Kiev Junta Makes Sham of OSCE Talks. Expect More of the Same.

Based on its reporting of the last few days, a shift appears to be underway at the New York Times. No longer is there complete unquestioned fealty to the Obama administration line that everything bad currently happening in Ukraine is due to Russian aggression against a peaceful democratic people yearning to be free of that evil Rasputin Putin.

Take this morning's story by David Herszenhorn, "Talks on Ukraine Crisis Open in Kiev Without Representation for Separatists." Herszenhorn makes clear that the Kiev junta is not bargaining in good faith:

Senior Ukrainian officials and leading public figures opened talks here on Wednesday that they portrayed as an effort to end the country’s six-month-old political crisis, but the provisional Ukrainian government offered little compromise and there was no one present directly representing the pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine. 

Officials said the negotiating effort would continue with a session on Saturday in the embattled eastern city of Donetsk. 

Pro-Russian leaders in the east reacted dismissively, saying they were not invited to participate in the so-called round-table talks, while officials connected to the region who did attend urged the government to develop concrete proposals that could be presented at the next meeting. 

Oleksandr Yefremov, a member of Parliament from Luhansk, urged the provisional government to put forward solid initiatives. “I really would like to see all the officials who are now represented by the acting president and prime minister come to the round table, come with some proposals and not just slogans,” Mr. Yefremov said. “We have to give answers.” 

While some officials from the east, like Mr. Yefremov, attended the talks, the provisional government in Kiev had vowed not to negotiate with the leaders of the masked gunmen, whom they refer to as “terrorists” and “killers.” As a result there were no representatives of the separatist factions, who are crucial to reaching an accord that might resolve the crisis. 

Mr. Yefremov, in his opening remarks, said he expected more of a presence from his region, and he complained that the talks had opened with sharp words by a leader of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Filaret, blaming Russia for the crisis. 

“I am surprised that nobody is here from Luhansk,” he said, “and I also don’t understand why we start our dialogue with morality.” He added, “We have people who think differently, who have different culture, and we have a responsibility to create a state that corresponds to the needs of our people.”

Herszenhorn quotes Donetsk's junta-appointed governor, oligarch Sergei Taruta, saying the obvious: there is no support for the coup government in the east. The billionaire knows which way the wind blows. He wants to maintain the size of his fortune, something not possible if the junta sticks with its absolutist position:

Sergei A. Taruta, the billionaire governor of Donetsk, another embattled eastern region, also attended the talks, which were held in the Parliament building and featured two former presidents of Ukraine as well as religious leaders. While the negotiations were billed as round-table talks, the table itself was oblong in shape. 

Mr. Taruta warned that there was genuine opposition in the east, known collectively as Donbass. “The majority of Donbass population is for Ukraine’s unity, but at the same time against the current authorities in Kiev,” he said. 

The acting prime minister, Arseniy P. Yatsenyuk, was among the first to speak on Wednesday, and he reiterated a promise to fight graft and urged unity. But he made no particular outreach to the besieged eastern regions where separatist leaders on Sunday held referendums that they said showed broad public support for seceding from Ukraine. 

“To fight corruption and provide people with jobs is our main task,” Mr. Yatsenyuk said. “And that will unite our country.”

Yatsenyuk does nothing without consultation with his U.S. masters. And the U.S. position apparently is -- no surprise here -- to stage-manage a display of "good faith" talks under the auspices of the OSCE, floating phony federalization-lite proposals (what the junta labels "decentralization") that go no further than offering more regional control of tax receipts, all the while terrorizing the civilian population of Donbass with a mercenary-directed Ukrainian national guard and lining up the rubber-stamp acceptance by Europe of the May 25 presidential election.

The United States is not looking for a reasonable solution to the impasse. It wants control of east by Kiev, and short of that it wants war. There is no indication so far of anything else. We'll see how the next round of talks goes. I would assume, based on a turn to more reality-based reporting by the Gray Lady, that the junta will be under pressure to be more inclusive in its public relations, particularly since opinion in Europe is growing more estranged from the putschists. But the U.S. is still running the show. And there is a great deal of arrogance in its conduct. So expect no substantive changes.

Russia/Germany Work for Peace, U.S Wants War

The crisis in Ukraine has for the most part hogged the news since the end of last November. There was a lull after Putin bailed out Yanukovych by buying Ukrainian bonds and reducing the price of Gazprom's gas. Then protests fired up again on the Maidan, leading eventually to ascension of the neo-Nazis and Yanukovych skipping town. That was toward the end of February, February 21 to be exact. Since then it has pretty much been all Ukraine all the time. Crimea quickly broke off after the February putsch and joined the Russian Federation. For the last several months, the Ukraine's industrial east, the historically pro-Russian, Russian-speaking portion of the country has been the site of Maidan-like uprisings, culminating in Sunday's vote in favor of self rule by People's Republic of Donetsk. That's where we are.

