Russia’s Annexations Run into Ukraine’s Counterattacks

Friday is set to be a momentous day for Russia and for Ukraine.

After rushing through his ridiculous, sham referenda in four partially occupied provinces of Ukraine — Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizka, and Kherson — the Kremlin has spread the word that Vladimir Putin will formally annex the now independent “republics” into the Russian Federation.

No Western or neutral country will recognize this aggression. Moreover, not even Russia’s authoritarian allies in Beijing, Pyongyang, and Damascus have so far signaled that they will offer a measure of diplomatic cover to Moscow.

Of course, the Kremlin hopes that victory, or perhaps even simply a stalemate, will grant de facto “legitimacy” to Russia’s territorial gains. That has been Putin’s playbook in Crimea, and in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the two provinces that Russian troops occupied during Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia.

What makes the Russian annexation so interesting — and so dangerous — is that it could be accompanied by another Russian defeat.

For the past two weeks, after early September’s breathtaking Ukrainian advances, the Russians seemed to steady themselves. The Ukrainian army was still pushing forward, and the Russians were still falling back, but progress had slowed. In recent days, however, the Russian forces in and around the town of Lyman, in Donetsk province, had seen their flanks increasingly threatened by Ukrainian movements.

This map from the Institute of the Study of War lays out the situation.

Rob Lee, a former U.S. Marine and a researcher of the Russian army, wrote late Thursday that “several Russian telegram channels are warning that the battle in Lyman is at a critical point and that Ukraine is advancing from the north and southeast.”

[It’s] possible that the pocket collapses tonight or tomorrow, which would overshadow the annexation announcement. It also sounds unlikely that Russia will be able to conduct a withdrawal without heavy losses. Of course, Russia is already facing a manpower problem and a lack of reserves in the Donbas. If it loses the forces in the Lyman pocket, that could lead to further advances by Ukraine deeper into the Donbas.

Remember, Putin has promised to defend all Russian territory from foreign attack, going so far as to loudly hint at a nuclear response. And, of course, by the Kremlin’s definition, Donetsk oblast will be formally a part of Russia by tomorrow afternoon. What will the Russians do if Putin’s announcement is accompanied by a repeat of early September’s rout of the Russian army? No one knows for sure, but at the very least, we can expect the Russians to shovel their newly mobilized and barely trained conscripts into the churning maw of this war.

Interestingly, Putin was today forced to admit “mistakes” — not his, of course! — during Russia’s mobilization, telling a televised meeting of the security council that “those who were called up without proper reason should be returned home.” As has been widely reported, the Kremlin’s commissars were drafting completely untrained or ineligible men into the army when, at least officially, they were only supposed to be calling up reservists, men who already had military training. The fact that Putin was forced to admit error here goes to show the breadth of the anger that was touched off by the incompetence of Russia’s very Russian mobilization.

If you have the appetite for a further ominous development, rumors have begun to spread that the Kremlin has finally subjected Belorussian dictator Alexander Lukashenko to enough pressure to bring him into the war directly. If you recall, back in February, Russian troops used Belarus as an avenue of approach for its initial assault on Kyiv. In those heady days, when it looked like Russia might win the war quickly, there was talk of the Belorussian army crossing the border in force, perhaps to cut off the Ukrainian capital from NATO supply lines and the Polish border.

In the end, Lukashenko decided the payoff wasn’t worth the risk, and the Belorussian army never did much of anything. After Russia’s spring setbacks, the Belarus–Ukraine border has stayed mostly quiet. True, the Russians have used Belorussian airspace to attack into Ukraine, but as the war shifted to Ukraine’s east and south, there has been little threat of a renewed ground attack on Kyiv.

That may — I repeat may — now be changing.

Pavel Latushka, a former Belorussian politician and diplomat now in exile in the West, has stated that he believes the Belorussian army may be ready to make a move.

For what it’s worth, the Ukrainians believe this is not an idle threat. Today, Oleksiy Danilov, the secretary of Ukraine’s national-security council, was quoted in a Ukrainian paper as saying, “We understand that daily, Putin is putting pressure on Lukashenko to launch armed aggression from Belarus.”

We know everything. Even the recent meeting in Sochi [between Putin and Lukashenko] was on this topic.

I don’t think Lukashenko will make such a decision. But if Belarussian troops invade the country, as happened on 24 February, they will receive a response that they did not expect.

Lukashenko and the Belorussian army have a lot of incentive to stay out of direct involvement in this war — civil unrest in opposition to the Belorussian regime is not far below the surface, especially after the 2020 protest movement.

But when you add up Russia’s mobilization, its annexation of four Ukrainian provinces, Putin’s renewed nuclear threats, and the (very likely) Russian attack on the Nord Stream pipelines, we shouldn’t be surprised by further escalatory moves by the Kremlin and its decrepit allies.