As Putin Blames West, Russia’s Military Buildup Continues

Even as President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia claims the United States is trying to goad Russia into war with Ukraine, new satellite imagery shows no sign of a slowdown in Moscow’s military buildup.

One image, taken on Feb. 1, shows an entire new housing area next to an existing deployment of military vehicles in Novoozernoye, in Russian-occupied Crimea. The personnel camp was established within the last 10 days, according to a New York Times analysis of additional satellite imagery.

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The establishment of tents and shelters for troops may signal an increased “overall readiness level,” according to an analysis by the Colorado-based company that released the images on Wednesday, Maxar Technologies.

Breaking a monthlong silence, Mr. Putin said Wednesday that while he hoped diplomacy would continue, the West had ignored Russia’s demands.

The Russian leader has repeatedly cast his country not as the aggressor but as a victim of NATO expansionism — but the new imagery, along with information from independent military analysts, confirms the enormous scale of Moscow’s military buildup.

Russia has massed about 130,000 troops on the Ukrainian border, by Western estimates. Its troops, tanks and heavy artillery have encircled the border from the north, east and south, according to information obtained by Ukrainian and Western officials, as well as independent military analysts and satellite imagery.

The images released Wednesday also show the deployment of weaponry across Ukraine’s border in Belarus, including Iskander short-range ballistic missile systems, as well as local training exercises at multiple sites.

There were also signs of live-fire exercises. At the Persianovsky training area in western Russia, multiple new craters from recent artillery fire stand out in the snow-covered landscape.

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President Biden has approved the deployment of about 3,000 additional American troops to Eastern Europe, administration officials said on Wednesday.

The troops, including 1,000 already in Germany, will head to Poland and Romania, the Pentagon spokesman, John F. Kirby, said. Their purpose will be to reassure NATO allies that while the United States has no intention of sending troops into Ukraine, where President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has been threatening an invasion, Mr. Biden would protect America’s NATO allies from any Russian aggression.

“Its important that we send a strong signal to Mr. Putin and the world that NATO matters,” Mr. Kirby told reporters at a news conference. “We are making it clear that we are going to be prepared to defend our NATO allies if it comes to that.”

At the moment, Russia is threatening Ukraine, not Romania or Poland. But Mr. Putin has made clear his distaste for both NATO and the post-Cold War redrawing of the map of Europe, which put former Soviet republics and satellite countries in the West’s foremost military alliance at his doorstep.

The president’s decision comes days after Pentagon leaders said that Mr. Putin had deployed the necessary troops and military hardware to conduct an invasion of Ukraine. Senior Defense Department officials also said that the tense standoff was leading the United States, its NATO allies and Russia into uncharted territory.

The number of Russian troops assembled at Ukraine’s borders has reached well north of 100,000, the officials said, publicly confirming for the first time what intelligence analysts have described for weeks.

Close to 2,000 of the troops — most of them coming from the 82nd Airborne in Fort Bragg, N.C. — will be going to Poland, Mr. Kirby said. While many of those troops are paratroopers, Mr. Kirby said he did not expect the Airborne troops to deploy to Poland in a “tactical operation,” which would raise the ire of Russia even more.

The troops being moved to Romania will complement French troops being deployed there, Mr. Kirby said.

The administration has not ruled out sending additional troops to Europe, and still has 8,500 American troops on “high alert” for possible deployment to a NATO rapid response force.

Asked why Mr. Biden decided to move troops unilaterally, Jen Psaki, White House press secretary, said the move had been under discussion “for some time” with NATO partners and there was no specific event in recent days that pushed Mr. Biden to deploy the troops.

“There’s no question that Russia and President Putin has continued to take escalatory, not de-escalatory steps,” Ms. Psaki said. “So it is not that it is one moment, it is we are looking at events over the course of time.”

Mr. Kirby also said there would be no change in the status of the small number of American troops in Ukraine. More than 150 U.S. military advisers are in Ukraine, trainers who have for years worked near Lviv, in the country’s west, far from the front lines. The current group includes Special Operations forces, mostly Army Green Berets, as well as National Guard trainers from Florida’s 53rd Infantry Brigade Combat Team.

“It’s a big, unambiguous signal,” said Jim Townsend, a former top Pentagon official for Europe and NATO policy. “It’s also significant that they are going to the Black Sea. Finally, the Black Sea region is being recognized as a major theater. It’s not just the Baltics.”

