Ceasefire in Gaza, No Ceasefire in Novorossiya

"They're destroying our buildings." That is the line that filled my head as I awoke this morning. My wristwatch alarm had gone off at the usual time, 4 AM, but then I went back to sleep and dreamed of being out on the desert hardpack at Burning Man with Sergey Brin.

"They're destroying our buildings" refers to the chief strategy of U.S. allies Israel and Ukraine. An Egyptian-brokered ceasefire in Gaza was announced yesterday. Despite vows from both the Palestinian Authority and Hamas that they would never again accept a return to the status quo ante, that is exactly what happened. Jodi Rudoren reports in "Cease-Fire Extended, but Not on Hamas’s Terms" that

A statement from Egypt’s Foreign Ministry describing the deal included only vague language about “the aspirations of the Palestinian people” and the need to create “an independent Palestinian state to achieve peace and security in the region.” Hamas’s call for a seaport and airport in Gaza, and Israel’s call for demilitarization of the coastal territory — along with an exchange of Israeli soldiers’ remains for Palestinians in Israeli prisons — were put off for discussion within a month if the truce holds.

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Though Egypt, Israel and the United States have all said a cease-fire should strengthen Mr. Abbas and give him the leading role in rebuilding Gaza, he was not mentioned in the Egyptian statement. The statement also said nothing about Gaza’s southern Rafah crossing with Egypt, whose frequent closings since President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi came to power in Egypt have been a prime Palestinian complaint.

The agreement restores the six-nautical-mile fishing zone off Gaza’s coast that Israel agreed to in 2012 but later cut back. It also says that Israeli-controlled border crossings will be opened to allow the “quick entry” of humanitarian aid and materials to reconstruct Gaza, where more than 11,000 homes and scores of schools and mosques have been reduced to rubble. A senior Israeli official said the entry of cement and concrete would be monitored to ensure it was used for civilian purposes, because “we’re not interested in allowing Hamas to rebuild its military machine.”

It is hard to know why exactly the Palestinian side caved in so badly. Maybe there is a secret agreement on the release of Hamas prisoners. After all is said and done the place to look is the obvious. The longer the Israeli bombardment lasted the more Gaza became an uninhabitable landscape of rubble:

The agreement followed a week of renewed fighting after the collapse of an earlier cease-fire. Israel killed several top Hamas military commanders and felled three high-rise buildings in audacious airstrikes, while more than 100 rockets a day pounded its battered south. 

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“The human catastrophe is just very immense, it’s getting worse and worse every day, and I think that’s one of the reasons Hamas took into consideration in accepting the cease-fire,” said Mkhaimar Abusada, a political scientist at Al-Azhar University in Gaza City. “The mood is very critical of Israel, but they are also asking questions of Hamas: Why did we have to go through all this? Why is there no cease-fire? Why did we provoke Israel into this war? More and more questions are in the minds of the Palestinians, especially in this last week.”

There was an excellent story at the beginning of the month by Rudoren and Fares Akram, "Conflict Leaves Industry in Ashes and Gaza Reeling From Economic Toll," that highlighted the Israeli strategy of targeting Palestinian industry in Gaza for destruction. All of this -- targeting civilian homes and industry -- is a war crime. And it worked to bring about the best Netanyahu could expect to achieve, a ceasefire with a vague promise to allow construction material through the blockade to rebuild what will be destroyed again at a later date.

The ballyhooed meeting yesterday in Minsk between Putin and Poroshenko turned out to be, at first blush at least, little to do with securing a ceasefire in the Donbass and more about the reasons Russia has for opposing Ukraine's newly-signed association agreement with the European Union. Niqnaq has a illuminating post today, "minsk in a nutshell," that lays out Putin's arguments, the foremost of which is that duty-free products from Europe will flood Ukraine where they be misleading re-labeled Ukrainian goods and exported to Russia:

As soon as Ukraine introduces zero import duty on goods from Euia, a step envisaged right after the ratification of the agreement that would apply to 98% of all the goods, there will obviously be a sharp increase in the supply of Euian goods to the Ukrainian market. We understand our Euian partners: they have already developed the Ukrainian market rather well, and would like to get hold of whatever is left and squeeze out everyone else. Besides, less competitive Ukrainian produce will also be squeezed out from its own market. Where to? Primarily to Russia and the other Customs Union states, but primarily to us. We should not rule out the risk of illegal re-export to the Customs Union market of goods from Euia under the guise of Ukrainian produce, either.

I was wrong. I thought Putin was going to make a deal with Poroshenko at Minsk. But now it appears that while Putin was in Minsk Moscow has committed itself even more to Novorossiya by opening up new fronts. According to Andrew Higgins and Michael Gordon in "Putin Talks to Ukrainian Leader as Videos Show Captured Russian Soldiers":

The release of the videos [of junta-captured Russian soldiers] and the high-level talks came a day after Ukraine accused Russia of sending an armored column across the border toward the coastal city of Mariupol. That, along with other Russian moves, prompted Geoffrey R. Pyatt, the United States ambassador to Ukraine, to express alarm on Twitter. “The new columns of Russian tanks and armor crossing into Ukraine indicates a Russian-directed counteroffensive may be underway. #escalation,” he wrote. 

Western officials said the purpose of the push toward Mariupol, which is far from the main conflict zone, was to open a new front that would divert Ukrainian forces from Donetsk and Luhansk, and possibly to seize an outlet to the sea in the event that Russia tries to establish a permanent separatist enclave in eastern Ukraine. 

Two other Russian incursions, the officials said, were aimed at breaking the siege of Luhansk by Ukrainian forces and opening a supply corridor to Donetsk. 

To support the counteroffensive, Russia has deployed a sizable amount of artillery within range of Ukrainian forces near Luhansk. The Ukrainian forces were out of range of artillery based on Russian territory, so Moscow moved the units into Ukraine. 

“Russian military units with self-propelled artillery have entered eastern Ukraine and have established an operational presence in the Krasnodon area, an area controlled by Russian separatists,” a senior Obama administration official said. 

The videos released by Ukraine could make it more difficult for the Kremlin to stick to its approach of denying that it has any hand in the fighting, though a state-run Russian news agency cited an unnamed Defense Ministry official as saying the soldiers had crossed into Ukraine by accident.

Colonel Cassad reports the hot phase of fighting will last through Ukrainian parliamentary elections in October. No politician can afford to be seen suing for peace until then. This means the humanitarian crisis in Novorossiya will deepen since all the junta military has proven it can do is shell civilian structures using heavy artillery. Power and water has been out for weeks in Luhansk. Unless the counteroffensive of the Novorossiyan self-defense forces is a smashing success and the junta is routed thoroughly we can expect more destroyed homes and high rises and civilian slaughter.