Category Archives: Ukraine

American journalist, Simon Ostrovsky, taken hostage in eastern Ukraine

The Guardian reports: Pro-Russian gunmen in Ukraine confirmed on Wednesday that they had taken hostage an American journalist, whom they were holding according to “war rules”, they said, in the town of Slavyansk.

Simon Ostrovsky, a correspondent for Vice News, had not been seen since early Tuesday. He had been covering the crisis in Ukraine for several weeks, first in Crimea and then in the east of the country. He had been following the activities of masked gunmen as they seized government buildings.

Ostrovsky had visited Slavyansk several times. The town has been under the control of a heavily armed pro-Russian militia since 6 April.

The rebels have seized the nearby police and security station, as well as the city hall, turning it into a sandbagged garrison, complete with sniper positions. Men suspected to be Russian soldiers have also been spotted in Slavyansk, together with irregular “Cossacks” from southern Russia.

Stella Khorosheva, a spokeswoman for the pro-Russian insurgents, said on Wednesday that Ostrovsky was being held at the local branch of the rebel-occupied Ukrainian security service. Separatists have blockaded access to the building with a large wall of tyres and debris. Outsiders are not admitted.

“He’s with us. He’s fine,” Khorosheva told the Associated Press on Wednesday. Asked why Ostrovsky was being held hostage, she said he was “suspected of bad activities”. She did not elaborate but said the insurgents were now conducting their own investigation.

Khorosheva later told journalists that Ostrovsky was suspected of spying for Right Sector, a far-right Ukrainian nationalist party, or other possible “enemy groups”.

Since an apparent shoot-out at a Slavyansk checkpoint on Sunday left three dead, the separatists have become increasingly aggressive. They have harassed western journalists turning up at checkpoints into the city. [Continue reading…]

This is the most recent report Ostrovsky filed for Vice News:

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Russia displays a new military prowess in Ukraine’s east

The New York Times reports: Secretary of State John Kerry has accused Russia of behaving in a “19th-century fashion” because of its annexation of Crimea.

But Western experts who have followed the success of Russian forces in carrying out President Vladimir V. Putin’s policy in Crimea and eastern Ukraine have come to a different conclusion about Russian military strategy. They see a military disparaged for its decline since the fall of the Soviet Union skillfully employing 21st-century tactics that combine cyberwarfare, an energetic information campaign and the use of highly trained special operation troops to seize the initiative from the West.

“It is a significant shift in how Russian ground forces approach a problem,” said James G. Stavridis, the retired admiral and former NATO commander. “They have played their hand of cards with finesse.”

The abilities the Russian military has displayed are not only important to the high-stakes drama in Ukraine, they also have implications for the security of Moldova, Georgia, Central Asian nations and even the Central Europe nations that are members of NATO.

The dexterity with which the Russians have operated in Ukraine is a far cry from the bludgeoning artillery, airstrikes and surface-to-surface missiles used to retake Grozny, the Chechen capital, from Chechen separatists in 2000. In that conflict, the notion of avoiding collateral damage to civilians and civilian infrastructure appeared to be alien.

Since then Russia has sought to develop more effective ways of projecting power in the “near abroad,” the non-Russian nations that emerged from the collapse of the Soviet Union. It has tried to upgrade its military, giving priority to its special forces, airborne and naval infantry — “rapid reaction” abilities that were “road tested” in Crimea, according to Roger McDermott, a senior fellow at the Jamestown Foundation.

The speedy success that Russia had in Crimea does not mean that the overall quality of the Russian Army, made up mainly of conscripts and no match for the high-tech American military, has been transformed.

“The operation reveals very little about the current condition of the Russian armed forces,” said Mr. McDermott. “Its real strength lay in covert action combined with sound intelligence concerning the weakness of the Kiev government and their will to respond militarily.”

Still, Russia’s operations in Ukraine have been a swift meshing of hard and soft power. The Obama administration, which once held out hope that Mr. Putin would seek an “off ramp” from the pursuit of Crimea, has repeatedly been forced to play catch-up after the Kremlin changed what was happening on the ground. [Continue reading…]

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Taking sides in Ukraine

By Charles Turner, Open Democracy, April 21, 2014

Shortly before her death, Susan Sontag published an essay on that indispensable chronicler of Stalin’s rule, Victor Serge (1890-1947). Reflecting on the fact that works like Serge’s The Case of Comrade Tulayev (1949) were for some time regarded with hostility on the American left, she writes:

‘The decades of turning a blind eye to what went on in communist regimes, specifically the conviction that to criticise the Soviet Union was to give aid and comfort to fascists and warmongers, seem almost incomprehensible now. In the early 21st century, we have moved on to other illusions – other lies that intelligent people with good intentions and humane politics tell themselves and their supporters in order not to give aid and comfort to their enemies.’