Russia acknowledged the vote but called for negotiations:

This time, the Kremlin issued a statement saying only that it “respects the will of the population of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions,” and that the crisis should be resolved through dialogue between representatives of the easterners and the national government in Kiev.

That is from Neil MacFarquhar's "Russia Keeps Its Distance After Ukraine Secession Referendums." Though People’s Republic of Donetsk Denis Pushilin announced that his province wants to accede to the Russian Federation, Putin's strategy is based on working with Germany through the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to get parties back to the bargaining table to deal with the only workable solution for a viable Ukrainian state -- federalization and neutrality; in other words, the sensible proposal that Russia has been floating all along.

Alison Smale, reporting from Berlin, talks about German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier's trip to Kiev today to try to get the junta to negotiate:

Mr. Steinmeier met the acting prime minister of Ukraine, Arseniy P. Yatsenyuk, in Kiev and had plans to travel on to Odessa on the Black Sea, where a horrific fire killed some 40 people earlier this month, German diplomats said. 

“We support your efforts to launch a national dialogue, under Ukrainian ownership, here in your country, through round tables, at the central level and in the regions,” Mr. Steinmeier told a joint news conference with Mr. Yatsenyuk, Reuters reported. 

The trip was Mr. Steinmeier’s third to the country since February, when he and his French and Polish counterparts brokered an accord between demonstrators and President Viktor F. Yanukovych that fell apart when Mr. Yanukovych was ousted [by neo-Nazis] and fled the country for southern Russia. 

Germany has repeatedly pushed for a diplomatic solution in Ukraine while insisting that it would support tougher sanctions if Russia either invades or obstructs a scheduled presidential vote on May 25. Above all, German politicians have made clear, they seek an elected figure to deal with in Kiev. 

Mr. Steinmeier is also promoting a proposal to get the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, a 57-nation group that includes Europe and the United States as well as Ukraine and Russia, involved in disarming separatists, promoting dialogue and overseeing a free and fair election. 

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has assured his support, although Russia has also pledged to respect the referendums in eastern Ukraine that were condemned as illegal by the authorities in Kiev and by the West. 

Berlin has asked the veteran German diplomat Wolfgang Ischinger, a former ambassador to the United States who now runs an annual security conference held in Munich each February, to coordinate a series of “round tables” intended to bring together all sections of Ukrainian society under the O.S.C.E. proposal. 

The terminology being used harks back to 1989, when Poland’s Communist rulers met representatives of the trade union Solidarity, and to the time when the Communists who ruled East Germany, where Chancellor Angela Merkel grew up, met dissidents. But German media questioned whether there is in Ukraine today even that minimum of national consensus that existed in Soviet bloc countries then.

Germany is the key here. Russia is working with Germany to avoid a Ukrainian civil war which would lead to a failed state that The Saker has dubbed "Banderastan." Working against peace is the United States. As in Syria, the U.S. prefers cracking a state open with non-stop violence. To get a sense of how this looks in the city of Slovyansk, read today's offering by C.J. Chivers and Noah Sneider, "In One Eastern City, Ukrainians Find Battle Hits Too Close to Home." The Ukrainian military is lobbing 120-mm mortars into neighborhoods:

Roughly midway through an hourlong gunfight that began just after midnight Sunday, six high-explosive mortar rounds narrowly missed the home of Yevgeny Kharkovsky and his wife, exploding around them on Yuzhnaya Street. 

One hit a few feet from their home’s east side. Another hit near the south side of the wall of their shed. A third landed on the shed roof. A fourth hit beside a row of beehives. Two more landed in their neighbor’s yard, blasting out windows there and at the next house down.

No one was wounded by the 120-millimeter shells that seemed to originate from a Ukrainian military position a little more than a mile to the southeast. But the near misses demonstrated a very real danger of the government’s effort to crack down on rebels controlling this city. Change the angle of a round’s descent, add or subtract a few yards, and one might have hit squarely on a house, killing civilians and igniting the kind of sustained fighting that has so far remained only a fear. 

“I couldn’t believe that there were explosions in my yard,” Mr. Kharkovsky said Monday, as intermittent gunfire could be heard at the nearby government position, where soldiers have been dug in for 10 days. Crossing himself slowly, Mr. Kharkovsky said he and his wife, Galina Kharkovskaya, had been lucky. He had been struck only by flying glass as windows were blown in. 

The close call on Yuzhnaya Street signaled a dangerous turn in the turmoil in eastern Ukraine.

