Paul Goble writes: Commentators have long celebrated the fact that the USSR broke up with little violence in 1991 – the conflicts in Abkhazia, Tajikistan, Nagorno-Karabakh, Transdniestria and Chechnya typically have been treated as exceptions that prove the rule. But now, many of the unresolved issues from 23 years ago are leading to violence as in Ukraine.

In an editorial article in today’s Vedomosti, Nikolay Epple and Maksim Trudolyubov argue that for two decades, Russia and Ukraine sought to avoid the outcome that had occurred in Serbia and Croatia, but that did not mean that “the revolutionary processes” in the two were “overcome but only “put off”.

The ongoing crisis in Ukraine shows more sharply than ever before that Ukrainians cannot avoid facing some critical issues any longer, including “the geopolitical choice between Europe and Russia, real sovereignty or dependence on ‘the elder brother,’ the unification of the country on the basis of a new national self-consciousness or its split via ‘federalization.’”

And “the development of the postponed revolution in Ukraine will inevitably have an impact on Russia as well” because “the exit of Ukraine from the post-Soviet space will confront Russia with the need to reformat its own historical matrix.” [Continue reading…]

Reuters reports: Holding military drills on Ukraine’s border and sending bombers to the edge of NATO airspace, Russia’s newly reformed armed forces are in just the kind of regional confrontation it was redesigned for, experts say.

Moscow has increased defence spending by about 30 percent since its 2008 war with Georgia, and those who study it say the money has been spent not just on hardware but on a much more flexible military structure.

The result, they say, is a more streamlined force that can mobilise key units in a matter of days and support President Vladimir Putin’s goal to reassert Russian influence over countries it once controlled within the former Soviet Union. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports from Slovyansk: The rebel leader spread a topographic map in front of a closed grocery store here as a Ukrainian military helicopter flew past a nearby hill. Ukrainian troops had just seized positions along a river, about a mile and a half away. The commander thought they might advance.

He issued orders with the authority of a man who had seen many battles. “Go down to the bridge and set up the snipers,” the leader, who gave only a first name, Yuri, said to a former Ukrainian paratrooper, who jogged away.

Yuri commands the 12th Company, part of the self-proclaimed People’s Militia of the Donetsk People’s Republic, a previously unknown and often masked rebel force that since early April has seized government buildings in eastern Ukraine and, until Saturday, held prisoner a team of European military observers it accused of being NATO spies.

His is one of the faces behind the shadowy paramilitary takeover. But even with his mask off, much about his aims, motivations and connections remains murky, illustrating why this expanding conflict is still so complex.

Yuri, who appears to be in his mid-50s, is in many ways an ordinary eastern Ukrainian of his generation. A military veteran, he survived the Soviet collapse to own a small construction business in Druzhkovka, about 15 miles south of here.

But his rebel stature has a particular root: He is also a former Soviet special forces commander who served in Afghanistan, a background that could make him both authentically local and a capable Kremlin proxy.

In this war, clouded by competing claims on both sides, one persistent mystery has been the identity and affiliations of the militiamen, who have pressed the confrontation between Russia and the West into its latest bitter phase.

Moscow says they are Ukrainians and not part of the Russian armed forces, as the so-called green men in Crimea turned out to be.

Western officials and the Ukrainian government insist that Russians have led, organized and equipped the fighters.

A deeper look at the 12th Company — during more than a week of visiting its checkpoints, interviewing its fighters and observing them in action against a Ukrainian military advance here on Friday — shows that in its case neither portrayal captures the full story. [Continue reading…]

James Miller writes: Ever since it became clear that Russian forces were operating in Crimea, it’s been a pretty safe assumption that almost any information flowing out of Moscow has been BS used to justify Russia’s Ukrainian land grab.

But Russia had been slowly choking off dissent and independent media long before its takeover of Crimea — it’s just that the Kremlin accelerated the process once the crisis began. And that was no accident, as the dissemination of propaganda is a crucial part of Moscow’s strategy to gain control of eastern (and perhaps the rest of) Ukraine.

On the surface, it appears that Vladimir Putin is poised to use the same strategy he employed in Crimea. Soon after then-president Viktor Yanukovych fled Ukraine, spetsnaz (Russian Special Forces) airborne units joined with personnel from the Black Sea fleet who were already stationed on the Crimean peninsula, then proceeded to capture government buildings, erect checkpoints, and eventually gain control of the entire region. With the peninsula under Russia’s military control, Moscow installed allies in the Crimean government, held a referendum, and used the result — an unconstitutional sham in which even children voted — to justify the official annexation of Crimea into the Russian Federation.

