Kiev Ends Ceasefire

Let's get caught up with what is going on in Ukraine. Poroshenko, the president who was elected in a flawed poll in May, scrapped the ceasefire he declared on June 20. The Ukrainian military is now heavily shelling around Slovyansk. The end of the ceasefire comes after signs that Europe was parting company with the U.S. on its belligerent posture toward Russia. Last Friday in Brussels the EU refused to issue a new round of sanctions called for by the U.S. targeting banking, defense and energy sectors of the Russian economy. Absent new sanctions, European leaders issued an ultimatum that if by Monday a series of steps had not been met, foremost of which was the return of border posts to Ukrainian control, then Europe would go ahead with additional sanctions.

Monday came and went and the border posts were still under the control of the pro-Russian federalization forces; yet, despite this, Europe was still negotiating with Russia and no new sanctions were levied.

To force Europe's hand, to prevent talks from continuing, Poroshenko broke off the ceasefire and began what appears to be a full-scale assault on Slovyansk. Coup parliament leader Turchynov hints that the chocolate king might declare martial law soon.

This morning it is David Herszenhorn writes, in "Fighting Intensifies in Ukraine After Cease-Fire Is Ended," that :

The decision by Mr. Poroshenko to call off the cease-fire, while saying he still hoped to reach a truce in the coming days, reflected his conclusion that Russia was not genuinely working to bring the rebel forces under control even as President Vladimir V. Putin participated in conference calls and the Kremlin issued statements in support of a peace process.

Mr. Poroshenko’s decision also reflected a clear lack of confidence by the Ukrainian government that its European allies would follow through on threats of additional economic sanctions against Russia.

European leaders had issued a series of demands of Russia on Friday, and had set Monday as a deadline for tangible results, including that rebel forces relinquish control of three border crossings to the Ukrainian authorities. On Sunday and Monday, the leaders of Ukraine, Russia, Germany and France held lengthy conference calls.

But with no sign of progress — and with no indication from the Europeans that they were prepared to go forward with new sanctions — Mr. Poroshenko met with his national security team on Monday night and emerged resolute that the Ukrainian military go back on the offensive.

The United States and its NATO allies have accused Russia of sending tanks, artillery and other weapons to the rebels, and of allowing fighters from Russia to cross the border to join rebel militias. Some rebel leaders had demanded a complete withdrawal of government troops from eastern Ukraine as a precondition for formal peace negotiations.

Mr. Putin and other senior Russian leaders have repeatedly blamed the government in Kiev for the violence in the east. They said that the former Ukrainian president, Viktor F. Yanukovych, was ousted illegally in a coup, and insisted that the rights of Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the east have been under threat.

In Russia’s first comment on the ending of the cease-fire, the foreign ministry on Tuesday said that Mr. Poroshenko’s decision had undermined the personal diplomatic efforts of the four heads of state, and suggested that Mr. Poroshenko had been pressured by his Western allies to end the cease-fire.

In a statement, the foreign ministry said, “This step by Kiev is very regrettable.”

In addition to asserting that the West had pressured Mr. Poroshenko to end the cease-fire, the ministry again described the rebel activity in eastern Ukraine as the actions of political protesters.

“We are urging yet again to stop using Ukraine as a loose coin in geopolitical games and to stop imposing a criminal line for the forceful suppression of protests,” the agency said.

Russia said peace negotiations should resume immediately and blamed the Ukrainian government for the failure of previous talks. “We are convinced that the efforts to put the situation back on the negotiation track should be continued, including urgent meeting of the contact group,” the ministry said. “We will assist this in every way.”

This page has argued all along that Europe holds the cards. Last Friday and again yesterday there were hopeful indications that the EU was beginning to play its superior hand by refusing calls for more sanctions and bargaining directly with Russia, even agreeing to discuss the association agreement that Ukraine signed (something it refused to do when Yanukovych was office).