Where is the outrage from Obama and Kerry? Remember during the major Maidan clashes in February they regularly scolded Yanukovych for allowing his security forces the use of weapons. Here, not a peep, when the coup government uses heavy weapons on civilians in their own homes. These people are not even protesting or violating a curfew; they're in their owns homes tending to their bees and their gardens.

It is obscene. Such hypocrisy does lasting damage to a state. Barack Obama is hollowing out the Democratic Party. It is going to be a tough row to hoe on down the line.

The Fable of Western Sanctions

Obama is in the Netherlands today to attend a G-7 meeting (G-8 minus an ostracized Russia). His goal will be largely confined to public relations gimmickry, to convey unity of purpose among the G-7 industrial nations towards "Russian aggression" in the Crimea. There is no unity of purpose. All one has to do is look at the graphic "How Much Europe Depends on Russian Energy" that was included in a story by Steven Lee Myers and Neil MacFarquhar this past Saturday to know that any sanctions Europe imposes on Russia will be window dressing only. Here's why: Germany, the largest economy in the Eurozone, imports 30% of its energy from Russia; the Netherlands, 34%; Sweden, 46%; Italy, 28%; Finland, 76%; Poland, 91%; Czech Republic, 73%; Lithuania, 92% -- and so on down the line.

The lede story today in the Gray Lady admits as much:

The other members of the Group of 7 economic partnership hardly have interests identical with those of the United States, and in many ways they are divided even among themselves, complicating any effort to draw a firmer line with Moscow. 

Mr. Obama’s sanctions, announced last week, were aimed at sowing pain among members of a Russian economic and political elite who owe their wealth and loyalties to Mr. Putin. But the sanctions were also targeted to minimize disruption to the global economy and to avoid further jeopardizing already meek Russian cooperation on issues like the war in Syria, Iran’s nuclear program, the Middle East and North Korea. 

For European countries, the risk of wider conflict with Russia is even graver. Britain hosts Russian billionaires and their money; Germany gets about one-third of its energy from Russia and sells it machinery and cars; France is in the process of delivering sophisticated attack ships to the Kremlin; and Italy depends on Russia for some 28 percent of its energy.

The U.S. position boils down to lies and bluffs. First, the lies: Pretend the putsch that sent the elected Ukrainian president fleeing for his life is perfectly legal and that there is no precedent, like, say, the U.S. dismemberment of Yugoslavia, for Russian actions in the Crimea. Next, the bluff: Talk incessantly of serious economic consequences for Russia when clearly nothing of the sort is in the works.

It is both clumsy and obvious; it is simply embarrassing.

More proof of the crass nature of the Obama administration's information war is its fear-mongering the military exercises Russia is conducting on its Ukrainian border. Though fears of an incursion into eastern Ukraine have subsided with Russia agreeing to the presence of OSCE monitors, this salient fact is ignored; rather, war hysteria is played up.

The United States would be much better served by quieting things down. But apparently its leadership, beginning to realize that it is now responsible for a dysfunctional Ukrainian state, cannot accept the fact that its stewardship of the February putsch (Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasian Affairs Vicky Nuland's famous and oft-quoted "Fuck the EU") has turned into a punch bowl caked with turds.

C.J. Chivers Plumbs New Propaganda Low

With bluster, propaganda and probably a number of covert operations we don't know anything about yet, the United States continues to play out its weak hand in the Ukraine. On the propaganda front, a new low in is on frontpage display in the Gray Lady today. Written by C.J. Chivers, the author last September of the now debunked "smoking gun" article arguing that azimuth data taken from impact craters "proved" that Syrian government forces launched the August 21 chemical weapons attack on the Ghouta suburb, "A Kiev Question: What Became of the Missing?" takes an issue, post-putsch missing protesters, that even the Maidan group, Euromaidan S O S, tasked with finding the "disappeared" dismisses as much ado about nothing and blows it up into a sort of killing fields whodunnit:

In all, 661 people have been reported missing since protests began last December, according to Euromaidan S O S, a volunteer group leading efforts to find the disappeared. The fates of 272 of them remained unknown late last week. 

Many people were found in prison cells or hospitals, or resurfaced on their own, said Vitaliy Selyk, a Euromaidan S O S coordinator. Some cases were caused by breakdowns in communications, including people who lost cellphones or ran out of credit on SIM cards, he said. 

A few of the missing were people estranged from families and whose recent silence was by choice. Mr. Selyk said he expected that most of the remaining cases would be solved and that the missing would turn up. 

But beneath that hope lies the grim concern that many Ukrainians may have disappeared after being seized by the Berkut riot police unit, by pro-Russian provocateurs or by unofficial forces that worked to keep Mr. Yanukovych in power.