A close look at what’s been happening in eastern Ukraine reveals key differences, however. For starters, eastern Ukraine didn’t already have Russian military installations and troops stationed there. In addition, eastern Ukraine is much larger, with a far bigger population. Traditional thinking holds that in order to control a region that large, Russia would need a full-scale military invasion — and with tens of thousands of troops and armored vehicles stacked up just a few miles from Ukraine’s border, many observers are waiting for those forces to inevitably pour in.

But that may never need to happen, because Russia has a weapon at its disposal in eastern Ukraine that has arguably proved more effective than all of its military hardware could have ever been. This weapon has already defeated anything the interim government in Kiev — or the entirety of the international community, for that matter — has wielded against it.

That weapon is the Kremlin’s propaganda machine. [Continue reading…]

RUSI Analysis: The Ukrainian military operation that began this morning (2 May) in Slavyansk seems to have been directed against a lesser problem for the Kiev government than anything that has happened recently in Donetsk, Luhansk or Kharkiv. But there are hard strategic reasons why this small city has become the new focus of the Ukrainian crisis over recent days. It is at the centre of an escalating game of deterrence that both Kiev and Moscow are playing against each other.

In the event of a conventional Russian military invasion of the territories of eastern Ukraine it is highly unlikely that Kiev’s troops could do more than buy a certain amount of time. In any direct military confrontation Ukrainian forces would lose. That does not mean, however, that the government in Kiev is without any military cards to play.

Kiev knows that it has a strategic reserve of Kalashnikov assault rifles and other light weapons stored in Ukraine as a mobilisation reserve dating back to Soviet times. It has hinted quietly but strongly in back channels between Ukrainian and Russian military establishments that it might be prepared to open this strategic reserve of weapons to an eastern Ukrainian population prepared to resist any Russian military incursions. Since the stockpile consists of up to five million weapons, the prospect would be a nightmare for Russian military planners if they realistically prepared to move into eastern areas of Ukraine. The prospect of civil war and an anti-Russian insurgency on an unprecedented scale with unpredictable consequences represents a real – if extremely dangerous – bargaining chip for Kiev. [Continue reading…]

This map shows how Russia is deploying military assets near border with Ukraine http://t.co/cOa01ABHVX pic.twitter.com/CxCf8UDEum

— Washington Post (@washingtonpost) May 2, 2014

National Geographic: It’s been more than 20 years since the disintegration of the U.S.S.R., but the effect of that breakup on its people remains a daily reality for many. Almost overnight, some 25 million ethnic Russians became a diaspora. By 2003, about eight million of them were reabsorbed by Russia. About half of that number came from Central Asia, where relations between Russians and the indigenous Turkic nationalities were often strained.

Relations have also been fraught with difficulty in the Baltic countries where ethnic Russians have been particularly vocal about feeling disenfranchised after independence. About one-third of ethnic Russians living in Latvia are considered “non-citizens” and not allowed certain rights, including the right to vote or hold office. The country has been reprimanded by the UN for failing to encourage integration, yet, at the same time, intermarriage between ethnic Latvians and Russians has increased after independence despite official tensions. Intermarriage has long been common between ethnic Russians and Ukrainians as well — yet another factor that could complicate identity issues as parts of Ukraine vote on whether to secede.

Are there other post-Soviet countries with large Russian populations that could soon face the kind of upheaval that Crimea and eastern Ukraine are experiencing? Historian [Alexei] Miller says the answer doesn’t just lie in where you can find ethnic Russians on a map — but also on whether the Kremlin might benefit from becoming entangled in yet another crisis.

“What Putin is doing in Ukraine is not caused by the wish to save Russians but by geo-strategic motives,” Miller says, adding that Russia’s motivations may be much like those of the U.S. when it says it is fighting for democracy—in countries that happen to have oil riches. The question other former republics must ask, he says, is, “Do we really treat Russians fairly enough, and does Putin have enough important strategic interests in our country to use discrimination of Russians as an instrument of his involvement?”

Mark Galeotti writes: When U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry accused Russia of trying to impose its will through the “barrel of a gun and the force of a mob,” he could just as well have said “the force of the mob.” After all, this is the new model of asymmetric conflict in which Moscow is using myriad covert, third-party, and deniable agents to extend its power. Among them are local gangsters, both petty and powerful, who are providing everything from local political allies to street muscle. In the process, Moscow is demonstrating the extent to which organized crime can be used as a tool of statecraft and war.

Although Russian state agents clearly are working in eastern Ukraine, from Spetsnaz special forces to intelligence officers, the exact number is hard to define. In any case, it is undeniable that the overwhelming majority of the camouflaged gunmen seizing buildings, blocking roads, and skirmishing with loyalist forces are either locals — including defectors from the notorious Berkut special police — or else irregular Russian volunteers who have been allowed or encouraged to cross the border and join the conflict.

