With Crimea in his pocket, Putin eyes next step

Even in the face of intensifying economic pressure from the West and further threats of diplomatic isolation, such firebrand rhetoric could create a momentum Putin might find impossible to walk back — if that had ever been his intention. Putin now appears poised to complete the annexation of Crimea without firing a shot — Moscow says the shooting at a Simferopol military facility on Tuesday that claimed the life of a Ukrainian soldier was the work of local irregulars — and his confrontation with Western powers has sent his domestic political popularity soaring.

Many observers had hoped that acquiring Crimea would mark the peak of the Russian intervention in Ukraine, having read the aggression as a form of retaliation for the recent uprising in Kiev that spurned ties with Russia in favor of greater European integration. Crimea has now declared itself part of Russia, and Putin is celebrating a rare geopolitical victory against Western rivals whose limited economic and military leverage could not counter his commitment in Ukraine.

But Kiev’s new leaders fear that massive Russian military exercises just across the eastern border suggest Moscow's incursion into Ukraine has only just begun.

In his speech on Tuesday, which formally welcomed Crimea back to Russia, Putin did little to dispel fears that his next move will be to roll into the Russian-speaking eastern half of Ukraine under the same thin veneer of protecting his ethnic kin. Russia will “always protect” the interests of Russian speakers through “political, diplomatic and legal means,” he said, but “don't believe those who say Russia will take other regions after Crimea. We do not want a partition of Ukraine, we do not need this."

In fact, many analysts would take Putin at his word that a full-blown invasion of mainland Ukraine is an unlikely scenario. “The factors that made the Crimea operations so quick and bloodless aren’t present in the rest of the country, which is larger, less geographically isolated, more ethnically heterogeneous, and doesn’t have the same historical links to Russia,” noted Joshua Keating in Slate.

The population of eastern Ukraine is not as overwhelmingly pro-Kremlin as Crimea's, as last weekend's violent clashes between rival protesters signaled. A Crimea-style referendum endorsing annexation could not be easily engineered. And Russian forces entering mainland Ukraine would likely force the government in Kiev to order its NATO-trained forces to resist. Even though the Ukrainians would almost certainly be thrashed in a head-to-head confrontation with the Russian military, a shooting war would raise massive pressure on Western powers to back a more robust response, and could create a protracted conflict on the ground beyond Moscow's control. 

Still, the geography of the isolated Crimean peninsula seems to invite a creeping push northward. “Whether it’s invasion by tanks or through economic means, the momentum is already heading that way,” said Andrew Meier, former Moscow-based correspondent for Time magazine and author of “Black Earth: A Journey Through Russia After the Fall.”

“If you look at Crimea, how much of its infrastructure, its drinking water, its energy resources are actually in Crimea? It’s a bit of a pretense to imagine that the line stops there.”