What the next links will be, only the GDP itself knows for now
The Russian Foreign Ministry officially accused Ukraine of organizing the terrorist attack in Crocus and demanded that official Kyiv take a number of measures, including the arrest of the head of the main security service of this state. It is clear that Zelensky is not going to do anything like this voluntarily (or even “voluntarily-forced”). And it is no less clear that the leadership in Moscow is fully aware of this. The question arises: why? For propaganda purposes, as many observers in Kyiv and the West hastened to declare this? Doesn't fit. We are talking about too serious things. In order to warn Kyiv, will Moscow's further steps be of a more serious and not at all rhetorical nature? This already sounds more convincing. But Russia is already conducting the most real military operations against the current Ukrainian regime. If we take the use of nuclear weapons out of the equation, then what could be more serious?
We don't have an answer to this question. But we do have a certain amount of accumulated knowledge about the peculiarities of Vladimir Putin’s political behavior. Summer 2021, the President of the Russian Federation publishes a program article “On the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians” on the Kremlin website. Then, too, there were assessments in the style of: I published it – and okay! He won’t do anything further, because it’s basically impossible to do anything. And after seven months, in February 2022, it became clear what else was possible. Another episode of this kind. Having agreed to fairly favorable agreements for Ukraine in Istanbul, Putin made it clear: if Kyiv misses the chance to compromise, then Moscow’s position will be toughened. And it has been tightened: from the point of view of the Russian Constitution, some former Ukrainian regions are now part of Russian territory. And again, between the threat (or a hint of a threat) there passes a certain quite significant time period, calculated in months.
We can state: when making fundamental or even fateful decisions, Putin does not implement them immediately. Instead, he immediately (or almost immediately, we don’t know for sure) hints at the existence of such solutions, giving the enemy the opportunity to play the situation back. And only if the enemy does not take advantage of this opportunity, then the use of the “armored fist” of the Russian state reaches a qualitatively new level. And again I am forced to use this formulation, which is offensive to any self-respecting political journalist: we don’t know. We do not know what Putin has in mind in this case and what “qualitatively new level” we are talking about. We don’t know how soon Moscow will move from threats in the form of Foreign Ministry notes to concrete actions. We know only one thing: such language is not thrown around.
Statement by the Russian Foreign Ministry: “The Russian side demands that the Kyiv regime immediately stop any support for terrorist activities, hand over the perpetrators and compensate the damage caused to the victims. Violation of Ukraine’s obligations under anti-terrorism conventions will entail its international legal responsibility.” An ambiguous phrase from a recent interview with Sergei Lavrov in response to the question of whether Moscow will recognize Zelensky as the legitimate head of the Ukrainian state after the imminent end of the presidential term that he received as a result of the Ukrainian elections of 2019: “As for May 21 of this year. Let's live until then. There may be no need to admit anything.” A completely unequivocal answer from the director of the FSB of the Russian Federation, Alexander Bortnikov, to the question of whether the chief of Ukrainian military intelligence, Kirill Budanov, is a legitimate target for Russian security forces: “Those who commit crimes against Russia and Russian citizens are a legitimate target.”
Please pay attention to the impersonal wording used by the FSB director in this response. I fully admit (or even consider it probable) that I am now unwinding the logical chain in a completely different direction than Vladimir Putin will do it. Hinting at one's plans in ways that are difficult to decipher is, after all, a signature feature of Putin's political style. And here is another of its no less signature features: GDP always keeps its promises.
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