So What Happens if Putin Enters Eastern Ukraine

I will admit that I kept hoping that Putin would not sign the documents that ratified the transfer of the Crimea from the Ukraine to Russia.  Not because he is a nice guy.  No, but because I had hoped that he wanted to demonstrate his power, and then pull back from actually using it and thereby creating a form of gunboat diplomacy in the near-Russia periphery.

I was wrong.  Mr Putin really does want to recreate the Soviet Union.

This throws a new light on things.

In the first instance it raises the stakes exponentially.  For the moment it demonstrates that the decision to join NATO by the Baltics, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland and  Roumania was the right decision even if some of the southern European members might be having second thoughts about their position within the EU.

For, if a NATO state is attacked by definition the rest of the NATO states must come to its defence.

The Ukraine is not a NATO state.  Nor is Georgia.

Perhaps Russia only took back what they hold to have been rightfully theirs.  But, as I have discussed previously, it is a dangerous precedent both for those countries on the Russian periphery, but also perhaps for ethnic groups within the Russian mainland such as Chechnya.

But for Russia to make a military move into the Ukraine is a step which cannot be allowed to happen without a response far beyond the sanctions put in place as "punishment" for devouring  the Crimea.

I don't want war.  The West doesn't want war.  But is Putin willing to risk war?  I don't know.  I especially don't know as currently I don't believe he thinks a military move into the eastern Ukraine will be met with a military response, so he quite possibly doesn't even perceive such a move as even a potential declaration of war.

So what to do.

I believe the West needs to call his bluff.  It has to say that a military move into the Ukraine would constitute a declaration of war.

This is not something the West wants-and I would hope neither does Putin.

It would force both sides to sit down and pursue a diplomatic solution which would probably be some sort of a "Finlandisation" of the Ukraine i.e. a neutrality which required any foreign policy moves by the Ukrainians to be sanctioned by the Russians.

It is not clear to me that the Ukrainians would agree to such a solution.  It might require massive pressure from the West to make them acquiesce along the lines that if they don't then they will be left to take on Russia on their own...

This is what Russia really wants.  Control over the Ukraine.

Great Power Realpolitik is full of examples of small countries being sacrificed for what is considered the greater good which in this case is a non-military solution.

I can't help but think that if the West allows Putin to annex the Ukraine, under the threat of a loaded gun, that he will continue until the West says stop.

It is an incredibly depressing thought that on the 100th anniversary of WWI,  the 75th anniversary of the start of WWII, despite the end of the Cold War and the supposed new paradigm of peace, that the Russians, whom I hold at least partially responsible for WWI, and who were joint aggressors in 1939, should once again be the sable rattlers for another European war.