James G. Stavridis, a retired four-star Navy admiral who was the supreme allied commander at NATO, echoed that assessment.

“This is a smart, tight and focused deployment that provides real combat punch by linking up with the very capable U.S. troops already stationed in Europe,” he said. “But its symbolic value is even higher in reassuring the Baltics and Eastern Europeans that NATO is tangible and real in its deployable combat power.”

There are currently 4,000 American troops deployed to Poland and 900 in Romania, as well as about 100 U.S. forces in Lithuania, and 60 in Latvia and Estonia on temporary, rotational assignment.

Zolan Kanno-Youngs contributed reporting from Washington.

KYIV, Ukraine — Ukraine’s foreign minister said Wednesday his government does not object to Washington’s proposal to help defuse the Ukraine crisis by promising not to deploy American missiles or troops in Ukraine.

The U.S. proposal is intended to assuage what Moscow has said is a key security concern for Russia.

The Biden administration included it in a letter from the U.S. ambassador in Moscow to Russia’s foreign ministry last week. The proposal was obtained and published on Wednesday by El País, the Spanish daily, and confirmed to The New York Times as accurate by a senior European official.

The proposal addresses a concern President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has raised repeatedly in recent months as his military massed troops near Ukraine’s borders: that if Ukraine joins NATO, short-range missiles could be deployed that could reach Moscow in mere minutes.

The American offer, however, was not a clear-cut concession to Russia. It was part of a proposal for reciprocal commitments by both Russia and the United States to refrain from deploying the offensive military capabilities in Ukraine. The United States now has no offensive missiles or combat troops in Ukraine.

“I would like to note that while the United States has neither missiles nor combat units in Ukraine, Russia has both,” Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s foreign minister, said in a video call with foreign reporters. “And if this proposal is accepted on a reciprocal basis, that will imply that Russia has to withdraw. So, no, we have no objections against the idea of Russia withdrawing its forces, its personnel and its weapons from the territory of Ukraine.”

Mr. Kuleba said Ukraine and the U.S. have similar assessments of the threat of a Russian military intervention in Ukraine.

Just last week, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, and President Biden seemed to take starkly different positions on the threat Russia poses to Ukraine. The United States has said an attack could come at any day, while Mr. Zelensky has urged Ukrainians to remain calm and put their trust in a diplomatic resolution.

But Mr. Kuleba said Washington and Kyiv are on the same page regarding the Russian threat.

“Ukraine and our partners, including the United States, have no difference in assessing risks of current Russian escalation,” Mr. Kuleba said, thanking the U.S. for mobilizing international support for Ukraine.

“The tone of voice of our messages may sound different,” Mr. Kuleba said. “But the actual assessment is the same: Everything is possible, and we should be preparing for every possible scenario.”

MOSCOW — President Vladimir V. Putin said on Tuesday that the United States was trying to pull Russia into armed conflict over Ukraine that Russia did not want, saying that the West had not yet satisfied Russia’s demands for a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe but that he hoped “dialogue will be continued.”

Mr. Putin has massed more than 100,000 troops near the Ukrainian border, in what American officials have warned could be a prelude to an invasion. But Mr. Putin accused the United States of trying to goad his government into launching a conflict to create a pretext for tougher Western sanctions against Russia.

“Their most important task is to contain Russia’s development,” he said. “Ukraine is just an instrument of achieving this goal.”

In Washington, the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, reacted derisively to Mr. Putin’s comments, comparing them to “when the fox is screaming from the top of the henhouse that he’s scared of the chickens.”

A State Department spokesman, Ned Price, declined to respond directly to Mr. Putin’s statements, saying, “I will leave it to the Kremlinologists out there — budding, professional, amateur or otherwise — to read the tea leaves and try to interpret the significance of those remarks.”

Mr. Putin’s comments, at a news conference in Moscow with Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, marked the first time since December that he had spoken publicly about the crisis.

The Kremlin has demanded in writing that NATO not expand eastward and that NATO draw down forces in Eastern European countries that were once part of the Soviet Union or part of its orbit.

Mr. Putin described the possibility of Ukraine joining NATO as a threat to world peace. He said that a Western-allied Ukraine strengthened with NATO weapons could launch a war against Russia to recapture Crimea, leading to war between Russia and the NATO bloc. Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 was not recognized as legitimate by the international community.

