The Economist January 29th 2022 15
BriefingThe Ukraine crisisA
battalion tactical group(btg) is a
Russian army unit which consists of
800 or so troops, sometimes rather more,
and most of the armour, artillery and air
defences they need in order to fight. When
Russia attacked Ukraine in 2014, stirring
up separatism among Russian speakers in
Donbas, at the eastern end of the country,
and annexing Crimea, it did so with per
haps half a dozen btgs. The following year,
when its surrogates in Donbas needed
help, it responded with roughly ten btgs.
There are now 56 Russian btgs on or
near Ukraine’s border, according to its gov
ernment. Other estimates put the number
above 70. It is by far the largest concentra
tion of military force seen in Europe since
the end of the cold war. And only Vladimir
Putin can say how, or if, it will be put to use.
When President Joe Biden said, on Jan
uary 19th, that he thought Vladimir Putin
was going to invade Ukraine, the reason he
offered was simply “he has to do some
thing”. Huge clouds of smoke betoken fire;
mobilisations have momentum. But the
fact that Mr Biden thinks his Russian coun
terpart, having gone this far, must go fur
ther, does not mean Mr Putin agrees. MrPutin comes from a political culture very
unlike Mr Biden’s, one where negotiations
often start with threats rather than at
tempts at understanding. And he is ac
countable to no one.
Having not specified any objective or
target, Mr Putin might feel able to deesca
late in a way a leader who has to build co
alitions around courses of action would
not. It is striking that, inside Russia, there
have been quite a few voices prophesying
not war, but its absence—and though the
absence of war, as students of Spinoza can
attest, is not the same thing as peace, it
would nevertheless entail fewer risks for
Mr Putin.
Russia is not the only place where peo
ple are unconvinced about the imminence
of battle. Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s
president, has told the public that Mr Pu
tin’s mobilisation is a form of psycholog
ical warfare best countered by staying
calm. Years of losing soldiers in Donbas
have taught the country a certain stoicism.
But there was a marked increase in ten
sion around January 23rd, when various
embassies started withdrawing people
from Kyiv. Young members of the middle
class are making contingency plans to
leave Kyiv or to move family members out
of regions where fighting looks more like
ly. Official reassurance does little to help
when it tips over to absurdity. Oleksiy Da
nilov, the head of Ukraine’s national secu
rity and defence council, insisted on Janu
ary 25th that Russia’s troop movements are
nothing out of the ordinary and on the 26th
that fullscale invasion would be “physi
cally impossible”. They are, and it’s not.
Mr Putin has made political capital out
of armed conflict before. The war in Chech
nya which began in 1999 helped him as
cend to the presidency. The war in Georgia,
in 2008, marked a new defiant antinato
nationalism. Seizing Crimea in 2014 was
hugely popular at home.
But he has fought shy of committing
massive forces or risking dreadful casual
ties, and many Russian opposition politi
cians, political analysts and businesspeo
ple think he has no interest in changing
that approach now. They suggest the mo
bilisation along the border was not intend
ed as the prelude to war, but just to gener
ate a sense of conflict and crisis at home,
thus shoring up the regime, and to rattle
the West, exposing some of its internal
tensions. Those goals have been achieved.
The drums of warhave drowned out
grumbles about inflation, the raging pan
demic and corruption. The demands Rus
sia has made of nato—that it abandon an
opendoor policy towards new members,
that it cease military activity in the coun
tries of eastern and central Europe and that
it remove various missile systems—have
brought about highlevel summitry remiK YIV AND LONDON
Vladimir Putin is keeping the world guessing
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