It’s a typical late Sontag passage, challenging and measured. Yet it doesn’t quite hang together. Indeed, the second sentence gives the lie to the first: she says that turning a blind eye persists, albeit now directed at – or away from – new targets (she was probably thinking of militant Islam), but if that is true then what happened before may be all-too-comprehensible, the continuity of practice suggesting that turning a blind eye may be a standard feature of a certain type of political commitment. After all, the first version of it that seemed incomprehensible in 2004 had persisted into the 1970s, decades after people had felt the need to choose communism as the lesser of two evils; though the two most notorious right-wing regimes of the 1930s and 1940s had gone, there were still other examples aplenty of ‘fascist’ regimes. So Trotskyists, for instance, uneasy heirs of Victor Serge, didn’t so much turn a blind eye to what went on in communist regimes as squint at it through a lens that allowed them to call it ‘state capitalism’, thereby making themselves critics of Moscow without aligning themselves with cold war hawks and their dictator friends.

The current Ukrainian crisis has seen blind eye turning on all sides. Much of it has been directed by left liberals at or away from Russian foreign policy, on the basis that open criticism of Russia might make one a bedfellow of those hypocrites in the White House. Hence Russia’s armed seizure of Crimea and organisation of a farcical referendum is regarded as troubling, but not something we need to shout too loud about because Crimea is really Russian anyway (or at least has been since 1783); hence Putin’s support for the despotic regime of Bashar-al-Assad is passed over in silence for fear that criticism of it will make one a supporter of the Syrian opposition, and hence the United States that is arming it; and when Putin calls the extremists in Kyiv who ousted President Yanukovych ‘fascists’, it rings alarm bells loud enough to cancel out the sound of those that Putin himself triggers.

From the other side there is not so much blind eye turning as dewy-eyed romanticism, led by the Yale historian Tim Snyder: where Putin saw only extremists in Maidan square, Snyder implies that Ukraine is already ready to join the EU because the leader of a group of frightening looking men in combat fatigues is really a gay hairdresser from the Donbas, while the new deputy minister for whatever is a Jewish transvestite whose mother was a disabled German preacher. I was never much impressed by this sort of argument: in 2000 a Polish friend tried to impress me with the fact that in that Catholic country the president was a former communist (Aleksander Kwaśniewski), the prime minister a Protestant (Jerzy Buzek) and the foreign minister a Jew (Bronisław Geremek). Five years later it was being ruled by a coalition of the surreal Kaczyński twins, Andrzej Lepper’s thuggish Self-Defence party and the far-right League of Polish Families.

I have also seen articles that begin with questions like ‘how should people on the left respond to events in Ukraine?’, but these are worse than useless: the real task is, with old Kant, to think for oneself. In the current crisis I think that that entails more than seeing faults on all sides, easy though that is. The charge of ‘hypocrisy,’ for instance, can be directed everywhere: John Kerry invokes the sanctity of territorial boundaries while approving drone attacks in Pakistan, Vladmir Putin warns that the (temporary) Ukrainian government might wage war on its own people while he himself supports Assad in Syria, and the new EU-friendly Ukrainian prime minister was on television a few years ago advocating a blanket ban on the use of the Russian language.

So here, for what it’s worth, is what I think. Firstly, the absurd spectacle of John McCain and some naïve Euro MPs in Maidan Square notwithstanding, and while there may be many Russian speakers in Eastern Ukraine who do wish to be citizens of the Russian Federation, the use of military force – and that is what the seizure of government buildings in Eastern Ukraine is – to make the latter point is no more justified than would be Hungary’s occupation of southern Slovakia to protect the rights of the Hungarian minority, and is no more right than was the use of military force in Iraq. Anyone who marched in London against that, on principle should march against this. Secondly, Putin’s Eurasian Union project, devised by an admirer of Carl Schmitt, can only work – and here Snyder is right – if it consists of a series of autocracies: what he fears above all is not fascism in Ukraine or the spread of NATO; he has had that on his doorstep since 1999 when the accession of Poland took it up to the border of Russia’s Baltic Sea enclave of Kaliningrad, formerly Prussia’s second city Königsberg, and the home of old Kant; and his late lamented Soviet Union had NATO on its doorstep for thirty years with Turkey’s membership. No, what Putin fears more than anything is even more of his doorstep being occupied by democracy, the rule of law, freedom of speech and a respect for human rights. Were Ukraine to enter the EU, or even prepare to do so, its people might at least have a hope of aspiring to these. As part of the Eurasian Union – or as is possible if Russia invades, part of the Russian Federation – that hope would vanish. The third alternative, being put about by people in the West who enjoy these benefits already, namely that Ukraine might act as a buffer state between the EU and NATO and the Russian Federation, is grotesque. The interwar period alone shows that the history of weak European states going it alone without being part of a larger economic and security structure is dismal: this is why when they were invited to join the EU and NATO in the 1990s the governments of Eastern Europe of all stripes were not the victims of soft power but rather accepted with alacrity. Ukraine, the Ukrainian people, should be given the chance to choose which way it wants to turn. It can be given that chance, and that might include either the federalization of the country, or the option to split in two, with Russian speaking Eastern Ukrainians not free but secure under Putin’s gathering wing, and a rump Western Ukraine a full member of the EU and NATO with all the risks – and possibilities – that that entails. But it cannot do this with a gun pointing at its head. On this occasion the one pointing the gun is in Moscow, not in Washington.

