Current Russian military aggression is for the long term, Poroshenko says

The current Russian military aggression in Ukraine and military threat is “for the long historical prospect obviously,” Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said in his Oct. 14 speech honoring the Defenders Day national holiday. A minimum of five percent of GDP will be spent on defense, or UAH 110 bln (about USD 4 bln) next year, he said. The Ukrainian Armed Forces gained more than 2,000 units of Russian military hardware and domestic enterprises are producing new rocket complexes, artillery systems, armed drones, and cosmic intelligence-gathering devices.

Ukraine is currently in a state of war and could be subject to a full-scale invasion by the Russian Armed Forces, Poroshenko said the next day at a military base. “The likelihood of an escalation of the conflict remains significant,” he said, pointing out that more than 700 artillery shells and more than 300 mines were activated near the town of Vodiane in the Luhansk region.

Zenon Zawada: While it’s understood that the Russian military threat will now be a permanent fixture in the Ukrainian public’s collective conscious (which it hadn’t been before 2014), Poroshenko’s statement about the long prospect of the current aggression should raise some eyebrows. When sanctions were imposed in 2014, they were done so with the accompanying assurance of experts that they would cause the Putin government to buckle by 2017. While that is still possible, the Russian government has done a good job of at least creating the appearance that it will withstand the sanctions for much longer.

Given the populist-nationalist political trends today, we see a risk that Western governments will start to remove the sanctions in the second half of 2017, partly out of exhaustion or impatience by their electorates and local businesses. Removed sanctions will likely require the creation of a frozen conflict, in which neither side is actively attacking nor has achieved victory. The Ukrainian government would argue that removing sanctions would merely encourage Russian aggression, yet what’s apparent now is that the Russians will not draw closer to any attempt at peace with the sanctions in place.

And what’s also apparent is that Russia will extend its military aggression if sanctions remain in place in 2017 and beyond, having demonstrated that it manipulates its aggressive actions in Donbas as, among other things, an instrument to stir up the Western mass media to pressure Western leaders, particularly when they enter negotiations. So the president’s confidence of an extended aggression campaign is partly based on an expectation that sanctions will be renewed beyond a year, a view that we would not place too much confidence in.