IF RUSSIA DECIDES TO INVADE EASTERN UKRAINE, EXTENDING ITS GRIP ON
ITS NEIGHBOR’S TERRITORY FROM THE CRIMEAN PENINSULA TO ITS EASTERN AND
SOUTHERN PROVINCES, HOW WOULD IT DO SO?
Since Russia invaded and annexed Crimea, the prospect of a full-fledged Russian invasion has gained new currency
with Ukraine’s government locked in a bitter stand-off with separatists
in the country’s east. Pro-Russian activists and gunmen have seized
government buildings there, and while the government in Kiev has pledged
to oust them, that ultimatum has so far gone unenforced.
Many observers speculate that the seizure of government buildings have come at the behest of Moscow — senior U.S. officials have claimed as much –
in order to stir up a pretext for invasion. Once Moscow’s agents have
sowed sufficient chaos, the thinking goes, Russian forces will swoop in
from their positions just outside Ukraine’s borders and restore the
peace, selling their invasion as a peacekeeping mission.
But what will Russian forces do once they cross the Ukrainian border? In a little-noticed and increasingly prescient report from earlier this month, analysts at the Royal United Services Institute, a defense think tank, lay out a series of scenarios spelling out possible courses of actions for Russian troops invading the eastern and southern provinces of Ukraine.
While a Russian invasion of
Ukraine is far from certain, recent events in Ukraine mirror events in
the lead up to the stealth invasion of Crimea. And even if predictions
of a Russian invasion do not come true, these scenarios provide a framework for considering Moscow’s military options.
According the authors of the report — Igor Sutyagin, a research fellow at RUSI, and Michael Clarke, the institute’s director general
— Russia has some 50,000 troops lined up against roughly 70,000
Ukrainian troops. While Ukraine possesses a numerical advantage in
troops, Kiev’s forces are “poorly equipped and would struggle to
mobilise fully.” “In the event of a military clash,” the report notes,
“its formations would be locally outnumbered and certainly outgunned by
Russian forces and their reserves.”
The map below presents a rough guide to the location of Russian troops massed along Ukraine’s borders. As the report notes, the Polessya Group and Northern Group are poised to strike quickly at Kiev. While reports on Monday
indicate that Ukrainian commanders have shifted their forces east to
crack down on separatists in the east, Russian forces along the northern
border prevent them from moving east in greater numbers. Moreover, as
seen further below on the map tracking Ukrainian troops deployments from
early this month, its forces are already heavily clustered in the west.
indicate that Ukrainian commanders have shifted their forces east to
crack down on separatists in the east, Russian forces along the northern
border prevent them from moving east in greater numbers. Moreover, as
seen further below on the map tracking Ukrainian troops deployments from
early this month, its forces are already heavily clustered in the west.
Under the first scenario laid out by the report, Russian troops have been placed in large numbers along Ukraine’s border in order to force Kiev and the West to acquiesce to Moscow’s land gains
in Crimea. According to this line of thinking, Russian troops won’t
cross the border and “would be stood down quite quickly once the
political process has given Putin the recognition of his fait accompli
over the Crimea.” Recent unrest in Ukraine points to the unlikelihood
of this scenario. Moreover, the report’s authors consider this scenario
less probable given the placement of Ministry of Interior troops on high
alert, whose purpose is typically to pacify local populations.
Under a more aggressive scenario, “Russian forces would covertly support, or even engineer, civil unrest throughout south-east
Ukraine and use that as a pretext for opening the secure land corridor
to Crimea through Donetsk, Zaporizhia, and Kherson oblasts.” As shown on
the map above, the Donbass Group and troops stationed in Crimea would
likely move to secure that territory.
Under the third scenario,
“unrest and separatist pressures in south and eastern Ukraine, real or
manufactured, may present a dangerous, but nevertheless tempting
opportunity to split the country in two, south and east of the Dnieper
River.” As the map indicates, Russian forces are well-positioned to
execute such a split.
But Russia could go even
further than that and carve out a “western corridor from Transnistria in
Moldova into Crimea through Odessa and Mykolaiv Oblasts, which would
encompass the historic city of Odessa itself.” Such a move would create a
southern arc of Russian territory in Ukraine, uniting the pro-Russian
breakaway region of Transnistria with newly claimed Russian lands. (As
my colleague Christian Caryl reports from Odessa, residents of that
city aren’t exactly enthused at the prospect of incorporation into Russia.)
So how are Ukrainian troops poised to respond to these threats? In short, not well. Recent reports have Ukrainian troops moving east,
but it is unclear whether they are redeploying in large numbers. And
even if they effectively shift ahead of a Russian military incursion,
they would likely be outmatched by their opponents.
For all this prognosticating,
it remains highly unclear which of these scenarios is most likely to
play out. For now, we remain somewhere between scenarios one and two,
with Russian troops holding along the eastern borders to secure their
land gains in Crimea and Russian agents stirring up trouble in the east
as a potential justification for a future invasion.
Several geopolitical factors,
the authors argue, make some of these scenarios more likely than others.
As the report notes, Russia would greatly ease Crimea’s isolation by
securing a land corridor between Russian territory and the peninsula.
Moreover, by securing a land corridor to Crimea, Russia would end a
dispute over the Kerch Strait and secure exclusive access for Gazprom to
energy deposits in the Sea of Azov. Moreover, key elements of the
Russian defense industry — including its missile programs — rely on
Ukrainian suppliers in the country’s east. Its SS-18 intercontinental
ballistic missiles, for example, are designed and manufactured in
Dnepropetrovsk on the Dnieper River.
But whether that indicates
Russia will pursue the most aggressive options available to it, is far
from certain.”It could be argued that since most of the military plants
in question are in south and east Ukraine, the temptation to follow the
third and fourth scenarios will be all the greater,” the report says.
“To suggest these scenarios for the sake of capturing the production at
these various plants would be a very nineteenth-century way of looking
at a twenty-first century relationship. However, even that cannot be
ruled out in current circumstances.”
BY ELIAS GROLL
GENYA SAVILOV/AFP/Getty Images
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