The Ukraine crisis has come to a head with Russia biting the bullet and launching “a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.” Even as the United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres was warning that the world was facing a “moment of peril” and calling for “restraint, reason and de-escalation” to avoid “a scale and severity of need unseen for many years”, Russian troops that had massed on Ukraine’s borders for months now were preparing to launch an assault on Ukraine — after Russian President Vladimir Putin recognised the Russian-backed, rebel-held areas of Donetsk and Luhansk as independent and even challenged the historical right of Ukraine to exist.
Mr. Putin continued to insist that he was open to “direct and honest dialogue” but with every step of the escalatory ladder he climbed, he ensured that dialogue was becoming difficult to sustain. And the Russian Foreign Ministry even suggested that the idea that Russia is to blame for the crisis in Ukraine is an invention by the West. But the invasion has now happened in full view of the international community, with Mr. Putin saying that Russia did not plan to occupy Ukraine and demanding that its military lay down their arms. Launching a “special military operation” and alleging that Ukraine’s democratically elected government “had been responsible for eight years of genocide”, Moscow’s seeming goal is demilitarisation and a “denazification” of Ukraine.
