Russia's aim is to smash Ukraine bit by bit, expert says

Over the last few weeks, as allied Western nations screamed from the rooftops that a further invasion of Ukraine was nigh, the people at the centre of this extraordinary crisis in eastern Europe have been patiently waiting for the proverbial other shoe to drop.

And now it seems it has.

It wasn't as though, with their suppressed anxiety and studied skepticism, the Ukrainians were willfully blind as they pushed back against the warnings. They could see the massive Russian military buildup on their border and knew what it meant.

They have seen this movie before, a couple of times. The difference was that before, we in the West weren't paying attention, or perhaps didn't fully understand what was unfolding in the complicated layers of post-Soviet politics.  

What was missing for several weeks throughout the sky-is-falling invasion warnings was pretext, many Ukrainian leaders and senior officials have argued to anyone who would listen. 

Moscow, they said, needed a set of circumstances that they could use — or engineer — to give Russian military action a veneer of global legitimacy.

"The matter of justification of the invasion is crucial for them to avoid serious international punishment," Oleksandr Danylyuk, Ukraine's former national security chief, told CBC News in a recent interview. 

With Russian President Vladimir Putin's recognition on Monday of two breakaway Eastern Ukrainian regions as so-called "independent" republics and his order for Russian peacekeepers to protect them, the final missing piece of this tragic international puzzle fell into place.  

Interestingly, the Russian parliament last week called on Putin to recognize the autonomy of both the Donetsk and Luhansk regions — a notion the Russian president's spokesperson initially swatted away as a violation of the international agreements that have tried to end the seven-year proxy war in the region.

"As we can see, the West is mostly not ready for a real clash with Russia, and Russia is very good at giving them, you know, excuses to say that this is not a very certain situation," said Danylyuk, who now heads the Centre for Defence Reforms, a Kyiv-based think-tank that has studied Russian warfare methods.

The goal, he said, is to dismember the country, piece by piece.

"It's not a matter about their ability to invade Ukraine. It's about their ability to control Ukraine after that," said Danylyuk.

"That's why the partition of Ukraine into several parts — this is what they need. In such a case, they could leave the central and western Ukraine for some time and start digesting the east and the south."

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, reacting to Putin's decree, tweeted on Monday that "Canada strongly condemns Russia's recognition of so-called 'independent states' in Ukraine."