How Russia's standoff with Ukraine could play out

As Western leaders and diplomats flock to the Kremlin in a frenzied round of shuttle diplomacy to stave off the largest military invasion in Europe since World War II, President Biden said Tuesday that more Russian troops remained poised “in a threatening position.”

“And the fact remains, right now Russia has more than 150,000 troops encircling Ukraine in Belarus and along Ukraine’s border,” Biden added in remarks delivered from the White House.

Already many diplomatic missions are fleeing Kyiv and some airlines have canceled or diverted flights into the country. The hasty evacuation was sparked by a recent U.S. intelligence report that Russia planned to stage a “false flag” attack that it would blame on Ukraine to justify an invasion. That warning followed earlier Western intelligence reports of a Russian coup plot and roving sabotage teams inside Ukraine as well as a presumed Russian cyberattack that splashed scores of government websites with the ominous warning to "be afraid and expect the worst.”

With the tensions showing no signs of easing, experts who spoke to Yahoo News said they saw three possible paths forward.

De-escalation

A number of experts believe that having achieved maximum coercive pressure by making an all-out invasion of Ukraine seem imminent in the coming days, Putin now will most likely solidify his gains from this display of brinksmanship, and pocket some concessions before slowly de-escalating the crisis. They note that after telling Russian diplomats last November that it was good that tensions with the West were high and it was “important for them to remain in this state for as long as possible,” Putin abruptly changed course on Tuesday, giving the green light for a spokesman for the Russian Defense Ministry to announce the partial pullback of some Russian troops from the Ukrainian border.

“If you look at the scripted meeting this week between Putin and [Russian Foreign Minister Sergey] Lavrov, their body language suggested that they wanted to calm tensions and de-escalate to a degree, which I think is the most rational and likely scenario going forward,” said Pavel Podvig, a Russia expert and senior researcher at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research. The Kremlin narrative is that Putin’s show of military force got the attention of the United States and NATO, who were refusing to take Russian security concerns seriously.

“Now Putin’s banging on the table has gotten the West’s attention and made some progress on the Minsk agreement, and he’s likely to declare victory and begin to de-escalate, noting that Russia said all along that it wasn’t going to invade Ukraine,” said Podvig. “That’s the most likely way forward because there’s no real domestic support or ‘Party for War’ in Russia supporting an invasion scenario.”

From the Kremlin’s viewpoint the military brinksmanship has already achieved significant concessions, including pressure from major European powers on Ukraine to implement the flawed Minsk II peace agreement reached in 2015 between Russia and Ukraine. The agreement was supposed to end the fighting in eastern Ukraine between government forces and Russian-backed separatists. Since that time Moscow has issued more than 600,000 Russian passports to the Ukrainian separatists, convincing many Ukrainian officials that implementing Minsk II on Russia’s terms would be tantamount to ceding the separatist regions in the east to “greater Russia.”

With U.S. officials warning that Russia is poised to invade Ukraine, however, Kyiv has been under pressure to swallow the unpopular peace deal. On his visit to Kiev earlier this month, for instance, French President Emmanuel Macron called for resolutely “implementing the Minsk agreements to the end.”

Speaking this week alongside German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky even conceded that Ukraine’s desire for membership in NATO, which ostensibly led to the current crisis, could be “like a dream.”

“How much should Ukraine go on that path?” Zelensky said of NATO membership. “Who will support us?”

Kurt Volker, who served as the special representative for Ukraine negotiations in the Trump administration, and is a former U.S. ambassador to NATO, told Yahoo News that Putin was now playing from a position of strength.

“There are still a spectrum of possible scenarios for how the Ukraine crisis plays out, but Putin has already achieved many of his goals,” he said. Putin proved to Ukraine that the West would not come to its rescue with troops, he noted, and that it has no future with NATO.

“Putin also made the United States and its allies look weak by failing to send sufficient arms to Ukraine and pulling their embassy staffs out of the country,” said Volker. “And he’s receiving all of these diplomatic visits from European leaders and Western emissaries, who I suspect are privately assuring him that NATO will never invite Ukraine to join the alliance. When [French President Emmanuel] Macron says there are simple, practical steps that can be taken to solve the crisis, that’s what he is talking about.”

As for resurrecting and implementing Minsk II on Russia’s terms, he noted, that would force Ukraine to grant autonomy to the breakaway region and hold elections while they are still occupied by armed separatists holding Russian passports. “That would make those so-called People’s Republics a permanent ball and chain around Ukraine.”

