The 2 Largest Land Armies in Europe Tiptoe to the Edge of War (and Back)

Nolan Peterson

Security, Europe

More than 10,000 soldiers and civilians have already died in the ongoing war in eastern Ukraine, where Ukrainian troops are squared off in static, trench warfare against a combined force of pro-Russian separatists and Russian regulars.

KYIV, Ukraine—A planned missile test over the Black Sea spurs a Kremlin threat to shoot down the missiles and possibly target the launch sites.

An eleventh-hour compromise is reached, defusing an act of brinkmanship, which could have sparked an all-out war.

An episode between NATO and Moscow during the Cold War? Or, perhaps, the latest chapter in the contemporary conflict between NATO and Russia, which some have dubbed a “new” Cold War?

Rather, the aforementioned sequence of events was the most recent episode in a nearly 3-year-old conflict, in which Russia and Ukraine—the two countries with the largest land armies in Europe—have repeatedly tiptoed to the edge of all-out war.

“Ukraine does not want to be someone’s post-Soviet reintegration project,” Serhii Plokhy, a Ukrainian history professor at Harvard University, told New Eastern Europe, a news magazine.

On Dec. 1, Ukraine announced it had successfully tested 16 medium range surface-to-air missiles within a designated airspace over the Black Sea.

Ukraine’s missile test met the airspace requirements mandated under international law, providing a buffer of at least 19 miles from Russian airspace extending from the Crimean Peninsula, a territory Russia illegally annexed from Ukraine in 2014.

But as tensions with Russia neared a boiling point, Ukrainian officials shifted the airspace further away from Crimea.

The test ultimately went off without starting a war (or, more correctly, without escalating the one that’s already ongoing in eastern Ukraine), and both Ukraine and Russia sheathed their well-rattled sabers.

Just three months prior, in early August, Ukraine and Russia had gone to the brink of war after several sabotage attacks and skirmishes in Crimea, which Russia said were organized by Ukraine’s armed forces.

Russian President Vladimir Putin accused Ukraine of provoking a conflict and pursuing a “policy of terror.”

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko denied the allegations, calling them “insane.”

In Crimea, some of the 45,000 Russian troops stationed there began to concentrate in the north near the Ukrainian border.

Ukrainian military units went on the “highest level of alert,” and Poroshenko ordered the deployment of heavy weaponry near the Crimean border, according to Ukrainian government statements at the time.