What will happen now is that the bloodletting will continue. Refugees will flow across the border into Russia. But Russia will not directly intervene. Europe has to make a decision now. It either goes along with the big lie orchestrated by the U.S. and punishes Russia for Kiev crimes, cementing its status as a gutless lackey, or it stands by Russia and future economic growth.

I think Kiev is desperate. I think its game is about over. Hold strong Donbass! Find your intestinal fortitude Europe!

Ukraine on the Verge of Civil War and Economic Collapse

The news this morning is that the Kiev putschists have finally begun there ballyhooed crackdown on restive eastern Ukraine. Andrew Kramer, reporting from Slovyansk, has the story, "Ukraine Says It Has Begun Military Operation in East":

After days of failing to enforce its own ultimatums, the Ukrainian government on Tuesday began what the president called a military operation to confront pro-Russian militants in the east of the country. 

The first indication that the operation represented more than just words this time was a modest Ukrainian military checkpoint established on a highway north of the town of Slovyansk, which has been controlled by militants since Saturday. 

Witnesses said a dozen armored personnel carriers parked on the highway flew Ukrainian flags about 40 kilometers, or 25 miles, north of the town. There were no credible reports of confrontations with the well-armed and apparently Russian-backed forces in the town. 

“On Tuesday morning, in the north of Donetsk region, an antiterrorist operation began,” the Ukrainian speaker of Parliament and acting president, Oleksandr V. Turchynov, told Parliament in the capital, Kiev. “It will be carried out in stages, and responsibly and in a balanced manner. The goal is the defense of citizens of Ukraine.”

So far this action by the putschists seems largely cosmetic. Slovyansk is completely under the control of pro-Russian protesters. Staying 25 miles outside the city is wise.

The Ukrainian troops were not moving by early afternoon on Tuesday. Ahead of them in Slovyansk, scores of armed men maintained their hold on the police and domestic security service building and the City Hall. They have barricaded the roads and, locals say, placed snipers on roofs.

And yet the town remained crowded with people milling about the streets and standing at protests in front of barricades, illustrating that an overly assertive Ukrainian military response could quickly lead to heavy civilian casualties and play into Moscow’s narrative that Russian-speakers are in need of protection.

The putschists are likely responding to counsel from the gargoyle-like CIA Director John Brennan who was recently weekending in Kiev. The thinking in the West is probably that the putschists have to demonstrate some sort -- any sort -- of ability to establish facts on the ground (even if these facts are merely cosmetic) prior to the scheduled four-party talks in Geneva this Thursday. The U.S. did its part by whispering about more sanctions, also cosmetic, to be applied against Russia. The main one discussed being a travel ban and/or asset freeze of Rosneft president Igor Sechin. Peter Baker Reports in "With Ukraine Tensions Mounting, U.S. Weighs New Sanctions Against Russia" that 

Targeting Mr. Sechin would aim directly at Mr. Putin’s inner circle. Rosneft, Mr. Sechin’s oil company, is deeply involved with Western firms. BP owns nearly 20 percent of the company, and ExxonMobil has multiple projects with Rosneft in Siberia, the Arctic, the Black Sea, Canada, Alaska and Texas. 

Lawyers at ExxonMobil are researching the impact of sanctions against Mr. Sechin. Given that they would apply to Mr. Sechin personally and not his company, some specialists said it might mean little more than a logistical hassle because he could not travel to the United States to meet with his ExxonMobil partners.

Baker's story also illuminates the confusion inside the beltway over Brennan's house call on the putschists:

Mr. Brennan’s decision to travel to Kiev, however, struck many in Washington as baffling. Russian television first reported over the weekend that the C.I.A. director had arrived in Kiev under an assumed name to direct operations there. The White House and the C.I.A. initially refused to comment but on Monday confirmed his trip. Mr. Carney said it was meant simply to foster “mutually beneficial security cooperation,” and he called Russia’s characterization “absurd.”

Some former intelligence officers privately criticized the visit, saying it only bolstered the conspiracies advanced by Russian officials that the C.I.A. was behind the Ukrainian unrest that toppled a pro-Moscow president in favor of a government oriented toward the West. 

