Kiev Losing Control

Not having posted on Ukraine since the sham OSCE round table talks the middle of May, there is a good place to dip back. Sabrina Tavernise has an interesting story this morning, "Separatists Storm Border Post in Eastern Ukraine." What is interesting about it is the story undercuts its own headline. But I'll get to that in a minute.

First, a few words about Sabrina Tavernise. I remember her as a reporter in Iraq covering the U.S. occupation during the period of time preceding the surge. She is very attractive, which is memorable, but I also thought she was intelligent. I didn't follow her in Lebanon, but recently she has been covering public health in the United States. (I did a post on a story she did about the low life expectancy in the U.S. compared to other developed countries.)

That's why it is sad for me to find her in Donbass peddling the U.S. Department/Gray Lady line: the Russian-speaking east of Ukraine is experiencing a Putin-contrived violent rebellion against the people-powered democratic government in Kiev.

This morning she reports that a border control headquarters in the city of Luhansk was attacked by "Hundreds of separatist fighters":

The attack in Luhansk, Ukraine’s easternmost province, began at 4 a.m. and fighting was still raging at noon. Oleg Slobodyan, a spokesman for the Ukrainian state border service, said about 500 rebels had stormed the district headquarters building in the Mirny neighborhood, using automatic weapons and rocket launchers with snipers posted in nearby apartment buildings.

Five rebels were killed and eight wounded, Mr. Slobodyan said, though there was no independent confirmation of that count. Seven border guards were injured, he added.

Then five paragraphs later she refutes the first part of the story and says it was the Right Sector dominated Ukrainian National Guard that attacked the border control HQ:

The rebels gave a different view of the fight, saying that their forces were battling members of the ultranationalist Ukrainian group Pravy Sektor and the National Guard, a quasi-governmental force that includes many of the so-called defenders of Maidan who were part of the protests in Kiev that toppled the government this year. 

According to an account from the Russian news agency Itar-Tass, citing the press service of the separatist Luhansk People’s Republic, several hundred armed men took up positions around the border patrol building and began shooting at around 4 a.m. It was not clear who the men were, but the agency characterized the fight as being between Ukrainian nationalist radicals and central government forces. 

It also said that the Ukrainian military had sent a fighter jet to defend the building. Mr. Slobodyan acknowledged that a jet had been dispatched, but he said it flew over without taking action because the fighting was taking place in a residential area.

This squares with plenty of information about the reluctance of the Ukrainian military to get involved in the fighting going back to the beginning of the Donbass uprising. Right Sector is there to guarantee that the Ukrainian military fights. Here is how The Saker describes it in a post from Saturday:

Right now the junta is using an old Bolshevik technique: they send conscript units into combat and right behind them they use "blocking squads" - special Right Sector death squads which will summarily execute anybody not willing fight. While such methods are more or less doable in open terrain they are absolutely impossible to use in an urban environment. Thus, those Ukrainian army forces which might be able to competently execute an urban assault (paratroopers) are rarely willing to do so, while those who would be most willing to do so would either be killed in minutes ("street rioter turned national guardsman in 2 weeks") or to cowardly to try (death squads).

Tavernise basically paints the same picture in her story:

The attack was a deeply troubling sign for Ukraine’s new government, whose president elect, Petro O. Poroshenko, has pledged to crush the separatist movement in the country’s east. That promise may prove difficult to keep, particularly in the lawless areas of southeastern Luhansk, where separatists control large swaths of territory that have become combat zones for Ukrainian forces. 

The assault also raised the question of how strong the central government’s forces are in the east, where many members of the police and other state security forces have either melted away or joined the rebels. Border guards are one of the few forces left in eastern Ukraine, but are not particularly practiced in combat.

If you take the forty minutes or so to watch Frontline's "The Battle for Ukraine," which was broadcast May 27, you come away with a similar impression. The country is being pushed towards anarchy and civil war by the Ukrainian ultra-nationalism of Right Sector. The reporting is strongly skewed toward the Western perspective. The Donbass uprising is portrayed as violent and lawless and paid for by Russia; the bloody attacks on the Maidan in February are entirely the fault of Yanukovych's security forces; Yanukovych abandoned the government in Kiev instead of escaping from a Right Sector death squad; Stepan Bandera was a nationalist hero who fought both the Soviets and the Nazis without a word about the ample role of Bandera's Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) in the Holocaust; the strong turnout for the independence vote in Donbass was downplayed; etc.

Nonetheless, the picture "The Battle for Ukraine" presents is clear. Right Sector is attacking the east and Ukraine is being torn apart. You have Dmytro Yarosh on camera saying so.