Ceasefire Goal of Russian Aid Convoy

I haven't posted on Ukraine since the end of last month when the United States successfully herded, thanks to unsupported allegations that rebels were responsible for downing Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, the European Union into sanctioning Russia. Since then MH17 has been discarded down the memory hole, its task accomplished, and the rebels, despite a number of impressive battlefield victories, have gradually been pushed back into the cities of Donetsk and Luhansk. The Ukrainian military has not punched through to the centers of the cities; the rebels still largely control the outskirts. But the junta is indiscriminately shelling the urban core of both Donetsk and Luhansk, a war crime, and in this the United States has been complicit.

Then early this week the junta shelled a hospital in Donetsk, a war crime, and narrowly missed slaughtering a maternity ward filled with expecting mothers and newborns. Andrew Kramer reported on August 10 that

In the previous strike on the hospital, on [last] Thursday, shells hit the dental ward, killing one patient, destroying a pediatric wing and sending people running into the street midway through their dental work. 

On Sunday, the explosions and flying shrapnel blew out windows in the maternity ward. Tragedy was averted only because the deputy head doctor, Marina Ovsyanik, had evacuated 52 new and expecting mothers into the basement the night before, even though one woman was already in labor. She gave birth to a healthy boy in the basement, Dr. Ovsyanik said.

At this point Putin had to act. If he did nothing the huge popular support that he has received since February's coup in Kiev would curdle on him and he would be faced with a volatile, unpredictable domestic political situation. And what should be obvious by now is that Putin doesn't like volatility and unpredictability.

Putin's solution to the problem of inaction in the face of a weaker opponent's atrocities was to send from Moscow a large aid convoy comprised of some 260 trucks loaded with food and sleeping bags and generators bound for Luhansk.

This sent the junta and its Western allies into conniptions. Since Tuesday there has a been a constant back and forth between the parties -- the International Red Cross in Geneva, Moscow, Kiev, the United States -- about which border crossing the trucks will travel to, whether the trucks will be offloaded into new vehicles, whether they will be accepted into Ukraine at all.

Once again it appears that Russia has made a shrewd move. At the very least the aid convoy has revealed that the U.S. does in fact issue diktats to the Kiev junta. According to a story, "A Russian Convoy Carrying Aid to Ukraine Is Dogged by Suspicion," by Neil MacFarquhar in yesterday's paper:

Mr. Chaly [who is Poroshenko’s deputy chief of staff] also said outright that Ukraine had accepted the aid because of pressure from its Western allies.

In initially saying that Ukraine would accept the aid, the office of President Petro O. Poroshenko announced that President Obama had supported the move and offered American aid as well. Later, the Ukrainian president’s office amended the statement to note that the United States had endorsed the plan but not offered aid. 

Not everyone agreed to acceptance. 

At a morning session of Parliament, Oleh Lyashko, a nationalist politician who has helped form several paramilitary battalions, called for Ukraine to turn back the convoy and seal the border.

In today's paper MacFarquhar updates the aid convoy situation:

The dispute over the convoy comes as Kiev is bearing down militarily on the separatist rebels, forcing many of them to retreat into the region’s two major cities, Donetsk and Luhansk, which they control. 

Shelling there and elsewhere in the region by the Ukrainian forces has taken a heavy toll on civilians, with the death toll in the war doubling in the last week to more than 2,000, the United Nations’ Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights reported on Wednesday. 

Conditions in Luhansk, under siege by Ukrainian government forces, are particularly dire. City officials said Tuesday that its 250,000 residents had been living without power, water or a sewage system since Aug. 3, and that only essential food was available.

Nevertheless, both Kiev and its Western allies have warned that the Russian aid convoy was either a cynical ploy to get much-needed military assistance to rebel fighters in Luhansk, who are running low on ammunition, or, in the worst case, the first step in an invasion of southeastern Ukraine. 

***

Presuming the convoy does end up at the Shebekino crossing in Kharkiv, there were still issues to be resolved. Both Russia and Ukraine said they were expecting the Red Cross to handle the logistics of the delivery, but officials from the group said that the two governments had to agree first on the inspection of the goods and their transfer — if indeed they are transferred — to other vehicles for transport to Luhansk. 

“The Russians and the Ukrainians have not agreed on the first step,” Pascal Cuttat, the head of the Red Cross delegation in Moscow, said in an interview. Once the aid material had been inspected and cleared for entry into Ukraine, the Red Cross could take responsibility for it, he said. 

That could take time, depending on whether the inspection was by X-ray or by hand. Agreement had to be reached on questions like whether in a grain shipment every bag would be inspected, he said. 

