For Philip Breedlove, the fact that Russia has amassed some 120,000 troops at Ukraine’s border is not exactly a surprise.
Instead, the former supreme allied commander of NATO forces in Europe says it’s the latest sign of President Vladimir Putin’s confidence that the West has no answer for the playbook he has used for a more than a decade in efforts to restore the country’s historical sphere of influence.
“It is a tool that be has used in the past, and he has learned it works,” said Mr. Breedlove, a retired Air Force general who now teaches as a distinguished professor at Georgia Tech’s Sam Nunn School of International Affairs.
Speaking at a Jan. 21 program with new World Affairs Council of Atlanta President Rickey Bevington and using detailed digital maps to paint a picture of Russia’s military encirclement of Ukraine, Mr. Breedlove said Russia is continuing to push the envelope mainly because the West has failed to mount a convincing response to previous incursions. Russia took over two regions of Georgia in 2008 and then annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014, facing little substantive response.
The recent threat of a Ukraine invasion is another “contrived” crisis designed to “push us around in the West” by showing Russia can impose its will in its neighborhood, Mr. Breedlove said, noting Putin’s prior statements that the end of the Soviet Union was the “greatest tragedy of the 20th century.”
The Russian president has also used energy as a tool, restricting gas flows to Ukraine and giving credence to the idea that the Nordstream 2 pipeline to Germany could create a security liability, Mr. Breedlove said.
Watch the World Affairs Council of Atlanta program here:
By butting into neighboring countries, Mr. Putin seeks to drive a wedge between Western allies and “veto” any efforts toward NATO expansion, he said.
“I want to use a very simple set of terms: If we see bad behavior and we don’t address it, and if we allow bad behavior to be rewarded by giving him what he wants, then we will see more bad behavior,” said Mr. Breedlove, who has argued for a more concrete military response — like equipping Ukraine with weapons that would make an invasion even more costly.
“The refrain is always, ‘We can’t provoke Russia,’” he said. “I often ask, when are we going to be provoked, and when is the West going to be provoked?”
Of course, Ukraine itself is no pushover — its military has received training and some limited assistance from international partners including the U.S. over the last decade. Analysts believe Russia would incur heavy costs in a land war aimed at overtaking the country.
But Putin’s proxy forces in the Donbas area in the Southeast, where 14,000 people have died since that conflict began in 2014, are helping tie up some of the Ukrainian army’s best units, setting the stage for two other options Russia may be considering.
The first is taking over the southeastern coast to create a “land bridge” from the Donbas to the Russian-occupied Crimean peninsula, thus choking off Ukraine’s port of Mariupol — a key agricultural outlet that accounts for a significant portion of Ukraine’s GDP.
The other option, already in motion, is placing units in Belarus that could come over the northern border and directly toward the capital, Kiev, avoiding the costlier east-west route across Ukraine that would likely be stymied by the large river and reservoir in the center of the country.
Even if a military confrontation can be avoided, Russia has other levers to pull, mounting campaigns across the diplomatic, informational, military and economic arenas — all levers of the DIME acronym that Mr. Breedlove uses to teach his students about how countries project influence.
“They attack us broadly across all of national power, and we reply always in a silo, and I wonder why we would expect anything to change, because clearly what we have done so far has not changed Mr. Putin’s calculus,” he said.
Sanctions tend to be the preferred response, to little effect, and the U.S. so far shied away from supporting the “nuclear option” of sanctions in the event of a Ukraine invasion: banning Russia from the SWIFT system that governs international banking transactions. Mr. Breedlove believes this should be on the table.
That’s because while Ukraine is important in its own right, Mr. Breedlove said, there are even greater ramifications at play for the West as nations like China and Iran look on.
This could be a moment of truth for NATO, he said in response to Ms. Bevington, noting his own bias in its favor as someone who served in Europe eight times and was the alliance’s top commander.
“I think it’s incredibly important that Europe take a stand here and say enough is enough.”