Violence in
East Ukraine is spiking, but Western pols are silent.
Russia’s dirty
war in Ukraine is far from frozen, and despite the deteriorating situation, the West
appears keen to turn a blind eye.
While the
fighting in southeast Ukraine has rumbled on incessantly throughout the winter,
inducing conflict fatigue and a drop in media coverage, the last weeks have
seen a marked spike in the number of attacks.
Ukrainian
officials are reporting up to 71 attacks a day, with most of the fighting concentrated around the separatist-held cities
of Donetsk and Gorlovka, as well as the countryside east of the Azov port city
of Mariupol.
Both sides
accuse each other of daily using heavy mortars, which were supposed to have
been withdrawn in accordance over a year ago in accordance with the first Minsk
agreement.
According to the
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), which monitors the
ceasefire, last month saw the return of the use of Grad multiple-launch rocket
systems and 152 mm artillery. Both were reportedly used on two consecutive days
in separatist-held Gorlovka.
Jan. 26 and 27
saw a multitude of reports from Donetsk residents on social media of intense
fighting in the north
of the city, where the frontline runs alongside the ruins of the
airport and the suburbs of Peski and Avdeyevka. Dozens of Twitter and VKontakte
(Russia’s Facebook equivalent) users across the city reported a powerful
explosion and shockwave on the 27th, for which there is
still no credible explanation. Some users claimed that the shelling was the
heaviest heard since the final assault on Donetsk Airport at this time last
year.
Furthermore,
over the last few days, we have seen the targeting of frontier checkpoints,
which allow civilians to enter and leave separatist-held territory, by
Russian-backed fighters, raising the possibility that the government may be
forced to close these vital
passages to avoid casualties.
The Jan. 13
call, put forth by the new Russian representative at the Minsk peace talks,
Boris Gryzlov, for an immediate, total ceasefire has clearly amounted
to nothing.
The Ukrainian
and separatist leaderships are pursuing diametrically opposed plans regarding
the holding of local elections in the occupied regions of the Donbass—a key
element of the Minsk
ceasefire agreements.
While Kiev, and
the text of the Minsk deal itself, says the elections must be held in
accordance with Ukrainian law, Aleksandr Zakharchenko, the leader of the
self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR), last week restated his
commitment to barring all major Ukrainian political parties and conducting the
votes under DNR “law.”
The prospects
for another element of the Minsk process—the exchange of prisoners of war, are
looking gloomy too. On Jan. 28 the head of the International Committee of the
Red Cross (ICRC) delegation to Ukraine, Alain Aeschlimann, told reporters that
his organization had been allowed access to only four of the 133 Ukrainian
prisoners theseparatists claim to
hold.
On Jan. 25
former President Leonid Kuchma, the lead Ukrainian negotiator in direct talks
with the Russian-backed separatists, said that he now thinks that many of those
prisoners are already dead. The separatists are, he suggested, using the
negotiations over the number of prisoners
to stall and buy time.
All this comes
amidst a grim backdrop. The ICRC says that over a thousand people are still
missing as a result of the conflict in the Donbass, and disease, fostered by a
breakdown in infrastructure and thousands of casualties caused by the fighting,
is spreading rapidly.
Ukraine (as well
as southern Russia) is now in the grips of an epidemic of H1N1 variant flu,
which has infected 18 regions of the country and killed at least 171
people. Schools have been closed indefinitely in Kharkiv. In separatist-held Donetsk, well over 2,000 people have turned to doctors
with complaints of viral
respiratory infections so far this year.
The
sister Lugansk “People’s Republic” reports an even worse situation, with more
than 10,000 people infected and dozens of quarantine zones introduced. Both
Eduard Basurin, a DNR military spokesman, and Vadim Solovyov, an MP in the
Russian State Duma, have claimed that the flu outbreak in Ukraine originated
from an American biological warfare facility in government-controlled
Kharkiv.
This of course,
combined with a (most likely Russian) cyber attack that caused a blackout late
last year and the stand-off at the frontier with occupied Crimea over imports,
only adds to the deep-seated mistrust between Kiev and the Russian side.
Yet on Jan. 22,
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said that sanctions on Russia could be
lifted within “these next months” if the Minsk agreements were implemented in
full.
