Ukraine’s Rookie Leader Ups the Ante in Match-Up With Putin

(Bloomberg) -- Best known as a TV comic before he shot to power this spring, Ukraine‘s leader isn’t joking any longer.

Looking for a quick win early in his presidency, Volodymyr Zelenskiy has prioritized freeing the Ukrainian sailors held by Russia after a naval clash in 2018. Talks last week with Vladimir Putin yielded little, but the stakes rose dramatically on Thursday when Ukraine seized a Russian oil tanker and its crew.

It’s a bold gambit. Putin is comfortable locking horns with Russia’s ex-Soviet neighbors and isn’t afraid to up the ante even further. In fact, it came as a surprise when he recently rejected the idea of sanctions against Georgia following anti-Kremlin protests in Tbilisi.

Even so, the risk is that Zelenkiy’s bravado backfires.

“There’s a risk that it will cause tough response from Russia,” Volodymyr Fesenko, head of the Penta research institute in Kiev, said by phone.

Later Thursday, it looked like Zelenskiy wanted to lower the temperature as the Russian embassy in Kiev announced that the ten crew members -- all Russians -- were released.

But Ukraine still has the vessel -- a small tanker built in 1989 to carry gasoline and diesel. And Putin, who remains desperate to reclaim some sway in Ukraine after protests wrenched the country out of Russia’s orbit and toward the European Union, won’t like the optics of his ship being seized.

The blowback, when it comes, may be painful. Russia’s foreign ministry has promised a swift response consisting, ominously, of “appropriate measures.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Yulia Surkova in Kiev at ysurkova@bloomberg.net;Andrew Langley in London at alangley1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Andrea Dudik at adudik@bloomberg.net, Balazs Penz, Flavia Krause-Jackson

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