Russian President Vladimir Putin has launched an attack on Ukraine.
What began as a limited incursion by Russia’s armed forces is now a full-scale invasion. Western intelligence agencies and various European leaders, including British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, have for several weeks warned that the hostilities could eventually become the largest conflict on the continent since World War II.
Most of the impact will be felt in Europe, even if the war widens. NATO will likely expand defense spending. Russia will be heavily sanctioned and increasingly isolated from the world economy.
In East Asia, however, the immediate fallout of Russian aggression will be minor. Russia itself is geopolitically weak in the region. Only a fifth of its population lives in the vast Siberian space between the Ural Mountains and the Pacific Ocean. Russia’s ability to project hard power in East Asia is limited. It is unlikely to repeat the asymmetric tactics it has used against Ukraine and other neighboring post-Soviet countries, because borders in East Asia are more fixed and agreed-upon than in Eastern Europe. Putin is also mostly concerned with European-area disputes. His goal in Asia seems primarily to maintain good relations with China while he tangles with NATO.
There is one unique area of concern for Tokyo. Japan is in a long-running territorial dispute with Russia over the Kuril Islands. There is some similarity there to Russia’s many territorial disputes along its European borders. But Russia already controls the four islands in dispute, so there is no obvious revanchist threat. That “frozen conflict” seems likely to remain frozen.
Instead, the real Asian concern from the Ukraine crisis is a territory-snatching precedent that China might exploit in the East and South China Seas.
The Russian narrative
Putin’s speeches and writings over the past two decades as Russian leader have emphasized unfairness in the post-Cold War European settlement, particularly with the independence of Ukraine. This year’s crisis is the zenith of Putin’s long-running obsession with these issues.
The collapse of the Soviet Union was a dramatic setback for Russian national power. In just three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Russia shed two layers of empire — the Eastern European “allies” of the Cold War-era Warsaw Pact, like Poland and Romania, and then the Soviet Union’s own non-Russian nations, such as Lithuania and Ukraine, which also became independent.
Putin was trained in the old Soviet system and once called the USSR’s collapse a “geopolitical catastrophe.” He has never accepted the loss of prestige associated with the post-Cold War revision of the European order at Russia’s expense. He and the Russian foreign policy community suffer from intense post-imperial nostalgia, even now, 30 years later.
Putin was unable to halt the eastward march of NATO and the European Union in the 1990s and 2000s. He never seemed to grasp that his nostalgia for Soviet dominance in Eastern Europe is precisely what drove those countries toward the West. These states, including Ukraine, sought safety after 45 years of Russian domination.
Putin has fought this by arguing that Ukraine is not really a country at all. It is historically a part of Russia, his argument goes, and that its post-Soviet independence is an inexplicable happenstance. And just as in Eastern Europe, this belligerence and imperial nostalgia is now fueling a counter-reaction in flourishing Ukrainian nationalism.
Taiwan’s military is well-prepared to defend the island against an attack from China. | BRYAN DENTON / THE NEW YORK TIMES
One widely touted response to a Russian takeover is a popular insurgency. That would turn his quick land-grab into an unwinnable quagmire along the lines of the American war in Vietnam or the USSR’s own disastrous counter-insurgency in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
Instead, Putin has launched his aggression by cloaking it with the modern language of liberal values and “peacekeeping.”
First, he declared two eastern districts of Ukraine — Donetsk and Luhansk — to be independent states. Their independence was necessary, because Ukrainians were murdering ethnic Russians there in a genocide, according to Russian state media. Russian troops in these regions would therefore be peacekeepers, and the invasion itself is to “denazify” Ukraine. This is the Russian narrative.
What is Putin’s strategy?
Should Putin choose to occupy Ukraine indefinitely, there are significant risks.
First, it could devolve into a counter-insurgency quagmire if the Ukrainian population resists. Ukraine also borders NATO states that would allow the organization to support a cross-border insurgency, much as Pakistan provided a staging base and safe zone for Islamist guerillas to fight the Soviet Red Army in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
Second, openly violating Ukraine’s sovereignty permanently risks alienating China, whose support, or at least forbearance, Putin desperately needs. Putin has tried hard to dance around this — hence his manipulation of ethnic Russians in Ukraine, the independence proclamations of Donetsk and Luhansk, and the outlandish talk of Ukrainian “Nazis.”
Third, sustained open warfare makes it far more likely that the world would aggressively isolate and sanction Russia. So far, Western countries have resisted the harshest sanction — expelling Russia from the SWIFT financial transaction system.
But such serious punishment, to delink Russia from the dollar, is likely if journalists start broadcasting war imagery from Ukraine — intense military violence, civilian massacres, sieges of Ukrainian cities and so on.
Taiwanese soldiers take part in a military exercise as part of preparations to defend the island against an amphibious attack from China. | REUTERS
An alternative for Putin might be a westward, rolling series of minor land-grabs, puppet states and frozen conflicts. Putin has experience ginning up these sorts of subversive moves that avoid the appearance of open warfare, yet allow him to project Russian power and undercut the westward drift of post-Soviet states.