Leaving aside
the fact that sanctions were first introduced in response to Russia’s
occupation and annexation of Crimea—a completely separate issue on which there is not even a hint of progress,
Kerry’s suggestion that Minsk could be fully realized in the space of a few
months is absurd.
Poroshenko has said that there must be a ceasefire before the “special status”
law, that would establish semi-autonomy for the occupied areas of the Donbass
and establish the legal framework for local elections, comes into effect. And
even if those highly contested electoral plans come to fruition, the Minsk
agreements stipulate the withdrawal of all foreign (i.e. Russian) forces from
Ukraine and the return of government control of all of the border with Russia
before full implementation looks near.
Kerry’s hint at
rapprochement is part of a wider trend.
The German and
Finnish governments continue to pursue the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project with
the Russian state gas monopoly Gazprom, a policy that flies in the face of
moves to achieve European energy independence and is opposed by Ukraine,
Poland, and the Baltic states.
In the U.K.,
despite a devastating conclusion from the public inquiry into the murder of
Alexander Litvinenko, which found that the Russian Federal Security Service
(FSB) had organized the radiological assassination, and that then FSB chief
Nikolai Patrushev and even President Vladimir Putin himself had “probably”
ordered it, the government has refrained from rocking the boat.
During the House
of Commons debate that followed the publication of the Litvinenko Inquiry
report, the home secretary, Theresa May, opposed calls from across the house
for the introduction of a British equivalent to the U.S. Magnitsky Act—a broad
sanctions bill aimed at corrupt and human rights-abusing Russian officials—and
announced little more than the lukewarm punitive measure of freezing any U.K.
assets belonging to the two assassins, who have been living under Kremlin
protection (one as an MP) for almost a decade since the murder.
The reason for
both Kerry and May’s soft approach to Russia derives from Western hopes that
Putin will be of assistance in Syria. “We will continue to call on President
Putin for Russia, as one of the five permanent members of the United Nations
Security Council, to engage responsibly and make a positive contribution to
global security and stability,” May said. “They can, for example, play an
important role in defeating [ISIS] and, together with the wider international
community, help Syria work towards a stable future.”
But this means
turning a blind eye not only to the killing of Litvinenko, but Russia’s annexation
of Crimea and invasion of the Donbass for the sake of a hope that Putin may be
turned to work with the West on Syria. If Russia can, with impunity, use
radioactive polonium to murder a British citizen in London or shoot down a
passenger airliner over Ukraine, then how can we collaborate on “serious crime”
or “aviation security”?
The hope here is
profoundly misplaced.
While Russia
“could” play an important role in fighting ISIS, they are not and have used the
cover story of doing so to further aims that run directly contrary to the
(publicly stated, at least) aims of the U.K., U.S., and France. The vast
majority of Russian airstrikes in Syria are aimed not at ISIS-held territory,
but areas controlled by opposition groups. This includes U.S.-supplied Free
Syrian Army units.
When they do carry out strikes in ISIS-held land, they bomb
water treatment plants and grain silos, which the Russian Ministry of Defense
attempts to pass off as oil
refineries. Meanwhile, there are reports that Russia actually
spent the years prior to the direct military intervention last September
dispatching domestic jihadists to wage war in Syria with
groups including ISIS itself.
The worst effect
of this is that by devastating the opposition, which includes both nationalists
and Islamists of shades varying from moderate to the fundamentalist, while
leaving ISIS relatively unscathed, Putin and Bashar al-Assad are ensuring that
the moderates are squeezed out and the jihadists’ appeal to bombed and abused
Sunnis is strengthened.
Furthermore, if
the Assad regime succeeds, with the help of Russian air and ground forces, in
retaking rebel-held areas like Idlib and Aleppo, then the refugee crisis that
is already causing a breakdown in the EU Schengen system of free movement will
worsen dramatically.
It is by no
means a stretch to say that the breakup of the European Union is a foreign
policy goal for the Kremlin. Russia has fostered relationships with far-right
Eurosceptic parties across the EU, with the virulent, neo-Vichyist Front
National even receiving millions of euros from a Kremlin-linked
Russian bank. Last month has even seen Russian state TV spreading a fabricated story of a German teenager being gang-raped by
immigrants and the Russian embassy in London posting starkly racist tweets about Germany being trampled beneath the feet of migrants.
Western
governments now appear set to ignore Russian malfeasance, not only in Ukraine
and Syria, but at home in the EU, for the sake of fantasy and financial gain.
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