A flatbed rail wagon speeding through South-West Russia last week carried an ill omen for negotiations to avert a larger war with Ukraine.
A Buk-M-1, a type of medium-range surface-to-air missile system that became notorious in 2014 after a Russian proxies shot down a Malaysian airliner, killing all 298 people aboard.
If Russia goes to war in Ukraine, it still needs to take a number of steps, including establishing fuel supply lines, opening field hospitals, and deploying air-defence systems such as the Buk, which would protect its heavy weaponry and troops near the front.
Even as Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin sat down to talk about the crisis, Russia was poised to launch a full-scale ground invasion of its neighbour.
These data allow us to conclude that despite the negotiations between Biden and Putin, the concentration of Russian troops in the areas bordering the territory controlled by the Ukrainian authorities continues, wrote the Conflict Intelligence Team CIT, an online research group that used social media, railway schedules and other data to reveal Russia's military buildup on the border.
Putin may decide not to launch an invasion, as he leaves troops near the front as leverage for negotiations. Russian and western analysts believe that this military buildup will cause a series of future crises over Ukraine as Putin seeks to reverse its trajectory towards the west.
Even if Putin gets some good things from the west, serious talks or discussions about guarantees will that be enough for Putin? Tatiana Stanovaya, founder of the political analysis firm R.Politik, said. Russia is witnessing the dawn of a new geopolitical adventurism. Russia sFSB said on Thursday that it had intercepted a Ukrainian ship in the Sea of Azov near Crimea for failing to obey orders. A day later, Russia closed about 70% of the Sea of Azov, a shared body of water used by Ukraine, for firing drills. There is the escalating rhetoric.
Deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov said Russia and the US may be hurtling towards a repeat of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. In a recent meeting, Putin said that the situation in eastern Ukraine looked like genocide and he was worried that he could use his troops to send troops into the country.
Russia s foreign ministry released its list of demands for a possible end to the crisis on Friday, with its military threat on the table. In 2008, the decision to annex Crimea and kill more than 14,000 people motivated Nato to officially disavow the decision of the 2008 Bucharest Nato summit that Ukraine and Georgia will become Nato members.
"Please don't touch Ukraine or there is going to be a problem," said Fyodor Lukyanov, an influential Russian foreign policy analyst who has been involved with Western colleagues about Nato's enlargement in the 2000s. There is a real red line. This kind of engagement with Ukraine on security and military affairs is seen as absolutely unacceptable, right or wrong. Lukyanov said that Putin saw it as his duty not to leave the Ukrainian problem, meaning its trajectory towards the west for the next Russian leader.
The US tried to persuade Russia that Ukraine would not join the alliance in the near future, but on Friday Moscow demanded a more formal declaration. That was a non-starter, according to Jens Stoltenberg, head of Nato, within a few hours of the demand being made public. The 30 Nato allies and Ukraine will decide their relationship with Ukraine, he said at a press conference with Germany's new chancellor, Olaf Scholz.
In Ukraine, support for joining Nato has jumped considerably in recent years, as the country has sought protection from an increasingly aggressive Russia. For the nations on Nato's eastern flank, allowing Russia to dictate the alliance's policy on Ukraine is seen as a first step down a slippery slope towards recognising a Russian sphere of influence.
In an article by Foreign Affairs on Friday, Ukraine's pledges of neutrality do nothing to abate Putin's appetite, but they feed it, according to Ukraine's foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba. The best way to respond to such ultimatums is to ignore them altogether. Analysts said that Russian diplomats had not prepared any formal documents or even formulated the country's demands despite Moscow building up its forces for months. The idea of having more than 100,000 troops within striking distance of the Ukrainian border has struck western observers as overkill and Russia could increase that number to 175,000 by the end of January just to hold talks with Biden.
That brings us back to the Buk, which, as CIT noted, had its numbers crudely painted over in an effort to prevent identification. Russia used similar tactics during its 2014 clandestine invasion of Ukraine.
Putin could pull back, but it would be embarrassing to do so without a solid win in hand. Putin thinks that if Biden wants to move mountains, he can convince allies and convince Kyiv to make concessions, and Russia's demands look impossible to fulfil for the west. This problem could lead Putin to demand the impossible and to push the stakes so high that everything ends in war.