From there C.J. Chivers repeats every dark rumor and every bit of fantastical bloody innuendo he can muster, not to mention re-reporting all the tales of pre-putsch savagery alleged to have been committed by shadowy Russian-speaking allies of the Yanukovych security forces. It is a sorry, sloppy attempt to occlude the story gaining attention in the European press, that, as The Guardian reported last week in a leaked phone conversation between  Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Paet and the EU's Catherine Ashton, "[S]nipers responsible for killing police and civilians in Kiev last month were protest movement provocateurs rather than supporters of then-president Viktor Yanukovych."

Once this story hits the U.S. market, any hope of the Obama administration salvaging even a shred of credibility would seem to be a distant one. The Crimea secession vote is this Sunday. I would imagine that neither the Paet-Ashton conversation nor Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov's request for an OSCE investigation into the Maidan snipers will get any play in the U.S. media until the results of the vote are tallied.

And speaking of a vote count, Jonathan Weisman has a story, "House Republicans Balk at Wording in Obama Emergency Aid Package for Ukraine," about difficulties the Obama administration is having getting the money to the putschists. It has to do with a reorganization of the International Monetary Fund that conservative Republicans are unwilling to go along with because of a perception that it would weaken U.S. control of the IMF; there is language in the Ukraine aid bill "that would extend a separate billion-dollar package of loans from the fund to $1.6 billion by expanding loan limits for countries like Ukraine." As with the effort to bomb Syria last summer, Obama is having problems getting a green light from Congress.

How long will Obama maintain his bluff when it is obvious that the hand he holds is a losing one?

How the Snipers on the Maidan Figure in the Kosovo Precedent

The big Ukraine story that the Gray Lady is featuring this Sunday is actually a good one. Written by Peter Baker, "Sovereignty vs. Self-Rule: Crimea Reignites Battle" explores the applicable precedents of the Wilsonian doctrine of self-determination. The one that gets the most ink, and the one that makes Obama's national security public relations man Benjamin Rhodes defensive, is Kosovo. If Kosovo can secede from a democratically elected government why can't Crimea?

Kosovo declared independence in 2008. The United States under George W. Bush recognized it, as did Britain, France and Germany, but Russia adamantly rejected it, as did Spain. The International Court of Justice later ruled that Kosovo’s declaration was legal. 

“We never saw it as setting a precedent, but there were some nations that saw it that way and still do,” said James W. Pardew, who was Mr. Clinton’s special representative for the Balkans.

John B. Bellinger III, who was the top lawyer at the State Department under Bush, said: “We were very careful to emphasize that Kosovo was a unique situation. We were fond of saying it was sui generis — and it did not create a precedent that would likely be replicable anywhere else.” 

That is not how the Kremlin sees it. Ever since, Russia has cited Kosovo to justify support for pro-Moscow separatist republics in places like Georgia, where it went to war in 2008 and recognized the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia over Western objections.

But here is the "money" passage:

“Kosovo is very much a legitimate precedent,” said Dimitri K. Simes, president of the Center for the National Interest, a Washington research organization, agreeing with Moscow’s argument. “Independence was accomplished despite strong opposition by a legitimate, democratic and basically Western-oriented government of Serbia.” By contrast, he said, the new pro-Western government in Kiev “lacks legitimacy,” since it came to power by toppling a democratically elected president.

The Obama administration maintains that the cases cannot be compared. Serbia, White House officials said, lost its legitimacy and right to rule in Kosovo by its violent crackdown. Despite Russian claims, there has been little, if any, independent evidence of such a campaign against the Russian-speaking population in Crimea. 

“There’s no repression or crimes against humanity that the government in Kiev has committed against the people of Crimea,” Mr. Rhodes said. “There’s no loss of legitimacy.”

But what if the "legitimate" government in Kiev came to power by means of a violent crackdown, a putsch? This is obviously what happened. And it is getting trickier for the Obama administration since a leaked phone call between Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Paet and EU foreign affairs representative Catherine Ashton reveals that the sniper fire that killed both the protesters and police on the Maidan had the same "handwriting," meaning it came from the same snipers.

Why would the snipers, if they were Yanukovych goons, as the Obama administration prefers, gun down police? They wouldn't. Therefore the sniper fire was an act of provocation designed to create mayhem, mayhem used by the putsch leaders and their Western allies to delegitimize the Yanukovych government.

The Guardian ran the story last Wednesday. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov is now pressuring the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to investigate. Agence France Presse has the story. Lavrov is making his request because the putsch government refuses to investigate.

I assume the Gray Lady will maintain her blackout of this story for as long as she can, even up to and including the OSCE actually conducting an investigation (maybe then she would assign it a sidebar). In any event, add this sniper issue to the March 16 Crimea vote to align with the Russian Federation (not to mention the enormous funding issues facing the putschists, ably outlined in a story by Steven Erlanger, as well as the political rise of anti-EU-integration Right Sector) and you have a train coming round the bend that is sure to fly off the rails.