But other C.I.A. veterans said there must have been a good reason for him to go because the White House would have known Mr. Brennan would be spotted. “It’s a well-thought-out decision that had to be weighed against playing right into Putin’s message,” said Milton Bearden, chief of the C.I.A.’s Soviet division during the Soviet Union’s collapse.

Should Ukrainian troops decide to attack Slovyansk I am sure that nestled among the soft civilian targets they would find some very efficient and hardened Russian special forces. Appreciation of this is no doubt the reason that two putschist ultimatums have come and gone without any enforcement activity.

Writing yesterday from Horlivka, Andrew Kramer explores the idea that Russian troops walk among the pro-Russian protesters in the Donbass in his "In Ukraine’s East, Russians Are Blending Right In." Based mostly on an online video and one interview with a pro-putsch Ukrainian in Sloyvansk, Kramer concludes that there is a heavy Russian presence to the protests. I'm sure he is right. Russia would be completely negligent if it did not have special forces on the ground milling around acting as an invisible shield to putschist violence. But Kramer's story is important because it validates the essentially popular nature of the uprising in eastern Ukraine:

All the same, an emphasis on a Russian military role discounts the genuine discontent among a portion of the population in eastern Ukraine. And some of the political and business elites of the Donets Basin, an industrial and coal-producing region in the east that is the base of support of the former president, Viktor F. Yanukovych, felt that they had much to lose after he was deposed in February.

The question at this point -- with a bank run on Monday that prompted the central bank to raise interest rates three percent, the hryvnia has lost 35% against the dollar in 2014 -- is will the putschists instigate an all-out civil war to obscure the inevitability of economic collapse?

One thing is crystal clear. The U.S. has created another mess.

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.

Bill for Ukraine's Putsch Comes Due

Now the bill for the putsch in Ukraine comes due: Austerity by International Monetary Fund mandate. I always wondered why anti-government Ukrainians were so fervent about aligning with the European Union when the price of membership was obvious for all to see. All one need do is look to Greece, a country being dismantled by the IMF and European Central Bank according to the usual neoliberal prescriptions: privatize public assets, reduce social benefits and slash public sector employment. This is what is in store for Ukraine and her citizens, and this is why President Viktor Yanukovych balked at the the trade deal with the EU last November: It would have been political suicide if he would have signed it. David Herszenhorn outlines the precarious nature of Ukrainian finances in an offering today, "Regional Rifts Pose Hurdle to New Coalition in Ukraine":

The I.M.F. has made clear it is unwilling to help Ukraine without a commitment from the country to undertake painful austerity measures and other restructuring. Mr. Yanukovych’s resistance to those demands was a principal reason he backed away from a trade deal with Europe and sought help from Russia instead.

In a statement on Monday, the acting finance minister, Yuriy Kolobov, said Ukraine would need a staggering $35 billion in assistance between now and the end of next year, as well as an emergency loan within the next two weeks that he said was expected from Poland or the United States. 

In his statement, Mr. Kolobov said he hoped to organize a conference with international donors. “The situation in the financial sector as a whole is complex but controlled,” he said. 

That could change at any moment, however, should Russia decide to follow through on previous threats of devastating trade sanctions if Ukraine moves closer to Europe.

Given the animosity of the new Ukrainian government toward Russia, Ivan Tchakarov, an analyst with Citibank, said that Ukraine could turn only to the West for help, and would inevitably face demands for tough reforms and a near-certain recession as a result.

“Assuming that Russia will pass, it will be up to the I.M.F. and E.U. to pick up the tab,” Mr. Tchakarov said. “The I.M.F. will impose hard constraints on the economy, and these will most probably mean a recession in 2014.”

Still, Mr. Tchakarov noted that there would be long-term benefits to Ukraine’s undertaking desperately needed measures, like ending subsidies of gas prices and cutting the thickets of business regulations that weigh down the economy. These actions could potentially allow it to emerge far stronger, like its neighbors Poland and the Baltic countries, he said.

