BY ,
Moscow says it’s sticking to a ceasefire agreement.
Meanwhile, it’s piling up troops and weapons for something that doesn’t look so
peaceful.
The war in Ukraine may have
faded largely from international headlines, but Vladimir Putin’s drip-drip
invasion continues. In the last two weeks, forensic evidence, some of which has
been reported by monitor organizations and senior Western diplomats, the rest
corroborated by eyewitness photography and video, only confirms what the U.S.
fears most: A summer offensive is inevitable.
On May 5, the Ukrainian government released new data which says that they have lost 28 towns to Russian-backed
separatists since February 18. That was
the day the strategic town of Debaltsevo, which guarded a key highway to
separatist-controlled regions, slipped from Ukraine’s control. The map of separatist territoryis as alarming
as it is illustrative, especially when it is combined with the daily reports of
ceasefire violations and fighting coming out of both the Organization for
Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and Kiev.
On May 6, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko addressed the National
Security and Defense Council and warned that
Russia has 50,000 troops on the border and its proxies have more than 40,000
fighters inside the country. That’s not only a combined 50% increase in
possible invaders over July of last year, the month which proceeded the
“Russian invasion” on the Ukrainian mainland. It’s more than enough soldiers to
invade and gobble up a significant amount of Ukrainian territory.
“There is a convincing evidence that Ukraine strictly complies with the
Minsk [ceasefire] agreements and militants constantly violate them,” Poroshenko
noted. Separatists do not allow international observers to verify their
withdrawal of heavy weaponry. “Militants regularly shoot Ukrainian positions,
engage in reconnaissance and subversive activity and provoke armed
confrontations in order to disrupt peaceful settlement of the conflict.”
One day later, May 7, the OSCE witnessed a significant amount of fighting
both near Donetsk and around a town called Shirokino, 20 kilometers east of
Mariupol—part of a trend of heavier fighting which started in late April. The
OSCE also reported that one of their surveillance drones was
jammed for 10 minutes while attempting to monitor
the movement of separatist tanks near Donetsk, in violation of the 50-kilometer
demarcation line agreed upon by both sides.
While the OSCE reports that it has seen an increase of
heavy weaponry within the demarcation line for weeks, Ukraine maintains that it
is only returning fire and it is the Russian-backed separatists who are on the
offensive. On May 8, the day after the OSCE’s unmanned aerial vehicle
(UAV) was jammed, the OSCE witnessed three Ukrainian tanks in
government-controlled territory—an admitted violation of the negotiated
ceasefire. That same day the OSCE witnessed 30 separatist tanks moving toward the front lineswithin the demarcation line—10 times more than the
Ukrainian government was deploying. The OSCE also observed a testing ground for
advanced weaponry—proof, according to the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey
Pyatt, of “Russia’s train and equip program in plain sight.”
Each day since has provided more evidence
that the Minsk agreement is little more than a piece of paper. For weeks the
OSCE, NATO, and citizens of eastern Ukraine brave enough to snap pictures and
video have been warning that a large amount of heavy Russian armor and
artillery has been headed back to the front lines. The separatist leadership
has maintained that this equipment was only moving around to prepare for
military parades on Saturday, May 9, to commemorate the 70th anniversary of
Nazi Germany’s capitulation to the Soviet Union in World War II. While the
movement of this equipment would be a violation of the Minsk agreement whatever
the floated reason, since the parades ended the weaponry hasn’t been moved back
beyond the demarcation line.
It’s not just the amount of firepower now
in separatists’ hands that is alarming observers. It’s also the kind of
weaponry—specifically, the Strela-10 anti-aircraft missile system.
The Strela-10 is designed to supply close support to
troops and vehicles near the front line of fighting. It’s meant to shoot down
fast-moving, low-flying aircraft such as helicopters or non-stealth jets. There
is significant evidence that the Russian military regularly includes the Strela-10 in
important convoys because
it can protect against immediate air threats while longer-range weapons (such
as the Buk system, which shot down a MH17 passenger jet in 2014) can perform
the same function from further afield. In fact, the first time the
Russian-backed fighters were ever seen using T-72 tanks, Strela-10s were filmed escorting the vehicles from a border crossing in Lugansk just seven days
before the MH17 was immolated. There are no documented cases of the Strela-10
system having been captured by Russian-backed separatists, and the T-72 has not been used by the Ukrainian military in this conflict.
On May 2, three Strela-10s were spotted escorting a convoy of two T-64B tanks, three BMP-2s, three BTR-80s, three
2S1 Gvozdika self-propelled howitzers, three BM-21 Grad MLRS, three trucks
towing artillery pieces, perhaps 2A65 152mm howitzers, and several other
military trucks and fuel tankers through Lugansk. On May 5 Strelas were seen parading through Donetsk, escorting a similar convoy. But if they were only in
Donetsk for the May 9 parade, it’s curious that a similar convoy was spotted by the OSCE within the line of demarcation near Donetsk on May 10,
suggesting that the weapons have not returned to their holding areas as
specified in the Minsk protocol.