The United States and NATO delivered written responses to Russia’s demands last week. Russia has not yet responded formally, but Mr. Putin said it was clear “that the principal Russian concerns turned out to be ignored.”

Mr. Putin threatened in December that Russia would take unspecified “military-technical” measures if the West did not meet its demands. He did not repeat the threat on Tuesday, instead sounding a somewhat optimistic note, describing the diplomacy that has been underway.

“I hope that eventually we will find this solution though it’s not easy, we understand that,” Mr. Putin said. “But to talk today about what that will be — I am, of course, not ready to do that.”

Jason Horowitz contributed reporting from Rome and David E. Sanger from Washington.

When he spoke about Ukraine on Tuesday for the first time in over a month, President Vladimir V. Putin’s signal that Russia was open to a diplomatic resolution seemed to cool temperatures — at least for the moment. But it also illustrated the vast gulf between Moscow’s demands and what Western nations are even willing to discuss.

Here are some takeaways:

President Putin breaks his silence.

It was notable that Mr. Putin did not repeat his earlier threatening language on Tuesday, saying that “dialogue will be continued.”

But he made it clear that the chasm between what Russia wants and what the United States and NATO will discuss remains vast.

He also continued to accuse the West of trying to goad Russia into a conflict, saying that the crisis was an attempt “to contain Russia’s development” and a pretext for imposing economic sanctions.

The U.S. has slightly toned down its warnings, but is sending more troops.

Amid a burst of diplomatic meetings — and after criticism from President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine that the United States’ talk of war was unhelpful — the Biden administration appears to have softened its tone.

“We are still pursuing a diplomatic solution to give the Russians an off-ramp,” Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, told NPR on Tuesday.

But President Biden’s deployment of about 3,000 additional American troops to Eastern Europe, which officials announced on Wednesday, signaled that the threat of conflict has not passed.

European leaders are pursuing one-on-one contact with Mr. Putin.

European nations have a keen interest in defusing tensions, partly because if a Russian invasion prompts harsh sanctions against Moscow, their economies — which are far more closely linked to Russia’s than that of the United States — would suffer.

MARIUPOL, Ukraine — Tactical movements, explosives identification, applying tourniquets — these are just some of the skills Ukrainians are learning as the country tries to prepare the civilian population to become an insurgent force against an invading army.

It’s part of a national resistance strategy the military here is betting on: relying on the country’s men and women to support regular troops who would likely be overwhelmed if Russia unleashed a full-scale assault on Ukraine.

The Ukrainian government has accelerated such training in response to Russia’s aggressive military buildup along the border, and aims to enlist 130,000 reservists to be fully mobilized when needed. The enlisted will be on call to take up weapons and body armor provided by the military, and report to one of 150 battalions and 25 brigades across the country.

“If we’re in the hour of need, these people can come to help us and they will already have the basic knowledge,” said Andrii Kibalnyk, a lieutenant with Ukraine’s Armed Forces, who helped coordinate a recent training course. “It’s urban warfare, they need to have the skills for urban warfare.”

Watch the video report here.

WASHINGTON — The White House dispatched its top cyberdefense official to NATO on Tuesday, in what it described as a mission to prepare allies to deter, and perhaps disrupt, Russian cyberattacks on Ukraine, and to brace for the possibility that sanctions on Moscow could lead to a wave of retaliatory cyberattacks on Europe and the United States.

The visit by Anne Neuberger, the deputy national security adviser for cyber- and emerging technology, underscores recent intelligence assessments that an invasion of Ukraine would almost certainly be preceded by renewed cyberattacks on Ukraine’s electric grid, communications systems and government ministries.

All of those systems have been targets of Russian cyberattacks in the past six years, including some innovative strikes in recent weeks. Ukraine has often been President Vladimir V. Putin’s testing ground for Russia’s arsenal of cyberweapons.

“We have been warning for weeks and months, both publicly and privately, that cyberattacks could be part of a broad-based Russian effort to destabilize and further invade Ukraine,’’ the White House said in a statement about dispatching Ms. Neuberger.

The U.S. government has been sending teams quietly into Ukraine to help shore up the country’s cyberdefenses. But those experts are reporting back to Washington that there is relatively little they can do to fundamentally harden the system in a few weeks.

Ms. Neuberger’s trip is largely focused on how to coordinate a NATO response should Russia once again attack parts of the power grid in Ukraine. That grid is still connected to Russia’s own electric supply network, a huge vulnerability that Ukrainian officials vowed to fix after attacks that turned out the lights in 2015 and 2016.

