DECODING THE UKRAINE CRISIS
The Ukraine-Russian faceoff is the closest that the NATO forces have come to a shooting war with Russia after the collapse of the USSR. Geopolitical Strategist Mr. Brunello Rosa, was interviewed by Manasa S. Murthy of the Synergia Foundation.
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ndeterred by Western sanctions, Russia has launched a full-scale ‘military operation’ in Ukraine. The countries on NATO’s eastern flank, especially the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, are on high alert, with the U.S. deploying its first batch of military troops and equipment there.
CASUS BELLI FOR WAR
Since Ukraine allied itself with the western powers with its publicly expressed desire to join both EU and NATO, its relations with Russia, never on the best of terms, speedily went south. “Moscow has been trying to assert itself in an old-fashioned geopolitical stance. It needs to ensure that there is enough geopolitical depth between itself and Central Europe. In other words, Russia wants to have a sort of ‘cushion’ in case of a NATO invasion, so that the Motherland is always protected” explains Mr. Brunello Rosa, CEO and Head of Research, Rosa and Roubini Associates, London. A glimpse of the map of Eastern Europe will make it amply clear. As Russia shares no border with any NATO country. An economically weak but militarily still formidable country, Russia deems this buffer critical to its security. Russia’s relations with these so-called buffer states fluctuate - from close relations with the beleaguered Alexander Grigoryevich Lukashenko of Belarus to openly hostile with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine.
Russia is a country which will leverage its influence with one country to assert itself over another - remember the war with Georgia a few years ago and, more recently, the country’s intervention in the Kazakh crisis. This is its way of pressuring NATO and other European countries to abandon their idea of inducting Ukraine into their folds. However, considering Russia-Belarus relations in the past, Mr. Rosa opines that there is no direct relation between the presence of troops in Belarus and what is happening in Ukraine. There have been a number of bilateral tensions between Russia and Belarus over the past few months. “Russia is a country which will leverage its influence with one country to assert itself over another - remember the war with Georgia a few years ago and, more recently, the country’s intervention in the Kazakh crisis. This is its way of pressuring NATO and other European countries to abandon their idea of inducting Ukraine into their folds,” says Mr. Rosa.
CRIMEA 2.0?
Haunted by the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea, which caught the West by surprise, NATO this time over is more circumspect over Ukraine. Given its history and geography, Ukraine is vulnerable to both an actual military invasion by a powerful Russian armoured juggernaut as also to hybrid warfare, including cyber-attacks, something at which Moscow has gained considerable expertise. In addition, there
