West and East face-off in the heart of Europe

The West and Rus­sia are im­mersed in a dis­pute that has sparked spec­u­la­tion about the pos­si­ble out­break of a war that both blocs in­sist they do not want. The cause of this cri­sis is again Ukraine, a re­pub­lic that de­clared its in­de­pen­dence fol­low­ing the dis­so­lu­tion of the So­viet Union, but in which Rus­sia main­tains great strate­gic in­ter­ests (see our fea­ture about sev­eral po­ten­tial cur­rent crises in Eu­rope with a spe­cial focus on the con­flict be­tween Ukraine and Rus­sia on pages 14-27).

The Putin regime has amassed large mil­i­tary re­sources in areas bor­der­ing Ukraine, and the West­ern world (prin­ci­pally NATO, the US and the EU) has warned Rus­sia of the con­se­quences of an in­va­sion or at­tempted in­va­sion of Ukraine. The West fears that Putin wants to se­cure the an­nex­a­tion of Crimea and con­sol­i­date the “de facto states” of Donetsk and Lu­gansk, three Russ­ian-speak­ing ter­ri­to­ries that pro­claimed their in­de­pen­dence from Ukraine with­out in­ter­na­tional recog­ni­tion.

Mean­while, the West is fac­ing this cri­sis amid in­ter­nal di­vi­sion that weak­ens the strength of its po­si­tion vis-à-vis Rus­sia. States such as Ger­many and France do not share the same mil­i­tary en­thu­si­asm as other al­lies, and NATO has made it clear that it will be dif­fi­cult for the At­lantic al­liance to in­ter­vene mil­i­tar­ily in the event of a Russ­ian in­va­sion. There have also been many calls for diplo­macy, and the fact that France holds the pres­i­dency of the Coun­cil of the Eu­ro­pean Union may con­tribute to a diplo­matic exit from this con­flict. But Putin has cho­sen the right mo­ment to un­leash this cri­sis: France is fac­ing a pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, Italy is look­ing for a pres­i­dent, Ger­many has changed its gov­ern­ment and its for­eign min­is­ter doesn’t have the ex­pe­ri­ence of her pre­de­ces­sors and, above all, the US pres­i­dent is suf­fer­ing a se­vere de­cline in pop­u­lar­ity. And to top it all, we are in the mid­dle of a cold win­ter. Putin knows that a large part of Eu­rope heats it­self with Russ­ian gas. The ques­tion is: Will Rus­sia turn off the gas when the EU de­cides on new sanc­tions?