Putin makes his case for Greater Russia

The Ukrainian crisis has reached a turning point. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s remarks on a World War II victory anniversary at a parade in Sevastopol in Crimea on May 9 highlighted the Kremlin’s intention to press ahead in Ukraine and elsewhere despite European Union and U.S. opposition.

Putin’s speech included this soaring patriotic vision: “I am sure that 2014 will also become part of the city’s chronicle and of that of our entire country as the year in which the people here expressed their firm desire to be together with Russia. In this decision they have shown that they remain true to the historic truth and our forefathers’ memory.”

Putin’s Sevastopol speech makes it clear that Moscow will take matters into its own hands in Ukraine, without help from Washington.

The blunt development of the last days is that Berlin also no longer sees Washington as part of a comprehensive deal to resolve Ukraine’s travails.

Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany met with President Barack Obama in the White House last month in order to discuss the unresolved discord over the revelations of National Security Agency spying on Germany as well as the fresh challenges in the Ukrainian crisis. 

The meeting went badly. Both Russian and European observers report that Merkel believes she was misinformed in person when she asked about the extent of U.S. support for the violent Maidan protests of last winter that led to the crumbling of the Kyiv government and flight by President Viktor Yanukovych. 

Moscow knows that Merkel has confirmed information from her own intelligence services and elsewhere that the White House helped sustain and intensify the Maidan uprising.

I am told that Merkel confronted Obama about the fresh violence in Ukraine this spring, especially the Ukrainian forces’ offensives in Donetsk Oblast. He responded that the United States was not involved. He also told her that the collapse of Ukraine was not about Kyiv’s uncertain government or the threat of the Maidan protesters’ Right Sector, which has been deputized to launch the offensive in Donetsk Oblast, but about Putin’s personal upset with Obama’s vision of world affairs.

The argument from voices sympathetic to Moscow is that the White House calculated that the fighting at the heart of the pro-Russian forces would move Merkel and her advisers to the Washington solution of isolating Russia with an ever-sharper sanction regime. The White House maneuver did not succeed. Merkel is now looking away from Obama. 

European observers emphasize that the Germans are distraught about their meeting with Obama and his national security aides. Merkel’s aides were astonished by the poor quality of information and the unearned superiority of Obama’s experts and counselors. She regarded the event as mistreatment, sandbagging, deceiving.

The Kremlin is not in a hurry in Ukraine at this moment, I am told, and the next days and weeks will see more Russian military and diplomatic strength in the approximately 55 percent of Ukraine that is sympathetic to Russian heritage and language. At the same time, Moscow does not now believe that it can comprehensively control events on the ground in the front-line areas of Donetsk Oblast. The pro-Russian separatists are made reckless by casualties. Russian special forces widely reported on the scene are said not to be capable of constraining all the gunmen in the field. Furthermore, Kyiv’s forces, under Ukrainian flags, are unpredictable and motivated to create conditions that call for outside interventions and cease-fires.

For the bigger picture, the failure of the White House to convince German leadership in person that the U.S. understands European dilemmas in a post-Soviet century looks to be the most significant change brought by the Ukrainian crisis. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel’s call for European governments to increase their defense budgets while the U.S. is cutting back its own did not sit well with European observers. The sanctions so far launched against Russian oligarchs in order to intimidate the Kremlin are having a perverse effect in Moscow: Russian VIPs are actually campaigning to get on the sanctions list in order to demonstrate that they’re close to the center of power. 

The International Monetary Fund’s decision to offer the Kyiv interim government $17.2 billion in loans has not impressed the Kremlin. Reliable financiers assert that the IMF does not have the money. The funds will come from U.S. and EU sources that do not require legislative approval. Kyiv is out of money. The Ukrainian economy has collapsed. The immediate portion of the loans, more than $3 billion, goes to Ukrainian creditors so they do not seek default judgments. None of it will go to pay the outstanding energy bill to Russia, which is due in mid-May.

The Europeans are well informed of their poor options in the face of the Kremlin’s ambitions. There is no foreseeable military response for NATO or its member states to the Russian army camped on Ukraine’s border. More important, there is no foreseeable workaround for the European economy, which is dependent on Russian energy. Berlin and the EU are playing a losing hand as well as possible while waiting on the Kremlin’s card choices.