Charles Turner is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick. This article was originally published in the independent online magazine www.opendemocracy.net

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The silent ‘little green men’ stalking eastern Ukraine

AFP reports: The expertly armed, masked men in matching camouflage stripped of all insignia are tough, taciturn and tactically devastating.

And according to President Vladimir Putin, they are not — absolutely, categorically not — elite Russian special forces.

So who are the members of this mysterious military or paramilitary force operating in eastern Ukraine, nicknamed “little green men” by many here?

For Kiev and its Western backers, the units, observed moving in lightning-fast and cohesive team formation, are indisputably Russian commandos sent by Moscow to sow trouble, no matter what Putin says. They also appear to be almost identical to those who operated in Crimea before the peninsula’s annexation by Russia last month.

For separatist insurgents whose fealty lies with the Kremlin, they are simply preternaturally good examples of their rag-tag, homegrown “self-defence volunteer brigades”.

In many of the 10 towns in the east controlled by the rebels, the fearsome fighters guard seized public buildings and offer few, if any, words to the curious.

They do, however, easily stand out from their less disciplined brothers in arms.

They wear camouflage uniforms, black ski masks, sports shoes and bullet-proof vests. That is a far cry from the hodge-podge of military surplus and camping attire thrown on by the ordinary separatists — who are also more likely to chat proudly.

On Wednesday, when the Ukrainian military sent an armoured column to confront the rebels, it was the (not so) “little green men” who sprang into action after the vehicles were stopped by angry locals.

The capable fighters quickly took control of six of the armoured personnel carriers and drove them into the centre of the town of Slavyansk — where one of them displayed his mastery of the tracked machine by sending it spinning in high-speed doughnuts. [Continue reading…]

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The statues of Lenin and Stalin still stand, not only on Russia’s squares and plazas, but in the minds of its citizens

Vladimir Sorokin writes: In the course of three days in August 1991, during the failed putsch against Gorbachev, the decaying Soviet empire tottered and began to collapse. Some friends and I found ourselves on Lubianskaya Square, across from the headquarters of the fearsome, mighty KGB. A huge crowd was preparing to topple the symbol of that sinister institution — the statue of its founder, Dzerzhinsky, “Iron Felix” as his Bolshevik comrades-in-arms called him. A few daredevils had scaled the monument and wrapped cables around its neck, and a group was pulling on them to ever louder shouts and cries from the assembled throng.

Suddenly, a Yeltsin associate with a megaphone appeared out of the blue and directed everyone to hold off, because, he said, when the bronze statue fell, “its head might crash through the pavement and damage important underground communications.” The man said that a crane was already on its way to remove Dzerzhinsky from the pedestal without any damaging side effects. The revolutionary crowd waited for this crane a good two hours, keeping its spirits up with shouts of “Down with the KGB!”

Doubts about the success of the coming anti-Soviet revolution first stirred in me during those two hours. I tried to imagine the Parisian crowd, on May 16, 1871, waiting politely for an architect and workers to remove the Vendôme Column. And I laughed. The crane finally arrived; Dzerzhinsky was taken down, placed on a truck, and driven away. People ran alongside and spat on him. Since then he has been on view in the park of dismantled Soviet monuments next to the New Tretiakov Gallery. Not long ago, a member of the Duma presented a resolution to return the monument to its former location. Given events currently taking place in our country, it’s quite likely that this symbol of Bolshevik terror will return to Lubianskaya Square.

The swift dismantling of remaining Soviet monuments recently in Ukraine caused me to remember the Dzerzhinsky episode. Dozens of statues of Lenin fell in Ukrainian cities; no one in the opposition asked people to treat them “in a civilized manner,” because in this case a “polite” dismantling could mean only one thing — conserving a potent symbol of Soviet power. “Dzhugashvili [Stalin] is there, preserved in a jar,” as the poet Joseph Brodsky wrote in 1968. This jar is the people’s memory, its collective unconscious.

In 2014, Lenins were felled in Ukraine and were allowed to collapse. No one tried to preserve them. This “Leninfall” took place during the brutal confrontation on Kiev’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square), when Viktor Yanukovych’s power also collapsed, demonstrating that a genuine anti-Soviet revolution had finally occurred in Ukraine. No real revolution has happened in Russia. Lenin, Stalin, and their bloody associates still repose on Red Square, and hundreds of statues still stand, not only on Russia’s squares and plazas, but in the minds of its citizens. [Continue reading…]

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Diplomats reach deal on defusing Ukraine crisis

The Washington Post reports: Top diplomats on Thursday laid out a series of steps to tamp down violence and political unrest in Ukraine, even as Western officials publicly doubted Russia’s resolve to use its influence to help defuse the crisis in the former Soviet republic.

The potential diplomatic breakthrough, which the Russian foreign minister referred to as “a compromise, of sorts,” came after nearly seven hours of negotiations with Secretary of State John F. Kerry, the Ukrainian foreign minister and the European Union’s foreign policy chief.

