The situation in Donbas is fluid. No one knows what Putin will decide to do. Reports are that military is still gathering on the borders, and the joint maneuvers with Belarus have been extended. That said, there is reason to think that US alarmist rhetoric boxed Putin in. If he doesn’t move farther into Ukraine, we will have to wonder if he ever really planned to move on Ukraine in the first place, but hoped to shake down Ukraine and the west to the point where he could force Ukraine to implement the Minsk 2 agreement according to Russian wishes, permanently crippling Ukraine. By raising the warnings of an invasion to fever pitch the US forced Putin to acknowledge that he can’t credibly do more than threaten an invasion of Ukraine, and recognizing the Luhansk People’s Republic and Donetsk People’s Republic was a way to save face, something that according to the exceedingly well connected and judicious Russia expert Mark Galeotti many in the Russian political class had been urging.
We will know in the coming days and weeks if this truly was an off ramp for Putin. It would ring true with the Putin analysts like Galeotti are accustomed to, one who is pragmatic and a rational actor if viewed on his own terms. Seen in that light, both the staged meeting of his security council and the looney speech he gave later justifying his actions are best understood as the grudging and angry recognition that the US and just as importantly Ukraine’s Zelenskiy had out-foxed him. The fact that Ze, a former comedian, has managed to hold Ukraine together must be especially irksome to a man like Putin, who thinks of statesmen as anointed great men.
To add insult to injury Putin now finds himself in charge of cleaning up the mess he made in Donbas eight years ago. He didn’t want that. Forcing Ukraine to keep Donbas was a way to weaken Ukraine, and that was why Putin hoped to get the west to go along with his plans to force Ukraine to accept Minsk 2 on his terms, formally creating a pocket veto on Ukraine’s efforts to move towards the west. But even without Minsk being implemented the Donbas was a drain on Ukraine. The limited but moderate intensity warfare with no resolution cost money and lives. Ukraine was also paying the pensions of people who were not living in territory controlled by Ukraine, an expense that was necessary for Ukrainian dignity, but of little good for its economy. Even implementing the Minsk agreement according to Ukrainian terms would have been costly and time consuming. Rebuilding the state and institutions systematically destroyed by the combination of Russian military operatives and organized crime gangs that ran the city would have been difficult, and the investment necessary to revive the Donbas’s mining-based economy in Donbas cost effective would have been huge. Modernization would not lead to employment for most miners — just look at the situation in West Virginia, Southeastern Ohio, western Pennsylvania and Eastern Kentucky. In times other businesses would develop, but with huge social costs.
Ever since the insurgencies of Spring 2014 the dirty secret of the conflict has been that whoever ends up with Donbas will be the loser of the war. Today, Putin took that honor and was forced to pretend that this was a good thing. Putin will now have to fix it; although whether he can do that is another question. Of course, Putin can break more. He can use the claims of the Donetsk and Luhansk Republics to the whole administrative regions to justify pushing Ukrainian forces out there. He can move to create the so-called land bridge to Crimea that has been talked about since 2014, but that should not be confused with victory. That will be a drain on the Russian economy and cost lives that many Russians will resent, Ukrainians won’t like it much either but they will be fighting for their country and that will make a big difference.
