Vova Zhukov, a Ukrainian San Jose State aerospace engineering junior, said he felt the pressure of a potential Russian invasion in his home country while visiting his family over winter break in Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine.
“It was tense, you know, like a small tense you can feel everywhere,” Zhukov said over Zoom. “My mother, for example, was really, I would say, scared about the situation. My father was more calm, and my grandmother too, because they don't believe that something can happen.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin demanded a commitment from North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) countries to refrain from a Ukrainian alliance at his annual news conference on Dec. 23. He mobilized military forces all around Ukraine without officially admitting any plan of invasion.
NATO is a military alliance formed in 1949 with the original goal to counter the post-war Russian expansion. It now counts 30 countries from North America and Europe committed by article 5 of the treaty to assist any attacked member with armed force if necessary, according to the NATO website.
Russian officials could decide to invade Ukraine before the Feb. 20 end of the Winter Olympics said United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Friday in Melbourne, Australia. Russia has more than 130,000 soldiers massed near Ukraine's borders as of Sunday, according to an ABC News article.
U.S. President Joe Biden said in a Thursday NBC interview that Americans in the Ukraine should leave.
“American citizens should leave, should leave now,” he said.
The Biden administration deployed 3,000 soldiers to Poland and Romania’s western borders with Ukraine on Feb. 2 according to the U.S. Department of Defense updates made that day.
Political science professor Karthika Sasikumar said soldier deployment is not the beginning of a military response.
“If these American soldiers were supposed to be countering the physical force of Russian soldiers, then clearly it’s not enough,” she said.
Sasikumar said U.S. military deployment serves as a deterrent to demonstrate the U.S. willingness to help Ukraine in crisis.
“We're in a really weird position right now,” said Sabrina Pinnell, political science lecturer specializing in post-Soviet politics. “We're a member of NATO, but we're kind of pushing the idea of an united NATO front, and at the same time we're not directly at the negotiating table.”
Biden and Putin talked over the phone for more than an hour on Saturday but the White House has not given any suggestion that the call decreased the threat of an imminent war in Europe, according to a Saturday Reuters article.
Divisions remain about what to expect from Russia in the following days, weeks and months.
Sasikumar said she believes diplomatic de-escalation is still the most likely scenario.
“I actually do believe that Putin doesn’t want to invade Ukraine, ” Sasikumar said. “The reason is that Ukraine, if you look at the map, it’s a very large country right in the heart of Europe and the people are not friendly towards Russia, unlike Crimea.”
In 2014, Russia annexed Crimea, a peninsula along the northeastern coast of the Black Sea in Eastern Europe, after civilians in Kyiv protested against the former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych who rejected closer ties with the European Union, according to a CNBC Jan. 27, 2022 article.
Zhukov said it’s been 8 years since Ukrainians lived in a war.
“It's not too different from what we had before, it just started to feel more and more dangerous,” Zhukov said.
After Russian military forces took control of Crimea, Putin organized a referendum in which a majority of Crimea citizens voted to leave Ukraine. This referendum is still considered illegal by the UN, according to a March 27, 2014 Time article.
“In 2014, when Russia basically occupied [Crimea], it was a different issue because the population there was Russian-speaking and wanted to be part of Russia,” Sasikumar said. “So it would be very difficult for Russia to occupy Ukraine if it invaded it.”
She believes the fear of nuclear weapons pushes all the involved states to avoid a military confrontation.
Pinnell said while the nuclear threat remains in the “background,” it wouldn’t necessarily stop Russia from invading Ukraine.
“Is it possible that they could end up marching in Ukraine and eventually leave? Yes, they did that with Georgia,” Pinnell said.
In 2008, Putin invaded Georgia, a country located at the intersection between Eastern Europe and Western Asia, during the opening ceremony of Beijing Olympics.
Pinnell said Putin justified the invasion as a “responsibility to protect Ossetians from Georgian ‘genocide.’ ” Russian officials accused Georgian soldiers of systematically killing hundreds of civilians in the separatist enclave of South Ossetia located near Russia borders, she said.
Georgia was close to joining NATO in 2008 and Russian officials were aware, according to a June 7, 2008 The New York Times article.
“The case of Ukraine is more complex [than Georgia],” Pinnell said. “These are breakaway regions trying to unite with Russia or get autonomy, so the conditions are different.”
According to a February 4 Al Jazeera article, in the Donbass region of Ukraine, located at the eastern border shared with Russia, pro-Russia separatist rebels have declared a Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republic.
Pinnell said there is a real division between Western and Eastern Ukraine.
She said the western side would support the idea of joining NATO, but the eastern part would not, even if they don’t favor uniting with Russia.
“For the moment, this [Russian] mobilization is not a direct invasion, but a massing on the border which means ‘We want to get concessions,’ ” Pinnell said. “I mean the stakes for Russia are the equivalent of having, you know, another country established military bases along the border with Mexico,” said Pinnell.
She described how Russia sees a Ukraine/NATO alliance as a direct threat.
“They now want a commitment that this is never going to happen,” she added.
Accepting Russia’s conditions would send a signal of weakness to the rest of the world, said Sasikumar.
“It would be very difficult for NATO to publicly say to Russia that ‘okay, we agree that we will not allow Ukraine to join because you don’t want Ukraine to join it,’ Sasikumar said.
The U.S. gave $200 million of defensive aid to the Ukrainian army, according to a Jan. 23 Reuters article.
“Every [piece of military equipment] the U.S. gives right now is increasing the morale of Ukrainians,” Zhukov said. “We feel the support from the west, that really gives us hope.” In Kyiv, Zhukov said he witnessed weapon shops run out of bullets because civilians went to buy some, “just in case.”
Zhukov said he believes that Russia won’t invade his country for now but if it happens, his people would fight to keep their independence and democracy.
“I see [the] bright future of Ukraine,” he said.
