“We’re dealing with a leader who assassinates people on foreign soil, who gratuitously carries out many vicious cyber attacks on other countries, who violates basic norms of international law,” Leuprecht said of Russian president Vladimir Putin. “This is why I don’t think there will be a formal declaration of war, because that would mean they would actually need to play by the rules.”

“Declaring war triggers a host of international obligations, including the application of the Law of Armed Conflict and the UN Declaration on Human Rights,” Leuprecht said in a follow-up email to CTVNews.ca. “Putin is unlikely to declare war precisely because time and again has been intent on eschewing his international obligations.”

Leuprecht said Russia “banks on a grey zone conflict,” where combatants operate under a certain threshold of aggression to avoid outright war being declared and the various human rights obligations that come with it.

Leuprecht said there may be an invasion of some kind, but it would most likely follow theories from U.K. intelligence that suggest a smaller operation to install pro-Russian Ukrainians in government.

“They'll stage a counter-revolution in Kyiv using their GRU intelligence operatives that are already embedded in across all the Ukrainian institutions,” he said, characterizing them as “deeply beholden” to Russian intelligence and “deeply compromised.”

“To stage a counter-revolution, you'll probably need to draw away security assets from Kyiv centre, and stage all sorts of border skirmishes across the country.”

“Then he'll [Putin] send in special ops into Kyiv to install a new government…I think everybody's looking for the war that Putin never intends and the war that isn't going to come. This is going to be a quick and dirty counter-revolution. The troops around the borders are sort of an insurance policy in case things don’t go as planned.”

“This can quickly get out of hand, anybody who thinks that we can contain this conflict to Ukraine is clearly delusional, this is a very dangerous game,” he said.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/in-a-very-dangerous-place-why-one-expert-says-the-russia-ukraine-crisis-won-t-be-a-traditional-war-1.5758377