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.

***

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. 

*** 

“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.

Gray Lady's Info War Against Novorossiya

For the most part the Gray Lady's reporting on the battle for Novorossiya has been adequate. If a person is willing to read the dispatches every day from start to finish, while maintaining an eye on other sources available on the Internet, then one can basically figure out what is going on.

The problem is in what the Gray Lady chooses to emphasize. Take the story by Andrew Kramer, "Ukraine Says Army Controls Center of a Rebel City," which I spied on the newspaper of record's web site last night before going to bed:

DONETSK, Ukraine — The Ukrainian military on Sunday moved into the heart of the separatist hub of Luhansk for the first time, officials said, chipping at one of the cornerstones of the pro-Russia rebels’ disintegrating virtual state. 

Ukrainian officials said army units had raised the national flag over a police station in central Luhansk, the eastern city that, along with Donetsk, has been a center of rebel activity and an important destination for Russian fighters and aid. Other parts of Luhansk, however, were still said to be under rebel control. 

The claim could not be independently confirmed, though a photograph of the flag and police station was circulating on social media, and the report was consistent with the progress of fighting there going into the weekend.

There is a tendency in the Western press to "stovepipe" or "front load" all bogus junta claims to the top of the story, usually constructing the headline out of said claims, and then append a demur, parenthetical "could not be independently verified." With that disclaimer the Gray Lady can argue, in a legal sense, that she is objective and neutral, when clearly she is waging an information war.

The objective is to create the impression that for Novorossiya all is lost. And I must admit it had an impact on me. I went to bed and dreamed disturbed, harrowing dreams. But all is not as the Gray Lady would have us believe. For instance, Kramer says that "Besides the advance in Luhansk, the Ukrainian military made another critical move, capturing the town of Yasinovataya, a strategic railway hub north of Donetsk." But according to a report by the reliable Colonel Cassad, Yasinovataya has not been captured by the junta:

Yasinovataya is currently not captured by the junta. As stated at the beginning of the offensive, Yasinovataya is a key goal for the junta in the battle for Donetsk. So when junta tanks rolled into Yasinovataya, Poroshenko’s Twitter reported it captured, although there is a difference between entering a city and capturing a city. Similarly, claims about the taking of Lugansk were untrue, when a couple of days ago junta’s infantry entered to the West of Hriaschevaty suburbs. Yasinovataya is now under fighting, both sides have been amassing reserves, with extensive use of tanks and artillery.

So there you have it. A night filled with nightmares for nothing. But that is the point of disinformation.

In his story Andrew Kramer paints a picture of drunken and unruly rebels at the point of collapse:

The army has tightened its siege on Donetsk in recent weeks, and inside, a breakdown in discipline among the hard-pressed rebel fighters had locals on edge. Residents said rebel fighters had taken to carousing drunkenly at night and wearing civilian clothes at checkpoints, a change that would allow them, at a moment’s notice, to throw down their weapons and blend in with the population.

Kramer also speculates that the large number of empty trucks in the humanitarian aid convoy, still idling at the border where they have been since Friday, are meant to transport the routed rebels back to Russia:

The seemingly imminent defeat of the rebels also raised the possibility that the huge convoy of trucks waiting to bring aid from Russian to civilians in Luhansk and elsewhere in eastern Ukraine might also be used to carry fighters and weapons out of the country. During random inspections by journalists, a number of the trucks have turned out to be mostly empty, and Russian officials have not offered much explanation other than to say they were trying to account for the possibility that some trucks might break down.

Kramer could just as easily talk about the rebel victories in, as Colonel Cassad says, "Ilovajsk, Miusinsk and Krasny Luch," or the fact that the junta cannot use air power without it being shot down:

Today self-defence shot down 3 aircraft: one MiG-29 and two Su-25. Regarding the MiG, there’s confirmation from the junta. A video already appeared about Su-25 (although the video is confusing, a fuller version actually shows visible characteristic of the wreckage of a MiG-29, so this may be one and the same aircraft). So, confirmed 2, and 1 unconfirmed. In general, we can say that junta’s attempts to use aviation in the zone of punitive operation has always ended with losses, because of no opportunity to crush even such old air defence systems, as ADMS and MANPADS.

Why doesn't the Gray Lady report any of the turmoil emanating from Kiev? The sanctified space of the Maidan has finally been cleared by skinheads. Where is the outrage? Where is the unsigned editorial inveighing against the use of violence on peaceful protesters? Also, an internal power struggle has broken out into the open between Dmytro Yarosh of Right Sector and junta interior minister Arsen Avakov. Yarosh is threatening a march on Kiev to be staged by Right Sector's volunteer paramilitary unit unless the interior ministry rescinds all charges against the group's members.

But for all the exigencies of the information war -- what trifling anecdotes get emphasized at the expense of real newsworthy events like the forced clearing of the Maidan, the epicenter of the February coup which brought us where we are today -- the Gray Lady's Kramer concludes by pointing the informed reader in the correct direction:

In the past week, three senior rebel leaders have left the war zone, in moves seen as setting the stage for a possible negotiated settlement by removing contentious personalities or Russian citizens from top positions. 

In Luhansk last week, the prime minister and military commander of the Luhansk People’s Republic, Valery Bolotov, announced in a recorded video address his “temporary resignation” as leader and departure for Russia for medical treatment. 

Aleksandr Borodai, a Russian citizen, stepped down and was replaced by Mr. Zakharchenko. Mr. Borodai later announced that a fellow Russian who had been the military commander, Igor Girkin, who uses the nickname Igor Strelkov, or Igor the Shooter, had also resigned and a Ukrainian citizen appointed in his place. 

Mr. Borodai said Mr. Strelkov had left the eastern Ukrainian war zone for a “vacation,” and would return. 

Something is definitely in the works. The aid convoy is a distraction meant to buy time. In Berlin there is a powwow between the foreign ministers of Russia, Germany, France and Ukraine who are trying to hammer out a deal. It doesn't look like we are there yet.