To gauge the economic strength of a Baltic neighbor, let's take a look at Latvia, care of an article, "Ukraine's Sickness," by Eric Draitser:

The Ukrainian people however would do well to examine the precedent of Latvia to understand what lies in store for them. As renowned economists Michael Hudson and Jeffrey Sommers wrote in 2012:

What enabled Latvia to survive the crisis were EU and IMF bailouts…Elites aside, many emigrated…Demographers estimate that 200,000 have departed the past decade – roughly 10 per cent of the population…Latvia experienced the full effects of austerity and neoliberalism. Birth rates fell during the crisis – as is the case almost everywhere austerity programs are imposed. It continues having among Europe’s highest rates of suicide and of road deaths caused by drunk driving. Violent crime is high, arguably, because of prolonged unemployment and police budget cuts. Moreover, a soaring brain drain moves in tandem with blue-collar emigration.

The myth of prosperity to follow EU integration and bailouts is just that, a myth. The reality is pain and suffering on a scale far greater than the poverty and unemployment Ukraine, especially the western portion of the country, have already experienced. The most highly educated, those most equipped to take up the mantle of leadership, will flee en masse. Those leaders who remain will do so while lining their pockets and ingratiating themselves to the European and American financiers who will flock to Ukraine like vultures to carrion. In short, the corruption and mismanagement of the Yanukovich government will seem like a pleasant memory. 

The “liberalization” that Europe demands will create massive profits for speculators, but very few jobs for working people. The best land will be sold to foreign corporations and land-grabbers, while the resources, including the highly regarded agricultural sector, will be stripped and sold on the world market, leaving farmers and city dwellers alike in grinding poverty, their children going to bed hungry. This will be the “success” of Ukraine. One shudders to think what failure would look like.

Herein lies the rub. Western governments (at least for public consumption) have labeled events in Ukraine a people-power uprising by pro-democracy activists, rather than a putsch by armed, back-mask-wearing hooligans, as Russia sees it. So what happens when the Ukrainian citizenry rises up and rebels against the austerity that is shooting down the pike? According to Andrew Higgins' story, "Ukrainian Protesters See Too Many Familiar Faces in Parliament After Revolution," a rumbling is already audible:

[T]he prospect of a new order dominated by established opposition parties, almost as discredited in the eyes of many Ukrainians as Mr. Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, has left a bitter feeling that what comes next could end up disappointing as much as the government that followed the 2004 Orange Revolution.

“We need new people who can say no to the oligarchs, not just the old faces,” said Ms. Nikanchuk, referring to the wealthy billionaires who control blocks of votes in the Parliament but who, with a few exceptions, hedged their bets until the end about which side to support in a violent struggle that left more than 80 protesters dead between Mr. Yanukovych and his opponents. 

***

“The problem is that the old forces are trying to come back to take their old chairs,” said Vasily Kuak, a shipping broker who stood outside parliament waving a sign that read: “Revolution, Not a Court Coup!”

*** 

All the same, the sight of luxury cars dropping off members of Parliament at the colonnaded legislature building, is now guarded by “self-defense” units that previously battled government forces, has stirred dismay and anger.

“Again we see Mercedes and BMWs bringing deputies who are supposed to represent the people,” said Mr. Kuak, “We don’t want to see these people again. We want to see people from the square, from the revolution.”

***  

“We need people from Maidan, not people like you,” screamed an angry woman as Volodymyr Lytvyn, a former speaker of the Parliament known for shifting with the wind, left the legislature building. As he tried to answer questions from the crowd, protected by two bodyguards and a solid wrought iron fence, a cry went up clamoring for “lustration of everybody,” a term usually associated with the purge of officials and politicians suspected of serving Communist regimes before the revolutions of 1989 across Eastern and Central Europe. 

Peppered with angry demands that the Parliament raise pensions, reopen closed hospitals and find work for the jobless, Mr. Lytvyn struggled to respond but basically called for patience, a virtue that is likely to be in short supply if the interim government does not manage to convince people it is working to improve their lives, not line its own pockets.

