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.

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.

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.