Ukraine is scheduled to conduct some long-planned experiments in coming weeks that involve disconnecting from the Russian networks and connecting, instead, to other European power grids. But the effort is preliminary, and experts say any project to separate Ukraine’s grid from Russia’s will take years.

If Russia conducts cyberattacks on Ukraine that are not connected to a traditional military invasion, American officials acknowledge it is uncertain how Europe would respond. As Mr. Biden himself noted at a news conference in Washington two weeks ago, the allies are divided on what kind of response would be triggered by a short-of-war action.

Trying to explain Mr. Biden’s position, the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, suggested in a statement that when he spoke of a “minor incursion” he had “cyberattacks and paramilitary tactics” in mind, all of which fall short of traditional military attacks. “Those acts of Russian aggression will be met with a decisive, reciprocal, and united response,” the statement said.

NATO and the European Union have never acted in concert in responding to a broad cyberattack. When Russia was blamed for the SolarWinds supply chain attack in late 2020 and early 2021, which affected the Federal government and hundreds of global firms, only the United States issued sanctions.

Increasingly, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand — all members, with the United States, of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance that grew out of World War II — have joined the United States in issuing some joint warnings, or endorsing conclusions about which countries were responsible for major hacks. NATO did the same last year in identifying China as a culprit when the security of a Microsoft system used around the globe was pierced. Still, NATO has not forged a consensus among its 30 member states about how to deal with short-of-war attacks in cyberspace.

BEIJING — As the United States moves to exert maximal pressure on Russia over fears of a Ukraine invasion, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has found relief from his most powerful partner on the global stage: China.

China has expressed support for Mr. Putin’s grievances against the United States and NATO, joined Russia to try to block action on Ukraine at the United Nations Security Council, and brushed aside American warnings that an invasion would create “global security and economic risks” that could consume China, too.

On Friday, Mr. Putin will meet in Beijing with China’s leader, Xi Jinping, before the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics that President Biden and other leaders have pointedly vowed to boycott.

Although details of any potential agreements between the two countries have not been disclosed, the meeting itself — Mr. Xi’s first in person with a world leader in nearly two years — is expected to be yet another public display of geopolitical amity between the two powers.

A Chinese promise of economic and political support for Mr. Putin could undermine Mr. Biden’s strategy to ostracize the Russian leader for his military buildup on Ukraine’s borders. It could also punctuate a tectonic shift in the rivalry between the United States and China that could reverberate from Europe to the Pacific.

In speeches, interviews and lengthy articles, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and his close associates have telegraphed a singular fixation on Ukraine. The Kremlin thesis goes that Ukrainians are “one people” with Russians, living in a failing state controlled by Western forces determined to divide and conquer the post-Soviet world.

Ukrainians, who ousted a Russia-friendly president in 2014 and are increasingly in favor of binding their country to Western institutions, would largely beg to differ. But Mr. Putin’s conviction finds a receptive ear among many Russians, who see themselves as linked intimately with Ukraine by generations of linguistic, cultural, economic, political and family ties.

Russians often view Kyiv, now the Ukrainian capital and once the center of the medieval Kyivan Rus, as the birthplace of their nation. Well-known Russian-language writers, such as Nikolai Gogol and Mikhail Bulgakov, came from Ukraine, as did the Communist revolutionary Leon Trotsky and the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.

Ukrainian is Ukraine’s official language, but Russian — which is closely related — is still widely spoken. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, now speaks Ukrainian in public but first gained fame as a Russian-language comedian who performed across the former Soviet Union.

To Mr. Putin — and many other Russians — the conflict with Ukraine is about a hurt national psyche, a historical injustice to be set right. One of his former advisers, Gleb O. Pavlovsky, in an interview described the Kremlin’s view of Ukraine as a “trauma wrapped in a trauma” — the dissolution of the Soviet Union coupled with the separation of a nation Russians long viewed as simply an extension of their own.

Mr. Putin has years of grievances about what he sees as Western overreach in Eastern Europe, and Ukraine has been the object of decades of Kremlin efforts to keep it within Moscow’s sway.

