The Putsch in Ukraine: a Clearer Picture Emerges

Since last Friday, when Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych signed off on a deal brokered by Poland, Germany and France to step down this December (Russia ended up refusing to sign the agreement, saying it was nothing more than an opposition diktat), the situation has deteriorated precipitously. The security forces abandoned Yanukovych, as did a large number of Members of Parliament from Yanulovych's Party of Regions, and Yanukovych fled the capital. He is now apparently holed up incognito in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv. All this happened by Saturday, not to mention that Yanukovych's archrival Yulia Tymoshenko was released from her prison hospital room.

If there is any doubt that what transpired in Kiev last week was a putsch, that is put to rest today in a story, "As His Fortunes Fell in Ukraine, a President Clung to Illusions," reported by Andrew Higgins, Andrew Kramer and Steven Erlanger. Fearing that they would be used for target practice by Obama's "peaceful protesters," who were rushing the weapons from a looted armory in Lviv to the capital, the security forces quietly negotiated their surrender with the putschists occupying Independence Square:

On Tuesday, empowered by a new aid package from Russia announced the day before, Mr. Yanukovych pressed to remove an encampment of antigovernment activists from Independence Square, where they had been cursing his government since November. 

Squads of riot police overpowered the outer ring of defenses protesters had set up and advanced to within 25 yards of a stage in the center of the square, called the Maidan.

Running out of options, the protesters mounted a final, desperate defense, a so-called ring of fire stoked with tires, firewood and even their own sleeping bags and pads. 

But Andrei Levus, deputy head of the Maidan “self-defense” forces, the umbrella organization of militant activists fighting the government, knew he had reinforcements on the way. Protesters in Lviv had overrun an Interior Ministry garrison and were en route to Kiev with the captured military weapons. 

“I’m reluctant to talk about this because we are protesters and not illegal armed groups,” Mr. Levus said. “But the square was about to look different. There would be more people, and they would not have had empty hands.” 

Despite the dwindling of the protective fires, the protesters decided to hold on to the square long enough for both sides to consider the significance of the arrival of the weapons in the capital.

Using a member of Parliament as an intermediary, Mr. Levus opened a line of communication with a deputy interior minister, whom he declined to name. It appeared that Mr. Yanukovych, perhaps sensing that his security forces were reluctant to press the crackdown, was inclined to turn to the army for help. He had fired the armed forces chief of staff, Col. Gen. Volodymyr Zamana, on Monday.

“We understood they had a few hundred fanatical riot police, but the rest of the police would not fight,” Mr. Levus said. 

Several street fighters who were on the barricades early Thursday morning said that they saw police officers walking away from their positions, and that this emboldened them. Some protesters fired hunting rifles and shotguns. Police lines crumpled. 

“Our people are ideologically motivated, and on the contrary, they were demoralized,” Mr. Levus said. “They did not want this fight. And he understood that our people were ready to run against gunfire.” 

Mr. Levus said he received a call on his cellphone around noon on Thursday from the deputy interior minister. “I told him, ‘We will guarantee the safety of the police if they leave the city,’ ” he said. 

The deputy minister agreed first to a cease-fire until 3 p.m., when Parliament was set to meet. With support from some members of Mr. Yanukovych’s quickly disintegrating Party of Regions, Parliament voted to support the protesters’ demand that the police demobilize.

This reporting makes for some discordant passages in the Gray Lady today. On the one hand putschists are described as pro-democracy advocates, while those defending the duly elected government are depicted as drunken hooligans. This is from Alison Smale, "Power Shift Inspires Joy in Kiev, Fury in East," reporting from the anti-putschist (and hence, pro-democracy) eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk:

DONETSK, Ukraine — Red Communist flags flew on Sunday in front of a massive bust of Lenin in this hardscrabble coal-mining city, a stronghold of pro-Russia sentiment in Ukraine. About 500 yards away, a few hundred pro-democracy activists, harangued by hundreds of counterdemonstrators, laid wreaths for the victims of last week’s bedlam in Kiev at a memorial to one of Ukraine’s most revered figures, the 19th-century poet Taras Shevchenko.

***

Earlier, activists at the wreath-laying ceremony emphasized in a statement that they would neither storm administrative offices, as protesters did in Kiev, nor tear down memorials, as protesters have done with 16 statues of Lenin across the central and eastern parts of the country in recent days, according to the Ukrainian news media. About 300 people turned out for the ceremony at noon. 

Just an hour later, the second scene unfolded. Hundreds of loud citizens — mostly young men, many of them masked and carrying wooden or metal clubs — gathered on a sidewalk, separated from the memorial crowd by various police units, including black-clad riot units and militia in navy uniforms. The crowd chanted “glory,” not to honor the protesters in Kiev but to praise the Berkut, the elite police units widely held responsible for the violence against the demonstrators.

The fact is the New York Times for the most part in its foreign affairs coverage mirrors the position of the U.S. State Department. This means that the Gray Lady must sculpt its reporting to obscure the violent nature of the putsch, and this she has done. But now that it appears that Yanukovych is well beyond the point of no return, it is safe to let the truth shine in. (We saw this in the invasion of Iraq.) The problem is that the story is still developing and not all the Gray Lady's staff got the memo.

What lies ahead?

Russia does not seem ready to acknowledge the new situation in Kiev, though National Security Advisor Susan Rice is foursquare behind the putschists. Moon of Alabama blog makes the good point that Yanukovych's removal by the Ukrainian Parliament is illegal because it does not follow the process outlined in the constitution. Like in the United States, a president's removal has to be made by means of a formal process of impeachment. The Ukrainian Parliament has not impeached Yanukovych; rather, it has merely transferred presidential power to newly elected Speaker of the Parliament, Oleksandr Turchynov. Now, acting interior minister Arsen Avakov has issued an arrest warrant for Yanukovych. Additionally, in an indication that the current Parliament is not broadly representative but tilted toward the western part of the country, the official status of the Russian language in Ukraine was terminated.

Also, the police are not back to work in Kiev. How long can that last before we see a situation like the one that happened in Libya where militias started battling each other in the streets?

Time is on Russia's side. The U.S./EU has created a mess. The Ukraine is nearly insolvent. Will the International Monetary Fund step up with a generous bailout? If so, the putschists will have to deliver a pound of flesh. This is from David Herszenhorn's frontpage story, "Ukraine’s Acting Government Issues Warrant for Yanukovych’s Arrest":

On Sunday, the fund’s managing director, Christine Lagarde, said that there was concern about the political instability in Ukraine and that the fund could provide assistance only in response to a formal request. But she added that an economic program to help Ukraine had to be “owned by the authorities, by the people, because at the end of the day it will be the future of the Ukrainian economy.”