But the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, had already rejected the idea of unloading the goods as impractical and too costly.

Now, according to a story filed today by Andrew Roth, "Russian Convoy Rolling Again Toward Ukraine," the aid caravan appears to be headed to the rebel-held crossing at Izvarino:

The convoy itself was headed to the border post at the Ukrainian town of Izvarino, just southeast of the beleaguered eastern Ukrainian city of Luhansk, diplomats said. A New York Times reporter following the long line of vehicles said they had turned off the main north-south highway in Russia toward that crossing, which is not under Ukrainian government control. 

Initially the two sides had agreed that the goods would cross farther north in a location fully under the control of Ukraine. But the apparent change of destination, said one diplomat, speaking anonymously because he was not authorized to comment publicly, meant that the previous agreement would have to be reworked. 

That is only one of the outstanding issues, diplomats said. It appeared that the Russian trucks would be allowed to cross into Ukraine, for example, but it was not clear who would drive them and where exactly they would go in or around Luhansk.

This prompted threats threats threats from the junta that force would be used to stop the convoy if it attempted to enter Ukraine:

Andriy Lysenko, a Ukrainian military spokesman, said on Thursday that Kiev had no precise information on the current whereabouts of the Russian aid convoy or where it might try to enter Ukraine. 

He warned that Ukraine would use “all forces available” to block the Russian trucks if they tried to enter Ukrainian territory without being checked first by border guards and representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross. 

“This convoy has to be checked to see what cargo it is carrying. This has to be controlled by Ukrainian border guards,” Mr. Lysenko told a news conference in Kiev. Red Cross representatives, he added, also “need to learn the exact contents of this cargo.” 

He said Ukraine hoped that Russia “will adhere to all these requests and will not violate Ukrainian law.” Asked what would happen if it did not, he said: “In this case the movement of the convoy will be blocked with all the forces available.”

So there you have it. The junta is on record. All available force will be used against the humanitarian aid convoy if it crosses the rebel-held border. This will give Putin the casus belli he seems to need. The U.S. and its feckless European allies are in a difficult spot. They can't crank up their shrill media monopoly smoke-screen machine over Russia providing relief for civilians in obvious crisis; the West's partisan prestige press organs acknowledge the perilous situation for residents who have not been able to flee Donetsk and Luhansk.

If and when the junta attacks the Russian aid convoy, the thinking in Moscow must be, the West will realize the dangerous offspring they have spawned in Kiev and press for a ceasefire. Even the force-addicted Israelis have agreed to a ceasefire.

U.S. Full-Court Press Against Russia Covers Kiev's Weakness

The newspaper today is loaded with stories pertaining to Russia and the Ukraine. The place to begin is not with the front page "bombshell," written by government mule Michael Gordon, on alleged Russian violation of the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) Treaty. That story has been waiting on the back burner for the U.S. to serve up at the appropriate time.

The appropriate time is now. Along with a ruling by a panel in The Hague awarding $50 billion to shareholders of Yukos oil company for its seizure by the Russian government, and the new raft of sanctions being debated and implemented today in Brussels, the U.S. assertion that Russia is in violation of the INF is part of a full-court press. And our question should be why now.

I have an answer. The answer is the junta in Kiev is in trouble. The inherent instability in the coup coalition of Svoboda/Right Sector Nazis and Fatherland neoliberal predators was made manifest last week when putsch prime minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk tendered his resignation, paving the way for new elections this fall. The clock is ticking. The Donbass uprising has to be put down in the next few months in order for the Kiev junta to begin implementing the IMF reforms; otherwise, Kiev will run out of money.

But the current junta offensive is not going well, despite assurances from Andriy Lysenko, spokesman for the junta's fascist security council. Let's turn to Andrew Kramer and David Herszenhorn, "Officials Pull Back From Crash Site as the Army Puts Pressure on Rebels":

Fighting raged farther east along the highway as well, overnight and through the day. Outside Shakhty-20, a coal mining town on the road, a photographer who was passing through Monday morning saw the scorched hulks of Ukrainian armored personnel carriers in the road, and the bodies of Ukrainian soldiers lying about. 

The Ukrainian offensive was intensive enough that the separatists’ military commander — a Russian citizen who uses the name Igor Strelkov, or Igor the Shooter — held a news conference on Monday to deny rumors that he had fled the city or that important positions had fallen.

“Everywhere, the fight was tough,” he said. “They attacked from the north and the south. As a result of the fierce fighting, most of the advance was pushed back.”

