Unrest in Eastern Ukraine Benefits Putschists

Since last month's accession of Crimea to the Russian Federation we've been waiting for the other shoe to drop in Ukraine's industrial East. Something like the sound of a boot thudding on the floorboards is presently audible. Beginning Sunday pro-Russian demonstrators occupied government buildings throughout eastern Ukraine, principally the cities of Donetsk, Lugansk and Kharkiv. The Kharkiv occupation has been rolled back by Ukrainian Interior Ministry troops, who, according to the Russians, are rife with Right Sector goons and mercenaries from the contractor formerly known as Blackwater. This is from today's story, "Ukrainian Troops Move to Reassert Control in East," by David Herszenhorn and Andrew Roth:

The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, responding to the deployment of Ukrainian Interior Ministry troops, issued a stern statement accusing the Ukrainian government of embedding within its forces in eastern Ukraine both nationalist militants from the group Right Sector and private American mercenaries from a company called Greystone. 

It said the American contractors were being disguised as members of a military unit called “Falcon.” 

Academi, a private American security company affiliated with Greystone that was once known as Blackwater, notorious for its military contracting work in Iraq, issued a statement in mid-March saying its personnel were not working in Ukraine, after similar allegations surfaced in the Russian press. 

The company did not immediately respond to the statement from the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

In Donetsk the protesters called for the formation of an independent republic and a referendum on secession. The occupations in Lugansk and Donetsk are under siege.

The message being sent in unison from the putschists in Kiev and their Western benefactors is that this outbreak in the East is from Russian orchestration:

While widely regarded as political theater that is supported, if not directed, by the Kremlin, the protests could help promote what analysts say is Russia’s primary goal of destabilizing the shaky government in Kiev, preventing it from drifting further into the West’s orbit and giving Moscow leverage over the country’s future ahead of presidential elections in May. 

The turmoil in eastern Ukraine also makes it extremely difficult for the provisional government in Kiev to begin putting in place austerity measures and financial overhauls required by the International Monetary Fund as a condition for an $18 billion loan package that the country desperately needs to avert a default on its debt. 

The protesters themselves may be trying to provoke a violent response from Kiev, analysts say, hoping to provide the pretext for a Crimea-like military incursion in a country that Moscow considers an integral part of historical Russia.

You'll notice that in making the case for Russian string-pulling, Herszenhorn and Roth actually produce an argument that points to the putschists being the main beneficiaries of turbulence in the East. The IMF mandates, likely not only to fire up the Maidan once implementation begins but also end any hope of keeping Right Sector on the reservation, can be put off as long as there is a crisis of potential invasion from Russia.

The Gray Lady's lede unsigned editorial today, "A Familiar Script in Ukraine," repeats the same contradiction: It starts off asserting Russia's initiation of the protests but then makes a persuasive case that the Russians couldn't be behind the building seizures because they have nothing to gain and a lot to lose:

Yet [Putin] must understand that the cost of invading eastern Ukraine would be much greater than the putsch in Crimea, both in damage to Russia’s already sagging economy and in the new Cold War that would surely arise. Ukrainians would not forgive the theft of an economically critical region; NATO would be re-energized; and opposition within Russia would also grow as isolation and potential recession shut off the freedoms and prosperity Russians were learning to enjoy.

One thing we have learned is that Russia, unlike the United States, is a rational actor. Clearly Putin knows the difference between Donetsk and Sevastopol. The Crimea operation was a slam dunk. Assimilating eastern Ukraine into the Russian Federation would be no such thing. This is obvious.

No, the Russians have been consistent here. Their bargaining position is -- 1) give the regions broad autonomy, and 2) no NATO inclusion for the Ukrainian state. The putschists, holding a terrible hand, facing painful austerity and economic collapse, are taking a page from the playbook of their Western benefactors -- when you have a problem, make it bigger.

Russia, as I see it, was content to wait unlike the billionaire chocolate oligarch Petro Poroshenko is elected president next month, at which point his seized Russian factory would be on the negotiating table as part of any deal.

