By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on April 22, 2014

In the wake of Russia’s annexation of Crimea last month, The New York Times has reported on the tactics of subversion and provocation the Kremlin used to destabilise and ultimately conquer parts of Ukraine:

For two weeks, the mysteriously well-armed, professional gunmen known as “green men” have seized Ukrainian government sites in town after town, igniting a brush fire of separatist unrest across eastern Ukraine. Strenuous denials from the Kremlin have closely followed each accusation by Ukrainian officials that the world was witnessing a stealthy invasion by Russian forces.

Now, photographs and descriptions from eastern Ukraine endorsed by the Obama administration on Sunday [April 20] suggest that many of the green men are indeed Russian military and intelligence forces—equipped in the same fashion as Russian special operations troops involved in annexing the Crimea region in February. Some of the men photographed in Ukraine have been identified in other photos clearly taken among Russian troops in other settings.”

In particular, there is one easily-identifiable bearded man who helped incite the mayhem in Georgia in 2008, identified as Igor Ivanovich Strelkov, a Russian military-intelligence (GRU) operative in his mid-50s whose real name is Igor Girkin. He is apparently overseeing the operation in east Ukraine. The Times goes on:

[M]asking the identity of its forces, and clouding the possibilities for international denunciation, is a central part of the Russian strategy, developed over years of conflict in the former Soviet sphere, Ukrainian and American officials say.

John R. Schindler, a former National Security Agency counterintelligence officer who now teaches at the Naval War College, calls it “special war”: “an amalgam of espionage, subversion, even forms of terrorism to attain political ends without actually going to war in any conventional sense.”

And one country, Mr. Schindler noted in an article last year in which he coined the term, that particularly excels at special war is Russia, which carried out its first post-Soviet war to regain control of rebellious Chechnya back in 1994 by sending in a column of armored vehicles filled with Russian soldiers masquerading as pro-Moscow Chechens.

Russia’s flair for “maskirovka”—disguised warfare—has become even more evident under Mr. Putin, a former K.G.B. officer whose closest advisers are mostly from that same Soviet intelligence agency.

The great advantage of this to Russia is not only the “deniability” is gives them, but the “deniability” it gives a weak American President in not responding. By not overtly invading Ukraine, as he did in Georgia, Vladimir Putin holds out to President Obama the option of doing nothing—an option he has found irresistible, time after time, especially in Syria, which was for Moscow the dress-rehearsal of this aggression in Eastern Europe.

Michael Doran recently noted that the absurd idea put out by the administration’s apologists that it was the threat of force that got rid of Bashar al-Assad’s chemical weapons neglects, first, the fact that those weapons are not going anywhere—even if the stockpiles are shipped out, itself doubtful, the production infrastructure will never be surrendered, which means the stockpiles can be back in a few weeks. But more than that:

In return for Russia’s agreeing to help with the chemical-weapons deal, the U.S. would back off from any pursuit of regime change. … Obama’s true message to Assad, Putin, and Khamenei was not, “Negotiate with me or face military action” but “Hand me a fig leaf and I will retreat”.

Given that the entire fiasco—from Kerry’s “goof” in London onwards—was itself a Russian “active measures” campaign, the truth is quite plain: that chemical weapons “deal”—which re-legitimised the Syrian dictator, including savage and indiscriminate campaigns of massacre and reconquest in Safira and Qalamoun, and gave him a free pass for all measures of warfare with conventional weapons, while abandoning even the pretence that America wanted to force him aside—was a defeat, a heavy and near-total humiliation by the Kremlin of an administration that had shown it was more frightened of using American force than it was of allowing its own credibility to be destroyed by a petty tyrant and the erasure of one of the few international norms left to us, namely the no-no of using weapons of mass destruction against civilians.

Having taken the measure of President Obama in this way over something as easy as Syria, Putin was in no doubt that he could have Crimea and eastern Ukraine. Putin needed only to provide President Obama a fig leaf, and even then not indefinitely: as in Syria, that fig leaf can fall after a time, and the administration can admit error—or at least spin in such a way that the error is conceded and the blame is not—while then saying it is too late to do anything about it.

Those who complain will be accused of being warmongers and there will be plenty of “realists” on hand to explain that this is the natural order of things, with a Russian “sphere of influence” in the East. “Realism” it seems means accepting America’s enemies’ demands as facts of the world, and finding ways to accommodate oneself to them. They used to call this appeasement, and the script is always the same. The Western democracies refuse to fight—or be clearly prepared to fight, which is often enough—a small war in the short-term, which opens the road to a larger war and greater bloodshed later. Here we go again.