Mr. Putin also argues that a greater Western military presence represents an existential threat to Russia. Nuclear missiles placed there, he has said, would be able to reach Moscow with just a few minutes’ warning. American officials say the United States has no plans to base such missiles in Ukraine.

transcript

transcript

Listen to ‘The Daily’: Why Ukraine Matters to Vladimir Putin

Amid fears that Moscow is preparing for an invasion, one thing is clear: The Russian president has a singular fixation on the former Soviet republic.

michael barbaro

From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily.

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Today: Russia is making preparations for what many fear may be a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, prompting warnings from the U.S. of serious consequences if it does. I spoke to my colleague, Moscow bureau chief Anton Troianovski, about what Vladimir Putin wants from Ukraine and just how far he may go to get it.

It’s Wednesday, December 8.

Anton, describe the scene right now on the border between Ukraine and Russia. What does it look like? What exactly is happening there?

anton troianovski

Well, what you’re seeing on the Russian side of the border within 100 to 200 miles away is that thousands of Russian troops are on the move.

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A top military official says intelligence shows nearly 100,000 Russian troops —

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Russian troops have massed on the border of Ukraine.

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— troops on the border with Ukraine. And that’s prompted fears of an invasion early next year.

anton troianovski

We’re seeing a lot of social media footage of tanks and other military equipment on the move, on trains, in some cases, heading west toward the Ukraine border area from as far away as Siberia.

archived recording

Tensions between Russia and Ukraine have been building for some time in the wake of —

anton troianovski

These satellite images that we’re seeing show deployment areas around Ukraine that were empty as recently as June that are now full of military equipment-like tanks and armored personnel carriers.

archived recording

The U.S. called it unusual activity.

anton troianovski

And obviously, Russia moves its forces all the time. It does big military exercises, snap military exercises all the time, but what we’re being told is that these military movements are very unusual. Some of them are happening at night and, in other ways, seemingly designed to obfuscate where various units are going. And experts are saying we’re also seeing things like logistics and medical equipment being moved around, stuff that you really would see if there were real preparations being made for large-scale military action.

michael barbaro

So what’s happening in Russia is not just the movement of the troops that would perhaps carry out an invasion, but the kind of military personnel and equipment that would be required to deal with the repercussions of something like invading Ukraine?

anton troianovski

Yes. So American intelligence officials are seeing intelligence that shows Russia preparing for a military offensive involving an estimated 175,000 troops —

michael barbaro

Wow.

anton troianovski

— as soon as early next year.

michael barbaro

And Anton, is Ukraine preparing for what certainly looks, from what you just described, as a potential invasion?

anton troianovski

They’re in a really tough spot because no matter how much they prepare, their military would be utterly outgunned and outmatched. Ukraine doesn’t have the missile defense and air defense systems that could prevent a huge shock-and-awe campaign at the beginning of Russian military action.

They also don’t know, if and when an attack comes, which direction it might come from, because Russia could attack from any of three directions. So we’re not seeing a big mobilization in Ukraine right now, but our reporting on the ground there does show a grim and determined mood among the military. The soldiers on the border have made it clear that if it comes to it, they will be prepared to do what they can to make this as costly as possible for the other side.

michael barbaro

So I guess the question everyone has in this moment is why would Putin want to invade Ukraine right now and touch off what would no doubt be a major conflict, one in which, as you just said, Russia would have many advantages, but would nevertheless end up probably being a very deadly conflict?

anton troianovski

So obviously, we don’t yet know whether Putin has made the decision to invade. He’s clearly signaling he’s prepared to use military force. What we do know is that he has been extraordinarily fixated on the issue of Ukraine for years. But I think to really understand it, you have to look at three dates over the last 30 years that really show us why Ukraine matters so much to Putin.

michael barbaro

OK. So what’s the first date?

anton troianovski

The first one, 1991, almost exactly 30 years ago, the Soviet Union breaks up, and Ukraine becomes an independent country. For people of Putin’s generation, this was an incredibly shocking and even traumatic moment. Not only did they see and experience the collapse of an empire, of the country that they grew up in, that they worked in, that, in Putin’s case, the former K.G.B. officer that they served. But there was also a specific trauma of Ukraine breaking away. Ukraine, of all the former Soviet republics, was probably the one most valuable to Moscow.