Under the agreement, all parties, including separatists and their Russian backers, would stop violent and provocative acts, and all illegal groups would be disarmed. A joint statement made no mention of the presence of what the United States has said are 40,000 Russian troops massed on Ukraine’s eastern and southern borders. But Kerry said it made clear that Russia is “absolutely prepared to begin to respond with respect to troops,” provided the terms of the agreement are observed.

In Washington, President Obama said Russia’s stated commitments were only the beginning of a process.

“My hope is that we actually do see follow-through over the next several days, but I don’t think, given past performance, that we can count on that,” Obama said during a White House press conference. “We have to be prepared to potentially respond to what continue to be, you know, efforts of interference by the Russians in eastern and southern Ukraine.”

Obama threatened further economic sanctions and stressed American economic and diplomatic support for the Western-oriented government in Kiev. He ruled out a U.S. military response to help Ukraine fend off Russian incursions. [Continue reading…]

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The dilettantes Obama chose to guide U.S. foreign policy

James Bruno writes: Working the Afghanistan account at the State Department in the late 1980s, I occasionally met the Russian muckraking journalist Artyom Borovik. Before he joined the vanguard of those agitating for change during glasnost, he had served as a Soviet diplomat. The son of a Novosti journalist posted to New York, Borovik spoke nearly unaccented English and excellent Spanish. He was as comfortable in an Afghan tea house as he was at a Manhattan Starbucks. Borovik, in short, was the cream of the crop of Russian youth from which the Foreign Ministry traditionally recruits its diplomats: urbane, multilingual, with elite educations and the skills to deftly navigate foreign societies.

Borovik died in 2000 in a still-unsolved Moscow plane accident days after producing a scathing article about an ascendant Russian politician, Vladimir Putin, who was about to become president. Borovik quoted Putin in an article as saying, “There are three ways to influence people: blackmail, vodka, and the threat to kill.”

Whether or not Putin has expanded his tools of persuasion, he’s got good help in the influence department. In the lead-up to four-way talks over Ukraine and Secretary of State Kerry’s consultations with European leaders this week, Russian ambassadors are using their many close connections with continental elites to press Putin’s case, to seek to stifle or limit economic sanctions and to foster divisions between Washington and its allies. In most cases these Russian envoys have spent the bulk of their diplomatic careers dealing with the countries to which they are posted and have extensive decades-long contacts with whom they can speak, often in the latters’ native languages. This gives them a decided edge.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is fairly typical. A graduate of the prestigious Moscow Institute for International Relations (known by its Russian acronym, MGIMO) and 42-year Foreign Ministry veteran, Lavrov speaks fluent English as well as Sinhalese, Dhiveli and French. A former U.S. ambassador who had dealt with Lavrov at the United Nations described him to me as disciplined, witty and charming, a diplomat so skilled “he runs rings around us in the multilateral sphere.”

Russia has always taken diplomacy and its diplomats seriously. America, on the other hand, does not. Of this country’s 28 diplomatic missions in NATO capitals (of which 26 are either currently filled by an ambassador or have nominees waiting to be confirmed), 16 are, or will be, headed by political appointees; only one ambassador to a major NATO ally, Turkey, is a career diplomat. Fourteen ambassadors got their jobs in return for raising big money for President Obama’s election campaigns, or worked as his aides. A conservative estimate of personal and bundled donations by these fundraisers is $20 million (based on figures from the New York Times, Federal Election Commission and AllGov). The U.S. ambassador to Belgium, a former Microsoft executive, bundled more than $4.3 million. [Continue reading…]

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Putin has more admirers than the West might admit

Timothy Garton Ash writes: Tell me your Ukraine and I will tell you who you are. The Ukrainian crisis is a political Rorschach test, not just for individuals but also for states. What it reveals to us is not encouraging for the west. It turns out that Vladimir Putin has more admirers around the world than you might expect for someone using a neo-Soviet combination of violence and the big lie to dismember a neighbouring sovereign state. When I say admirers, I don’t just mean the governments of Venezuela and Syria, two of his most vocal supporters. Russia’s strongman garners tacit support, and even some quiet plaudits, from some of the world’s most important emerging powers, starting with China and India.

During a recent visit to China I was frequently asked what was going on in Ukraine, and I kept asking in return about the Chinese attitude to it. Didn’t a country which has so consistently defended the principle of respecting the sovereignty and territorial integrity of existing states (be they the former Yugoslavia or Iraq), and which itself has a couple of prospective Crimeas (Tibet, Xinjiang), feel uneasy about Russia simply grabbing a chunk of a neighbouring country?

