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A camouflaged pro-Russian tank seen in the town of Novoazovsk, in eastern Ukraine, last Friday. Credit Sergei Grits/Associated Press
When a state sends more than a thousand troops with mobile artillery and heavy equipment into a neighboring state and takes control of territory, that’s an invasion, right?
Not according to NATO, which reported the Russian military movements in Ukraine this past week but depicted them only as increased Russian “interference.” And not according to President Obama, who saw Russia being only “a little more overt” in its support of secessionists in southeastern Ukraine. And certainly not according to President Vladimir V. Putin, whose lieutenants simply denied everything and labeled the evidence a Western “canard.”
Spin, of course, is an elemental political tool, and for the West to call the invasion an invasion would require a response that neither Washington nor other Western capitals nor NATO are prepared for. But an invasion it is, and the fundamental challenge to the liberal world order that it poses will be high on NATO’s agenda when its leaders gather in Wales this week.
As for Mr. Putin, the lie is an honored Soviet propaganda tool he has used since the start of the Russian campaign against Ukraine. The Russian leader is aware that acknowledging an invasion would not only sharply elevate the level of tension with the West, but would carry considerable domestic repercussions. Polls show that only 5 percent of Russians would support sending their troops into Ukraine.
When Russia acknowledged that Ukraine had captured some Russian soldiers — Moscow said they accidentally wandered across the border — mothers and girlfriends of the prisoners immediately and loudly began demanding an explanation.
The implausibly deniable invasion of Ukraine, to play on an old C.I.A. term, is not the only unconventional war facing the United States and NATO. There is also the question of what to do about ISIS, the brutal jihadist outfit marauding through Iraq and Syria.
In brief comments on Ukraine and the Middle East on Thursday, President Obama said the United States had not yet formulated a strategy for dealing with ISIS inside Syria, but he confirmed he had asked Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel for options. But however reluctant he and the American public were to get militarily involved abroad, it was clear that neither the United States nor NATO could ignore the two threats.
As NATO grapples with armed conflicts, international health authorities will be fighting their own unconventional war against the Ebola virus, which spread to a fifth West African country, Senegal, and, according to the World Health Organization, could eventually infect 20,000 people.
In this struggle, too, finding a strategy was not always easy. Liberia’s misguided attempt to quarantine the squalid West Point neighborhood of the capital of Monrovia, the African city hit hardest by Ebola, created a reaction arguably as dangerous as the infection, with residents crowding together and battling surrounding soldiers and the police.
The Convenient Lie
The crisis in Ukraine has been underway now for half a year, and the Russian involvement, from the outright annexation of Crimea in March to the men, arms and convoys repeatedly reported spotted in the fighting in the southeastern industrial belt, has been obvious. But something seemed to change in the past week, when Mr. Putin amiably shook hands with President Petro O. Poroshenko on Tuesday, just two days before NATO reported that more than 1,000 Russian soldiers with artillery and other heavy weaponry were on the march inside Ukraine, and as rebels poised themselves for a new thrust along the Sea of Azov.
Until now, Europe, and to a lesser degree the United States, had publicly sustained the myth that Russia was intent only on destabilizing Ukraine to deter it from shifting westward politically, rather than to gain control over its eastern provinces, and that Mr. Putin could be brought to the negotiating table through sanctions and censure. But the Russia-backed rebel drive toward the port of Mariupol could also open a land route from Russia to Crimea, underpinning Russian control of a broad section of Ukrainian territory that Mr. Putin has provocatively called by its old czarist name, “Novorossiya,” or “New Russia.”
The West has been reluctant to acknowledge that Mr. Putin may be seeking actual control over the Donbass region, in part because breaking with Russia would endanger a major European energy source and lucrative trade deals, including the French sale of two Mistral-class assault ships to Moscow. More broadly, defining Russia as an enemy would mean an end to the post-Cold War world order based on the international rule of law — an order in which a democratizing Russia was to be a partner in integrating emerging economies, fighting terrorism and reining in rogue states.
Mr. Putin has craftily assisted Europe in its illusions by consistently denying any role in the Ukrainian fighting, regularly referring to the Europeans as “our partners,” pinning the blame for the crisis on American “unilateralism,” and posing as a mediator between Kiev and the pro-Russian militias. His actions, however, reflect a primitive and aggressive brand of geopolitics that was not supposed to have survived the Cold War.
In his comments on Thursday, Mr. Obama seemed intent first of all on restraining expectations of what the United States might do about either Ukraine or ISIS. Russia’s actions, he said, were “not really a shift,” and he was vague about tightening sanctions.
Yet the pressure for intervening more directly in Ukraine by supplying the government in Kiev with weapons and intelligence is bound to grow, both within the Obama administration and among Eastern European states.
The Islamic State
That challenge extends to Iraq and Syria, where the latest iteration of fanatical Islam, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, has established a virtual state straddling the two countries through military prowess and ruthless cruelty.
While Washington has agreed to airstrikes against ISIS inside Iraq to protect threatened minorities and to give the Baghdad government time to marshal its badly battered and fractured forces, President Obama emphasized on Thursday that no decision had been made yet on dealing with ISIS inside Syria.
But there was a growing awareness that ISIS could not be curbed so long as it could flee to bases in Syria. Officials were said to be debating whether to use drones or fighter jets, and whether to target ISIS forces or specific leaders.
Mr. Obama did not address the actual choices before him. His message was not the action the United States or its allies might take, but rather the inadmissibility of any mission creep.
…and I am Sid Harth