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Putin’s playbook

I wouldn’t want to impugn Russian President Putin’s originality, but his playbook does seem borrowed from Slobodan Milosevic.  Ukraine is not really a country.  Nor was Bosnia to Milosevic.  The threat to Russian-speakers in Ukraine (and Georgia and Moldova) requires that they be protected.  So too the Serbs in Croatia, Kosovo and Bosnia.  Russia did not start what is happening in Ukraine–it was the West that chased President Yanukovich from Kiev.  So, too, for Milosevic it was Croatian President Tudjman who precipitated things in Zagreb, Bosnian President Izetbegovic in Bosnia and of course rioting Albanians in Kosovo:  “no one should dare to beat you again!”

There is of course some degree of truth–I won’t go into how much–in each of these allegations.  In revolutionary situations, there are bound to be bad moments, bad actors, bad provocations.  The playbook requires that you overreact: mobilize paramilitaries, occupy territory, saturate the airwaves with justification and crush any hint of violent response on the part of a far weaker enemy.  This is Machiavelli, suggesting ways to seize control of territory as quickly and inexpensively as possible and ensuring by whatever means you can get away with that it remains yours.

There is one play missing, so far:  ethnic cleansing.  So far as I am aware, the Russians are not, yet, expelling Tatars or Ukrainian speakers from Crimea.  For the moment they are reported to be taking the soft power approach, trying to convince the Tatars to support them and arresting relatively few Ukrainian speakers and oppositionists, even as they box in or take over Ukrainian military installations.  But that may change.  With what I anticipate will be an overwhelming victory of the independence referendum in Crimea Sunday,  Moscow may see the development of some real resistance to its plan to absorb Crimea into Russia as well as clashes in other parts of Ukraine between Russian and Ukrainian speakers.  If it doesn’t happen spontaneously, Moscow can of course make it happen.

That’s when I would expect the next play.  It is still early in the Ukraine saga.  Things can get much worse and likely will.  Crimea is more philo-Russian than other provinces in eastern and southern Ukraine.  It already had autonomy and governed itself in many ways.  It is not a great leap to independence, or to returning to the Russia from which it originated.  The contestants will be more evenly matched in other provinces, requiring removal at least some of those who won’t cooperate.

Russian troops are said today to be massing and exercising near Ukraine’s eastern border.  Success in Crimea could well embolden Putin further, tempting him to take a few more provinces piecemeal.  If he does, his need to expel Ukrainian speakers and others who oppose Moscow’s rule will be greater than in Ukraine.  We are far from the worst that can happen.