The five key questions that need answered on Russian invasion of Ukraine

Wars, once started, rarely follow a script. More frequently, they lead those caught up in its throes, combatants and civilians alike, down unanticipated pathways – and the war in Ukraine is no exception.

The first thing to realise about this conflict is that despite what are clearly early setbacks to Russia’s hoped-for “swift war”, Russian president Vladimir Putin has these past days repeated that taking “full control” of the country, by diplomatic or military means, remains his objective.

After the fall of the first major Ukrainian city – Kherson – to Russian forces, Putin appeared buoyed and in no mood to heed international pressure for hostilities to end as the war entered its second week.

In real terms on the ground, what this means is that for all Russia’s efforts to develop an unconventional “hybrid” approach to conflict in the 21st century, its invasion against Ukraine has been carried out along brutal and decidedly old-fashioned lines. Most likely it will continue to do so.

In short, this involves more aggressive artillery and aerial attacks on urban centres to pound its neighbour into submission, irrespective of the dire implications this has for Ukraine’s civilian population. The announcement by the Russian military that it is observing a ceasefire to allow civilians to evacuate from the strategic port of Mariupol in the southeast and the eastern town of Volnovakha is on one level a welcome sign.

But on past form in places like Syria the agreement to “humanitarian corridors” often precedes a Russian onslaught that subsequently lays waste to cities.

“We are now in for the long haul and Russia is reorganising itself to ensure that it wins this war,” was how Keir Giles, senior consulting fellow for the Russia and Eurasia programme at Chatham House, summed

it up.

After taking control of Kherson last week, Russian forces also continued their brutal assault on Mariupol on the Sea of Azov and showed signs they could be preparing for an attack on the critical Black Sea port of Odesa.

Russia’s progress in the south stands in contrast to the situation near Kyiv, where a 60km convoy has been stalled north of the capital for several days after stiff Ukrainian resistance.

For its part, Ukrainian forces on the battlefield are conducting a hugely effective and mobile defence, using their knowledge of their home turf to choke off Russian forces on multiple fronts.

For the moment, the Ukrainians as underdogs have flipped the script on the battlefield, but optimism is now tempered by the prospect of a Russian intensification in the coming days.

What of President Zelenskyy?

HE was once a fictional president in the hugely popular Ukrainian TV show Servant Of The People. But today Volodymyr Zelenskyy has left the world in no doubt of his remarkable courage and capabilities as his country’s real-time leader, a role that puts him now in acute personal danger.

His appeal over the past few days for members of the Ukrainian diaspora to volunteer to join his army resisting Russian forces has only further angered Moscow and fixed Zelenskyy in the Kremlin’s crosshairs as “target number one”.

Formally dubbed the “International Legion of Territorial Defence of Ukraine” by the Kyiv government, the numbers signing up from abroad to fight in Ukraine, including army veterans resident in Britain, the US and Europe, are growing.

Already military analysts say it could become the largest band of volunteers to fight in Europe since the international brigades participated in the Spanish civil war. Zelenskyy’s appeal for more Ukrainian volunteers from overseas has irritated Moscow which itself is alleged to be using outsiders and mercenaries to kill him and other senior Kyiv government and military officials.

During a briefing last Tuesday, Ukrainian National Security and Defence Council chief Oleksiy Danilov announced that Ukrainian forces had foiled an assassination plot against Zelenskyy.

Danilov said that an elite group of Chechen special forces working under Ramzan Kadyrov, the head of Russia’s Chechen Republic and known as the Kadyrovites, was dispatched by Russia to “eliminate our president” but was “destroyed directly”.

On Monday, The Times of London reported that The Wagner Group, a Russian paramilitary group allied with Putin, flew 400 mercenaries into Kyiv to assassinate Zelensky in return for what was described as a “handsome financial bonus”.

While it come as little surprise that Zelenskyy continues to be targeted, one of the most startling revelations are claims by the Ukrainians that the assassination attempts were thwarted after tip-offs from anti-war elements within Russia’s own Federal Security Service (FSB).

“I can say that we have received information from the FSB, who do not want to take part in this bloody war,” Danilov said. “And thanks to this, the Kadyrov elite group was destroyed, which came here to eliminate our president.”

The Times also reported that the other assassination squad from the Wagner mercenary group were unaware of the Chechen assassins but have been “embedded” in Kyiv for more than six weeks, tracking the activities of 24

high-profile Ukrainian targets on their “kill list” including Zelenskyy.

Clearly, the longer Zelenskyy stays, the more these efforts to target him will be stepped up as the “decapitation” of his government is crucial to Russia’s ongoing strategy to replace it with a puppet regime.

How bad might the humanitarian situation become?

The short answer is that it’s already dire in some places. But given that the war is little over 10 days old the capacity for this to become a major humanitarian catastrophe is obvious. Even yesterday, following announcements by Russian and Ukrainian leaders that temporary ceasefires would be implemented so that humanitarian corridors could be established, there were accusations from Ukrainians in the Russian-occupied city of Kherson that such corridors as agreed upon had not been allowed.

Other global humanitarian crises where restrictions on the ability of humanitarians to work offer a stark warning to what could befall Ukraine.

“The big issue of modern conflict – as you know in places like Syria, Yemen, elsewhere and Ethiopia most dramatically – is access,” insisted Samantha Power, the head of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), speaking in a virtual address last Thursday.