The putsch regime is fundamentally unstable. The neo-Nazis can only be kept on the reservation as long as the Russian bogeyman is alive and kicking. Once austerity sets in all bets are off.

Russia Triumphant, West Apoplectic

“They cheated us again and again, made decisions behind our back, presenting us with completed facts. That’s the way it was with the expansion of NATO in the East, with the deployment of military infrastructure at our borders. They always told us the same thing: ‘Well, this does not involve you.’ ”

President Vladimir Putin                                                          

Address on the Treaty of Accession with Crimea and Sevastopol

St. George's Hall, Kremlin                                                        

The orgy of Russophobia on display today in the Gray Lady is remarkable. One story after another is chock full of acidic disdain and an ignorance of the basic facts of recent history. Case in point is Steven Erlanger's think piece on NATO, "Russia’s Aggression in Crimea Brings NATO Into Renewed Focus." Nowhere mentioned is the fundamental betrayal of the verbal agreement between Bush I and Gorbachev, that German reunification would be allowed to proceed as long as the former Warsaw Pact countries would not be gobbled up by NATO. Clinton promptly broke the agreement and expanded NATO. This is what Putin refers to in the quote above.

Putin's speech was refreshing to behold, in stark contrast to Joe Biden's tired, obviously mendacious statement in Warsaw where he makes more stale threats. At what point does the U.S. foreign policy elite realize that they are losing and just, please, you know, stop talking, stop blustering?

A perfect example is White House Press Secretary Jay Carney yesterday trying to take credit for punishing the Russian economy on a day when the markets responded positively to Putin's Crimea address. Here is how Peter Baker describes it in the best piece to be found in today's paper, "Obama’s Test: Can Penalties Change Russia’s Course?":

Mr. Carney said the United States would also expand its sanctions, and noted that the geopolitical uncertainty had already taken a toll on Russia’s currency and markets. “I wouldn’t if I were you invest in Russian equities right now unless you’re going short,” he said. 

And yet world markets rose on Tuesday after Mr. Putin’s speech and action, either shrugging off the crisis or interpreting his reassurance that he did not want to split Ukraine as a signal that he would be satisfied after taking Crimea. The ruble, bolstered by Russia’s central bank, backed off the record lows it had fallen to in recent days.

Either way, Mr. Obama was left on the defensive against critics who said he was not being strong enough. Mitt Romney, his Republican challenger in the 2012 election, said Tuesday that Mr. Obama and his team waited too long to project strength and prepare possible punishments before Mr. Putin sent troops into Crimea. “Part of their failure, I submit, is due to their failure to act when action was possible, and needed,” Mr. Romney wrote in The Wall Street Journal. 

Mr. Carney said it was “preposterous” and “provably wrong” to suggest, as other critics have, that the president sent a signal of weakness that emboldened Mr. Putin after failing to follow through on threats to retaliate against Syria last year for a chemical weapons attack on civilians. Mr. Carney went on to note that Mr. Bush’s willingness to invade Iraq “didn’t seem to affect Russia’s calculations when it came to its actions in Georgia” in 2008. 

Mr. Obama has given himself more tools to use against Russia, if he chooses to do so. An executive order he signed on Monday authorizes sanctions against not just Russian government officials but also the Russian arms industry and Russian oligarchs who support Mr. Putin’s rule. 

One Russian who has been on some lists of possible targets circulated in Washington and Brussels is Igor Sechin, a longtime Putin adviser who is now the president of Rosneft, the state oil company. 

Rosneft is deeply entwined in a variety of projects with ExxonMobil, including a joint venture signed in December to develop oil reserves in Siberia. If Mr. Sechin is barred from traveling to the United States and has his personal assets frozen, current and former government officials said that could put the partnership between the oil companies in real jeopardy. 

Republicans in Washington are also pushing Mr. Obama to be more assertive to break Russia’s energy grip over Ukraine and Europe. “If we are serious about challenging Putin’s aggression,” said Representative Ed Royce, Republican of California, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, “the U.S. and our European allies should make an all-out effort to break that grip.”

