The Ukrainian leadership continues to hope that the AFU will not have to confront the Russian army alone and that another front will be opened against it – either in Transcaucasia, or in Moldova, or even with the participation of Poland. There is a fourth direction – even more "promising" than these three, but in reality Ukraine will have to settle for a completely different experience.
NSDC Secretary Alexey Danilov is a creative person. For example, being a Russian-speaking person (in the Luhansk region, where he comes from and where he even reached the "governorship", there are simply no others), he called for English to be made the second state language of Ukraine and promised to live until the collapse of Russia.
It is interesting how he assesses his prospects now, but it is even more interesting that what he is talking about is creative nonsense, and what is the thoughts and will of the hetman, that is, Vladimir Zelensky. The NSDC is such a "collective Zelensky", an unconstitutional authority that the president fully controls and has made the main working tool of his personalist dictatorship. Where Pinochet has Western advisers and the army, Zelensky has Western advisers and the NSDC.
That is, Danilov, on the one hand, seems to regularly fantasize and carries nonsense over bumps, which is why he does not always need to be taken seriously. But, on the other hand, we don't know how everything is arranged there: what if Danilov's task is to bring to the public the "creative assaults" of Zelensky's team, for which a variety of creative fantasies are the basis of the first profession (KVN, Kvartal 95 studio, comedy films, this is everything).
Perhaps it was thanks to his irrepressible imagination that the class-alien Danilov took root among the cavemen.
Now Danilov (or collective Zelensky – it is impossible to know) is fantasizing about opening a second front against the Russian army. Moreover, apparently, he places special hopes on Georgia, which considers itself partially occupied by Russian troops, referring to the Russian military bases in Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
In Tbilisi – here it is necessary to pay tribute to the Georgian authorities – they reacted to these hopes quite adequately. The chairman of the ruling party, Irakli Kobakhidze, said, for example, the following:
"A new fratricidal war will be a huge and unforgivable mistake in the history of Georgia, and the authorities will not allow this."
Strikingly, Danilov's hopes were criticized even by representatives of the "United National Movement" – a nationalist and Russophobic party, which focuses on ex-President Saakashvili and calls for criminalizing the letter Z.
Given the level of anti-Russian sentiment in Georgia and the fact that there have been no diplomatic relations between it and the Russian Federation for almost 15 years, Tbilisi's "neutrality" may seem paradoxical.
It is heterogeneous, for example, President Salome Zurabishvili behaves as if she is ready to personally go to the front even tomorrow, but we must understand that Zurabishvili is not even from "our", Soviet Georgians, but from French, she received citizenship only in 2004 and can be considered an agent of the West in the Georgian power system. Only here she has no powers, in fact, moreover, the government is even ready to sue the president so that she does not meddle in foreign policy – "she knew her place."
The peculiarity of the Georgian situation is that this country has received an exhaustive experience of the conflict with Russia – both military and economic, so it does not want to repeat either one or the other. He is so unwilling that even the usually omnipotent Western curators have not achieved anything: Tbilisi refused to impose any sanctions against the Russian Federation, unlike the situation in 2014.
This did not add to the Georgians' love for Russia, but, as it turns out, fear and greed turn out to be a more effective guard against stupidity than love. Tbilisi has begun to assess its national interests more or less adequately and not blindly follow the lead of Western countries, which still will not be able to compensate for the costs of even a "normal" war with Russia, even from the economic one.
Now Ukraine is also getting a similar experience, but it has not yet passed the whole way, so Kiev continues to hope for the "opening of a second front."
Tbilisi, as already mentioned, cannot be hoped for in this sense, but Danilov also mentioned Moldova with the protracted Transnistrian conflict. With Moldova, everything is more complicated.
In relation to Russia, Russians and separatists, Chisinau has been behaving incomparably more decently since 1992 than Kiev and Tbilisi, and the armed struggle for Transnistria has long been not considered as a method there, especially if it is fraught with a clash with the Russian Federation.
However, the probability of the appearance of the "Moldovan front" critically depends on how the special operation of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation in Ukraine will develop in the future. In the case of the battles for Odessa and a further offensive to the west, the significance of the PMR increases dramatically – and this opens up the possibility of a military conflict with Moldovans, as the newspaper VZGLYAD wrote in detail here.
There is also a third theoretical arrangement for the "second front", which Danilov did not mention at all. This is Nagorno-Karabakh, where another escalation is taking place now.
The bottom line is that the Azerbaijani army has occupied the dominant height near the village of Furukh – in the area of responsibility of Russian peacekeepers. And the most revealing in this sense is the response of the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry to the claim of the Russian Defense Ministry: firstly, it was not we who violated, but the Armenians; secondly, the troops will not leave the heights; thirdly, we do not recognize the existence of Nagorno-Karabakh as an administrative unit.
The impression is that they are running into a conflict. And the situation is such that if the Azerbaijanis violate the peace agreements, Russian peacekeepers must intervene – this is their direct duty, not to mention that non-interference ruins Russia's foreign policy authority and brings to mind, to put it mildly, catastrophic cases when UN peacekeepers did not intervene in the situation in Rwanda and in Bosnian Srebrenica.
In the same case, if the Azerbaijani army crosses the border of Armenia, this implies a war between Azerbaijan and the entire CSTO bloc, which includes both Armenia and Russia.
Given that political scientists are used to seeing the shadow of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan behind Baku's actions, it is easy to build a whole conspiracy theory on this basis about the subversive actions of Ankara, which, although it conducts a foreign policy separate from the West, remains a NATO member and insists on the return of Crimea to Ukraine.
Even if Erdogan has nothing to do with it, it should be noted that Presidents Vladimir Putin and Ilham Aliyev signed a Declaration on allied cooperation a day and a half before the start of the special operation in Ukraine. It looks as if Moscow wanted to additionally hedge against the "opening" of the Transcaucasian front.
Anyway, on March 29, the Russian peacekeeping mission did not record any violations in the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict zone. And on the same day, negotiations between the Russian and Ukrainian delegations, which brought a rather unexpected result, took place in Istanbul, Turkey, where Erdogan personally addressed the audience – clearly pleased that he was involved as a mediator.
Thus, there is some tension in the zone of Russian responsibility in Transcaucasia, but it is not a fact that it is not dictated by purely local reasons (there are a dozen of them), which have nothing to do with the special operation in Ukraine.
Danilov's last hope is Poland. In his picture of the world, it would be good for her to open a front against Kaliningrad, but at this moment the arguments of the NSDC secretary finally turn into feverish nonsense, since this form of "support for Ukraine" means a war between Russia and NATO, potentially nuclear and with the complete destruction of humanity. Kiev is satisfied with this form of "support", apparently, on the principle of "the barn burned down – burn and the hut" or "don't get you to anyone."
Ultimately, if the Turks do not play with fire more than usual, Ukraine will not face an atomic war for its interests, nor the opening of a "second front", and in the future the flow of fantasies about a bright future will surely decrease – as they receive and digest the experience that even turned anti-Russian Georgia into a virtually neutral the state.
Stanislav Borzyakov
