Crimea: the End of a Taboo

By Nina Bachkatov

The taboo concerning the fate of Crimea had just started to crumble, when the incident of 15 March involving a Russian fighter plane and an American unmanned drone put the Black Sea region under renewed international scrutiny – a region involving Ukrainian southern ports and the peninsula that Ukrainian forces want to regain. It was the first direct confrontation between two countries, Russia and the U.S., that are not technically at war which each other, but are actively involved on the dividing line about the European continent’s security. This kind of incident was due to happen in a region where Russians and the “allies of Ukraine” are testing the reactivity of each other in international airspace (or waters). In this case, the test concerned so-called “restricted zones”, unilaterally announced by Moscow in the framework of its invasion, extending Russian rights to occupied Ukrainian territories in 2014 and 2022.

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A  Long Year for Ukraine and the World

By Nina Bachkatov

The 24 January passed on without the anticipated Russian offensive. In the Western world, thousands of people took the streets to express solidarity with the Ukrainian people.  Their leaders promised again to be on Ukraine’s side “up to the end”, “the time it will take”. In Kiev, Volodymyr Zelensky attended low key ceremonies focused on prayers for the victims and thanks to the fighters. A year after the invasion, peace seems a distant reality, an issue that will be decided on the battlefield. This conviction is reinforced by the slow effects of the economic war, with its sanctions and counter-sanctions, declared by the West to limit the Kremlin’s capacity to finance its war. Now the accent is still on broader sanctions, but the accent is back to military aspects, notably the delivery of arms requested by Ukraine to push Russians out by its own forces. In those conditions, diplomacy is relegated to the sideline, albeit some discreet channels stay open, witnessed for instance by the regular exchanges of prisoners. In fact, nobody wants to expose itself as the one that will raise a white flag, while staying on the save side by talking about the need to keep contacts with Russia.

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The Importance of Perceptions: President Zelensky in Europe

By Nina Bachkatov

Back from his European tour, on 9 February, Ukrainian president Zelensky had addressed the nation as he does almost daily. He told his compatriots that he got “important agreements and good signals… This goes from long range missiles and tanks, to a new level of cooperation including fighter jets. But work has still to be done on that issue”. Evidently, Zelensky has only met supportive interlocutors and enjoyed standing ovations, keeping successfully world attention on his country. But, if he indeed got a lot of promises, a lot of hugs, and another European flag to enrich his collection, he came back home without clear conditions, and dates, for the jet fighters deliveries; nor an agenda for EU adhesion. Anyway, the training of pilots and engineers is “already starting” and the general consensus has been since that taboos about the deliveries of Western jets to Ukraine were falling, the way those concerning battle tanks did earlier.

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Davos, G7, G20: Russia left aside

By Nina Bachkatov

The absence of the Russians at the Davos Forum has underlined the country’s isolation, and has been celebrated as such by the West. Earlier, members of the G7 and G20 had already been meeting without president Putin or Russian high-level officials. But it did not prevent Moscow’s dignitaries to crisscross the world to engage all those who do not believe in the Western declared goals. Lately, Westerners’ sources have begun to question the claims that Russia is an international pariah and that the world at large has some appetite for more sanctions. Hence the apparition of a new narrative, still a minority, according to which Russia is indeed isolated from the West, but not from the world.

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Moscow and Kiev weaponizing orthodox Christmas

By Nina Bachkatov

The conflict between Russia and Ukraine leaves no stone unturned, witness the saga around Christmas celebrations, epitomized in two extravagant pictures: that of the Russian president celebrating the Nativity in an empty church; and that of a crowd of men in uniforms attending the mass in Kiev’s Pechersky Caves just ‘liberated” from the All Russia and Moscow Patriarchate by presidential decree.

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Another year EU-Russia energy war

 By Nina Bachkatov

According to European leaders’, the sanctions against Russian energy producers and exporters have reached their goals – depleting Russian’s national budget, which depends for almost half from energy’s trade, and finances the war in Ukraine. They rejoice that those sanctions provided EU with an incitant to drastically reform its energy sector. But that leaves open the question concerning the intermediary period, which will start in early 2023, especially if the West is not backed by other countries. Despite pressures, a majority of states still refuse to join sanctions that might threat their national interests, and are not ready to threat Vladimir Putin as the pariah president of a failed state. They also see the present crisis as an opportunity to increase their shares of the global market and their geopolitical profiles, to diversify their investments and their industrial basis.

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Wagner’s Prigozhin goes public

By Nina Bachkatov

For almost 10 years, the existence of the group, and the name of its leader, were an open secret, in Russia and abroad. As late as October 2022, president Putin, foreign minister Lavrov and defence minister Shoigu were denying the existence of private military companies in their country. Then, in early November, out of the blue, Yevgeni Prigozhin threw his Wagner group in full light, unleashing a stream of comments and the publication of well-timed books. The move was so astonishing that many Russians, who had seen the film in which Prigozhin was seen recruiting prisoners in a prison courtyard, believed it was a fake. Even in distant villages, people knew names such as Wagner or Prigozhin, but thought it  was not their business unless a member of the family had been enrolled.

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