Well, came the reply, that was a slight concern, but Ukraine was a long way away – and, frankly speaking, the positives of the crisis outweighed the negatives for China. What’s more, the United States would have another strategic distraction (after al-Qaida, Afghanistan and Iraq) to hinder its “pivot” to the Asia-Pacific region, and divert its attention from China. And, cold-shouldered by the west, Russia would be more dependent on a good relationship with Beijing. As for Ukraine – which already sells China higher-grade military equipment than Russia has been willing to share with its great Asian ally – its new authorities had already quietly assured the Chinese authorities that Beijing’s failure to condemn the annexation of Crimea would not affect their future relations. What’s not to like in all that? [Continue reading…]

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Ukraine is not ready for the consequences of taking Russia’s military bait

Time reports: By sending its military to quell the pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, the government in Kiev may be setting itself up for a spectacular defeat, as neither its army nor its intelligence services are prepared for a confrontation with Russia

Like many of the leading men in Ukraine’s new military pecking order, Petr Mekhed wasn’t exactly ripe for the task of fending off a Russian invasion when he assumed the post of Deputy Defense Minister in February. His last tour of combat duty was about 30 years ago, during the Soviet war in Afghanistan, after which he reached the rank of colonel in the Red Army. When revolution in Ukraine broke out this winter, his wartime experience made him better equipped than most at defending the barricades of the Maidan protest camp in the center of Kiev. But it was not as useful in preparing him to lead his country into war. “For some issues I’ve had to sit down with a book and study up,” he says.

His conclusion so far is an unsettling one for Ukraine’s political leaders. If they want to find a way out of their conflict with Russia, which edged closer on Tuesday to military confrontation in the eastern region of Donetsk, they have only one way to do it, Mekhed says, and that is to negotiate. “We’ll never get anywhere through the use of military force,” he tells TIME. It would be much more effective to undercut Russia’s support for the local separatists by meeting them halfway, Mekhed suggests, with an offer of more autonomy for Ukraine’s eastern regions. “Our chances of saving Donetsk are now in the hands of our politicians and their ability to sit down with the people there and talk to them.” [Continue reading…]

Reuters reports: There are important differences between Russia’s intervention in Crimea and the events unfolding this week in eastern Ukraine which suggest Moscow has adapted its Crimea playbook and may be pursuing a different outcome.

Unlike the Black Sea peninsula, where thousands of Russian troops were already based at ex-Soviet naval facilities leased from Ukraine, there is little clear evidence of Moscow deploying significant forces on the ground in the east of the country.

In eastern towns where armed, pro-Russian rebels have seized public buildings and raised the Russian flag, some gunmen identify themselves to journalists as “Russians” – but that says little about citizenship in Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine.

They appear to be irregulars. If adept at barricading town halls, they lack the elite kit and well-drilled bearing of forces in Crimea – some of whom identified themselves to Ukrainian soldiers as Russian troops, despite Moscow’s denials.

Reuters also reports: Separatists flew the Russian flag on armored vehicles taken from the Ukrainian army on Wednesday, humiliating a Kiev government operation to recapture eastern towns controlled by pro-Moscow partisans.

Six armored personnel carriers were driven into the rebel-held town of Slaviansk to waves and shouts of “Russia! Russia!”. It was not immediately clear whether they had been captured by rebels or handed over to them by Ukrainian deserters.

Another 15 armored troop carriers full of paratroops were surrounded and halted by a pro-Russian crowd at a town near an airbase. They were allowed to retreat only after the soldiers handed the firing pins from their rifles to a rebel commander.

The military setback leaves Kiev looking weak on the eve of a peace conference on Thursday, when its foreign minister will meet his Russian, U.S. and European counterparts in Geneva.

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‘We don’t want Ukraine. Ukraine doesn’t exist for us. There are no people called Ukrainians’

The Guardian reports: On the steps of Slavyansk’s occupied town hall a group of armed men in fatigues posed happily for photos. They were equipped with Kalashnikovs – military-issue AK-74s – commando knives, flak jackets and walkie-talkies. Round the back, close to the main square with its Lenin statue, was a green military truck. It bore no insignia.

Who exactly were they? “We’re Cossacks,” one of the group explained. “It doesn’t matter where we are from.” He declined to give his name. Instead, he offered a quick history lesson, stretching back a thousand years, to when Slavic tribes banded together to form Kievan Rus – the dynasty that eventually flourished into modern-day Ukraine and its big neighbour Russia.

“We don’t want Ukraine. Ukraine doesn’t exist for us. There are no people called Ukrainians,” he declared. “There are just Slav people who used to be in Kievan Rus, before Jews like Trotsky divided us. We should all be together again.” The man – a middle-aged commando with a bushy beard – said he had come to Slavyansk “to help”. He didn’t intend to kill anybody, he said. Producing a long knife, he said: “I can’t kill my brother Slavs.”

The mysterious “Cossacks” arrived in Slavyansk, 40 miles (65km) north of Donetsk, on Saturday. Similar “Cossacks” popped up in Crimea too, soon after Russia invaded and then annexed the territory. According to Kiev’s hapless interim government, Russia is behind the apparently co-ordinated takeover by masked men in military uniforms of government buildings all across eastern Ukraine. The US and EU agree. Moscow denies the charge. It says that the west blames it for everything.