That is a marker of the seriousness of Western talk of sanctions: Does the Russian energy sector get targeted? In order to go after Rosneft or Gazprom you would have to guarantee that Europe and the United States march together in lockstep, otherwise one country's loss would just be another's gain. Europe has already declared that the energy sector is off-limits. The result? Serious economic sanctions are as probable as a thermonuclear war between East and West.

Look to the East in Ukraine to Discern U.S. Intentions

At this point, with Joe Biden being trundled off to Poland and the Baltics to calm the former Soviet satellites, I am sure Obama wishes Ukraine would just disappear, at least for a while.

This morning, following Putin's speech announcing that Crimea will be accepted as a member of the Russian Federation and a pervasive sense of mirthful derision that has greeted the stentorian proclamation of  Russian sanctions by the U.S. and Europe, it is clear that the Western defense of the putsch in Ukraine has arrived stillborn.

The best riff on the sanctions dud is quoted this morning in "Putin Declares Crimea Is a Part of Russia" by Steven Lee Myers and Peter Baker:

The American sanctions targeted prominent Russian officials, but not those likely to have many overseas assets; the European list generally went after lower-level targets. As a result, the actions were met with derision and even mockery in Moscow. 

“This is a big honor for me,” said Mr. Surkov, once called the “gray cardinal” of the Kremlin and known as the architect of Mr. Putin’s highly centralized political system. He told a Russian newspaper that he had no assets abroad: “In the U.S., I’m interested in Tupac Shakur, Allen Ginsberg and Jackson Pollock. I don’t need a visa to access their work.”

Obama warns that more sanctions are to come; that the lucrative Russian arms industry is next. But to truly harm Russia, sanctions would have to come from Europe and they would have to target Gazprom and/or Rosneft. There is no indication Europe will go in that direction:

Asked whether the European Union had failed to match tough words with strong actions, Radoslaw Sikorski, the Polish foreign minister, told journalists: “The U.S. is from Mars and Europe is from Venus. Get used to it.” 

He noted that “Europe is closer and will therefore pay a bigger cost for sanctions against Russia.” He also pointed to Europe’s collective decision-making process. 

“In the United States, one man takes a decision on the basis of an executive order,” Mr. Sikorski said, “whereas in Europe, for these measures to be legal, we need a consensus of 28 member states.”

If round one in Ukraine went to the Nuland neocons and the Right Sector street fighters, round two goes to Russia. Now, with the clock ticking, the momentum has decidedly shifted  in favor of Putin and against the putschists in Kiev. Shortly, the International Monetary Fund will come forward with a bailout deal. I would imagine this will represent a significant challenge for the putsch government. The fiction floated by Western governments and their servile press is that the putschists have a popular mandate from the people; the truth is, the putsch only represents a minority. Once the austerity features of the IMF loan package are published, the putsch government should begin to fray.

Appreciation of this is probably what is motivating Kerry to consider previously dismissed Russian proposals for a constitutional overhaul of Ukraine to allow for federalization. As laid out the last couple of days on the Moon of Alabama blog ("Ukraine: U.S. Takes Off-Ramp, Agrees To Russian Demands"),

There was another phone call today between Secretary of State Kerry and the Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov. The call came after a strategy meeting on Ukraine in the White House. During the call Kerry agreed to Russian demands for a federalization of the Ukraine in which the federal states will have a strong autonomy against a central government in a finlandized Ukraine. Putin had offered this "off-ramp" from the escalation and Obama has taken it.

Going forward, the West needs Russia to help solve the crisis it created in Ukraine. But I am not confident that the United States has the ability to act cooperatively at this point. The logic of U.S. hegemony is "If you don't get what you want, just make the problem bigger." Populate the planet with a series of failed states. Granted, Obama and Kerry took the off ramp in the run up to war against Syria; let's hope that was not just a one-off.

Proof that Russia is going to bide its time is found in a refreshingly unbiased story by C.J. Chivers and Andrew Roth about protests in the pro-Russian Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, "In Eastern Ukraine, the Curtain Goes Up, and the Clash Begins." We should be able to interpret the intentions of the U.S. going forward by the response to pro-Russian protesters in the east. If there is a harsh crackdown by the putschist-aligned security forces, we know that it is the U.S. sticking to script, trying to the make problem bigger.

