No one wants war, but this is how one gets a war. Two angry states are poking and probing at the flammable edges of an extended war zone, each acting in what it believes is a controlled fashion with little risk of escalation, but each ready to risk the next step if the price of retreat seems too high. Here begins the chain of actions and reactions coupled with miscalculations leading to a conflagration neither wants or expects.
The violent incident on the approach to the Kerch Strait is not how many in the West envisage the path to war in Europe. That path is different from Russia using stealth to take a bite out of the Baltic states. It is also not Moscow heating up the war in Donbas before launching an assault on all of eastern Ukraine or conquering a land bridge from Donbas to Crimea. Nor was it Russia using a snap exercise to disguise an attack on a soft portion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s defenses.
Instead, the Kerch Strait crisis depicts a more realistic path to tragedy. Russia’s 2014 seizure of Crimea was rightly seen as a serious violation of international norms, but few at the time recognized it as creating new tinder for war—other than maybe out of a long-term smoldering Ukrainian revanchism. But Crimea under Russian control, when Russian-Ukrainian relations are so inflamed, is producing a potentially dramatic security problem. The base for a conflict that flies out of control often resides less in early actions, however alarming, but in the stakes inspiring them—and, in this case, the stakes are high.
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