Partial occupation

With military forces stacked around Ukraine’s borders, Putin could also revert to a familiar playbook when neighbors he considers within Russia’s sphere of influence show signs of drifting westward: invade and occupy breakaway republics, preferably ones with significant Russian-speaking populations. After NATO issued its Bucharest summit declaration in 2008 stating that Georgia and Ukraine “will become members of NATO,” for instance, Russian troops invaded Georgia. After fighting a short war, Russian forces occupied the self-proclaimed breakaway republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, where they remain to this day.

When Ukraine’s pro-Russian leader Viktor Yanukovych was ousted by democracy protesters of the Euromaidan movement in 2014, Putin similarly used Russian military forces to occupy and annex Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, home to the Russian Black Sea fleet. Russian military forces also supported pro-Russian separatists in the eastern Donbass region in the ongoing conflict that has claimed more than 14,000 lives.

On Tuesday, Putin blamed Ukraine for the situation in Donbass, and seemed to state that it alone could warrant a Russian invasion of the region.

“In our view, what is now happening in Donbass is genocide,” Putin said.

If Putin fails to wring the expected concessions on the Minsk II agreements out of Kiev, he could relatively easily launch a pincer operation from the Donbas region in the northeast and Crimea in the southeast, capturing territory that could serve as a land-bridge between the two enclaves. This week, the Russian Duma signaled its possible support by urging Putin to recognize the separatist-held areas of eastern Ukraine as independent.

Retired Army Gen. Martin Dempsey is the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “I still think Putin’s primary goal in the Ukraine crisis is to test NATO and see if it falters, but if he decides to act, there is a military logic to seizing land in Ukraine’s east to create a land bridge to the Crimean Peninsula and additional outlets to the Black Sea,” he told Yahoo News.

‘Shock and awe’ invasion

U.S. experts who deployed a similar force to the Middle East in 2003 recognize the capability that Russia has methodically amassed around Ukraine — an invasion force of potential “shock and awe.”

“One of the biggest indicators that the Russians are posturing for actual conflict was a report that they are stockpiling plasma and blood. You don’t do that for a military exercise,” said a retired U.S. major general who served in the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the subsequent occupation. “We always knew we were heading into a real fight, for instance, when our medics were issued morphine, because that is a very controlled substance. Telltale signs like that and the stockpiling of blood are sure indications that this is pretty damn serious, and we’re pretty high up on the escalation ladder.”

If the balloon actually does go up on an all-out Russian invasion, the order of battle is likely to resemble Operation Iraq Freedom in 2003. Cruise missiles launched from land and ships, as well as other smart munitions, will initially rain down on the Ukrainian military’s command-and-control nodes, air bases and air-defense batteries. Once air dominance is achieved, armored Russian ground forces backed by electronic jamming battalions will maneuver against Ukrainian units that will have great difficulty in communicating with one another and could have no prospect of reinforcement. Cellphone towers and other civilian communications nodes would be destroyed so that Ukraine would be unable to communicate with the rest of the world what Russian forces are doing.

Senior U.S. officials believe Russian forces would win such an all-out war in a matter of a few weeks if not days, at an estimated cost of 25,000 to 50,000 dead civilians; 5,000 to 25,000 casualties in the Ukrainian military; 3,000 to 10,000 Russian military casualties; and between 1 million and 5 million refugees fleeing the country.

For the Kremlin, such a risky war of choice would likely prove a Pyrrhic victory. Russia forces would occupy a country of nearly 45 million traumatized and angry people, and face a likely determined and well-supported insurgency. The massive costs of such an operation would fall on a Kremlin burdened by crippling economic sanctions as a result of the invasion.

“We learned that destroying a weaker country’s conventional forces and toppling its government is actually the easy part of an invasion,” said the retired general and Iraq veteran, who spoke on background. “The hard part is occupying and trying to govern a country in the midst of a tenacious insurgency. To do that, you better have the political will and economic wherewithal to knuckle down and spend the next 20 or 30 years on the effort.”

Retired Air Force Gen. Joseph Ralston, a former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, believes Putin could quickly come to regret the decision to launch a shock and awe invasion.

“I think Putin certainly has the military capability to invade Ukraine and topple its government, and I know there is intelligence suggesting he intends to do just that,” he told Yahoo News. “But the Russians are good at putting out false intelligence, and I remain skeptical because a full-scale invasion will result in horrible scenes of war and high casualties on both sides. Rather than achieve Putin’s primary objective of sowing dissension within the alliance, it would also produce exactly the opposite effect by pulling NATO together.”