Last week the White House accused Moscow of sending saboteurs into eastern Ukraine to create a provocation that would give Vladimir Putin an excuse to invade the country, after amassing 100,000 troops on its borders.
No hard evidence was presented. The assessment was reportedly based on U.S. intercepts and movements of certain individuals. But the accusation reminded me of the provocations Putin used to justify his first invasion of Ukraine, which I saw on a reporting trip in 2014. They involved using pro-Russian agents to terrorize Russian-speaking Ukrainians with the goal of convincing them they must turn to Moscow to protect them.
In other words, Putin was willing to harm those Ukrainians he professed to support in order to convince them to turn against the Ukrainian government. These kinds of provocations worked in the easternmost regions of Russia, the Donbas, which is now controlled by Russian proxies who are armed by Moscow and supported by nonuniformed Russian troops.
