Kiev Has Lost

The end of summer approaches. The Labor Day weekend begins. The end appears to be approaching for the coup-makers in Kiev. The junta military is about to snap. How else to interpret Putin's address to the Novorossiya militia?

It is clear the militia has achieved a major success in intercepting Kiev’s military operation, which represents a grave danger to the population of Donbass and which has already led to the loss of many lives among peaceful residents. 

As a result of the militia’s actions, a large number of Ukrainian service members who did not participate in the military operation of their own volition but while following orders have been surrounded. 

I call on the militia groups to open a humanitarian corridor for Ukrainian service members who have been surrounded, so as to avoid any needless loss of life, giving them the opportunity to leave the combat area unimpeded and reunite with their families, to return them to their mothers, wives and children, and to quickly provide medical assistance to those who were injured in the course of the military operation. 

For its part, the Russian side is ready and willing to provide humanitarian aid to the people of Donbass, who have been affected by this humanitarian catastrophe. 

I once again call on the Ukrainian authorities to immediately stop military actions, cease fire, sit down at the negotiating table with Donbass representatives and resolve all the accumulated problems exclusively via peaceful means.

Andrew Roth reports this morning from Moscow in "Putin Commends Separatist Militias in Ukraine" that there is dissension within the Ukrainian military:

Ukrainian irregular troops, who primarily serve in volunteer battalions, have complained in recent days of receiving no military support in pockets of strong separatist resistance. Semyon Semenchenko, the head of the pro-Kiev Donbass battalion, whose forces have been pinned down for more than a week in the city of Ilovaysk, called on Facebook for protests at the army’s headquarters in Kiev. 

“We have been tricked once again,” Mr. Semenchenko wrote on Wednesday. “There will be no help today. Those responsible are the minister of defense and the commander of the ATO,” he wrote, using the shorthand for Kiev’s anti-terrorist operation against the rebels in the east. 

The Ukrainian news media also reported that the Transcarpathian battalion, another pro-Kiev group, had returned home to western Ukraine after its soldiers came under heavy artillery fire from Grad rockets.

What makes this all so bizarre is that two weeks ago Gray Lady reporter Andrew Kramer, who was on the ground in Donetsk, predicted that the rebels' days were numbered but a few. Now, the junta military is surrounded southeast of Donetsk and the self-defense forces control a road to the west. Quite a turnabout.

I must admit that two weeks ago I was lost in the fog of war and Andrew Kramer's reporting. The junta's terror campaign of shelling the metropolitan centers of Luhansk and Donetsk led me to conclude that Putin would try to secure a ceasefire and some sort of reconciliation with Kiev. This turned out, as we see, not to be the case.

And that is why there is such a hue and cry in the West and from Kiev, with junta prime minister Yatsenyuk making a desperate plea for Western support, because the jig is almost up. The junta military offensive has always been a circus meant to keep the attention of the masses diverted from the impossibly high hurdles that Ukrainian economic integration with Europe represents. Putin reminded everyone of this in Minsk on Tuesday.

But for now the U.S. and Kiev will do what they have done since March, wail and gnash teeth over Russian aggression. Neil MacFarquhar and Michael Gordon in "Ukraine Leader Says ‘Huge Loads of Arms’ Pour in From Russia" sum up this wailing as follows:

Mr. Poroshenko spoke as NATO released satellite images to corroborate accusations that Russian forces were actively involved in Ukraine fighting. NATO also said that more than 1,000 Russian soldiers had joined the separatists battling the Ukrainian military. 

“Over the past two weeks we have noted a significant escalation in both the level and sophistication of Russia’s military interference in Ukraine,” Brig. Gen. Nico Tak of the Netherlands, a senior officer in NATO’s military command, said in a statement. One image, dated Aug. 21, shows a Russian military convoy with self-propelled artillery moving in the Krasnodon region inside Ukraine. Another, dated Aug. 23, shows Russian self-propelled artillery units in firing positions near Krasnodon.

General Tak said the Russian soldiers were backing the separatists and “fighting with them.” He also said NATO estimated that about 20,000 Russian troops were deployed on Russian territory near the Ukrainian border.

The United States ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey R. Pyatt, said in a series of Twitter messages that Russian military assistance to the separatists had failed to help them sufficiently, “so now an increasing number of Russian troops are intervening directly in fighting on Ukrainian territory.” He also asserted that Russia had sent its newest air defense systems, including an effective weapon, the SA-22, into eastern Ukraine, “and is now directly involved in the fighting.”

The Novorossiya militia responded by saying that there are Russians fighters among its ranks but they are volunteers:

“There are active soldiers fighting among us who preferred to spend their vacation not on the beach, but with us, among their brothers, who are fighting for their freedom,” Aleksandr Zakharchenko, a rebel commander and the prime minister of the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic, said in an interview on Russian state-run television. 

Mr. Zakharchenko said that 3,000 to 4,000 Russians had fought alongside separatists since the conflict erupted. 

That assertion evaded the issue of direct Russian involvement by painting the soldiers as volunteers. It suggests, however, that Moscow still seeks to organize and to some extent control a force that could be operated at arm’s length with a backbone of local participation. 

While the United States and its European allies have condemned Russia, they have not responded to criticism that the Ukrainian tactics against the separatists have included shelling civilian areas in rebel strongholds. The United Nations has estimated that 2,000 people have been killed in eastern Ukraine violence.

Yesterday Obama promised more sanctions. But there are already significant sanctions targeting Russian banking, military and technology. Any additional steps will have to go after the behemoth, Gazprom, which will harm Europe. Will France cancel its warship contract with Russia? If the answer is no, then the sanctions game has run its course.

NATO will likely station more troops and hardware in Poland and the Baltics, on a rotating basis to evade promises not to garrison Russia's borders. But a greater worry for the West should be what to do about the mess that they have made of Ukraine.