22 Briefing War in Ukraine The Economist February 26th 2022
aratists be provided with a level of autono
my and veto power that would stop the rest
of Ukraine from moving towards the eu,
economically, and nato, militarily. Uk
raine would be disunited, fragmented and
unable to assert itself as a unitary state:
just the sort of neighbour Mr Putin wants
for Russia. As Bruno Tertrais of frs, a
French thinktank, puts it, he “seeks a form
of castration of Ukraine, to deprive it of its
military potential”.
By recognising the republics as inde
pendent Russia abandoned the route to a
neutered Ukraine that the never imple
mented Minsk Accords had offered it on
paper. Its alternative route was to insert a
preRussian regime by force. If it did not do
so, its military action would incur the
heaviest sanctions the West was willing to
impose without delivering the strategic re
alignment Mr Putin wanted; big costs for
no real benefit.
Ukraine’s armed forces are unlikely to
withstand this assault for long. The first
round of Russian air and missile strikes
was almost certainly intended to destroy
Ukraine’s integrated air defence network;
one of the targets hit was an airdefence
battery in Vasilkiv, a town near Kyiv. If Rus
sian warplanes have command of the skies
its paratroopers and helicopterborne forc
es will be able to bypass large concentra
tions of Ukrainian soldiers in order seize
key objectives well behind the front lines,
going back on themselves to mop up pock
ets of resistance later. On the morning of
February 24th there were reports that Rus
sia had attempted to land paratroopers at
Gostomel airport outside Kyiv. Ukraine
claimed to have shot down some of the he
licopters and captured Russian personnel
How quickly the government might
fall, and whether Russian troops would
need to enter Kyiv to bring it down, is hard
to predict. One unknown factor is how many Ukrainians will resist—and how many
will collaborate. “Meeting with Ukrainian
security officials there is a widespread ac
knowledgment that many of their col
leagues—even in some quite senior posi
tions—are working for or sympathetic to
Russia”, Jack Watling and Nick Reynolds of
the Royal United Services Institute, a
thinktank, wrote in a report based on in
terviews with Ukrainian military and in
telligence officials conducted this month.
They say that last summer thefsb, Rus
sia’s security service, created a 200strong
Ukraine team, the 9th Directorate. In De
cember it reportedly held wargames with
the special forces and airborne troops who
would lead any invasion. The report also
claims that there Russian special forces
have two companies, each of 60 to 80 men,
in Kyiv and ready to strike: “Senior Ukrai
nian officials are clear that they expect,
and have planned for, a decapitation strat
egy against them.” Something new to occupy their minds
If Russia is to keep the puppet it presum
ably aims to install in power, rather than
see them driven out as Mr Yanukovych
was, it may well need not just to invade Uk
raine but to occupy at least some of the
country for some time. The very idea
sounds outlandish; even Western politi
cians familiar with the intelligence seem
hard put to credit it.
Nevertheless, the Russian forces in a
position to invade and the auxiliary forces
which may follow behind them, such as
units of Mr Zolotov’s national guard, “ap
pear more than sufficient to attempt an oc
cupation of Ukraine's eastern regions”, ar
gues Michael Kofman, an expert on Rus
sia’s armed forces at cna, a thinktank.
Ukraine’s eastern areas plus Kyiv amount
to only 18m inhabitants, he notes; the coast
adds another 3m. That would give Russia acomparable forcedensity ratio—the num
ber of troops relative to the population—to
that which 177,000 troops gave America
when it occupied Iraq.
And Russia enjoys advantages that
those Americans did not. Its army does not
suffer from the same language barriers; it
understands the terrain; and it will be
“much more ruthless in the application of
violence”, notes Mr Watling. The 9th Direc
torate has been working on lists of poten
tial collaborators who might take on gov
ernment roles—as well as people who
might lead the resistance.
As Mr Tertrais notes, Russia’s aims are
limited in principle, “but wars have a ten
dency to not follow the path traced by
those who launched them”. That is not
least because others get a vote. “It is in our
collective interest that Russia should ulti
mately fail and be seen to fail”, Boris John
son, Britain’s prime minister, declared on
February 19th.
Much more severe sanctions on the part
of the West and its allies could be a part of
that response. In the first tranche, trig
gered by Mr Putin’s speech on the 21st,
American imposed “full blocking sanc
tions” against veb, an economicdevelop
ment bank, and Promsvyazbank, which fi
nances Russia’s defence sector, freezing
their assets in America, prohibiting Amer
ican individuals and companies from
making deals with them, and blocking
their access to dollars. Further institutions
may now expect the same treatment.
The eu sanctions followed similar lines
to America’s, showing that their planning
had been more closely aligned than many
had thought. The most eyecatching de
monstration of solidarity was Germany’s
decision to mothball Nord Stream 2, a
pipeline which was to have supplied it
with Russian gas by a route that bypassed
Ukraine. Because no gas yet flows through
the pipeline this will have no prompt eco
nomic effect. But it heralds a profound
shift in both German energy policy and its
attitude towards Russia, where it has long
argued that interdependence could be a
foundation for peace. “The situation today
is fundamentally different,” said Olaf
Scholz, Germany’s chancellor.
Many observers criticised those first
sanctions as underambitious. The coun
tries involved said they had to keep some
in reserve to deter further aggression. Now
they will have to show whether what they
kept back measures up. Mr Kuleba,
Ukraine’s foreign minister, has called for
“devastating” sanctions on Russia, includ
ing its exclusion from the swiftsystem for
international financial transactions.
Attacks in cyberspace are also a pos
sibility. “There's a great temptation to
reach for cyber operations,” says Marcus
Willett, a former deputy head of Britain’s
On their way signalintelligence agency, gchq. “They