Key to understanding Ukraine is what governments do, not what they say

GlobalPost

LONDON — The key to understanding what’s going on in Ukraine and what’s likely to happen next is to pay more attention to what governments do rather than to what they say.

That’s a rule I learned many years ago as a foreign correspondent reporting events in Israel. An older and more experienced correspondent advised me to watch the Israeli bulldozers, see where they are building roads if you want to measure the government’s real intentions. He was right.

I learned that rule again a few years later when I went to an Israeli bunker on the Suez Canal to see what the Egyptians were doing on the other side of the canal. Egyptian bulldozers were doing earth moving. I duly reported what an Israeli official in Jerusalem had told me, that the Egyptian army was conducting maneuvers. A few days later, the Egyptians crossed the canal and launched the 1973 Arab war against Israel. Both the CIA and Israeli intelligence had seen what the Egyptians were doing but did not believe what they saw.

Apply the rule to the current crisis sparked by Russia’s takeover of the Crimea, and the picture becomes sharper. Russia has massed tens of thousands of well-equipped troops on its border with Ukraine.

The Russian government says its soldiers are conducting maneuvers. Western governments believe they are there either to intimidate the Ukrainian government or, more likely, are waiting for a pretext to invade and seize another chunk of Ukraine.

Meanwhile pro-Russian demonstrators in Ukrainian cities along the Russian border are trying to provide the pretext and demanding to be “protected” by the Russian army.

Since it is difficult to keep large troop formations deployed for a long time in a high state of readiness, the Russians will reveal their intentions in the very near future.

There is a second rule that should be applied to the Ukraine crisis. It is also true that what governments do not do is more important than what they say. President Putin can ignore tough talk by the US and its NATO allies because the West is unwilling to apply tough sanctions, the kinds that have brought Iran to the negotiating table.

Finally, it is always useful to focus on the big picture. President Putin has made no secret of his intention to re-establish Russian influence in the periphery of the former Soviet Union. Russia has lost most of its influence over the East European satellites that joined the Western camp, but hopes to keep other former satellites including Ukraine from joining the EU and NATO.

Add to all this the fact that Putin’s pugnacious foreign policy, re-enforced by his obsessive control of the Russian media, has created a patriotic response from the Russian public that has pushed his sky high ratings even higher. There are few reasons for Putin to hesitate to push further into Ukraine.

Public opinion in Western Europe and the US is firmly against a military response to Putin’s aggressiveness, and even if that were desirable, NATO’s lack of readiness to fight a war in Europe would rule it out.

There has been talk in foreign policy establishments that this crisis could halt the long term decline in the military spending of most NATO members, but there seem to be no Western government heads willing and able to ask voters to spend more for defense.

That’s the picture as I see it from my London listening post — a Russian President on a roll and the West in disarray.

Tom Fenton is a retired correspondent who spent 34 years in the field covering the world for CBS News. He writes an occasional analysis from London for GlobalPost.

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