Today's D Brief: Russia re-invades Ukraine's east; EU sanctions begin; Mariupol's fate in question; DC Guard on standby; And a bit more.

Russia has launched a military invasion of eastern Ukraine and its Luhansk and Donetsk regions, which Russia first invaded almost exactly eight years ago. Just as then, Reuters reports, Russian tanks and military vehicles are rolling through Ukraine’s eastern roads without markings or insignia—similar to Moscow’s 2014 “little green men” invasion tactic that bought Russia a small but significant window of time before the world fully understood what was happening. There is no such plausible deniability here.

Indeed, Russia’s autocratic leader announced the developments in a speech Monday in Moscow, declaring that he is recognizing Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics as independent—and so, by 69-year-old Vladimir Putin’s revanchist thinking, a new Russian military invasion wouldn’t violate Ukraine’s sovereignty. 

“Ukraine has become a colony of puppets,” Putin insisted in an hour-long speech occasionally delivered in forceful, angry tones. “Ukrainians squandered not only everything we gave them during the U.S.S.R., but even everything they inherited from the Russian empire.”

“Let me emphasize once again that Ukraine for us is not just a neighboring country,” Putin said. “It is an integral part of our own history, culture, [and] spiritual space.” Therefore, “I consider it necessary to take a long-overdue decision: To immediately recognize the independence and sovereignty of [the] Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic,” said Putin. 

Unsurprisingly, “Putin bent Ukraine’s complex history into his own version” in that speech, the New York Times reported Monday evening after Vladimir’s hour-long diatribe. The Associated Press emphatically agreed, calling Putin’s take on Russian history a “fiction” and that “Ukraine has its own thousand-year history.” The Wall Street Journal called it an “hourlong recitation of decades worth of historical grievances and an unmistakable challenge by Moscow to the post-Cold War international order.” 

Get the facts: The BBC also annotated Putin’s address, and corrected the record where necessary here. 

Several big questions loom at this apparently still-early stage of Russia’s new invasion, including: 

• Will Russian troops and equipment launch an offensive beyond the two breakaway regions, to the Dnieper River and the capital city of Kyiv, then on to the rest of Ukraine?
• What will become of Ukraine’s port city of Mariupol, on the Sea of Azov—in Donetsk, but not in territory held by Russian-backed troops? (See, e.g., this Times map.) Russian state-run media TASS on Tuesday morning seemed to be laying the groundwork for a later offensive in Mariupol.

More below the fold.

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Welcome to this Tuesday edition of The D Brief, brought to you by Ben Watson, with Jennifer Hlad. If you’re not already subscribed to The D Brief, you can do that here. 

Invasion reax from Kyiv: “We owe nothing to anyone and will not give anything to anyone,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a televised address at 2 a.m. local time. “We are on our own land…We are not afraid of anything or anyone.”
White House reax: “An invasion is an invasion and that is what is underway, but Russia has been invading Ukraine since 2014...I am calling it an invasion,” said Jon Finer, principal deputy national security adviser, to CNN Tuesday morning.
“There will be losses,” Ukraine’s Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov warned in a statement Tuesday following Zelenskyy’s remarks. “The Kremlin has made yet another step towards [the] resurrection of the Soviet Union, with a new Warsaw Pact and Berlin Wall. The only thing that stands in between is Ukraine and its army…We will have to endure pain, overcome fear and despair,” he said.
“Many guided by emotions will urge chaotic decisions,” Reznikov cautioned. “We will not allow this. Our strength is in unity and confidence, and in cool head.” Read the rest of that quietly historic address, here.
Ukraine’s top diplomat is in Washington today, where Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba has already canceled a speaking engagement with NATO wonks at the Atlantic Council.
Germany says the Nord Stream 2 pipeline is now on pause, Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced Tuesday. “The situation today is fundamentally different” from when Berlin first welcomed the deal years ago. “And that's why we must reevaluate this situation, in view of the latest developments,” he said.
Russia’s Dmitry Medvedev hit back on Twitter, warning cynically, “Welcome to the brave new world where Europeans are very soon going to pay €2.000 for 1.000 cubic meters of natural gas!” And that means he’s threatening to more than double the current price of gas for Europe, Dmitri Alperovitch tweeted.
The European Union has already begun sanctioning 351 Russian lawmakers who voted for Luhansk and Donetsk’s independence, as well as more than two dozen officials and military commanders believed to be helping with troop movements into Ukraine. “The EU has prepared and stands ready to adopt additional measures at a later stage if needed in the light of further developments,” officials said in a statement Tuesday.
Some observers warn: Now is not (yet) the time for comprehensive sanctions. That’s the message from the New York Times’ editorial board. Instead, the E.U., U.S. and Ukraine’s allies should gradually ratchet up sanctions in accordance with Moscow’s own escalation, beyond the two breakaway regions of Luhansk and Donetsk. A wider invasion, the board writes, should be met with “the full fusillade of punitive measures.”
Back stateside, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R.-S.C., wants to unleash the weight of U.S. sanctions now “to destroy the ruble and crush the Russian oil and gas sector,” he tweeted Monday afternoon. “Putin’s decision to declare eastern Donetsk and Luhansk as independent regions within Ukraine is both a violation of the Minsk Agreements and a declaration of war against the people of Ukraine,” Graham said. “When it comes to thugs like Putin disrupting world order and destroying democracies—enough is enough.”
For Graham, America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan is largely to blame. Now that Kabul is back in Taliban control, “every thuggish figure on the planet is licking their chops, including the Iranians and the Chinese,” Graham tweeted after Putin’s speech Monday. “I stand ready, willing, and able to work with the Biden Administration to impose the most crushing sanctions possible on the Russian economy. The question is whether the Biden Administration has the will and determination to do so.”
Related reading: 

• “Calls for more US troops increase during Austin’s visit,” Stars and Stripes reported late last week;  

By 2023, the U.S. Navy wants to launch a joint Middle East drone force with allies like Israel, the Associated Press reported Monday from Abu Dhabi. The plans seem to involve “100 unmanned drones, both sailing and submersible, [that] would dramatically multiply the surveillance capacities of the U.S. Navy” around the waters of the Middle East.
Such systems are “the only way to cover whatever gaps that we have today,” U.S. Navy Fifth Fleet Vice Adm. Brad Cooper said. Read more, here. 

And lastly, the D.C. National Guard is on standby for a planned “trucker protest” that could come to the nation’s capital over the next few weeks, Military Times reported Monday.
For the record, “Law enforcement agencies across the National Capital Region are aware of plans for a series of truck convoys arriving in Washington, DC,  around the time of the State of the Union,” the U.S. Capitol Police said in a statement on Friday.
Background: It began up north in Canada, Howard Altman and Davis Winkie write. And those protests were “first aimed at a COVID-19 vaccine mandate for cross-border truckers, but also encompassed fury over the range of COVID-19 restrictions and hatred of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, [and] reflected the spread of disinformation in Canada and simmering populist and right-wing anger.” Read on, here.