The Malaysian airliner was on its way from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur on July 17 when it fell from the sky over eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people aboard. Ukrainian and American officials say that a Russian-made surface-to-air missile fired from territory held by separatist rebels brought the jetliner down. The Kremlin and the rebels say the Ukrainian government was responsible for the crash.

Asked at the news conference if he had shot down the plane, Mr. Strelkov said that he would not have known how, even though he once served as a guard in an air defense unit. He also denied that his forces had the type of missile the United States says brought down the plane. “I did not have under my command any Buk systems, so I could not have ordered them to shoot at the airplane of Malaysia Airlines,” he said. “My subordinates did not do it.” 

In Kiev, Andriy Lysenko, a spokesman for the government’s security council, said the Ukrainian offensive had made gains, capturing a hilltop World War II monument complex that rebels have used for weeks as a stronghold. The claim could not be independently verified. In Donetsk, Mr. Strelkov said the site had not fallen.

The polite way the Gray Lady has devised for the serial mendacity of Lysenko and other junta representatives is to mention that the claims could not be independently verified.

But to return to the line of thought that I was pursuing, the offensive is not meeting with resounding success. Add to that the shift in the narrative that has taken place over the last week and is still ongoing as to who is at fault for bringing MH17 down. The week following the July 17 crash of the Malaysia Airlines passenger jet it was a foregone conclusion that the Novorossiyan militia, operating with Russian technical guidance, was to blame. That has shifted, with the unanswered questions piling up and the Kiev/U.S. case falling flat. So that now whenever MH17 is mentioned the standard form is to say that on the one hand Kiev/U.S. blames the rebels, while on the other the rebels/Russia blame the junta. For a sample of why Kiev/U.S. are running scared on the MH17, look at Lavrov's forceful statement:

In Moscow on Monday, the foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, repeated a Russian call for the United States to make public whatever proof it has that Flight 17 was brought down by a missile fired from rebel-controlled territory. “We do not understand why the Americans, who say that they have strong evidence to support their accusation, why they do not show that evidence,” he said at a news conference. 

Mr. Lavrov also said that the United Nations should guarantee security at the crash site, and he called on Ukraine to respect a United Nations Security Council resolution adopted on July 21 asking all parties to refrain from any action that would complicate the investigation.

The last paragraph refers to the agreement to cease hostilities within a 24-mile radius of the wreckage site. The junta is in direct violation of the UNSC resolution due to its offensive. So when serial liar Lysenko says "[W]e have information that terrorists from time to time are shelling the plane crash area, in particular from mortars and artillery, in order to destroy all possible evidence,” he is really talking about the junta.

Sabrina Tavernise and Noah Sneider report from Donetsk in "Enmity and Civilian Toll Rise in Ukraine While Attention Is Diverted" another reason for the big PR roll out by the United States. Kiev is losing the "hearts and mind" war. Even spook-infested Human Rights Watch is accusing the junta of war crimes:

In a report released on Thursday, Human Rights Watch documented four instances of the use of unguided Grad rockets, which killed at least 16 civilians in and around Donetsk in nine days. While both rebels and Ukrainian forces use the rockets — descendants of World War II-era weapons — the investigation “strongly indicates that Ukrainian government forces were responsible” for the four attacks. 

“Using these kinds of weapons in populated areas is a violation of the laws of war,” said Ole Solvang, senior emergencies researcher at Human Rights Watch. “International allies of the Ukrainian government — the United States, the European Union — should condemn this use and urge the government to stop.”

The junta's indiscriminate shelling in the urban centers of Luhansk and Donetsk, backed up by HRW, has given Russia all the justification it needs to rationalize an invasion of Ukraine for humanitarian purposes. All Russia need do is invoke the Kosovo precedent.

The U.S. is on shaky ground. That is the big picture. And true to form the U.S. is covering up its wobbliness with a lot of noise and bluster. It is a shame to see Europe bamboozled into placing more sanctions on Russia. The capital markets ban of Russian banks accessing medium- and long-term loans will no doubt hurt, but I don't think it is an existential threat. The dual-use machinery ban, depending on what gets placed on the black list, could be extremely damaging. Dual-use sanctions are what drove Iraq into poverty and caused the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children, eliciting the famous Madeleine Albright quote, "We think the price is worth it."

Already reservations are being voiced that this could drive Russia into more bellicose behavior, manifesting the very outcome that U.S.-led sanctions are designed to avoid. But for the United States the goal has not been the territorial integrity of Ukraine or peace and harmony. For the Unites States the goal all along has been to reestablish the Cold War, to rebuild a wall between Europe and Russia.