Will Obama publicly demand restraint when violence is directed at the Ukrainians demonstrating to reopen hospitals and restore slashed pensions? Of course not.

But first things first. The putschists have to actually form a government that can accept the U.S./Poland financial lifeline and the bailout package from the IMF. Putting aside the question of whether this government will actually be legal -- remember, just like the United States, Ukraine has a constitutional process for removal of a president; it's called impeachment; and nothing I have read has said impeachment proceedings are underway in the Rada -- Oleksandr Turchynov, new speaker of the Rada, has said he will form a government by Thursday.

There are two things it would be wise to keep our eyes on here. First, Russia. Russia holds all the cards, as the Gray Lady makes clear in her pathetic editorial this morning, "Ukraine's Uncertain Future": "Ukraine is broke, and a vindictive Russia could easily make things more miserable by closing the border or raising gas prices." Second, by now it should be apparent that like his predecessor, W., everything that Obama touches turns to shit. Run down the list: NATO intervention in Libya, the roll-out of his signature healthcare law, his kowtowing to the Gulf sheikhdoms on Syria, his inability to get any pro-worker legislation through Congress, and on and on. There is no reason to believe that Ukraine will be any different. In other words, we can expect an outcome that is not the one intended by the West.

The Putsch in Ukraine: a Clearer Picture Emerges

Since last Friday, when Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych signed off on a deal brokered by Poland, Germany and France to step down this December (Russia ended up refusing to sign the agreement, saying it was nothing more than an opposition diktat), the situation has deteriorated precipitously. The security forces abandoned Yanukovych, as did a large number of Members of Parliament from Yanulovych's Party of Regions, and Yanukovych fled the capital. He is now apparently holed up incognito in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv. All this happened by Saturday, not to mention that Yanukovych's archrival Yulia Tymoshenko was released from her prison hospital room.

If there is any doubt that what transpired in Kiev last week was a putsch, that is put to rest today in a story, "As His Fortunes Fell in Ukraine, a President Clung to Illusions," reported by Andrew Higgins, Andrew Kramer and Steven Erlanger. Fearing that they would be used for target practice by Obama's "peaceful protesters," who were rushing the weapons from a looted armory in Lviv to the capital, the security forces quietly negotiated their surrender with the putschists occupying Independence Square:

On Tuesday, empowered by a new aid package from Russia announced the day before, Mr. Yanukovych pressed to remove an encampment of antigovernment activists from Independence Square, where they had been cursing his government since November. 

Squads of riot police overpowered the outer ring of defenses protesters had set up and advanced to within 25 yards of a stage in the center of the square, called the Maidan.

Running out of options, the protesters mounted a final, desperate defense, a so-called ring of fire stoked with tires, firewood and even their own sleeping bags and pads. 

But Andrei Levus, deputy head of the Maidan “self-defense” forces, the umbrella organization of militant activists fighting the government, knew he had reinforcements on the way. Protesters in Lviv had overrun an Interior Ministry garrison and were en route to Kiev with the captured military weapons. 

“I’m reluctant to talk about this because we are protesters and not illegal armed groups,” Mr. Levus said. “But the square was about to look different. There would be more people, and they would not have had empty hands.” 

Despite the dwindling of the protective fires, the protesters decided to hold on to the square long enough for both sides to consider the significance of the arrival of the weapons in the capital.

Using a member of Parliament as an intermediary, Mr. Levus opened a line of communication with a deputy interior minister, whom he declined to name. It appeared that Mr. Yanukovych, perhaps sensing that his security forces were reluctant to press the crackdown, was inclined to turn to the army for help. He had fired the armed forces chief of staff, Col. Gen. Volodymyr Zamana, on Monday.

“We understood they had a few hundred fanatical riot police, but the rest of the police would not fight,” Mr. Levus said. 

Several street fighters who were on the barricades early Thursday morning said that they saw police officers walking away from their positions, and that this emboldened them. Some protesters fired hunting rifles and shotguns. Police lines crumpled. 