It was a matter of history and identity with, in many ways, Russian statehood originating out of the medieval Kiev Rus civilization. There’s the matter of culture with so many Russian language writers like Gogol and Bulgakov coming from Ukraine. There was the matter of economics with Ukraine being an industrial and agricultural powerhouse during the Soviet Union, with many of the planes and missiles that the Soviets were most proud of coming from Ukraine.

michael barbaro

So there’s a sense that Ukraine is the cradle of Russian civilization, and to lose it is to lose a part of Russia itself.

anton troianovski

Yeah. And it’s a country of tens of millions of people that is also sandwiched between modern-day Russia and Western Europe. So the other issue is geopolitical, that Ukraine in that sort of Cold War security, East-versus-West mindset, Ukraine was a buffer between Moscow and the West. So 1991 was the year when that all fell apart.

And then by the time that Putin comes to power 10 years later, he’s already clearly thinking about how to reestablish Russian influence in that former Soviet space in Eastern Europe and in Ukraine in particular. We saw a lot of resources go in economically to try to bind Ukraine to Russia, whether it’s discounts on natural gas or other efforts by Russian companies, efforts to build ties to politicians and oligarchs in Ukraine. Really, a multipronged effort by Putin and the Kremlin to really gain as much influence as possible in that former Soviet space that they saw as being so key to Russia’s economic and security interests.

michael barbaro

Got it.

anton troianovski

And then fast forward to the second key date, 2014, which is the year it became clear that that strategy had failed.

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Now, to the growing unrest in Ukraine and the violent clashes between riot police and protesters.

michael barbaro

And why did that strategy fail in 2014?

anton troianovski

That was the year that Ukraine had its — what’s called its Maidan Revolution.

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The situation in Kiev has been very tense.

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Downtown Kiev has been turned into a charred battlefield following two straight nights of rioting.

anton troianovski

It’s a pro-Western revolution —

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They want nothing short of revolution, a new government and a new president.

anton troianovski

— that drove out a Russia-friendly president, that ushered in a pro-Western government, that made it its mission to reduce Ukraine’s ties with Russia and build its ties with the West.

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Ukrainians who want closer ties with the West are once again back in their thousands on Independence Square here in Kiev. They believe they —

michael barbaro

Hmm. And what was Putin’s response to that?

anton troianovski

Well, Putin didn’t even see it as a revolution. He saw it as a coup engineered by the C.I.A. and other Western intelligence agencies meant to drive Ukraine away from Russia. And —

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With stealth and mystery, Vladimir Putin made his move in Ukraine.

anton troianovski

— he used his military.

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At dawn, bands of armed men appeared at the two main airports in Crimea and seized control.

anton troianovski

He sent troops into Crimea, the Ukrainian Peninsula in the Black Sea that’s so dear to people across the former Soviet Union as kind of the warmest, most tropical place in a very cold part of the world.

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Tonight, Russian troops — hundreds, perhaps as many as 2,000, ferried in transport planes — have landed at the airports.

anton troianovski

He fomented a separatist war in Eastern Ukraine that by now has taken more than 10,000 lives and armed and backed pro-Russian separatists in that region. So that was the year 2014 when Russia’s earlier efforts to try to bind Ukraine to Moscow failed and when Russia started taking a much harder line.

michael barbaro

And this feels like a very pivotal moment because it shows Putin’s willingness to deploy the Russian military to strengthen the ties between Russia and Ukraine.

anton troianovski

Absolutely. Strengthened the ties or you can also say his efforts to enforce a Russian sphere of influence by military force. And it’s also the start of what we’ve been seeing ever since, which is Putin making it clear that he is willing to escalate, he is willing to raise the stakes and that he essentially cares more about the fate of Ukraine than the West does.

And that brings us to the third date I wanted to talk about, which is early this year, 2021, when we saw the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, really start taking a more aggressive anti-Russian and pro-Western tack. He cracked down on a pro-Russian oligarch and pro-Russian media. He continued with military exercises with American soldiers and with other Western forces.

He kept talking up the idea of Ukraine joining NATO. That’s the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the Western military alliance. And in a sense, this is what Putin seems to fear the most, the idea of NATO becoming more entrenched in this region. So Putin made it clear that this was starting to cross what he describes as Russia’s red lines and that Russia was willing to take action to stop this.

michael barbaro

So to put this all together and understand why Putin is doing what he’s doing when it comes to Ukraine, we have as a backdrop here this fixation with Ukraine for historic, political, economic and cultural reasons. And what’s new and urgent here for Putin is his belief that Ukraine is on the verge of a major break with Russia and toward the West — in particular, a military alliance, NATO — and that he cannot tolerate. And so that brings us up to now and this very imminent and scary threat of a Russian invasion.

anton troianovski

That’s right, Michael. I spoke to a former advisor of Putin’s recently who described Ukraine as a trauma within a trauma for the Kremlin — so the trauma of the breakup of the Soviet Union plus the trauma of losing Ukraine specifically for all those reasons you mentioned. And the thing is it’s true.

