The recent Russian march on the borders with Ukraine and on the annexed Crimea leads many to fear an attack on the treacherous brother country, according to the Kremlin. In view of the high risks and costs, it is quite possible that President Vladimir Putin will leave it to "exercises" by his military, for which the deployment of last spring had already been declared. However, appropriate attack scenarios must be part of Defense Minister Sergej Shojgu's work profile: Anything else would amount to insubordination in view of Putin's regular attacks on the neighboring country. Shojgu's zeal for service is evidenced by the fact that he published Putin's article in July "On the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians", which denies an independent Ukraine the right to exist,promptly made required reading for all soldiers.

Friedrich Schmidt

Political correspondent for Russia and the CIS in Moscow.

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In the most recent, particularly strong outbreak of war fear, it is noticeable that Moscow's power apparatus has reacted with delay to Western accusations. Washington and - even with delay - Kiev have been warning of troop concentrations for weeks. For a long time Moscow left it with routine return coaches about “Russophobic hysteria”. These still exist now; Putin's foreign policy advisor, Yuri Ushakov, said on Friday that there was “no escalation whatsoever” because “we have the right to move troops on our territory”. But now the representatives of power are trying to justify in advance any measure that Putin could order. For example, President's spokesman Dmitry Peskov accuses Ukraine of concentrating troops, which lead to fears that Kiev is considering a “violent solution to the Donbass problem”."That is very dangerous adventurism."

The “head” of the “Donetsk People's Republic”, Denis Pushilin, highlighted on Putin's state television how many of his “citizens” already had Russian citizenship and announced that he would ask “Russia and Belarus” for help if necessary. A Casus Belli is quickly at hand when needed. At the diplomatic level, Moscow is now calling for “long-term security guarantees,” according to Foreign Minister Lavrov in an interview with American Foreign Minister Blinken. Adviser Ushakov made it clear that it is not just about excluding Ukraine and Georgia from joining NATO: In an interview with American President Joe Biden on Tuesday, Putin will demand a binding agreement that “also excludes any further expansion of NATO to the east like the deployment of weapon systems,that threaten us from the areas of neighboring countries ”. Russia has long been calling for such agreements, said Ushakov, and because of recent tensions they have become particularly urgent.

Putin tests Biden

In fact, the move is reminiscent of the call for a new “security architecture” in Europe, which the then Russian President Dmitry Medvedev first made in a speech in Berlin in June 2008. The advance was directed against NATO as a military alliance and against the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe as a refuge for uncomfortable human rights and election observers. Even then, there were Russian complaints that their own security interests were not being taken into account, although the hopes of Georgia and Ukraine for membership in the alliance at the Bucharest NATO summit in April 2008 on German and French instigation were pointed into an indefinite future. Russia's intervention in Georgia in August 2008 clouded the discussion of Medvedev's advance less than the fact thatthat Moscow only presented a first document on a “Treaty on European Security” at the end of 2009, which many experts believed was confused and full of contradictions.

Now, twelve years later, with a view to developments in Georgia's breakaway provinces and especially in Ukraine, the crucial point has become even more striking: Moscow wants to restrict the sovereignty of states that it both violates and threatens. Putin's request, for example with a view to Poland, even amounts to revising previous NATO expansions. Biden and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg have clearly rejected agreements such as those once suggested by Medvedev and now by Putin. But the Kremlin can only win with the revived advance: If Putin did prevail, he would have realized the claimed “sphere of interest”; if not, that fits into the role of the offended and threatened, which Russia, even in NATO member states, despite everything, has taken for granted.The story of promises allegedly made in 1990 that NATO would not expand eastward, something that was previously rejected by the then President of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, continues, for example. 

Putin himself maintained cooperation with NATO long after the enlargement rounds, which are demonized today. It was only under the impression of “color revolutions”, especially in the Ukraine, that his attitude towards the alliance clouded over and radicalized. Now Putin's "red lines", of which he often speaks, have shifted: If Moscow understood this to mean Ukraine's NATO membership in the past, Putin is already presenting joint maneuvers, actual but so far modest and all future arms deliveries as substantial threats eight years ago the planned association agreement with the EU, which was then not signed by the then Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, suddenly became Moscow's “red line”. So should prevail in the West,that concessions forced with threats of war are likely to result in Putin only drawing his "red lines" further. He is testing Biden, and not least the future federal government.