 | Unleash yourself and shop our special collection of tees and accessories for you and your pooch. From our sponsors |
| Kavkazcenter.com |
| Latest events from Kavkaz-Center |
Foreign Policy: What would Russia do once it crossed Ukrainian border?
4/16/2014 1:57:34 PM
Foreign Policy published an article about the sinister plans of Russia against Ukraine. The article states:
- Many observers speculate that the seizure of government buildings have come at the behest of Moscow in order to stir up a pretext for invasion. But what will Russian forces do once they cross the Ukrainian border?
A report of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a defense think tank, lay out a series of scenarios spelling out possible courses of actions for Russian troops invading the eastern and southern provinces of Ukraine.
According the authors of the report -- Igor Sutyagin, a research fellow at RUSI, and Michael Clarke, the institute's director general -- Russia has some 50,000 troops lined up against roughly 70,000 Ukrainian troops. While Ukraine possesses a numerical advantage in troops, Kiev's forces are "poorly equipped and would struggle to mobilise fully".
Under the first scenario laid out by the report, Russian troops won't cross the border and "would be stood down quite quickly once the political process has given Putin the recognition of his fait accompli over the Crimea". Recent unrest in Ukraine points to the unlikelihood of this scenario.
Under a more aggressive scenario, "Russian forces would covertly support, or even engineer, civil unrest throughout south-east Ukraine and use that as a pretext for opening the secure land corridor to Crimea through Donetsk, Zaporizhia, and Kherson oblasts".
Under the third scenario, "unrest and separatist pressures in south and eastern Ukraine, real or manufactured, may present a dangerous, but nevertheless tempting opportunity to split the country in two, south and east of the Dnieper River".
But Russia could go even further than that and carve out a "western corridor from Transnistria in Moldova into Crimea through Odessa and Mykolaiv Oblasts, which would encompass the historic city of Odessa itself".
Several geopolitical factors, the authors argue, make some of these scenarios more likely than others. As the report notes, Russia would greatly ease Crimea's isolation by securing a land corridor between Russian territory and the peninsula. Moreover, by securing a land corridor to Crimea, Russia would end a dispute over the Kerch Strait and secure exclusive access for Gazprom to energy deposits in the Sea of Azov.
Moreover, key elements of the Russian defense industry -- including its missile programs -- rely on Ukrainian suppliers in the country's east. Its SS-18 intercontinental ballistic missiles, for example, are designed and manufactured in Dnepropetrovsk on the Dnieper River.
But whether that indicates Russia will pursue the most aggressive options available to it, is far from certain. "It could be argued that since most of the military plants in question are in south and east Ukraine, the temptation to follow the third and fourth scenarios will be all the greater", the report says.
"To suggest these scenarios for the sake of capturing the production at these various plants would be a very nineteenth-century way of looking at a twenty-first century relationship. However, even that cannot be ruled out in current circumstances".
Department of Monitoring
Kavkaz Center
You are receiving this email because you subscribed to this feed at feedmyinbox.com
If you no longer wish to receive these emails, you can unsubscribe from this feed, or manage all your subscriptions
No comments:
Post a Comment