Heedless West Heads for Trade War with Russia

The United States and the European Union continue to act as if they have nothing to lose by baiting and threatening Russia in the Ukraine. This was brought home to me by a quote from an unnamed State Department official in an article this morning by Michael Gordon, "Kerry Arrives in London for Crisis Talks on Crimea." Referring to this Sunday's vote in Crimea to secede from Ukraine,

“If this referendum goes forward, there will be costs,” the State Department official said. “If there is further military escalation there will be more costs. If there is not serious diplomacy there will be more costs.” 

Mr. Kerry also plans to ask Mr. Lavrov about Russia’s snap military exercise, the State Department official said. 

“We are very concerned,” the State Department official said. “This is the second time inside of a month that Russia has chosen to mass large amounts of force on short notice without much transparency around the eastern borders of Ukraine. It certainly creates an environment of intimidation.” 

“That will be one question that will be asked,” the official said. “What is meant by this?”

"What is meant by this?" Really? How pathetic. The U.S. continues to act as if it is engaged in just another drone strike on Pashtun tribesmen, or destruction of an African aspirin factory, apparently heedless of Russia's ability to apply costs of its own to Western conduct. What amazes me is the success the Obama administration in having Germany toe its line. Merkel has sounded particularly strident over the last couple of days. This is from a good story by Steven Lee Myers and Alison Smale, "Russian Troops Mass at Border With Ukraine":

The ouster of the government of Viktor F. Yanukovych in February and Russia’s subsequent intervention in Crimea have deeply divided Russia and the West, and in Berlin, Ms. Merkel underscored the potential risks, declaring that “the territorial integrity of Ukraine cannot be called into question.”

As Russia’s largest trading partner in Europe, Germany is certain to have significant influence on the debate over how to respond to Russia’s actions in Ukraine. Some politicians and observers in other European countries and in the United States have suggested that Germany’s close trading and other ties with Russia had made it hesitant to adopt sanctions against Russia. 

Ms. Merkel’s speech, however, suggested that President Vladimir V. Putin might have miscalculated the anger that the occupation and annexation of Crimea would cause — or that he might be impervious to it. 

Mr. Putin, who has remained in Sochi to attend the Paralympics there, has so far showed no sign of bending to international criticism. In a meeting on Wednesday with the directors of national Paralympic teams, he implicitly reiterated the Kremlin’s argument that the ouster of Mr. Yanukovych was an armed coup instigated by outside forces. “I would like to assure you that Russia was not the initiator of the circumstances we are now facing,” Mr. Putin said. 

In her remarks, Ms. Merkel rejected any comparison between the situation in Crimea today and that in Kosovo in the late 1990s, when NATO bombed Serbia for 78 days to halt the attacks on Kosovo Albanians by Serbian forces. 

Ms. Merkel was clear that Germany would go along with the other 27 states of the European Union, and the United States, if Russia did not open meaningful diplomatic talks and the West moved to freeze Russian accounts and impose travel bans or restrictions on leading Russian figures. 

“To make it unmistakably clear,” she said, “nobody wants it to come to that.”

The West is boxing itself into a corner. Its public is not behind this conflict despite a full-tilt propaganda campaign. The public is exhausted with constant warfare. Why spend billions to stir up trouble in Ukraine when Detroit is bankrupt? Russia, on the other hand, is operating with what appears to be overwhelming public support.

Yet despite a lack of popular approval, the West is pursuing a maximal position: the absolute territorial integrity of Ukraine (in spite of the precedent it created in cracking apart Yugoslavia) backed up by threats of economic warfare.

Clearly, as Russian forces mobilize along Ukraine's eastern border and street riots turn deadly in Donetsk, the West is going to have to put up or shut up. Putin has put up and will continue to do so. A red line has been crossed for Russia; Putin will not retreat. Elites running the show in Western capitals think that economic warfare will bring Putin to heel. I think they will find themselves the ones besieged by their own supporters in the business world. Hopefully, when the Western alliance starts to fray, the United States does not ramp up military support for Ukraine.