In those other conflicts, she said, forces that control specific areas have denied humanitarian access “and so that cannot happen in this instance”, adding that the international community must be ready to press Russia to allow that assistance through as the fighting rages. But the question remains: no matter how much pressure is applied, will Moscow listen?

Currently, western Ukraine including the city of Lviv remains a staging post for supplies coming across the border from Poland before being shuttled east to Kyiv and other areas in need. But should Russian forces cut this corridor off, arguing that it is also being used as a military resupply route for Ukrainian forces, then the capacity to get humanitarian aid to where it is most needed would be seriously curtailed.

Supplies for those inside Ukraine aside, there is also the question of those internally displaced and refugees crossing international borders. Most Ukrainians leaving their country are heading west into Poland, Moldova, Slovakia, Romania, and Hungary, which have opened their borders to anyone trying to flee.

According to the UN refugee agency (UNHCR), already the fighting has pushed 1.2 million Ukrainians to flee the country in search of safety.

But this, it says, is only the beginning, with estimates that more than four million people will become refugees, while millions more will become displaced internally within Ukraine’s borders.

This is already Europe’s biggest refugee crisis since the Balkan wars of the 1990s, and if the pace keeps up – as indicators suggest it will – it could soon become the worst since the Second World War.

Is Putin unstable or just rational and dangerous?

It’s a question that has been getting a lot of attention lately as a Russian president once deemed to be a coldly rational, calculating, and cautious leader appears to have embarked on a reckless war from which there is no real apparent gain.

The problem is further compounded by the fact that there is no way out from the current crisis short of stepping back, not something the Russian leader is likely to do.

It was US Florida senator and former Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio who, as tensions in Ukraine mounted last month, observed that “something is off with Putin”.

Rubio was among a few international observers to question Putin’s state of mind, adding that the Russian president appeared to have “some neuro/psychological issues”.

As vice-chair of the US Senate Intelligence Committee, Rubio is privy to reports by US spies which only further raised speculation as to how much he knew or had been briefed about the Russian president’s disposition. “I wish I could share more, but for now I can say it’s pretty obvious to many that something is off with Putin,” he tweeted.

“He has always been a killer, but his problem now is different and significant. It would be a mistake to assume this Putin would react the same way he would have five years ago,” Rubio added, heightening the intrigue even further.

The decision to go to war aside, many observers agree that Putin’s behaviour seems erratic. As Politico magazine recently noted, Putin’s “extreme form of social distancing has raised questions about his own health, amplified by the unexplained bloating of his face, which doctors say could be a sign he is taking some form of steroids for an undisclosed medical condition”.

But some former US intelligence officials argue that writing off the Russian leader as having mental health problems would be a tremendous miscalculation.

“I have seen nothing to indicate that Vladimir Putin isn’t anything but the same coldly, calculating KGB operative he’s always been,” said Daniel Hoffman, a retired clandestine services officer and former chief of station with the CIA.

“I don’t think he’s made any mistakes yet,” Hoffman told Voice of America (VOA) in a recent interview, noting Russia’s successful military ventures in Chechnya, Georgia, Crimea, and Syria. Hoffman, like some other former US and European intelligence officials, believe instead that Putin, encouraged by those campaigns, saw a window of opportunity given the political condition in America and Europe to turn one of his long-held desires into reality.

Some go as far as to say that perhaps Putin is simply re-enacting Richard Nixon’s so-called “madman theory” in which the then-US president tried to make the North Vietnamese believe he was ready to push the button, in hopes of frightening them to the negotiating table.

What can we now expect from inside Russia?

JUST as views differ over Putin’s state of mind, the jury remains divided on what we can now expect from inside Russia as the war with Ukraine intensifies.

Many Russia-watchers insist it remains very difficult to measure the true extent of opposition to the war and to Putin personally.

With words like “invasion” and war” banned in Russian media, the state apparatus continues to portray a very different reality to what we here in the West have as media coverage.

With the closure or pullout of several major media outlets including the BBC, that one-dimensional take on news from Ukraine will only reinforce the message the Kremlin wants to be heard.

Instead of anti-war protests, the Kremlin’s vast structure of newspapers, magazines, websites, and TV stations keep up a steady flow of anti-Ukrainian propaganda that tries to rationalise for Russian citizens the reasons their brothers, sons and husbands have been sent to war, and possibly their deaths, hundreds of miles away.

“The prevailing wisdom holds that Putin will be able to survive any domestic backlash,” observed two respected Russia-watchers, Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Eric Frantz, writing in Foreign Affairs magazine last week.

“But the thing about repressive regimes like Putin’s Russia is that they often look stable right up to the point that they are not. Putin has taken a major risk in attacking Ukraine, and there is a chance – one that seems to be growing – that it could mark the beginning of his end,” added the authors.

Putin has gone to great lengths in recent years to crack down on Russian civil society, political opposition, journalists, and the information environment, but the opposition refuses to go away.

Then there is the issue of sanctions and their effect.

While their initial bite they might not hurt Putin in the short term, they could in the longer run erode his standing as Russian frustration and anger over the impact of sanctions percolates across almost every level of society.

“If Putin takes Ukraine, he will lose Ukraine,” observed Andrei Kolesnikov of the Carnegie Moscow Centre, writing a few days ago.

“More accurately, he has already lost it. Meanwhile, he has made Russia and the Russian public nearly as isolated as he is. Will he now lose Russia, too, as a result of this war, or will he bring it down with him?” Kolesnikov asked.

That question might take some time for a definitive answer to present itself.