One of the “Cossacks”, however, admitted on Monday that he had just arrived from Crimea, where he spent a month “helping” with Russia’s takeover there. How had he managed to travel from Russian-controlled territory to the east of the country? And from where did he get his Kalashnikov? He declined to answer but claimed the weapon had come from a seized police station, although Ukraine’s police use different, smaller ones. [Continue reading…]

Meanwhile, the Security Service of Ukraine released a recording of what are alleged to be intercepted conversations by Russian military intelligence groups operating in Eastern Ukraine under command of Joint Staff of Russian Armed Forces. Click the “CC” button to view English captions.

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Most Ukrainians are neither loyal Russians nor fascists

James Meek writes: Things weren’t easy in Ukraine when I lived there in the early 1990s, just after the country voted to break from Moscow. There was hyperinflation. People lost their savings. There were petrol shortages. The airport in Kiev would close for days at a time for lack of fuel. Nothing got repaired; nothing got built.

But nobody starved. Nobody froze. The electricity was never cut off. The trains kept running, schools and hospitals limped from day to day. Most importantly, horrifying as it was for Ukrainians to watch on the television news how long-peaceful places they knew, such as Georgia, Moldova and Chechnya, were suddenly on fire with heavily armed men strutting across them, they were far away.

There was much grumbling about the Ukrainian government, its incompetence, its corruption. There always seemed the possibility, in the abstract, that Russia might try to come back. In the mid-1990s I wrote an article for the Guardian suggesting a scenario for a new Yugoslavia in the east, with Ukraine as Croatia, Crimea as Bosnia and Russia as Serbia. But I felt I’d pushed it. After all, Boris Yeltsin was no Milosevic.

I remember visiting Ukraine one springtime in the mid-1990s. Days earlier, in Chechnya, I’d seen shell-ruined buildings, terrified civilians, battle-hardened separatists and frightened Russian conscripts. In Ukraine I drove past Ukrainian soldiers gathered around a radar truck; each one was blissfully asleep, bathed in the soft May sunshine. It made me smile. After all, what did they have to worry about? Ukraine had given away its nuclear weapons and in return, the country’s territorial integrity was guaranteed in a document signed by Russia, the US and Britain.

And then Russia got its Milosevic. Like his Serbian counterpart, Vladimir Putin is clever, articulate, popular, untrustworthy to those who are not his friends, ruthless, cynical to the point of absurdity and unable to account for his personal wealth. Like Milosevic, he has no compunction in exploiting the messianic, victim-narrative strain of his country’s patriotism. Unlike Milosevic, because of Russia’s nuclear arsenal, he is invulnerable to military attack from outside. Unlike Milosevic, he has had many years of income from raw materials exports with which to build up powerful, well-equipped security forces to carry out a well-targeted upgrade of Russia’s military, to turn the media into a government mouthpiece, to repress or buy off dissenters, and to offer the outside world the convincing illusion that his country is prospering. (It is true that Russian pensioners are somewhat less miserably poor than those in Ukraine.)

Now, a generation later, long after it had been unthinkable, those same chaotic figures with Kalashnikovs and fatigues have appeared in Ukraine, under Russian sponsorship and, all evidence suggests, direction. [Continue reading…]

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Ukraine asks for UN peacekeepers in restive east

The Associated Press reports: Ukraine’s acting President Oleksandr Turchynov on Monday called for the deployment of United Nations peacekeeping troops in the east of the country, where pro-Russian insurgents have occupied buildings in nearly 10 cities.

In a telephone conversation with Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon, Turchynov suggested that an “anti-terrorist operation” could be conducted jointly by Ukrainian security forces and U.N. peacekeepers, according to the presidential web site.

Peacekeepers would have to be authorized by the U.N. Security Council, in which Russia holds a veto.

The request comes from a government that has proved powerless to reign in separatists in the Russian-speaking east of the country, where insurgents have been occupying government offices in cities for the past week. A deadline for the insurgents to give up weapons and vacate the brigands, set by Turchynov, passed Monday morning without any visible action.

Instead, violence continued. A pro-Russian mob stormed a police station in yet another city near the Russian border, while gun men took control over a military airport in the ear.

The Kiev government and Western officials accuse Russia of instigating the unrest and of deploying armed Russian agents to carry them out.

During the storming of a police station in the city of Horlivka earlier Monday, one man identified himself as a lieutenant colonel of the Russian army. [Continue reading…]

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Ukraine tension turns deadly in ‘worst case scenario’

Bloomberg reports: Ukrainian security forces battled pro-Russian gunmen in the eastern town of Slovyansk, with both sides suffering casualties, in what European Union member Poland called “the worst-case scenario” for the country.

A day after Ukrainian officials accused Russia of “external aggression,” camouflaged gunmen fired on units deployed by the government in Kiev in an anti-terror operation near Slovyansk, about 240 kilometers (150 miles) from the Russian frontier, Interior Minister Arsen Avakov said today on Facebook. One serviceman was killed and five were wounded, with an unknown number of dead on the separatist side, he said.

It followed the takeover of a regional police station in Donetsk yesterday and gun battles in which police stopped separatists from seizing buildings in other towns. The events echoed those that preceded Russia’s annexation of Crimea, rattling Ukraine’s industrial heartland and raising concern that Russia may carve off more of Ukraine with what NATO has estimated are 40,000 combat-ready troops massed on the border.