Russia is losing Ukraine. I think objectively, though, you have to say it’s losing Ukraine in large part because of Putin’s policies, because of the aggressive actions he’s taken. And if you look at the polls before 2014, something like 12 percent of Ukrainians wanted to join NATO. Now, it’s more than half.

michael barbaro

Wow.

anton troianovski

So you put all that together, Ukraine is indeed drifting toward the West. It does seem like Putin feels like he’s running out of time to stop this and that he’s willing to escalate, he’s willing to raise the stakes, to keep Ukraine out of the West. And what we’re seeing right now on the border is all that playing out.

[music]

michael barbaro

We’ll be right back.

So Anton, the question right now is will President Putin actually carry out an invasion of Ukraine? And how should we be thinking about that?

anton troianovski

Well, it’s quite perilous, of course, to try to get inside Putin’s head, but here’s the case for invading now. Number one: NATO and the United States have made it clear that they are not going to come to Ukraine’s defense, because Ukraine is not a member of the NATO alliance, and NATO’s mutual defense pact only extends to full-fledged members. And of course, I think, politically, Putin believes that neither in the U.S., nor in Western Europe, is there the will to see soldiers from those countries die fighting for Ukraine.

michael barbaro

Right. And President Biden has just very publicly pulled the United States out of the war in Afghanistan and more or less communicated that unless American national security interests are at play, he will not be dispatching troops anywhere.

anton troianovski

Exactly. So Putin saw that, and he sees that potentially things could change. If the West does have more of a military presence in Ukraine in the future, let alone if Ukraine were to become a member of NATO at some point — it’s not going to happen in the next few years, but perhaps at some point — then attacking Ukraine becomes a much more costly proposition. So it’s a matter of war now could be less costly to Russia than war later.

michael barbaro

Right. The geopolitics of this moment may work in favor of him doing it in a way that it might not in a year or two or three.

anton troianovski

Absolutely. And then there’s a couple of other reasons. There’s the fact that if we look at everything Putin has said and written over the last year, he really seems convinced that the West is pulling Ukraine away from Russia against the will of much of the Ukrainian people. Polling doesn’t really bear that out, but Putin really seems to be convinced of that. And so it seems like he may also be thinking that Ukrainians would welcome Russian forces as liberators from some kind of Western occupation.

And then third, there’s the economy. The West has already threatened severe sanctions against Russia were it to go ahead with military action, but Russia has been essentially sanctions-proofing its economy since at least 2014, which is when it took control of Crimea and was hit by all these sanctions from the U.S. and from the E.U. So Russia’s economy is still tied to the West.

It imports a lot of stuff from the West. But in many key areas, whether it’s technology or energy extraction or agriculture, Russia is becoming more self-sufficient. And it is building ties to other parts of the world — like China, India, et cetera — that could allow it to diversify and have basically an economic base even if an invasion leads to a major crisis in its financial and economic relationship with the West.

michael barbaro

Right. So this is the argument that Putin can live with the costs of the world reacting very negatively to this invasion?

anton troianovski

Exactly.

michael barbaro

OK. And what are the reasons why an invasion of Ukraine might not happen? What would be the case against it, if you were Vladimir Putin?

anton troianovski

Well, I mean, I have to say, talking to analysts, especially here in Russia, people are very skeptical that Putin would go ahead with an invasion. They point out that he is a careful tactician and that he doesn’t like making moves that are irreversible or that could have unpredictable consequences.

So if we even look at the military action he’s taken recently, the annexation of Crimea, there wasn’t a single shot fired in that. That was a very quick special-forces-type operation. What we’re talking about here, an invasion of Ukraine, would be just a massive escalation from anything Putin has done so far. We are talking about the biggest land war in Europe since World War II, most likely. And it would have all kinds of unpredictable consequences.

There’s also the domestic situation to keep in mind. Putin does still have approval ratings above 60 percent, but things are a bit shaky here, especially with Covid. And some analysts say that Putin wouldn’t want to usher in the kind of domestic unpredictability that could start with a major war with young men coming back in body bags.

