英美报刊翻译

Russia and Ukraine

Military marches

A renewed Russian military build-up could be a prelude to more fighting

Nov 15th 2014 | DONETSK, KIEV AND MOSCOW | From the print edition

EVEN as Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, was heading to the G20 summit in Brisbane, Australia, tensions in Ukraine were escalating.

尽管俄罗斯总统弗拉基米尔·普京,目前正在前往在澳大利亚布里斯班举行的G20峰会，但乌克兰紧张局势仍然不断升级。

Scores of tanks, lorries and artillery, unmarked and stripped of licence plates, were snaking along Ukrainian roads. Kiev accused Moscow of sending in more troops; Russia denied it. The ceasefire that never worked is close to being outright non-existent.

基辅指责莫斯科派遣更多的部队;俄罗斯予以否认。停火从未接近实现，这是完全不存在的。

This time the build-up began days before elections in eastern Ukraine’s separatist republics. Independent observers, including an OSCE monitoring mission, noticed large military convoys around Donetsk. On November 12th NATO’s senior commander, Philip Breedlove, said the alliance had seen Russian equipment, primarily tanks, artillery,

air-defence systems and combat troops entering Ukraine. Ukraine’s prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, spoke of red lines being crossed.

Russia never abided by September’s Minsk peace accords that demanded a withdrawal of its troops from the region, because it insisted it had none. But the latest escalation looks like a deliberate affront. It may partly reflect Mr Puti n’s way of negotiating with the West. Escalating a conflict and then agreeing not to go any further in exchange for concessions has long been one of his favoured tactics.

“Putin likes to open talks by putting a knife on the table first,” notes Kirill Rogo v, a political analyst in Moscow.

莫斯科政治分析家基里尔·罗戈夫指出：“普京喜欢通过把一把刀放在桌子上开始讲座“

The West has all but dropped Russia’s annexation of Crimea as an issue, turning it into a fait accompli. Mr Putin is keen to show that Russia is not intimidated by sanctions. Dmitri Trenin, head of the Carnegie Moscow Centre, also suggests that Ukraine may be tempted to try to recapture more rebel territory—in which case Russia might respond by trying to overthrow the government in Kiev.

While the fighting has become heavier, its contours have remained broadly the same—so far. No new territory is changing hands. The battles are confined to specific areas, such as around Donetsk airport, which a ragtag group of Ukrainian soldiers have held against all odds. Meanwhile, in the city centre, mothers push buggies down the central boulevard as the shelling rumbles, ever louder, in the distance.

The EU’s foreign policy chief, Federica Mogherini, has declared that if the peace process completely breaks down, it will be “extremely difficult, if not impossible, to start again.” Ukraine’s UN ambassador has warned that Russia is planning a full-scale invasion. Government forces have been redeployed eastward in preparation. President Petro Poroshenko is under pressure to hold the line. One commander of a volunteer battalion has threatened a military coup if the government cedes anything else to the separatists.

Unfortunately, no amount of Ukrainian reinforcements can stop a Russian offensive, if one is indeed coming. The OSCE has reported that “high-grade military-specification jamming” is being used against its monitoring drones, suggesting an influx of more sophisticated kit into the region

. 欧安组织报告说，“高档军用规格的干扰”正在被用来对付它的监视无人机，这表明更复杂的工具包涌入该地区。

And along the border, Russia still has thousands of troops.

A rebel-led push remains more likely. Mr Putin has built up his separatist proxies specifically to torment Ukraine. The separatist leaders were not picked for their ability to govern. Alexander Zakharchenko in Donetsk used to be an electrician; another separatist leader, Denis Pushilin, once helped to run a Ponzi scheme. Fighting is their raison d’être. Russia is probably not interested in annexing the Donbas, an unattractive coal region in the south-east of Ukraine that would land it with responsibilities but no obvious benefits. Yet nor was it ever likely that Russia’s aggression in Ukraine would simply stop. Mr Putin

keeps talking about Novorossiya—a region that in Tsarist times included Nikolaev and Odessa.

Mr Putin’s recent public comments confirm that he considers Ukraine to be an artificial and inherently unstable geographic concoction whose future existence within its current borders is uncertain.

普京最近的公开评论证实，他认为乌克兰是一个人为的，本质上是不稳定的地理药汁，其未来的生存在目前的边界之内是不确定的。

An economic collapse of Ukraine (see page 79), followed by a division of the country between the West and Russia, still appears to be one of the Kremlin’s favoured scenarios. So another wave of bloody violence before the onset of winter remains all too possible. And it is not clear that the West can do anything to prevent it.