I believe the most likely window of opportunity for a Russian intervention is between 23 June and 15 July as the following table shows:
It may seem trite to link world sporting events to great geopolitical crises, but the reasoning is not as illogical as it may appear at first glance. Autocrats have traditionally given exorbitant weight to international sporting events far out of proportion to their real importance or benefit. Think of Hitler and the 1936 Berlin Olympics, the 1980 Moscow Games, and the emphasis placed on both the 2008 Beijing Olympics and 2014 Sochi Olympics as testimonies to the strength and modernity of those regimes.
Besides, what better time to invade your neighbor than when most of the planet is viscerally engaged in the world’s greatest sporting competition (yes, the World Cup is bigger than the Olympics)? No one is going to care so long as their national team is still in the competition, so Western leaders are going to find it difficult to mobilize much public support until after the competition.
Russia plays in the World Cup this year. They are in Group H, together with Belgium, Algeria and South Korea. The Russians have a good chance of passing the group stage and moving into the play-offs. Russia plays its last game of the group stage against Algeria on the 26th of June, though they could be eliminated by the end of the second game on the 22nd of June against Belgium. A disastrous performance by the Russian national team could therefore open the “danger zone” as early as the 23rd of June and lasting slightly beyond the end of the competition on the 13th of July.
There is a second danger zone in August, when European leaders are too busy with their holiday plans to worry much about foreign affairs. When this window closes at the beginning of September, Ukraine begins to see light at the end of the tunnel. The fall is not a good time to be campaigning in Ukrainian countryside. Even though the country’s infrastructure is far more developed than it was during the Second World War, the autumn rains still turn the vast fields into seas of mud, known as rasputitsa. Armored columns can’t stay exclusively on roads and Russia depends on a quick campaign to secure victory, so the autumn and winter months are unlikely to be favorable times for an invasion.
So keep one eye on your national team and another on CNN – we might see more than just o jogo bonito during Brazil’s World Cup.
Lots has happened since then, but fundamentally the situation remains unchanged: a pro-Western government in Kiev is simply unacceptable to Moscow and something must be done.
There are some indications that “something” is being planned:
1. A surprise military drill has been commenced near Ukraine’s eastern provinces, improving troop readiness levels and bringing them back onto the field;
2. Russian Foreign Minister has angrily accused the Ukrainians of issuing “ultimatums” when the latter offered a ceasefire deal to the separtists and Russians;
3. The Russians also accused the Ukrainian military id shelling a Russian border control post and retaliated in like manner.
This is the exact same casus belli that the Germans used in 1939 as an excuse to invade Poland. In the current situation, the provocation might not be as blatant as “Germans dressed in Polish uniforms”; after all, everyone down there is Ukrainian, many of them were formerly in the Ukrainian military, and Ukrainian uniforms are a dime a dozen. It doesn’t take a particularly bright separatist to figure out that framing your enemies might provoke the Russian intervention you are hoping for.
Russian intervention at this point seems most likely to take the model of the 2008 Georgian War: provoke an incident involving Russian “peacekeepers” under hostile fire (true or not) and then intervene swiftly with limited objectives. Unlike the situation in Crimea, where the majority of the population are actually ethnic Great Russians and where the major Naval base of Sevastopol was at play, Eastern Ukraine is less tantalizing and less easy for the bear to digest.
We are much more likely to see the formation of the Autonomous Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk than outright annexation. This would also play better in European circles, where leaders would be happy to be given a way out of imposing sanctions. By establish nominally independent puppet states, the Russians will play the secure all their gains – destabilization of Kiev, access to the Malyshev tank factory in Kharkov – and may even avoid further sanctions.
Russia plays Algeria on Thursday and they stand a good chance of losing and being eliminated from competition. We are therefore entering the first danger zone: we shall see if Mr. Putin remains true to form and uses a global sporting event to distract public attention from his recidivist adventurism.