In Moldova, Putin’s Russia has supported a breakaway republic known as Transnistria since 1992. In Georgia, it has supported the breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia since 2008. It has tilted toward secessionism in Azerbaijan. In Belarus, Putin has bullied the leadership into permitting indefinite Russian Army deployments. In Ukraine, it annexed the Crimean Peninsula in 2014 and supported insurgents in the Donbas region.
This model of stirring up local trouble and then supporting “peacekeepers” or mini-breakaway states might be an alternative to a full-scale Ukraine invasion. It would allow Putin to drag out the Ukraine crisis for months, so that it fades from the headlines and preempts the worst sanctions. Putin could then later push for further rebellious secession elsewhere in Ukraine’s east.
Could Putin’s oblique revanchism be repeated in Asia?
Putin’s revisionism in Europe, at least until the invasion proper just a few days ago, might be best described as “salami slicing” — taking a little here and a little there, always too little to avoid a major global reaction. These moves are usually covered with a narrative of violence against ethnic Russians or historical “explanations” about Russia’s role in the region.
China is the only country in Asia that might conceivably pursue a protracted course like this. The other capable states in the region are either democratic without regional imperialist ambitions, underdeveloped or both. Indonesia has tangled with East Timor, for example, but that has not spiraled into regional conflict. Japan, South Korea and the Philippines are highly unlikely to pursue military revisionism.
Taiwan is the often mentioned concern in Asia. If Putin snatches all of Ukraine, would Chinese President Xi Jinping try the same? Probably not.
First, China cannot salami slice its way into Taiwan, because Taiwan is separated from the mainland by water, which makes for robust borders.
So China could only attack Taiwan through a massive amphibious invasion that global public opinion would immediately read it as a major war. Putin’s earlier tactics of oblique territorial penetration will not work in the East China Sea. There is also an intense dispute over whether China could actually mount the large open-water operation necessary to conquer Taiwan.
Tank obstacles line a beach on Taiwan that looks across to mainland China. | BRYAN DENTON / THE NEW YORK TIMES
Additionally, the United States is committed to Taiwan far more than the West is to Ukraine. Ukraine is not a member of NATO, and it is unlikely to become one. Western publics strongly oppose direct military intervention and war against Russia. Everyone knows this, hence the West’s ability to deter Russia in Ukraine in recent months has been weak.
Taiwan is different. Although it has no formal alliance with the United States, it has a long-standing American relationship and wide sympathy both in the U.S. foreign policy community and among U.S. regional allies. Everyone realizes that a Chinese move on Taiwan would be a major revision of the Asian order that has ensured peace and prosperity for decades. The Taiwanese would fight hard; they are better prepared than Ukraine; the Americans would probably join; regional U.S. allies, most obviously Japan, would probably get involved as well.
And, importantly, China is ideologically committed to sovereignty, which undergirds its claims to restive areas such as Hong Kong, Xinjiang and Tibet. If China’s leaders reject sovereignty and borders as Putin has done in Eastern Europe, it risks opening ideological space for China’s many minorities to demand rights or succession. Bullying Taiwan into “voluntary” unification is its ideal outcome.
The future of Chinese revisionism
For sure, China has engaged in salami slicing tactics in the South China Sea — grabbing islets and shoals, building bases on them, and declaring air and maritime control zones. This is also troublesome, but far less important than moves on Ukraine or Taiwan, which are densely populated land masses. The stand-off over the South China Sea will continue, but it is different enough from Putin’s rolling land-grabs to mean that Ukraine is likely not a model there.
The real issue is Taiwan. China, like Russia, has ginned up fake narratives about the dispute. It lies to its own people about the desire of Taiwanese to “rejoin” China, but that has been unpersuasive. It is quite clear the Taiwanese value their democracy more than unification. Otherwise unity would have happened long ago.
The core concern, rather, is deterrence. Do the Chinese believe the Taiwanese, Americans and others will fight for Taiwan? And here the regional differences and particulars of the dispute matter a lot. Ukraine’s subversion, while tragic, is not seen as an existential challenge to the European order. An invasion of Taiwan would be, though, because it would be a massive military operation — given Taiwan’s island geography — by a power far larger and more capable than Russia. So the likelihood that the United States and its allies would fight is much higher; hence deterrence is stronger, blunting the notion that China will learn from Ukraine that it can freely attack Taiwan.
Protesters gather near the U.N. headquarters in New York on Thursday to denounce Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. | VICTOR J. BLUE / THE NEW YORK TIMES
Finally, it should be noted that Putin’s strategy is self-limiting. Absorbing damaged, economically depressed breakaway states and keeping them in perpetual crisis means Russian subsidies to them, burdening an already corrupt and inefficient Russian economy.
A Chinese conquest of Taiwan or other nationalistic people in Asia would be costly, and China already spends more on internal than external security. The cost-benefit of Putin’s invasion is balance-negative — apart from the nationalist satisfactions — and the Chinese leadership has always been much more cautious about such things than risk-taking Putin.
Robert E. Kelly is a professor in the Department of Political Science at Pusan National University in South Korea. More of his work may be found at www.RobertEdwinKelly.com.