Some in the new generation of local paramilitary commanders — warlords, we’d call them in other settings — appear to be gangsters who have spotted an opportunity to convert underworld might into upperworld power. The infamous Russian lieutenant colonel who appeared to introduce the Horlivka police to their new commander in mid-April was later identified as a local criminal, for example. More seriously, a closer look at some of the figures emerging as power brokers in the Russian-dominated east reveals distinctly dubious ties.

To a large extent this reflects the endemic criminalization of the Ukrainian state under successive leaders. Like Russia, Ukraine experienced a massive upsurge in organized crime in the 1990s, when new political and economic systems were being created at a time of catastrophically weak state control. Overt gangsterism in the streets was matched by the rise of a new elite who often blended political, economic, and criminal enterprises. Unlike Russia, though, there was no subsequent reassertion of the primacy of the state, something that did not so much eliminate organized crime as house-train it, bringing it back under the dominance of the political elite.

As a result, Ukraine headed into this current crisis already undermined and interpenetrated by criminal structures closely linked to cabals of corrupt officials and business oligarchs. However, a particular problem is the extent to which many local gangs — and not just in the Russian-speaking east — are connected with Russian organized crime networks. In Crimea, not only was the new premier, Sergei Aksyonov, allegedly a mobster nicknamed “Goblin” in the 1990s (he has denied this, but the one time he tried challenging the claim in court, his case was dismissed), but the new political elite is drawn largely from the former one, richly seeded with known and identified criminals. [Continue reading…]

Dan Peleschuk reports: A rally by pro-Ukraine supporters here on Monday night got off to a smooth start.

Hordes of armored police were dispatched to guard protesters as they marched peacefully down the city’s main street.

But when pro-Russian thugs wearing masks and brandishing crude weapons caught up to them, mayhem ensued. The tight police cordon peeled away, leaving the pro-unity protesters open to vicious beatings.

It’s not the first time that’s happened.

Whether it’s protecting eastern Ukraine’s embattled pro-unity protesters or defending local administrative buildings from seizures by anti-government rebels, law enforcement here has proven largely useless. Instead, it’s playing into the hands of pro-Russian rebels, further inflaming a crisis that’s threatening to tear the country apart at the seams.

Observers say a mix of pervasive corruption, split loyalties and sense of self-preservation is to blame. [Continue reading…]

Anton Shekhovtsov writes: For its massive information war waged against the Euromaidan protests and the consequent revolution that has toppled the authoritarian regime of pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovych, the Kremlin presumably mobilised all its lobbying networks in the West. This revealed what experts have long suspected, namely that today’s European extreme right parties and organisations are the most ardent supporters of Putin’s political agenda.

Crimea, 16 March. Here they are: international ‘observers’ at the illegal and illegitimate ‘referendum’ held in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea occupied by the Russian ‘little green men.’ The overwhelming majority of the ‘observers’ are representatives of a broad spectrum of European extreme-right parties and organisations: Austria’s Freiheitliche Partei (FPÖ) and Bündnis Zukunft, Belgian Vlaams Belang and Parti Communautaire National-Européen, Bulgarian Ataka, French Front National, Hungarian Jobbik, Italian Lega Nord and Fiamma Tricolore, Polish Samoobrona, Serbian ‘Dveri’ movement, Spanish Plataforma per Catalunya. They were invited to legitimise the ‘referendum’ by the Eurasian Observatory for Democracy & Elections (EODE) – a smart name for an ‘international NGO’ founded and headed by Belgian neo-Nazi Luc Michel, a loyal follower of Belgian convicted war-time collaborationist and neo-Nazi Jean-François Thiriart. Presented by Michel as ‘a non-aligned NGO’, the EODE does not conceal its anti-Westernism and loyalty to Putin, and is always there to put a stamp of ‘legitimacy’ on all illegitimate political developments, whether in Crimea, Transnistria, South Ossetia or Abkhazia. Moscow’s money talks.

Yet the EODE is only a drop in the ocean of extensive co-operation between the Kremlin and the European far right. Front National’s Marine Le Pen now visits Moscow on a seemingly regular basis: in August 2013 and April 2014 she had meetings with Vice Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin and Speaker of the Russian parliament Sergey Naryshkin. Le Pen’s adviser on geopolitical matters Aymeric Chauprade participated, as an ‘expert’, in the meeting of the Committee for Family, Women and Children Issues in the Russian parliament to endorse the laws banning adoption of Russian orphan children by LGBT couples. Several former members of the Front National run ProRussia.TV, an extension of the Kremlin’s international PR instruments such as Russia Today and the Voice of Russia. [Continue reading…]