“Over the past few hours we’ve witnessed the worst-case scenario playing out in Ukraine,” Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who has advocated a strong response to Russia, said in an interview with Radio Zet in Warsaw.

The anti-terror operation began after acting President Oleksandr Turchynov called an emergency meeting of the country’s National Defense and Security Council last night.

“Please let all civilians know to vacate the center of town, to not leave their apartments and to stay away from windows,” Avakov posted on his Facebook account. “Separatists have opened fire on approaching special-forces units.”

One person was killed an nine were wounded, news service Interfax reported, without giving details on which side the casualties came from. Russian state-run Rossiya 24 TV said Ukrainian “self-defense” forces led by an Afghan War veteran had spread across Slovyansk and troops allied to the government in Kiev arrived in armored personnel carriers and by helicopter.

Intelligence reports from the U.S. and its allies indicate that some of the pro-Russian demonstrators infiltrated cities in eastern and southern Ukraine during the past month or even earlier as part of a Russian plan to divide Ukraine into federated regions, some of which may hold referendums to rejoin Russia, as Crimea did, two U.S. officials said.

Speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the reports, which they stressed aren’t conclusive, the officials said that the assessment continues to be that Russian President Vladimir Putin prefers using a campaign of provocation, propaganda, bribery and subversion — rather than an outright invasion by Russian troops — to take over some of parts of eastern and southern Ukraine. [Continue reading…]

The Wall Street Journal reports: Anders Fogh Rasmussen, secretary-general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, said the appearance of heavily armed men in unmarked uniforms drew alarming parallels to the takeover of Crimea by Russian troops last month ahead of a referendum for the region to secede from Ukraine and Russia’s annexing the territory.

“The reappearance of men with specialized Russian weapons and identical uniforms without insignia, as previously worn by Russian troops during Russia’s illegal and illegitimate seizure of Crimea, is a grave development,” he said. “I call on Russia to de-escalate the crisis and pull back its large number of troops, including special forces, from the area around Ukraine’s border.”

On Saturday, the White House said it warned Russian President Vladimir Putin against using the clashes in Ukraine’s east as a pretext for seizing more territory. Moscow says it reserves the right to send troops into eastern Ukraine to protect ethnic Russians there from an alleged threat of violence against them from nationalists in the Ukrainian government, although Russia has presented little concrete evidence such a threat exists. [Continue reading…]

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Few in Ukraine — including in the East — support separatism or joining Russia, poll shows

Paul Goble writes: Vladimir Putin insists that his moves in Ukraine are motivated by a desire to protect ethnic Russians, Russian speakers and, Moscow’s latest category, “pro-Russian people” who do not want to live under Kyiv, a view that has been uncritically accepted by large numbers of Russians in the Russian Federation and by many in the West.

But a new poll shows that few of the people on whose behalf Putin claims to be acting are interested in separatism from Ukraine or in having their regions become part of the Russian Federation. Instead, even in the eastern portions of Ukraine where Russian speakers form a large share of the population, overwhelming majorities want to remain in Ukraine.

According to the results of a poll by the Democratic Initiative of Ukraine released today and discussed by Andrey Illarionov in an Ekho Moskvy blog post, 89 percent of the residents of Ukraine consider that country their Motherland. [Continue reading…]

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Ukraine, Putin, and the West

The editors of n+1 write: There’s a reason Ukraine is at the heart of the most significant geopolitical crisis yet to appear in the post-Soviet space. There is no post-Soviet state like it. Unlike the Baltic states, it does not have a recent (interwar) memory of statehood. Nor, unlike every other post-Soviet state aside from Belarus, does the majority population have a radically different language and culture from the Russians. In many cases, for these countries, the traditional language suggests a natural political ally—Finland for the Estonians, Turkey for the Azeris, Romania for the Moldovans. These linguistic and cultural affinities are not without their difficulties, but they do give a long-term geopolitical orientation to these countries.

Ukraine has this to some extent in its western part, formerly known as Galicia, which has cultural and linguistic affinities with Poland. But the country’s capital, Kyiv, has much stronger ties to Russia: Russians consider Kievan Rus, which lasted from the 9th to the 13th century (when it was sacked and burned by the Mongols), to be the first Russian civilization. Russian Orthodoxy was first proclaimed there. Most people in Kyiv speak Russian, rather than Ukrainian, and in any case the languages are quite close (about as close as Spanish and Portuguese). On television, it is typical for any live broadcast—whether it’s news, sports, or a reality-TV show—to go back and forth seamlessly between Russian and Ukrainian, with the understanding that most people know both. Russians all too often assume that these cultural affinities mean that there is no such thing as a separate Ukrainian people. There is. But the closeness of the two peoples makes forging an independent path for Ukraine extraordinarily difficult.

