasion essentially ended Georgia’s hopes of joining Nato. It also seemed to ring a death knell for Ukraine’s aspirations.

Even so, Putin remained fixated on the perceived threat from the west. In 2011, he accused the US of coordinating huge domestic protests about his return to the Kremlin for a third presidential term.

Then, when Ukrainians overthrew Moscow’s preferred leader, Viktor Yanukovych, in 2014, Russia responded by annexing the Crimean peninsula and covertly fuelling a war in the Donbas border region.

“We were forced to do something,” Putin said last month.

The 5,000-word essay that Putin published last July, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians”, offers a rare window into his thinking on the country.

The essay, apparently based on Putin’s own historical research, alternates between professions of undying love for Russia’s “brotherly nation” and thinly veiled threats should Kyiv continue to drift away from Moscow.

It also reflects how crucial Ukraine is to Russia’s conception of its own statehood, and how much Putin’s thinking has hardened since he annexed the Crimean peninsula in 2014.

With about 100,000 Russian troops positioned on the border, the essay needs to be parsed with a fresh eye. Analysing Putin’s version of history also sheds light on his motivations.

During his two decades in power, reclaiming Russia’s sphere of influence by halting Nato’s expansion — in particular, to Ukraine — has been Putin’s core foreign policy goal.

Analysts in Moscow say Putin may never have a better time to achieve it than now.

US president Joe Biden’s administration initially did not make repairing relations with Russia a priority. The White House was instead preparing for a growing confrontation with China, while facing major issues at home such as the pandemic and seeking to pass important legislation on spending, social policy and voting rights.

But in April, Putin made sure Russia was on Biden’s agenda by assembling 100,000 troops on Ukraine’s border. That was enough to secure his first phone call with Biden and the promise of a June summit in Geneva.

After the two leaders met, US officials hoped the White House and Kremlin could find common ground on relatively limited issues such as arms control, ransomware and a prisoner exchange.

But whatever progress they made was eclipsed in November, when US intelligence suggested Putin was considering a renewed invasion of Ukraine.

In two subsequent calls in December, Biden warned Putin the west would impose crippling sanctions on Russia if it stepped up its aggression against Ukraine. Those measures would go further than any previous sanctions and could include cutting Russia off from the Swift global payments system and restricting imports of Russian oil and gas.

But many countries in the EU — which buys more than 40 per cent of its gas from Russia’s Gazprom — are reluctant to sign up to the harshest measures against Moscow.

“Do we have missiles, ships, cannons, armies? At the moment we don’t and at the moment Nato has different strategic priorities,” Italian prime minister Mario Draghi admitted last month, adding that Europe could not give up Russian gas supplies. “It would not be the right moment,” he said.

Rather than destabilising Russia’s economy, western sanctions imposed since 2014 have propelled Moscow to pursue a conservative macroeconomic policy designed to transform the country into a financial fortress.

External shocks such as the Covid-19 pandemic demonstrated the resilience it had developed.

The central bank’s war chest has grown more than 70 per cent since late 2015 and now houses more than $620bn of foreign currency reserves.

High oil and gas prices have helped Russia pump up its rainy-day National Wealth Fund with $190bn in cash. The government predicts the fund will have more than $300bn in 2024.

Frugal fiscal policy has also kept gross government debt low, at about 20 per cent of gross domestic product. It is also forecast to fall to 18.5 per cent by the end of 2023, well below the forecast median 54 per cent level of its peers. Moreover, the proportion of foreign investors holding Russian sovereign bonds has sunk to a fifth of the total, making the country far less vulnerable to external shocks or a sudden sell-off than it was before.

Russian corporates are also better insulated from the shocks of any future sanctions. Total foreign corporate debt was $80bn last year — nearly half the $150bn total when the first sanctions were imposed in March 2014.

Imposing sanctions on a major natural resource producer like Russia isn’t easy either.

Europe imports more than 40 per cent of its gas and more than a quarter of its crude oil from Russia.

When the US imposed sanctions on Rusal, Russia’s largest aluminium producer, in 2018, the effect on global markets was also so disruptive that the Treasury had to negotiate a climbdown. Today, this could similarly deter any sanctions against VSMPO-Avisma, which remains the largest supplier of titanium for Boeing’s aeroplanes.

Russia has also been successful in replacing imports, particularly of agriculture.

When Russia seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, its armed forces were so unprepared that they surrendered the peninsula without firing a single shot.

Later that year, they came close to retaking the two major separatist-controlled cities in Ukraine’s east. But they were then driven back by full-scale Russian military interventions that inflicted crushing defeats.

Since then, the US has helped train Ukraine’s armed forces and supplied $2.5bn in military aid. That has included Javelin anti-tank missiles, which Ukraine says are crucial to stopping any further Russian incursions, and patrol boats for the coastguard.
Information graphic showing various elements of foreign military aid to Ukraine

Ukrainian civilians are also training for low-intensity guerilla combat as part of a territorial defence force.

There is no illusion that Nato’s support will be enough to turn the tide. The alliance has said it will not go to war to defend Ukraine. Even with the new equipment, officials in Kyiv openly admit that they will not be able to repel a full-scale Russian intervention for long.

Nevertheless, Nato’s increased support for Ukraine has angered Putin, who has accused the west of looking to secretly turn the country into a staging post for operations against Russia.

Last summer, when British warship HMS Defender passed through waters near Crimea, Russia fired warning shots and sent fighter jets to buzz the destroyer. A few months later, Ukraine deployed Turkish-made Bayraktar drones for the first time in the Donbas. Azerbaijan also used the same drones to devastating effect in its 2020 war with Russian ally Armenia over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh enclave.

People close to the Kremlin say the Russian troop build-up on the Ukrainian border is aimed at deterring a similar blitzkrieg that could help Kyiv retake its lost territories. Ukrainian officials insist they want a diplomatic resolution to Donbas.

Putin said last year that he had “all kinds” of military options to use against Ukraine if Russia’s security demands were unmet.

US officials say it is unclear whether Putin has decided to use force or not, and have mounted a major diplomatic effort to convince Russia to de-escalate.

But his force deployments indicate the build-up is more than a bluff, military analysts say. Russia has moved major fighting units and sophisticated weaponry close to Ukraine’s border.

Though they lack the full scope of logistical support necessary for a sustained operation — such as ammunition stocks, field hospitals and blood banks — Russia’s armed forces could deploy them in a relatively short time.

Western officials estimate Russia could ramp up its force deployment to 175,000 within a few weeks.

The most likely casus belli, according to people close to the Kremlin, would resemble the start of the four-day war with Georgia in 2008.

If Ukraine made an ill-advised military incursion into the Donbas, Russia would frame the conflict as a move to protect Russian-speakers in the Moscow-backed separatist states. Many of them have Russian citizenship.

Russia could do that without even a ground invasion by launching air strikes, cruise and ballistic missiles, and heavy artillery – most likely preceded by a cyber attack, such as the one which took down about 70 Ukrainian government websites yesterday.

Ukraine doesn’t have an air defence system sufficient to cope with a Russian bombardment, and its ground capabilities would probably be devastated.

If Ukraine does not surrender, Russia could then launch ground operations for as long as it takes to extract the necessary concessions.

A full-on land invasion that aims to seize huge swaths of Ukrainian territory is considered relatively unlikely.

Occupying hostile territory requires enormous manpower — several times what Russia is prepared to deploy currently — and could result in significant casualties.

But limited covert incursions were enough to force Ukraine to agree to two peace deals in 2014 and 2015.

If a similar scenario happened today, the deciding factors would be how long Ukrainians are prepared to fight, analysts say, and how much the west is prepared to support them.