Russia/Germany Work for Peace, U.S Wants War

The crisis in Ukraine has for the most part hogged the news since the end of last November. There was a lull after Putin bailed out Yanukovych by buying Ukrainian bonds and reducing the price of Gazprom's gas. Then protests fired up again on the Maidan, leading eventually to ascension of the neo-Nazis and Yanukovych skipping town. That was toward the end of February, February 21 to be exact. Since then it has pretty much been all Ukraine all the time. Crimea quickly broke off after the February putsch and joined the Russian Federation. For the last several months, the Ukraine's industrial east, the historically pro-Russian, Russian-speaking portion of the country has been the site of Maidan-like uprisings, culminating in Sunday's vote in favor of self rule by People's Republic of Donetsk. That's where we are.

Russia acknowledged the vote but called for negotiations:

This time, the Kremlin issued a statement saying only that it “respects the will of the population of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions,” and that the crisis should be resolved through dialogue between representatives of the easterners and the national government in Kiev.

That is from Neil MacFarquhar's "Russia Keeps Its Distance After Ukraine Secession Referendums." Though People’s Republic of Donetsk Denis Pushilin announced that his province wants to accede to the Russian Federation, Putin's strategy is based on working with Germany through the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to get parties back to the bargaining table to deal with the only workable solution for a viable Ukrainian state -- federalization and neutrality; in other words, the sensible proposal that Russia has been floating all along.

Alison Smale, reporting from Berlin, talks about German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier's trip to Kiev today to try to get the junta to negotiate:

Mr. Steinmeier met the acting prime minister of Ukraine, Arseniy P. Yatsenyuk, in Kiev and had plans to travel on to Odessa on the Black Sea, where a horrific fire killed some 40 people earlier this month, German diplomats said. 

“We support your efforts to launch a national dialogue, under Ukrainian ownership, here in your country, through round tables, at the central level and in the regions,” Mr. Steinmeier told a joint news conference with Mr. Yatsenyuk, Reuters reported. 

The trip was Mr. Steinmeier’s third to the country since February, when he and his French and Polish counterparts brokered an accord between demonstrators and President Viktor F. Yanukovych that fell apart when Mr. Yanukovych was ousted [by neo-Nazis] and fled the country for southern Russia. 

Germany has repeatedly pushed for a diplomatic solution in Ukraine while insisting that it would support tougher sanctions if Russia either invades or obstructs a scheduled presidential vote on May 25. Above all, German politicians have made clear, they seek an elected figure to deal with in Kiev. 

Mr. Steinmeier is also promoting a proposal to get the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, a 57-nation group that includes Europe and the United States as well as Ukraine and Russia, involved in disarming separatists, promoting dialogue and overseeing a free and fair election. 

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has assured his support, although Russia has also pledged to respect the referendums in eastern Ukraine that were condemned as illegal by the authorities in Kiev and by the West. 

Berlin has asked the veteran German diplomat Wolfgang Ischinger, a former ambassador to the United States who now runs an annual security conference held in Munich each February, to coordinate a series of “round tables” intended to bring together all sections of Ukrainian society under the O.S.C.E. proposal. 

The terminology being used harks back to 1989, when Poland’s Communist rulers met representatives of the trade union Solidarity, and to the time when the Communists who ruled East Germany, where Chancellor Angela Merkel grew up, met dissidents. But German media questioned whether there is in Ukraine today even that minimum of national consensus that existed in Soviet bloc countries then.

Germany is the key here. Russia is working with Germany to avoid a Ukrainian civil war which would lead to a failed state that The Saker has dubbed "Banderastan." Working against peace is the United States. As in Syria, the U.S. prefers cracking a state open with non-stop violence. To get a sense of how this looks in the city of Slovyansk, read today's offering by C.J. Chivers and Noah Sneider, "In One Eastern City, Ukrainians Find Battle Hits Too Close to Home." The Ukrainian military is lobbing 120-mm mortars into neighborhoods:

Roughly midway through an hourlong gunfight that began just after midnight Sunday, six high-explosive mortar rounds narrowly missed the home of Yevgeny Kharkovsky and his wife, exploding around them on Yuzhnaya Street. 

One hit a few feet from their home’s east side. Another hit near the south side of the wall of their shed. A third landed on the shed roof. A fourth hit beside a row of beehives. Two more landed in their neighbor’s yard, blasting out windows there and at the next house down.

No one was wounded by the 120-millimeter shells that seemed to originate from a Ukrainian military position a little more than a mile to the southeast. But the near misses demonstrated a very real danger of the government’s effort to crack down on rebels controlling this city. Change the angle of a round’s descent, add or subtract a few yards, and one might have hit squarely on a house, killing civilians and igniting the kind of sustained fighting that has so far remained only a fear. 

“I couldn’t believe that there were explosions in my yard,” Mr. Kharkovsky said Monday, as intermittent gunfire could be heard at the nearby government position, where soldiers have been dug in for 10 days. Crossing himself slowly, Mr. Kharkovsky said he and his wife, Galina Kharkovskaya, had been lucky. He had been struck only by flying glass as windows were blown in. 

The close call on Yuzhnaya Street signaled a dangerous turn in the turmoil in eastern Ukraine.

Where is the outrage from Obama and Kerry? Remember during the major Maidan clashes in February they regularly scolded Yanukovych for allowing his security forces the use of weapons. Here, not a peep, when the coup government uses heavy weapons on civilians in their own homes. These people are not even protesting or violating a curfew; they're in their owns homes tending to their bees and their gardens.

It is obscene. Such hypocrisy does lasting damage to a state. Barack Obama is hollowing out the Democratic Party. It is going to be a tough row to hoe on down the line.