***FILE*** BRASILIA, DF, 14/11/2019 Russian President Vladimir Putin during a BRICS meeting at Itamaraty Palace in Brasília. (Photo: Pedro Ladeira/Folhapress)
SAO PAULO, SP (FOLHAPRESS) Vladimir Putin’s exit game for the Ukraine war took on clearer contours this Wednesday (28) when the Kremlin said the conflict would last “at least until the liberation of the Donetsk People’s Republic”.
Spokesman Dmitri Peskov spoke to reporters about the daily life of the Russian government in his usual conference call. It is the first time that a goal of the war that began on February 24 has been formulated in such a matteroffact manner.
The selfproclaimed republic is one of two Ukrainian provinces that make up Donbass, a predominantly Russianspeaking region that has been partially under the control of proKremlin separatists since the civil war that followed Putin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea. .
His recognition and that of his sister Lugansk was one of the pretexts for the invasion they asked for Moscow’s help against Kyiv, just as their two leaders are now in Moscow to complete the formal annexation of the territories to Russia, so to speak, of the closing cycle.
Denis Pachilian from Donetsk and Leonid Psetchnik from Lugansk flew to the Russian capital on Tuesday (27th) after the conclusion of the referendums in both regions. As in the southern areas of Kherson and Zaporizia, which are even more suspect because they are newly occupied territories, a nearunanimous majority voted to join Russia in what has been called a farce in Kyiv and the West.
Psetchnik took to Telegram to ask Putin to “reconsider the issue,” another step in a choreographed ballet that is expected to take its next step with the president’s speech to parliament on Friday. Red Square, the heart of Moscow, dawned with large screens mounted beneath posters reading “Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporizhia, Kherson Russia!”, indicating an event to commemorate the annexation.
Peskov’s speech makes it clear that the border the Kremlin wants to call its own is not yet under its control. The problem for Moscow is that while control of Lugansk is almost complete, as in the southern areas, Donetsk still lacks about 40% of the territory to take. According to the Defense Ministry, the Ukrainian counteroffensive to recapture Liman, a strategically important city in the region, failed on Wednesday.
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There are no independent reports on this yet, but the fact is that the recent military victories of Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s government, which regained about 5% of its territory by recapturing the Kharkiv region earlier this month, have stalled.
The defeat there forced Putin to change his strategy in the war, decreed a delayed partial mobilization of at least 300,000 reservists and accelerated the annexation of the parts of Ukraine he already controlled. A risky move, because the war, previously portrayed on state television, has become part of the reality of Russian cities, with protests and young people fleeing to neighboring countries.
It shouldn’t take effect immediately because at least two months of training are required, says the defense, to send troops to the front. But it raises the prospect of reinforcements, the lack of which failed in Putin’s first attempt to take Kyiv by storm, and then forced a retreat to the Donbass and resulted in the loss of Kharkiv.
Before the mobilization, popular support for Putin was 83%, according to the independent institute Levada, and most Russians believed that the occupied territories should either be declared autonomous or incorporated as entities of the Russian Federation.
Of course, no one has talked about the cost, especially at a time when Russia’s economy is struggling to circumvent sanctions imposed by the West over the war. The annexation of Crimea, which took place without a war and with a referendum among a largely proRussian populace, cost the Kremlin hundreds of billions of dollars.
The subsidy to the budget of the two federal entities of the peninsula, the Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol alone cost Moscow BRL 7.7 billion in 2021. And it’s a region with almost four times fewer inhabitants than the occupied territories. They had before the war.
However, Peskow has set a political standard that did not exist before. On the day of the invasion, Putin spoke of “protecting the peoples of Donbass” and promised to “demilitarize and denazify” his neighbor.
In time, officials conceded territorial interests: a general spoke of uniting Russia with the breakaway Russian territory of Transnistria (Moldova), annexing the entire Ukrainian coast, and Chancellor Sergei Lavrov admitted he wanted Zelenskyy deposed.
Hence the apparent mistrust of the limit set by the speaker, which is not immediately accepted by Kyiv and the West anyway, but then Putin plays with the energy crisis of the onset of winter and the reduction in Russian gas supplies to the continent for Zelenskyy support among Europeans undermined raising suspicions about Monday’s attack on the Baltic Sea gas pipelines.
On the other hand, Peskov could indicate the exhaustion of the Russian campaign, albeit temporarily and waiting for the mobilization to take effect. Moreover, the occupied territories, after considering them as his own, became part of the nuclear blackmail against the West: Putin has already recalled that the Russian nuclear doctrine allows the use of this type of bomb in case of conventional attacks threatening his territory.
This has raised fears in the West that the Russians might use such a device, perhaps with lower power, against Ukrainian troops. On Wednesday, Polish Foreign Minister Zbigniew Rau said NATO must prepare a “devastating response,” albeit nonnuclear, if it comes to that.