A Crimean holiday

August has earned a pretty bad reputation in contemporary Russian history. This one is no different …

For most of us, August is about sun, sea, sand and a surfeit of ice cream. For Russian politicians, it’s sort of like the Glorious Twelfth – time to reload and send in the beaters.

If we try to reconstruct what happened in Crimea on August 7-8, we’ll have plenty of Hollywood special effects to conjure with. First up, we have the Ukrainian saboteurs, who, “dressed in Soviet-style camouflage gear” (Kommersant), arrived in Crimea by inflatable boat; then there’s the cemetery shootout with those selfsame saboteurs, caught digging a “fresh grave” by an FSB unit; and, finally, there’s the saboteurs’ inglorious retreat, as reported by  the pro-regime Rossiyskaya Gazeta: “In the end, the members of the Ukrainian recon team discarded their weapons and explosives and, stripping literally down to their trunks, retreated across the lagoon and back to Ukrainian territory.” Did they strip down to their trunks because it’s August and they thought they should be on holiday?

According to “well-informed” state journalists, Ukrainian saboteurs – Bruce Willis-style – literally stormed the Crimean border under cover of artillery fire on the very next night. For political analyst Kirill Rogov, this “hot news” represents a throwback to the news reporting of the Stalin era. “If we go by newspaper reports, the Motherland witnessed an exactly analogous situation in 1937, what with saboteurs […] crossing the Syvash and scheming against the Kremlin… How do you think the average guy in the street reacted on reading that kind of stuff? You might be hard-pressed to believe it, but you don’t exactly have a lot of choice in the matter.”

Meanwhile, Kiev has branded all these developments a provocation, an FSB stage show, and is seriously starting to fear that the situation might culminate in a Russian attack on Ukrainian territory. But to get a sense of just how little we really understand about what happened, it need only be pointed out that there’s another interpretation of events to consider. Saboteurs? None to speak of; nothing to speak of, in fact, but an operation to capture a group of armed soldiers who’d deserted a Crimean military unit. All the other details, including the questioning of a captured saboteur, were fabricated retrospectively (a “plot point” that fans of Wag the Dog are sure to relish …).

In a word, experts – alongside Russian citizens in general – have found themselves in a crazy yet entirely familiar situation: somewhere in the world, a major military operation involving Russian personnel and equipment is underway, and yet the public isn’t getting access to any truly reliable information about what’s going on.

Oleg Kashin, who has a healthy scepticism when it comes to Kremlin propaganda, is having none of it. “It’s of absolutely no consequence whether these were Ukrainians, deserters, or even virtual villains played by FSB operatives. If the objective had been to avoid escalation, this would have all culminated in silence or even refutations [… ] but no, the informational stakes are being raised so high that actual war has become a possibility – and the stakes are being raised by the Russians, who don’t need any half-way interpretations  – only terrorism […]. Russia is deliberately escalating the situation, ignoring all available opportunities to salvage the former peaceful order of things.”

If this whole affair had unfolded without the involvement of Vladimir Putin, Kashin would have been inclined to regard the current Crimean conflict as advantageous primarily for the FSB, which stands to gain more than anyone else from a fight against terrorism paid for out of the state budget. But, given that Putin took it upon himself to accuse the Ukrainian government of orchestrating a terrorist attack on Crimea in an attempt to “distract its own people from the plight of the economy,” Kashin believes that there’s more at stake here than an enhanced law enforcement budget. “The Crimean incident opens up many possibilities for the unleashing of the harshest possible rhetoric on the domestic political stage; it opens the door to new “Yarovaya laws”, and to any number of games and gambles in the month remaining before the Duma elections.”

Everyone’s picked up on the fact that Vladimir Putin has engineered the Crimean situation in such a way as to suspend, at least temporarily, Russia’s participation in the Normandy Format (which has been working to resolve the situation in the Donbas). Dmitry Gudkov, the sole truly oppositionist deputy in the Duma, is alarmed by this asymmetric course of action. “It’s only from a Moscow vantage point that the war in the Donbas could seem to have ended. But people are dying there day and night. The war will continue – and sanctions will remain in place (or be intensified?).”

Conversely, political analyst Stanislav Belkovsky believes that the lifting of sanctions is in fact precisely what Vladimir Putin now seeks to achieve – it’s just that he’s working towards this objective through channels other than Minsk II. “His main goal is to secure the abolition – or at least a softening – of European sanctions starting from January 1, 2017. […] Ukraine must be presented as guilty of non-compliance with the Minsk agreements, and as implicated in terrorist activities, with a view to demonstrating that the policy of defending Ukraine, as chosen by the West in the spring of 2014, is untenable.”

Needless to say, pro-Kremlin political analyst Sergei Markov construes things rather differently. Not only did Ukrainian saboteurs really invade Crimea, but they were goaded into doing so by US intelligence agencies and the Hillary Clinton campaign. “An escalation of tensions between Russia and Ukraine would be highly expedient for Hillary Clinton, who has repeatedly issued sharp-worded, aggressive statements against Putin and Russia. Donald Trump, on the contrary, has spoken about them in conciliatory terms. So if a two-week Russian-Ukrainian war were to break out, a massive anti-Russian informational storm would be unleashed […], and Hillary would patently defeat Trump as a result.”

So should you cut short your holiday, and take shelter? Best to just buy an ice cream and wait for things to cool down.