“Our people are ideologically motivated, and on the contrary, they were demoralized,” Mr. Levus said. “They did not want this fight. And he understood that our people were ready to run against gunfire.” 

Mr. Levus said he received a call on his cellphone around noon on Thursday from the deputy interior minister. “I told him, ‘We will guarantee the safety of the police if they leave the city,’ ” he said. 

The deputy minister agreed first to a cease-fire until 3 p.m., when Parliament was set to meet. With support from some members of Mr. Yanukovych’s quickly disintegrating Party of Regions, Parliament voted to support the protesters’ demand that the police demobilize.

This reporting makes for some discordant passages in the Gray Lady today. On the one hand putschists are described as pro-democracy advocates, while those defending the duly elected government are depicted as drunken hooligans. This is from Alison Smale, "Power Shift Inspires Joy in Kiev, Fury in East," reporting from the anti-putschist (and hence, pro-democracy) eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk:

DONETSK, Ukraine — Red Communist flags flew on Sunday in front of a massive bust of Lenin in this hardscrabble coal-mining city, a stronghold of pro-Russia sentiment in Ukraine. About 500 yards away, a few hundred pro-democracy activists, harangued by hundreds of counterdemonstrators, laid wreaths for the victims of last week’s bedlam in Kiev at a memorial to one of Ukraine’s most revered figures, the 19th-century poet Taras Shevchenko.

***

Earlier, activists at the wreath-laying ceremony emphasized in a statement that they would neither storm administrative offices, as protesters did in Kiev, nor tear down memorials, as protesters have done with 16 statues of Lenin across the central and eastern parts of the country in recent days, according to the Ukrainian news media. About 300 people turned out for the ceremony at noon. 

Just an hour later, the second scene unfolded. Hundreds of loud citizens — mostly young men, many of them masked and carrying wooden or metal clubs — gathered on a sidewalk, separated from the memorial crowd by various police units, including black-clad riot units and militia in navy uniforms. The crowd chanted “glory,” not to honor the protesters in Kiev but to praise the Berkut, the elite police units widely held responsible for the violence against the demonstrators.

The fact is the New York Times for the most part in its foreign affairs coverage mirrors the position of the U.S. State Department. This means that the Gray Lady must sculpt its reporting to obscure the violent nature of the putsch, and this she has done. But now that it appears that Yanukovych is well beyond the point of no return, it is safe to let the truth shine in. (We saw this in the invasion of Iraq.) The problem is that the story is still developing and not all the Gray Lady's staff got the memo.

What lies ahead?

Russia does not seem ready to acknowledge the new situation in Kiev, though National Security Advisor Susan Rice is foursquare behind the putschists. Moon of Alabama blog makes the good point that Yanukovych's removal by the Ukrainian Parliament is illegal because it does not follow the process outlined in the constitution. Like in the United States, a president's removal has to be made by means of a formal process of impeachment. The Ukrainian Parliament has not impeached Yanukovych; rather, it has merely transferred presidential power to newly elected Speaker of the Parliament, Oleksandr Turchynov. Now, acting interior minister Arsen Avakov has issued an arrest warrant for Yanukovych. Additionally, in an indication that the current Parliament is not broadly representative but tilted toward the western part of the country, the official status of the Russian language in Ukraine was terminated.

Also, the police are not back to work in Kiev. How long can that last before we see a situation like the one that happened in Libya where militias started battling each other in the streets?

Time is on Russia's side. The U.S./EU has created a mess. The Ukraine is nearly insolvent. Will the International Monetary Fund step up with a generous bailout? If so, the putschists will have to deliver a pound of flesh. This is from David Herszenhorn's frontpage story, "Ukraine’s Acting Government Issues Warrant for Yanukovych’s Arrest":

On Sunday, the fund’s managing director, Christine Lagarde, said that there was concern about the political instability in Ukraine and that the fund could provide assistance only in response to a formal request. But she added that an economic program to help Ukraine had to be “owned by the authorities, by the people, because at the end of the day it will be the future of the Ukrainian economy.”