Crimea Secession a Done Deal U.S. Seeks to Move the Goal Posts

War is toxic to the body politic. It blots out all else. Day after day after day it fills the newspapers and airwaves. All other information becomes secondary. It is a horrible way to live.

For almost a month now we have been living this way, longer if you factor in the riots in Kiev that led up to the putsch that sent President Yanukovych fleeing from the capital.

Viewed from on high, it is a fairly simple story. There is an East-West split in Ukraine, the same one that fueled the 2004 Orange Revolution. The West won, took control of Kiev and quickly installed a pro-neoliberal government composed of the usual suspects from the Fatherland Party along with the neo-Nazi muscle (Svoboda, Right Sector) that led the street fighting on Independence Square. Russia reacted by asserting control of Crimea, home to its Black Sea Fleet. This Sunday, the historically Russian Crimea will conduct a referendum on whether to secede from Ukraine and join the Russian Federation.

The position of the West is that such a vote is illegal, a violation of international law and the Ukrainian Constitution. The West is largely silent about the legal status of the putsch government. Obama and Kerry intone that it is the legitimate government without mentioning its constitutional status because it is not constitutional. The Ukrainian Constitution outlines an impeachment process that must be followed in order to remove the president. Like in the U.S., a trial must be conducted. A trial must be conducted so evidence can be weighed. Running a man out of town for fear of his life is not a weighing of evidence. Nonetheless the United States' only argument for the legitimacy of the putsch government led by Arseniy Yatsenyuk and Oleksandr Turchynov seems to be that Yanukovych skipped town.

Speaking of Yatsenyuk, he was in Washington D.C. yesterday making the rounds. The stories this morning in the Gray Lady --  "Obama Makes Diplomatic Push to Defuse Crisis in Ukraine" by Peter Baker and Michael Gordon; "Kerry Plans 11th-Hour Meeting With Russians Over Crimea" by Michael Gordon -- leave the impression that the goal posts are being moved:

Mr. Kerry held out the hope that a political solution might be reached even though there have been no public hints of Russian flexibility. Even if the referendum in Crimea went ahead, he suggested, there might be a chance for a political solution if Russia stopped short of annexing the province. 

“There are a lot of variants here, which is why it is urgent that we have this conversation with the Russians,” he said.

That was from Kerry's testimony yesterday before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Foreign Operations. And here is basically the same take from Obama and Yats:

Mr. Obama said Mr. Yatsenyuk told him that a new Ukrainian government formed after elections scheduled for May 25 could find ways to address Crimea’s concerns. “There is a constitutional process in place and a set of elections that they can move forward on that, in fact, could lead to different arrangements over time with the Crimean region,” Mr. Obama said. “But that is not something that can be done with the barrel of a gun pointed at you.” 

At a separate appearance later in the day, Mr. Yatsenyuk expressed willingness to consider concessions to Crimea. “We the Ukrainian government are ready to start a nationwide dialogue how to increase the rights of autonomous Republic of Crimea, starting with taxes and ending with other aspects like language issues,” he told an audience at the Atlantic Council.

The takeaway? The U.S. and its putschist quislings are writing off a Yes vote for secession this Sunday in Crimea. They are moving the goal posts to say that a Yes vote does not preclude continued negotiations; that a settlement on Crimea could include enhanced autonomy with guarantees for the Russian Black Sea Fleet. But the catch is that Russia will have to acknowledge the legitimacy of the putschists and bless their May 25 elections.

It is not going to happen. My read is that Russia no longer trusts the United States to deliver anything in good faith regarding Ukraine. Russia will now proceed to implement plans that it sees will bolster its national interest in its sphere and let the West react.

Merkel came forward with a tough statement against Russia yesterday, embracing the architecture of a New Cold War as dictated by the United States. My assessment is that this is a bluff. If big American business is actively lobbying against economic sanctions, what do you think German big business -- with far more exposure to Russia -- is doing?

Russia holds fast, stays strong -- and the North Atlantic alliance frays.