Vladimir Putin delivered a blistering speech last week to foreign diplomats in Moscow, accusing the US of reviving tactics of the cold war and declaring he would use all available means to protect ethnic Russians abroad.
“Our country will continue to defend vigorously the rights of Russians, our compatriots, around the world and will do so by any means necessary,” he said.
But since the Ukrainian army’s swift advance against pro-Russian separatists in recent days, ousting rebels from their Slavyansk stronghold, Mr Putin has gone strangely silent.
According to Mr Trenin, that strategy has revolved around three distinct goals since the crisis intensified late last year: keeping Ukraine out of Nato, protecting the status of the Russian language in Ukraine, and maintaining economic links with important Ukrainian enterprises.While that softer public stance may be interpreted by some as a retreat in Russia’s showdown with Kiev and its western allies over the fate of Ukraine, others view it as little more than a tactical shift.
“Time has to come change the tactics but the strategy remains the same,” says Dmitry Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Centre, a think-tank.
A few months ago, those interests might have been best served by fanning the separatist rebellion in eastern Ukraine, according to Mr Trenin. But continuing to do so now could bring heavy political costs – from both the US and EU and within Ukraine itself.
The continuing violence in the eastern part of the country, for example, has had the unintended effect of actually bolstering support for the new Kiev government in other parts of Ukraine.
Even without military force, Mr Trenin argued, a looming economic disaster in Ukraine, where the central bank has forecast a 4.6 per cent decline in output this year, could provide Russia with “new instruments of influence”.
Even if the Russian president’s long-term objectives in the region remain viable, it is hard to dismiss the setbacks Mr Putin has endured of late. Chief among them may be the election last month of a pro-western Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko, with a broad public mandate.
The routing of the pro-Russia movement in eastern Ukraine in recent days, which has involved scores of rebel casualties, represents another blow to the Kremlin, which appeared to believe the movement would reap a broader groundswell of popular support.
The threat of western sanctions on an already slowing Russian economy may explain part of the shift. According to documents obtained by the Financial Times, Brussels is likely to expand the list of people targeted for asset freezes and travel bans if EU diplomats determine the Kremlin has not lived up to European demands to stem the violence in eastern Ukraine by backing Mr Poroshenko’s peace plan.From the beginning, Mr Putin’s conduct in eastern Ukraine has differed from his approach to Crimea, which Russian forces moved quickly to overtake and then annexed in March. In eastern regions such as Donetsk and Lugansk, Russia has instead wielded military force more as a threat and worked diligently to cover evidence of its involvement in the conflict.
A “note on future possible measures” distributed to EU diplomats on Monday recommends the current list of 61 individuals be expanded to include both separatist leaders as well as those backing them from within Russia. EU prime ministers are expected to discuss new Russia sanctions at a summit next week. The EU is also considering cutting off as much as €450m in aid programmes to Russia, most of which is development funding.
Fyodor Lukyanov, chairman of the Council on Foreign and Defence Policy, a Moscow think-tank, said there were risks involved in Mr Putin’s silence. The president may face rising disenchantment from Russian nationalists, for example, who might argue he has not done enough to support their brethren across the border.In addition to sanctions, Mr Putin must also navigate domestic opinion. Some leaders on the Russian far right have petitioned the president to provide more aid to the separatists in Ukraine and expressed disappointment that Mr Putin has not gone further. At the same time, two-thirds of Russians do not want Moscow to intervene militarily in Ukraine, according to state-owned pollster VTsIOM, suggesting that Mr Putin could lose public support by pushing further into the conflict.
Just because Mr Putin is stepping back for now does not mean he is stepping back for good. The Russian president is a master tactician, Mr Lukyanov argued, and will often take a pause in the middle of a political crisis before unveiling a grand announcement – a strategy he has employed in catastrophes ranging from the 2000 Kursk submarine disaster to the current Ukraine crisis.
As Mr Lukyanov described it: “He takes a break, he is silent for quite a while and then comes up with something completely unexpected.”