It was Friday afternoon, just after three o’clock, when two pro-Russian separatist leaders sent video messages to the world via messaging app Telegram. They announced an “immediate evacuation” of the civilian population because of “an imminent attack” by the Ukrainian government army.
They probably didn’t realize they were sending metadata with their videos. They revealed that the videos were not shot Friday afternoon, but two days earlier, just before mortar shells slammed into Ukrainian positions at the front and disrupted telecommunications networks.
The videos are strong indications that Russia – the separatists are under the control of the Kremlin – is stepping up pressure on the West and Ukraine through a script. Information plays at least as big a role in this as weapons.
It is why a Ukrainian think tank gathered a group of foreign journalists on Saturday in a room overlooking Maidan Square in Kiev. “Russia is currently conducting a textbook example of a hybrid war,” said Oleksandr Danylyuk, the speaker. ‘The western focus is too much on military steps.’
Heavy damage without invading
Danylyuk is an expert in hybrid warfare, a method of attack in which non-military assets play a major role. He advised the chairman of Ukraine’s Foreign Intelligence Service and heads a NATO-Ukraine platform to detect hybrid threats: cyber-attacks, economic pressures, disinformation.
Western governments, much to Ukraine’s chagrin, have been counting down for months to a large-scale invasion by Russia. The more soldiers and tanks in satellite photos, the louder the alarm of Anglo-Saxon governments. The US government is warning of an invasion that will begin with aerial bombardments and end with the capture of a significant portion of Ukrainian territory, including Kiev. On Friday, President Biden said he is convinced Putin has decided to invade Ukraine. According to British Prime Minister Johnson, Russia is planning “the biggest war in Europe since 1945”.
But Ukraine argues that the very threat of invasion is part of Russian warfare. Without invading, Russia is already doing heavy damage in Ukraine. Western embassies in Kiev, including those of the US, UK and the Netherlands, have been evacuated. Hundreds of NATO instructors who trained the Ukrainian army have been recalled. Also gone: Western members of the OSCE monitoring mission at the front, foreign employees of large companies, tourists. Following KLM, the German airline Lufthansa announced this weekend that it would no longer fly to Ukraine.
‘Russia gets what it wants’, says Danylyuk. “It doesn’t even have to invade anymore.”
He points out that Eastern European countries, such as Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, have not left Kiev. That’s no coincidence, he says. ‘These are countries that have been under Soviet rule, they understand how Russia works.’
Long-term scenario
An increasing frustration of the Ukrainian government is that the West will allow the Russian threat as long as Russia does not invade. President Volodymyr Zelenski lashed out at Western heads of government at the Security Conference in Munich on Saturday. ‘If you say that war is certain to come in a few days, what are you waiting for? We don’t need your sanctions after the bombings, after our country is shelled, after we no longer have borders, after we no longer have an economy.’
In recent days, there has been more evidence of a Russian information war. For example, separatists claimed Friday that a car belonging to one of their leaders had exploded. But that attack seems staged: the license plate on the exploded car belongs to another, more expensive car, which the separatists may not have wanted to sacrifice. And Russian state television stated on Friday that a Ukrainian mortar shell ended up in Russia, but gave no proof.
They are messages interpreted in the West as the very last prelude to an invasion, but Ukraine points out that the attack still consists largely of a threat.
Ukraine takes more account of a long-term scenario. According to Ukraine, Russia’s troop build-up is mainly intended to intimidate the West. Meanwhile, Russia is pressuring Western leaders to force Ukraine to agree to Russia’s interpretation of the Minsk accords. This would give separatist republics an autonomous status with a veto right over foreign policy, including affiliation with the EU and NATO. That step will remove the threat of invasion, Russia promises.
But agreeing to Minsk would spark mass protests among the Ukrainian population, according to a feared scenario within Ukraine’s security service. In that scenario, right-wing nationalist movements make themselves heard during the protests. Like during the Ukrainian protests in 2014, Russia would present those protests as a neo-Nazi coup attempt and could invade ‘to protect’ the population and strategic objects, such as the area around the exploded Chernobyl nuclear reactor and gas pipelines to Europe. ‘Russia never just invades’, says Danylyuk. “Russia always comes to the rescue. Invading because of a Nazi coup sounds better than invading to restore the Russian Empire.”