CHONGAR, Ukraine — Ground zero of the latest
confrontation between Ukraine and Russia was a sea of mud and not much else on
Wednesday.
About half a dozen fighters, their boots sinking
into a sodden field, were guarding the downed electricity pylons that were blown up last weekend, plunging much of the
disputed Crimean peninsula and the Kherson region of mainland Ukraine into
darkness.
Activists from the Tatar minority and Ukrainian
nationalists attacked the first repair crews and their police escorts seeking
to restore the felled pylons, driving them away. The situation has been at an
impasse since, with more than 1.2 million people in Crimea without power and no
sign of any repair crews.
“The people of Crimea are not supposed to feel
like they live in a resort while the country is at war,” said Oleksiy Byk, 34,
a chunky, bearded veteran who serves as the area spokesman for the Right
Sector, a right-wing Ukrainian organization violently opposed to any
accommodation with Russia.
Mr. Byk said he used to fight the separatists in
the east, but after the cease-fire negotiated under the Minsk peace accords
finally took hold in September, he and many other hard-core fighters gravitated
to the area just north of Crimea. They are spoiling for a fight, since Ukraine
rejects Russia’s March 2014 annexation of the Black Sea peninsula as illegal.
A desultory economic blockade has been enforced
since September, but the downing of the pylons seems to have prompted a new
standoff between Moscow and Kiev, with each side finding new ways to increase
the tension daily.
On Wednesday, Ukraine’s prime minister, Arseniy
P. Yatsenyuk, said the country was closing its airspace to all Russian planes,
after earlier terminating all flights between the two countries. In a
you-can’t-fire-me-I-quit move, he also ordered Naftogas, the state-run oil and
gas company, to stop buying Russian gas.
But the Russian gas giant, Gazprom, had announced earlier in the day that it was
cutting off all gas supplies to Ukraine — not linked to the electricity issue,
at least not publicly — because Kiev had not paid its bills. Russia also
threatened to cut off coal supplies that some old power plants in Ukraine need
to keep functioning.
Russia has thus far not acted with overt
hostility, probably because the Kremlin is preoccupied with the crisis over
Turkey shooting down one of its airplanes. President Vladimir
V. Putin did pause long enough on Wednesday to express dismay that the
Ukrainian government was not addressing the problem.
“I am surprised by the position of our partners
in Kiev,” said Mr. Putin, who tends to use the word “partners” for most
interlocutors. “These events could not be taking place without their
connivance.” He mocked the idea that Kiev wanted Crimea back while victimizing
its residents.
Analysts said it was difficult for either side
to act. Russia, under the threat of European Union sanctions for any aggressive
action in Ukraine, is trying to extract itself from economic sanctions, not
prompt more. Ukraine used to depend on Russia for gas, but after years of
confrontations it has beefed up storage facilities and engineered reverse-flow
supplies from Europe.
Ukraine seeks to avoid further Russian
aggression to stymie its political and economic stability, and an already
unpopular government does not want to go against public sentiment.
In Kiev, the main driver of the confrontation
seems to be the leaders of the Tatar community who were exiled by Russia after
it annexed the peninsula and who are now in Parliament as allies of President
Petro O. Poroshenko. Mr. Poroshenko has not said anything in public directly about
the electricity confrontation.
The Tatars, a Turkic Muslim minority that now
numbers about 300,000, have memories of crushing brutality under Stalin’s rule;
thousands were forced into exile and returned to Crimea only after the fall of
the Soviet Union. Many said that their people again faced systematic
repression, and the initial demands to restore power included that all
activists be released from jail, that the independent Tatar news media be
restored and that international human rights monitors be allowed to operate.
Here around Chongar, however, Tatar activists
were not much in evidence. They seemed to have been assigned logistical tasks
like providing food and housing for the men guarding the checkpoints on the
road and the fallen pylons. The fighters were mostly veterans from the east who
did not want to go back to civilian life.
Roman, who would give only his first name, was
the spokesman for the group guarding the pylons. Even though there were not
many of them, he said, they could quickly summon reserves on standby should any
repairmen or Ukrainian troops arrive or scavengers try to make off with the
scrap metal.
He said he was ready to take on any government
forces who showed up. “I’m more experienced then them,” bragged Roman. “It
would take me two minutes maximum to take a gun from them.”
The small contingent’s main problem was boredom
and hunger. Their food stocks were running low and the constant rain had
affected their generator — the light bulb in their tent kept going out.
All the fighters in the area are a bit coy about
who blew up the four main pylons. The official answer they give is
“unidentified patriots,” an echo of the “polite people” that Russia used to
describe the special forces soldiers dispatched to seize Crimea in March 2014.
The fighters were allowing some repair work to
proceed on one pylon to restore power to about 200,000 customers in the
immediate vicinity, work that the state-run electric company, Ukrenergo, said
would be completed as early as Thursday.
Arsen Avakov, the interior minister, announced
that there was no point in rebuilding them all until they could be protected.
Crimea can generate about one third of the power
it needs, and a trunk line to Russia meant to be connected by the end of
December will not nearly close the gap.
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