Adding to this difficulty has been the Soviet legacy, which in Ukraine as everywhere else is always and everywhere visible. The Ukrainian historian Giorgy Kasianov has written that Ukrainians are forced to exist in several historical and semantic fields simultaneously: the roads they drive on, the factories they work at, the social relations they engage in—all are part of the Soviet heritage. As in the rest of the former Soviet Union, including Russia, this heritage is crumbling, but in Ukraine in particular it remains formidable.

As a result, Ukraine has essentially been frozen in time since independence. Nationalist and pro-Russian political parties (each bankrolled by a handful of oligarchs) have passed the presidency back and forth between them, neither getting much done while they ruled. The country’s two countervailing forces—Ukrainian-language nationalists in the west, and Russian-language nationalists in the east and Crimea—have ensured that neither maintains the upper hand. Because of this, Ukraine has consistently had a better, more lively public sphere than most of its neighbors—more freedom of speech, more freedom of assembly, more diverse political actors. Ukraine was also distinguished by the repeated, and usually peaceful, transfer of power from one party to another (something that post-Soviet Russia has still not achieved more than two decades in). And yet these positive democratic indicators did not, as contemporary dogma would predict, lead to positive economic results. Instead, Ukraine, a country that in 1991 had hope that, left to its own devices, it could flourish—with its highly educated workforce, proximity to Europe in the west and the Black Sea to the south, and many industrial enterprises inherited from the USSR—has instead lagged miserably behind its neighbors. Its per capita GDP is half of Russia’s, one fifth that of the US. Its economic performance is worse than that of its authoritarian neighbors Kazakhstan and Belarus. It is a country about as poor as El Salvador. And the poorest regions are in the west, which sends many undocumented migrant workers farther west, to Europe, and north to Russia. It is the disjuncture between Ukraine’s solid democratic performance and its miserable economic one that provided the protests with much of their pathos and durability. [Continue reading…]

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Russia plotting for Ukrainian influence, not invasion, analysts say

The New York Times reports: The separatist demonstrations again churning through eastern Ukraine have raised fears of a Crimean-style invasion by the 40,000 Russian troops coiled just over the Russian border. But Moscow’s goals are more subtle than that, focused on a long-range strategy of preventing Ukraine from escaping Russia’s economic and military orbit, according to political analysts, Kremlin allies and diplomats interviewed this week.

Toward that end, the Kremlin has made one central demand, which does not at first glance seem terribly unreasonable. It wants Kiev to adopt a federal system of government giving far more power to the governors across Ukraine.

“A federal structure will ensure that Ukraine will not be anti-Russian,” said Sergei A. Markov, a Russian political strategist who supports the Kremlin. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. troops may be sent to Eastern Europe

The Associated Press reports: NATO’s top military commander in Europe, drafting countermoves to the Russian military threat against Ukraine, said Wednesday they could include deployment of American troops to alliance member states in Eastern Europe now feeling at risk.

U.S. Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove told The Associated Press he wouldn’t “write off involvement by any nation, to include the United States.”

Foreign ministers of the 28-nation alliance have given Breedlove until Tuesday to propose steps to reassure NATO members nearest Russia that other alliance countries have their back.

“Essentially what we are looking at is a package of land, air and maritime measures that would build assurance for our easternmost allies,” Breedlove told the AP. “I’m tasked to deliver this by next week. I fully intend to deliver it early.”

Asked again if American soldiers might be sent to NATO’s front-line states closest to Russia, the four-star U.S. general said, “I would not write off contributions from any nation.” [Continue reading…]

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Why Crimea matters

Mark Leonard writes: “We have spent thirty years trying to integrate Russia into the international system, and now we are trying to kick it out again.”

These words — from a senior British official — sum up the disappointment and bewilderment of western diplomats struggling to handle Russia. They face two imperfect options: inaction in the face of Russia’s territorial aggression, and reacting so strongly that they unravel the international system that has sustained order for the last five decades.

As pro-Russian protesters declare a “people’s republic” in the Ukrainian city of Donetsk, Western leaders are smart to focus on deterring Putin from expanding beyond Crimea. But the West needs to think more about how its actions are seen beyond the Kremlin. The consequences of Crimea could be even more dramatic at a global level than within the post-Soviet countries.

In his March 18 speech, Putin expressed three ideas that Europeans have rejected since World War Two — nationalism that is not tempered by the guilt of war; identity defined by ethnicity, rather than geography or institutions; and social conservatism based in religion.

Yet these ideas remain popular outside the West. Just look at the Middle East, where Iran and Saudi Arabia are both defending their “people” across borders. China may one day want to defend its citizens overseas, in the same way that Putin sees himself as the defender of ethnic Russians. If other countries view Russia’s actions as cost-free, they could carry out copy-cat incursions.

America’s allies could also react in worrying ways if they lose trust in western deterrence. I recently spoke to well-connected military strategists in Tokyo and Seoul, who were disappointed by the West’s reaction to Russian expansionism. They predicted that within Japan and South Korea, security hawks might call for nuclear weapons as a hedge against American withdrawal from the world.

But if the West’s attempts to preserve its credibility are too clumsy, they could also lead to disorder — in particular, if the West throws Russia out of the global economy and the institutions that govern it. [Continue reading…]

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