JOIN USBeyond the battlefield: What might happen next in the Ukraine crisis
Much of the world woke up Thursday to the spectre of all-out war in Europe after President Vladimir Putin of Russia ordered his troops to invade Ukraine. That left millions of people — in Ukraine and Eastern Europe, but also in the United States and elsewhere — wondering how the conflict would affect their lives.
At least 40 Ukrainian soldiers were reported killed in the hours after the invasion, with estimates of tens of thousands of deaths over the course of the conflict. But beyond the anticipated bloodshed, economic penalties to punish Russia will reverberate worldwide.
Rising energy costs and potentially slowing supply chains will take their toll on consumers. Russian cyberattacks could cripple electronic infrastructure. A new refugee crisis will require international assistance. And an era of relative calm in the West that has pervaded since the end of the Cold War might be coming to a close.
Here is what might happen next on the military, economic and diplomatic fronts.
More military forces head to NATO’s eastern borders.
NATO announced Thursday that it was sending reinforcements to its eastern flank, joining some 6,500 U.S. troops the Pentagon has already dispatched to Eastern Europe and the Baltics.
“We are deploying additional defensive land and air forces to the eastern part of the alliance, as well as additional maritime assets,” NATO said in a statement. “We have increased the readiness of our forces to respond to all contingencies.”
The Pentagon is also repositioning about 1,000 troops in Europe. About 800 U.S. troops are moving to the Baltics from Italy; 20 Apache helicopters are heading to the Baltics from Germany, and 12 Apaches are going to Poland from Greece. Eight F-35 strike fighters are heading to Lithuania, Estonia and Romania from Germany, the Pentagon said.
In addition, U.S. Army troops, including those from the 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions, are preparing to move closer to Poland’s border with Ukraine to help process people fleeing the country, an Army spokesperson said Thursday.
Many of the 5,500 troops from the 18th Airborne Corps who arrived in Poland this month have been working with the State Department and Polish forces to set up three processing centres near the border to help deal with tens of thousands of people, including Americans, who are expected to flee Ukraine.
In Jasionka, Poland, an indoor arena has been outfitted with bunk beds and supplies for up to 500 people; U.S. officials say that capacity could be quickly expanded. In Austria, Chancellor Karl Nehammer said Wednesday that he was prepared to accept refugees.
The State Department and the US Agency for International Development are funding relief organizations that are currently providing food, water, shelter and emergency health care to people in the region who have fled to escape the violence.
In the days to come, the CIA will assess what kind of assistance it can provide to Ukraine. If a Ukrainian resistance develops in parts of the country that Russia seeks to control, the agency could secretly supply partisan forces with intelligence and, potentially, armaments.
“We need to support the resistance to the invasion and the occupation in all ways possible,” said Mick Mulroy, a former CIA paramilitary officer and senior Pentagon official in the Trump administration. “Our special operations and intelligence assets with an extensive knowledge base from 20 years of fighting insurgencies should be put to immediate use.”
‘Severe’ sanctions from the US and Europe.
President Joe Biden on Thursday plans to announce “severe sanctions” against Russia to try to deter Moscow from carrying out further violence in Ukraine and to punish it for its actions, US officials said.
The next set of economic sanctions is expected to be much harsher than what U.S. officials had described as a first tranche that was imposed Monday and Tuesday. Biden is likely to order the Treasury Department to put one or more large Russian state-owned banks on the agency’s list for the harshest sanctions, known as the SDN list. That would cut off the banks from commerce and exchanges with much of the world and affect many other Russian business operations.
The Biden administration said Tuesday that it was imposing that kind of sanctions on two banks, VEB and PSB, but those are policy banks with no retail operations in Russia.
Administration officials have studied how sanctions would affect each of the big banks, including Sberbank and VTB, Russia’s two largest banks. Sberbank has about one-third of the assets in the country’s banking sector, and VTB has more than 15%. Some experts are sceptical that the administration would put those two banks on the SDN list for fear of the consequences for the Russian and global economies. For now, US officials are not ready to cut off all Russian banks from Swift, the Belgian money transfer system used by more than 11,000 financial institutions worldwide.
The Treasury Department has other sanctions lists that would impose costs while inflicting less widespread suffering. For example, it could put a bank on a list that prevents it from doing any transactions involving dollars. Many international commercial transactions are done in U.S. dollars, the currency that underpins the global economy.
The Treasury Department is also expected to put more Russian officials, businesspeople and companies on the sanctions lists.
By Thursday afternoon in Russia, the nation’s stock market had fallen nearly 40%.
The Commerce Department has been making plans to restrict the export of certain U.S. technologies to Russia, a tactic that the Trump administration used to hobble Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications company. The controls would damage the supply chain for some Russian sectors. U.S. officials said their targets included the defence industry and the oil and gas industry.
European officials are expected to announce sanctions similar to many of the ones planned by the United States, as they did this week. However, they have been warier in imposing the harshest sanctions because of the continent’s robust trade with Russia.
Although Biden has said he will contemplate any possible sanctions, U.S. officials, for now, do not plan big disruptions to Russia’s energy exports, which are the pillar of the country’s economy. Europe relies on the products, and surging oil prices worldwide would cause greater inflation and more problems for politicians. However, Germany announced this week that it would not certify Nord Stream 2, a new natural gas pipeline that connects Russia and Western Europe. On Wednesday Biden announced sanctions on a subsidiary of Gazprom, the large Russian energy company, which built the pipeline and had planned to operate it.
“We have been frank, we have been candid with the American people that our measures — the measures we have and are prepared to impose on the Russian Federation — certainly won’t be cost-free for the Russian Federation,” Ned Price, the State Department spokesperson, said Wednesday. “But they won’t be entirely cost-free for the rest of the world as well.”
Even so, new economic burdens come at a difficult moment for Biden, who is grappling with voter frustration over inflation less than nine months before the midterm elections.
Republicans are expected to seize on additional domestic economic hardships to criticize Biden and Democrats. A strong faction of the Republican Party — led by former President Donald Trump that includes Fox News host Tucker Carlson — has been praising Russia, downplaying the importance of defending Ukraine and criticizing Biden for many policies. Some analysts say Putin sees such political division as a strategic advantage.
Diplomacy in turmoil with Russia’s ‘path of aggression.’
The State Department has moved its personnel to Poland from Ukraine, as diplomats continue to help the government in Kyiv and offer consular assistance to U.S. citizens who want to leave Ukraine. Price estimated Wednesday that far fewer Americans were in Ukraine than the 6,600 who were believed to be in the country in the fall.
The larger question for the rest of the world is whether Putin’s invasion has irrevocably broken international systems in which Russia has been seen as a legitimate contributor.
“Last night’s events are a turning point in the history of Europe and of our country,” President Emmanuel Macron of France said in an address Thursday morning. “They will have lasting, profound consequences for our lives.”
Diplomats representing the Group of 7 of the world’s largest industrial nations, NATO, the UN Security Council and the European Council were set to meet later Thursday to plot out the next steps. At the Security Council, the United States urged others to join a resolution condemning Russia’s aggression and defending Ukraine’s sovereignty. The effort, which will be put to a vote Friday, also calls for humanitarian aid to Ukrainian refugees and access for relief workers.
But Russia has a permanent veto on the council, meaning it could derail any resolution the body proposes to rein in Putin.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken may travel to Europe next week to meet allies and ensure that a unified front against Russia remains. He cancelled a meeting with the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, that had been scheduled for Thursday in Geneva, describing it as unproductive as Russian troops took up battle formations.
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