Ukraine on the Verge of Civil War and Economic Collapse

The news this morning is that the Kiev putschists have finally begun there ballyhooed crackdown on restive eastern Ukraine. Andrew Kramer, reporting from Slovyansk, has the story, "Ukraine Says It Has Begun Military Operation in East":

After days of failing to enforce its own ultimatums, the Ukrainian government on Tuesday began what the president called a military operation to confront pro-Russian militants in the east of the country. 

The first indication that the operation represented more than just words this time was a modest Ukrainian military checkpoint established on a highway north of the town of Slovyansk, which has been controlled by militants since Saturday. 

Witnesses said a dozen armored personnel carriers parked on the highway flew Ukrainian flags about 40 kilometers, or 25 miles, north of the town. There were no credible reports of confrontations with the well-armed and apparently Russian-backed forces in the town. 

“On Tuesday morning, in the north of Donetsk region, an antiterrorist operation began,” the Ukrainian speaker of Parliament and acting president, Oleksandr V. Turchynov, told Parliament in the capital, Kiev. “It will be carried out in stages, and responsibly and in a balanced manner. The goal is the defense of citizens of Ukraine.”

So far this action by the putschists seems largely cosmetic. Slovyansk is completely under the control of pro-Russian protesters. Staying 25 miles outside the city is wise.

The Ukrainian troops were not moving by early afternoon on Tuesday. Ahead of them in Slovyansk, scores of armed men maintained their hold on the police and domestic security service building and the City Hall. They have barricaded the roads and, locals say, placed snipers on roofs.

And yet the town remained crowded with people milling about the streets and standing at protests in front of barricades, illustrating that an overly assertive Ukrainian military response could quickly lead to heavy civilian casualties and play into Moscow’s narrative that Russian-speakers are in need of protection.

The putschists are likely responding to counsel from the gargoyle-like CIA Director John Brennan who was recently weekending in Kiev. The thinking in the West is probably that the putschists have to demonstrate some sort -- any sort -- of ability to establish facts on the ground (even if these facts are merely cosmetic) prior to the scheduled four-party talks in Geneva this Thursday. The U.S. did its part by whispering about more sanctions, also cosmetic, to be applied against Russia. The main one discussed being a travel ban and/or asset freeze of Rosneft president Igor Sechin. Peter Baker Reports in "With Ukraine Tensions Mounting, U.S. Weighs New Sanctions Against Russia" that 

Targeting Mr. Sechin would aim directly at Mr. Putin’s inner circle. Rosneft, Mr. Sechin’s oil company, is deeply involved with Western firms. BP owns nearly 20 percent of the company, and ExxonMobil has multiple projects with Rosneft in Siberia, the Arctic, the Black Sea, Canada, Alaska and Texas. 

Lawyers at ExxonMobil are researching the impact of sanctions against Mr. Sechin. Given that they would apply to Mr. Sechin personally and not his company, some specialists said it might mean little more than a logistical hassle because he could not travel to the United States to meet with his ExxonMobil partners.

Baker's story also illuminates the confusion inside the beltway over Brennan's house call on the putschists:

Mr. Brennan’s decision to travel to Kiev, however, struck many in Washington as baffling. Russian television first reported over the weekend that the C.I.A. director had arrived in Kiev under an assumed name to direct operations there. The White House and the C.I.A. initially refused to comment but on Monday confirmed his trip. Mr. Carney said it was meant simply to foster “mutually beneficial security cooperation,” and he called Russia’s characterization “absurd.”

Some former intelligence officers privately criticized the visit, saying it only bolstered the conspiracies advanced by Russian officials that the C.I.A. was behind the Ukrainian unrest that toppled a pro-Moscow president in favor of a government oriented toward the West. 

But other C.I.A. veterans said there must have been a good reason for him to go because the White House would have known Mr. Brennan would be spotted. “It’s a well-thought-out decision that had to be weighed against playing right into Putin’s message,” said Milton Bearden, chief of the C.I.A.’s Soviet division during the Soviet Union’s collapse.

Should Ukrainian troops decide to attack Slovyansk I am sure that nestled among the soft civilian targets they would find some very efficient and hardened Russian special forces. Appreciation of this is no doubt the reason that two putschist ultimatums have come and gone without any enforcement activity.

Writing yesterday from Horlivka, Andrew Kramer explores the idea that Russian troops walk among the pro-Russian protesters in the Donbass in his "In Ukraine’s East, Russians Are Blending Right In." Based mostly on an online video and one interview with a pro-putsch Ukrainian in Sloyvansk, Kramer concludes that there is a heavy Russian presence to the protests. I'm sure he is right. Russia would be completely negligent if it did not have special forces on the ground milling around acting as an invisible shield to putschist violence. But Kramer's story is important because it validates the essentially popular nature of the uprising in eastern Ukraine:

All the same, an emphasis on a Russian military role discounts the genuine discontent among a portion of the population in eastern Ukraine. And some of the political and business elites of the Donets Basin, an industrial and coal-producing region in the east that is the base of support of the former president, Viktor F. Yanukovych, felt that they had much to lose after he was deposed in February.

The question at this point -- with a bank run on Monday that prompted the central bank to raise interest rates three percent, the hryvnia has lost 35% against the dollar in 2014 -- is will the putschists instigate an all-out civil war to obscure the inevitability of economic collapse?

One thing is crystal clear. The U.S. has created another mess.