For the moment, Russians largely appear to subscribe to the Kremlin narrative that the West is the aggressor in the Ukraine crisis, said Denis Volkov, the director of the Levada Center, an independent pollster in Moscow. The alarmist messaging out of Washington about an imminent Russian invasion has only bolstered that view, he says, because it makes the West seem to be the one that is “exerting pressure and escalating tensions.”
If Mr. Putin were to carry out a short and limited military operation along the lines of the five-day war against Georgia in 2008, he said, Russians could be expected to support it.
But “if this is a lengthy, bloody war, we get to a situation where it’s impossible to forecast,” Mr. Volkov said. “Stability ends.”
Given that such a war still seems unthinkable and irrational to so many in Moscow, Russian foreign policy experts generally see the standoff over Ukraine as the latest stage in Mr. Putin’s yearslong effort to compel the West to accept what he sees as fundamental Russian security concerns. In the 1990s, that thinking goes, the West forced a new European order upon a weak Russia that disregarded its historical need for a geopolitical buffer zone to its west. And now that Russia is stronger, these experts say, it would be reasonable for any Kremlin leader to try to redraw that map.
Fyodor Lukyanov, a prominent Moscow foreign policy analyst who advises the Kremlin, said Mr. Putin’s goal now was “to force the outcome of the Cold War to be partially revised.” But he still believes Mr. Putin will stop short of full-scale invasion, instead using “special, asymmetric or hybrid means” — including making the West believe that he is truly prepared to attack.
“A bluff has to be very convincing,” Mr. Lukyanov said. And the United States, he went on, with its robust portrayals of an aggressive Russia poised for invasion, “is playing along at 200 percent.”
![[KA]](https://forum.pravda.com.ua/Smileys/default/kacapi.gif "[KA]")