Could these weapons systems have been
mobilized just to deter Ukraine and fortify standing separatist positions?
Well, the Minsk protocol was designed to forestall any such scenario and
explicitly called for de-escalation rather than retrenchment. Also, Western
military officials seem to think the presence of this materiel has another
purpose altogether. In late April, NATO Supreme Commander and U.S. Air Force
General Philip Breedlove warned that the Russian military had taken advantage of the ceasefire to train and equip the separatists and to “reset and
reposition” their forces. Nor were these mere training exercises. “Many of
their [the Russians’] actions are consistent with preparations for another
offensive,” Breedlove said, adding that Russia never rattles its saber without
the attendant follow-through. Breedlove also suggested that Russia had further
integrated its own military’s “[c]ommand-and-control, air defense, support to
artillery…making a more coherent, organized force out of the separatists.”
Then, on May 11, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg also warned that the
separatists are now so well equipped that they could launch an all-out
offensive against the Ukrainian military on little notice and without direct military assistance. Again, if all
this was just to hold the line, then why agree to Minsk in the first place,
when that protocol was designed to do just that without the benefit of tanks or
APCs?
There’s the added alarm of what the
separatist leadership itself says about its imminent plans. On April 23, Vice
News broadcast an interview with Alexander Zakharchenko, the
self-declared head of the “Donetsk People’s Republic.” Asked if he saw the
Minsk agreement holding, Zakharchenko was unambiguous: He did not want it
to hold.
He categorically rejected one of the main
planks of that diplomatic settlement—that the Donbass remain part of Ukrainian
territory. “Do you suggest we give up, so our territory can fall into Ukraine’s
hands?” he told Vice News. “So that they can put us back into the stalls, like
we are some kind of cattle? So that they can drag us to join the EU, to be
living off American handouts? We do not want that. We declared that we want to
be friends with Russia and that’s what we are doing. That’s what the majority of
the local population want. At least 95 percent.”
Zakharchenko, who wants to see the return
of the Soviet Union, mooted the possibility of other conducting “referenda” to
certify their breakaway status from Ukraine.
“Aside from Zakharchenko’s belligerent
rhetoric,” a senior Western diplomat told The Daily Beast, “the most worrisome
evidence is the continued active tempo of Russian training activities with the
separatist armies, and the presence of advanced Russian surface-to-air missile
systems near the contact line in blatant violation of the Minsk agreement.”
As ever, the Putinists command one side to
abide by a compact they never had any intention of honoring themselves. Only
now, they’ve managed to embarrassingly snare the State Department into defending
their own arguing position. While John Kerry was breaking bread (and potatoes)
with Putin and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov at the Russian
president’s personal residence in Sochi last week, Poroshenko made an ambiguous
statement about plans to regain Donetsk International Airport, once the
cynosure for some of the fiercest fighting the war as yet seen and some of the
bravest Ukrainian resistance to better-armed separatists.
“I have no doubt,” Poroshenko said at the
premiere of Airport, a new documentary
about the battle for that installation, “we will free the airport, because it
is our land. And we will rebuild the airport.”
Kerry was in Russia on his first state
visit since 2013, and clearly there to ask for various favors from a government
the United States has sanctioned yet nevertheless believes it still needs to
resolves various foreign crises from Syria to Iran and Ukraine. So the
opportunity to scandalize America’s top diplomat—something of a contact sport
in Russia these days—was too good for the Kremlin-owned press to pass up. Asked
by the state-owned media about Poroshenko’s provocative although nebulous
pledge, Kerry replied as the media hoped he might by saying that he hadn’t seen
the Ukrainian president’s remarks but would warn him to “think twice” before
kickstarting any military operation.
The U.S. embassy in Moscow tried to
downplay the inevitable awkwardness this created between two allies, noting,
for instance, that Poroshenko has elsewhereruled out taking back any of the Donbass by force. But Moscow
just sat back and enjoyed the squirming. Vitaly Churkin, Russia’s ambassador to
the UN, said, “It’s an important thing that Kerry made this
statement and that he said the U.S. believed it was crucial to observe the
accords reached in Minsk on February 12,” neglecting of course to mention how
his own government has “observed” those accords.
The Ukrainians, meanwhile, were left furious
at Kerry for kowtowing to the Kremlin (again) and now worry that the Obama
administration has gone out of its way to telegraph its own disposition should
fighting indeed escalate in the coming weeks. Kerry went so far as depict the
Ukraine crisis as the result of bilateral culpability: “Whoever has instigated”
war, he said, should stop, as it has gone on too long already. He also floated
the possibility of U.S. sanctions relief on Russia “if and when Minsk is fully
implemented.” Washington, it is feared in Kiev, will do nothing if Minsk is
turned to toilet paper. And that’s as good as an engraved invitation for Putin
to proceed as he’d already planned to anyway.
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