A video of a handful of screeching tanks and lumbering armoured vehicles mounting a transport train in Crimea accompanied the Russian defence ministry’s trumpeted announcement that some of the forces that have been encircling Ukraine will “head for their garrisons”.
Such evidence is clearly far too tentative to amount to anything definitive, however. The movement of Russian forces towards Ukraine has been patiently documented by a group of open source intelligence analysts, relying on public domain information, including satellite imagery and a large supply of on the ground videos.
Konrad Muzyka, one such specialist, and the president of Rochan Consulting, said any withdrawals would be a welcome development – but added that “previously announced withdrawals meant more Russian troop deployments near Ukraine” and it would take at best “a few days to verify” what, on balance, was happening.
Redeployments in Crimea, in any event, may be of only limited significance given how many troops – about 150,000 on some estimates – have moved up to the border, or are still exercising in Belarus, officially until 20 February, menacing Kyiv from the most direct invasion route, to the north.
Rob Lee, an analyst with the Foreign Policy Centre, said the key would be waiting to see where troops who have been called forward from Russia’s far off eastern and central military districts go, particularly when the joint exercises end. If they remain nearby “Russia will have the capacity to conduct a significant escalation, though possibly not on as short notice,” he tweeted on Thursday.
But if the analysts were unconvinced, scepticism was even greater in Nato. “We have not seen any sign of de-escalation on the ground,” said the alliance’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, at lunchtime. Other western officials were clearer still: “We see no sign of Russian de-escalation. We see the opposite.”
The British prime minister, Boris Johnson, who had held a Cobra crisis meeting earlier on Tuesday, said field hospitals were still being constructed on the border with Ukraine in Belarus – and the UK view is that forces number are still going up. Only a day earlier Britain said it believed several thousand more were in transit to the region.
There is no shortage of other reasons why Russia might want to appear to sound conciliatory at this point. Over the weekend, reports circulated that US intelligence had received reports that an invasion could begin on Wednesday, an unusually precise prediction given any attack will almost certainly involve deception and surprise.
Sending the opposite message the day before, and when the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, was visiting Moscow, was always going to be timely. Maria Zakharova, the Russian foreign ministry spokesperson, seized on the point with enthusiasm, posting on Facebook: “15 February 2022 will go into history as the day western war propaganda failed.”
It was last spring, in March and April, that Russia first mobilised on the borders of Ukraine, massing as many as 100,000 troops. A drawdown was announced towards the end of April, but in reality many of the forces stayed within the region, and whose presence was again felt from late November.
“We’ve also seen that sometimes they move into a position with combat ready troops and a lot of heavy equipment,” Stoltenberg said, referring to the earlier buildup. “And then they take out some of, or perhaps even most of, the troops but they leave the equipment behind.”
It is easy, then to be sceptical about Russian intentions. But there are always good reasons not to go to war. The humanitarian consequences of any invasion of Ukraine, likely to be resisted by both the country’s military and its people, will be fearful. Henry Boyd, from the International Institute of Strategic Studies, argues that Russia has spent a decade expensively modernising its armed forces.
The analyst argued on Tuesday that Russia would think twice about “spending this too freely in any kind of combat operation” and “given the length of time it takes to rebuild such capabilities, I think [that] will be strongly held in the minds of planners in Moscow”.
But there are also reasons why Vladimir Putin might want to try and maintain the crisis at high pitch for several weeks or even months, as western officials fear. Cheaper and far less risky than an invasion would be for the Kremlin to keep Ukraine under a longer period of pressure, bringing troops back and forwards at will to try and hurt Kyiv economically and see if any opportunities emerge.
