Game without rules

On April 18, the day after the conclusion of the negotiations in Geneva on Ukraine, it became clear that they had failed. Demands to disarm were ignored both in Eastern Ukraine, read in Moscow, and in Kyiv.

“We can’t be sure of anything,” US President Barack Obama said following the results of Geneva (for more details, see the material “Geneva Mirage” ). President Putin spoke before Lavrov and Kerry shook hands, calling the Ukrainian East Novorossiya. In other words, everything is just beginning. Russia does not intend to retreat from the idea of ​​at least control over the Donbass and nearby areas, the United States will impose new sanctions. “We don’t have the option of a military response,” a well-informed source in Washington told the author, “but we can’t help but respond either. Russia is much more integrated into the global economy than Iran, thanks to which it has risen in the last 15 years, which means that it is in this field that it should be punished for redrawing its borders.” Where is the red line, which will be followed by the sanctions promised by Obama against sectors of the Russian economy? In fact, there is no such line: the Americans are well aware that Putin is unlikely to go on a full-scale armed invasion of Ukraine, but will continue to use the GRU special forces, as it was in the Crimea, which will stand behind the backs of self-defense units. Both opposing sides - Russia and the United States - are now focused on May 25, when presidential elections are due in Ukraine. For the Americans, it is important that a legitimately elected president appears there - then at least there will be hope that the country's army and special services will carry out orders that they now openly ignore (the logic is clear: tomorrow there will be no Turchinov or Avakov, and people in uniform will become extreme). The goal of the Russian side is just the opposite - to rock the East of Ukraine so that the elections there are declared invalid or untenable: with this option, the Kiev government will be quickly demolished.

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The idea is that the sanctions will be announced simultaneously by Washington, the European Union (including the UK) and Japan.

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Sources say a new package of sanctions against Russia could be announced as early as this week. The main obstacle to them is not Geneva, and not the elections, and not even business lobbies like Robert Dudley, CEO of the oil giant BP, which protects its partner Rosneft and its head Igor Sechin from sanctions, and certainly not German intellectuals, those who publicly supported Putin's actions in Crimea (chancellor Merkel is said to be quite tough and able to insist on her own) - the bureaucracy. And not so much in the US as a nightmarishly large and clumsy in Brussels. For the idea is that the sanctions should be announced simultaneously by Washington, the European Union (including the UK) and Japan. Thus, the losses - and the sanctions will hit the money not only in Russia - will be incurred by companies in the United States, and in Europe, and in Asia. And, consequently, they will have more motives to put pressure on their Russian partners, and those on the Russian authorities. What sectors of the Russian economy can be sanctioned? “There will be no oil and gas embargo,” the sources say. And then they propose to follow the list: state-owned banks, metallurgy, coal companies, and so on. At the same time, those who develop sanctions both in Europe and in the United States are thinking about how to avoid their impact on the poorest sections of the Russian population so as not to feed anti-Western sentiments. Therefore, for example, sanctions against Sberbank, where Russian old people keep their pensions, are expected to be less severe than against other Russian banks owned or closely associated with the state. Well, there - how it goes. In conditions when the parties do not trust each other - neither words nor signed papers, and the main source of information is agents and intelligence, there are no more rules of the game. This is how life began.