Moscow deliberately upped the ante in Donbas and filled the dog days of August with endless speculation that it might launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine (Interfax, August 15). The cycle of troop movements, placing units on alert, and announcing snap inspections was matched by rhetoric concerning the ongoing upward trend in modernizing Russia’s Armed Forces.
However, the “threat” of war never materialized, and the guns of August gave way to the bluffs of August: a pattern of threat and coercion used by Moscow since the onset of the Ukraine crisis to maintain pressure on Kyiv and keep the North …read more
Source: The Jamestown Foundation
