Kremlin

Thousands of protesters took to the streets after Russian lawmaker Sergei Gavrilov, deputy of the Russian State Duma, sat in the Georgian parliamentary speaker’s seat and addressed the audience in Russian. Gavrilov was there as president of the Interparliamentary Assembly on Orthodoxy (IAO), “a body set up by the Greek parliament in 1993 to foster relationships between Christian Orthodox lawmakers” (Antidze). Protests cut IAO meetings short.

Mr. Putin would casually deny it, but Russia has fashioned the ongoing civil conflict in Eastern Ukraine in a manner that suits the Kremlin’s goals. The opening actions of the rebellion were pulled off without too many snags and managed to seize significant political and economic sites throughout the region, ranging from police stations to major railroad junctions. A growing amount of evidence suggests that these seemingly homegrown insurrections were originally led and coordinated by Russian operatives disguised as locals. Videos and eyewitness accounts show large convoys of vehicles packed with armed, uniformed men (many belonging to the Vostok Battalion, of Chechen War notoriety) streaming into Ukraine from over the Russian border. While this isn’t exactly hard evidence of the Kremlin’s direct involvement, it does speak volumes about what entities are fueling the current strife. Despite these occurrences, Putin does not seem interested in invading and annexing the eastern provinces of Ukraine in the same way that he did Crimea. This article discusses why Moscow does not want to absorb Eastern Ukraine, as well as what Russia’s true intensions are.