And then finally, looking at Putin’s strategy and everything that he’s said, for all we know, he doesn’t really want to annex Ukraine. He wants influence over Ukraine. And the way he thinks he can do that is through negotiations with the United States.

And that’s where the last key point here comes in, which is Putin’s real conviction that it’s the U.S. pulling the strings here and that he can accomplish his goals by getting President Biden to sit down with him and hammering out a deal about the structure of security in Eastern Europe.

So in that sense, this whole troop build-up might not be about an impending invasion at all. It might just be about coercive diplomacy, getting the U.S. to the table, and getting them to hammer out an agreement that would somehow pledge to keep Ukraine out of NATO and pledge to keep Western military infrastructure out of Ukraine and parts of the Black Sea.

michael barbaro

Well in that sense, Anton, Putin may be getting what he wants, right? Because as we speak, President Putin and President Biden have just wrapped up a very closely watched phone call about all of this. So is it possible that that call produces a breakthrough and perhaps a breakthrough that goes Putin’s way?

anton troianovski

Well, that’s very hard to imagine. And that’s really what makes this situation so volatile and so dangerous, which is that what Putin wants, the West and President Biden can’t really give.

michael barbaro

Why not?

anton troianovski

Well, for instance, pledging to keep Ukraine out of NATO would violate the Western concept that every country should have the right to decide for itself what its alliances are. President Biden obviously has spent years, going back to when he was vice president, really speaking in favor of Ukrainian sovereignty and self-determination and trying to help Ukraine take a more Western path. So Biden suddenly turning on all of that and giving Putin what he wants here is hard to imagine.

michael barbaro

Right, because that would create a very slippery slope when it comes to any country that Russia wants to have influence over. It would then know that the right playbook would be to mass troops on the border and wait for negotiation with the U.S. and hope that the U.S. would basically sell those countries out. That’s probably not something you’re saying that President Biden would willingly do.

anton troianovski

Right. And then, of course, the other question is, well, if Russia doesn’t get what it wants, if Putin doesn’t get what he wants, then what does he do?

michael barbaro

So Anton, it’s tempting to think that this could all be what you just described as a coercive diplomatic bluff by Putin to extract what he wants from President Biden and from the West. But it feels like history has taught us that Putin is willing to invade Ukraine. He did it in 2014.

History has also taught us that he’s obsessed with Ukraine, dating back to 1991 and the end of the Soviet Union. And it feels like one of the ultimate lessons of history is that we have to judge leaders based on their actions. And his actions right now are putting 175,000 troops near the border with Ukraine. And so shouldn’t we conclude that it very much looks like Putin might carry out this invasion?

anton troianovski

Yes, that’s right. And of course, there are steps that Putin could take that would be short of a full-fledged invasion that could still be really destabilizing and damaging. Here in Moscow, I’ve heard analysts speculate about maybe pinpoint airstrikes against the Ukrainian targets, or a limited invasion perhaps just specifically in that area where Russian-backed separatists are fighting.

But even such steps could have really grave consequences. And that’s why if you combine what we’re seeing on the ground in Russia, near the border, and what we’ve been hearing from President Putin and other officials here in Moscow, that all tells us that the stakes here are really high.

michael barbaro

Well, Anton, thank you very much. We appreciate your time.

anton troianovski

Thanks for having me.

michael barbaro

On Tuesday afternoon, both the White House and the Kremlin released details about the call between Putin and Biden. The White House said that Biden warned Putin of severe economic sanctions if Russia invaded Ukraine. The Kremlin said that Putin repeated his demands that Ukraine not be allowed to join NATO and that Western weapons systems not be placed inside Ukraine. But Putin made no promises to remove Russian forces from the border.

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We’ll be right back.

Here’s what else you need to know today. On Tuesday night, top Democrats and Republicans said they had reached a deal to raise the country’s debt ceiling and avert the U.S. defaulting on its debt for the first time. The deal relies on a complicated one-time legislative maneuver that allows Democrats in the Senate to raise the debt ceiling without support from Republicans, since Republicans oppose raising the debt ceiling under President Biden. Without congressional action, the Treasury Department says it can no longer pay its bills after December 15.

Today’s episode was produced by Eric Krupke, Rachelle Bonja and Luke Vander Ploeg. It was edited by Michael Benoist, contains original music by Dan Powell and Marion Lozano, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly.

That’s it for The Daily. I’m Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.