PUTIN’S CRISIS SPREADS, an “influx” of refugees seeking asylum in Russia

But, while claiming the authority of a great nation, Russia has been operating like a dangerous adventurist, with no regard for credibility or recognition. Right now, Putin stands ready to annex Crimea: the peninsula is controlled by Russian troops, and the newly installed government has said that it will hold a referendum on March 16th, when it is expected to proclaim Crimea part of Russia. Meanwhile, in Moscow, the legislature is speeding up a law enabling annexations of foreign territory.

While all politicians lie, the escalation of Russia’s dispute with Ukraine into an aggressive redrawing of European borders has been fueled by a series of unusually egregious lies and false claims.

On Friday, aPresidential spokesman saidthat Putin had a “firm intention not to interfere in the domestic affairs of a neighbor”—a surprising statement, given that just a few days earlier, Putin requested his parliament’s authorization for an invasion of Ukraine.

Just after the upper house of Russia’s parliament voted to authorize the use of force in Ukraine, the Speaker of the House,Valentina Matvienko, told the pressthat there had been casualties in a shootout in Crimea. The Russian Foreign Ministry made the same grim statement.

The next day, it turned out that there had been no casualties at all—the Russian consul in Crimea confirmed that nobody had been killed or wounded. Two days later, at a press conference,Putin emphasizedthat there had been “not a single shot, not a single victim.” He repeated “not a single shot” three times. Not to their credit, none of the journalists asked him about the obvious contradiction between his comments and those Russia’s high-ranking officials had made in justifying a potential invasion of Ukraine.

In a meeting of the United Nations Security Council on March 5th, Ambassador Vitaly Churkin of Russia showed the other Council members a sheet of paper with a few lines and a signature—this, he said, was the ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych’s request for a Russian military intervention in Ukraine. TheRussian ambassador quoted Yanukovychas saying, in the letter, that Ukraine “has plunged into chaos and anarchy,” and was “in the grip of outright terror and violence driven by the West. … People are persecuted on political and language grounds.” But, after the mayhem in Kiev in late February, reports from Ukraine show no real evidence of chaos or persecution, except for attempts by pro-Russian groups and forces to seize government buildings in eastern Ukraine. What’s more, nobody has so much as seen Yanukovych since a bizarre press conference that he held in Russia on February 28th—a week before the ambassador waved his letter—let alone heard him confirm that he asked foreign forces to invade his country. (He mentioned no such desire at his press conference.) He has completely disappeared. Rumors have it that Yanukovych has been confined to a hospital after a grave heart attack; the uncertainty has led to open speculation that he might even be dead. Asked about these rumors during his press conference, Putin said that Yanukovych was “alive and well and wishes you the same.” Putin then repeated a popular Russian joke: “He’ll still have a chance of catching a cold at the funeral of those who are spreading this information.”

Russian officials and government media reported an “influx” of refugees seeking asylum in Russia. The numbers varied from vague “thousands,” reported by the governors of the Russian regions bordering on Ukraine, to an amazing “hundred and forty-three thousand” cited in a government newspaper. But there were no refugees from Ukraine. Russian television showeda crowd at a border crossingsupposedly fleeing to Russia—except that viewers quickly identified the crossing as one between Ukraine and Poland, not between Ukraine and Russia. And the crowd was just the regular line of border crossers, not throngs of wretched refugees running for their lives. The United Nations, as well as Russia’s own Federal Migration Service, promptly announced that the earlier information about the refugees was simply untrue.

At the time of Putin’s press conference, thousands of troops wearing Russian uniforms without insignias had already landed in the Crimean peninsula and proceeded to disarm the Ukrainian military. The troops referred to themselves as forces of the “Crimean self-defense,” but, on several occasions, they admitted to journalists that they were indeed Russian servicemen. “The people who were blocking the Ukrainian Army units in Crimea were wearing uniforms that strongly resembled the Russian Army uniform. Were those Russian soldiers, Russian military?” a journalist asked. (He was later hailed by colleagues for his audacity.)

“Why don’t you take a look at the post-Soviet states,” Putin responded. “There are many uniforms there that are similar. You can go to a store and buy any kind of uniform.”

“But were they Russian soldiers or not?”

“Those were local self-defense units,” Putin said.

The next day, the Russian Minister of Defense alsodisavowed his own soldiers; he dismissed reports about the presence of the Russian troops in Crimea as “nonsense.” When asked just how modern Russian military equipment and armored vehicles with Russian military license plates had ended up in Crimea, the minister said that he had “no clue.” On Friday, a Pentagon spokesman said thatthe number of Russian troopshad reached twenty thousand.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, in 1962, Soviet troops secretly deployed to Cuba cared much more about hiding their presence. They camouflaged their missiles and did not even wear military uniforms: “their appearance could scarcely have been less military. They were wearing a strange assortment of clothes: checkered shirts, military trousers cut above the knees, heavy Russian boots with tops sliced off and holes for ventilation in the tropical heat,” Michael Dobbs writes in his book “One Minute to Midnight.” In Crimea, these days, the Russian government does not care about disguises; it just lies.

At home, Putin’s authoritarian grip keeps him politically unchallenged. Hisapproval ratinghad grown, in a February poll, to sixty-seven per cent. He is right because he says so.

But, in the West, Putin has no credibility left. The U.S. State Department put together and circulated a list ofPutin’s ten “false claims”about Ukraine. The E.U. emergency summit on Thursday dismissed the Kremlin’s denial about the presence of Russian troops in Crimea. Even Russia’s closest allies among the ex-Soviet states, such as Belarus and Kazakhstan, have not gone along with Putin. China, which often supports Russia at the U.N. Security Council, this timechose to sidewith the United States. Isolated from the rest of the world, Putin is prepared to grab part of Ukraine’s territory. This presages a crisis that could spread well outside Ukraine, and even beyond Europe.