As violence once again flares up in eastern Ukraine, this time in the industrial city of Avdiyivka, many correspondents are doing an important job by informing the world about the grim reality of this bloody war.
There are claims and counter claims about how this latest round of violence started. In assessing the statements made by each party to the conflict, Russia and Ukraine, it is wise to look at the historical track record of those parties when it comes to truth telling.
Russia, renowned for asking the international community to swallow their obvious lies, is suggesting that Ukraine provoked this escalation, and the reason Ukraine did this, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov asserts, is to draw attention to Ukraine at a time when, frankly, anything might happen because Donald Trump is now in the Oval Ofice.
Following on from Mr. Lavrov’s absurd suggestion, which essentially asks people to believe that Ukraine is purposely sacrificing the lives of some of their bravest defenders as part of some kind of PR ploy, incredibly even some normally reasoned people have used language to intimate that Ukraine is “playing up” these events while there is an open dialogue about the future of the international policy of sanctions against Russia.
Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko has confirmed this hypothesis, in the minds of some writers, by asking how it is possible that removing sanctions on Russia can even be a consideration at this time.
This is the fog of war. What Poroshenko is doing is asking an entirely reasonable and pertinent question, this is not something that should be perverted to try to match up with, and somehow confirm, an outrageous claim from Russia’s foreign minister.
What we need, what is essential, is clarity – and not just about the tragic current events in Avdiyivka, but about the whole war. Because this level of aggression is only ever reached on the express instructions of the Kremlin, and logistical support (in terms of material provided, at the very minimum) for an attack of this magnitude can only come from Russia. This isn’t some small arms skirmish, something which has in fact been experienced in the PromZone on the outskirts of Avdiivka for more than a year.
When we step back from analyzing the reason for certain battles for certain places, Ilovayivsk and Debaltseve are both significant rail hubs, and Avdiyivka sits near an important road linking Horlivka to Donetsk. If we take these elements and bring them together, zooming out to look at the bigger picture, we see that the overall battle plan being carried out in and against Ukraine is very sophisticated, and obviously requires military precision planning at a pay grade and level of expert knowledge far above and beyond that of the “miners and tractor drivers” that Vladimir Putin once foolishly and falsely claimed were the men lined up against Ukraine’s armed forces.
So, let us, finally, dispel the notion that this war, which has killed well in excess of 10,000 people, is any kind of local “separatist” conflict. It is not. You think fake news is a problem? This is a very real and deadly war, but the grounds of it are entirely fake. It is not a local conflict, or an inter-Ukrainian battle – it is Russian trained directed commanded and supplied, as well as ordered.
The Ukrainian towns and cities that were among the first to see fighting, like Slovyansk, are now at peace in free Ukraine. This is an obvious indication of the fact that this conflict was never driven by local agency. The few locals who did indeed participate were the thugs linked to the organized crime gangs that were a hallmark of the Yanukovych era. It is no surprise to see such people coming down on Putin’s side, of course.
In this eastern Ukraine “uprising” fable that Russia has tried to sell to the world, where were the prominent local players? They were nonexistent. The only known Ukrainian that had any kind of leadership position in this attempt to bullshit a state into existence was the repugnant Oleg Tsarov, and he’s not even from the Donbas. The rest of the rag tag band of men tasked by Moscow with wresting this land away from Ukraine, regardless of the will of the people, came from nowhere, or they came from Russia.
Prior to the spring of 2014, what was the desire in Donbas for some kind of independence from the rest of Ukraine? Local support for any such thing was almost certainly in the single digits in percentage terms.
This is not to say that there are no locals fighting in this war on the side of the self-proclaimed “Republics” though. In a place where the economy is in ruins and employment is scarce, people must find ways to feed their families. War is one of the few things in Donbass that can provide a paycheck. But even in the military units comprising of locals in the east of Ukraine, the leadership is Russian. As one prominent Ukrainian researcher said recently in a private discussion, “this is a hybrid army managed by Russia, fully supplied by Russia, but designed in such a way (with fakery and propaganda) to make it look like a local insurgence.”
The battle wages on as Vladimir Putin tries to conceal his smirks when he trots out his list of what he pretends might be Ukraine’s motivation for provoking this battle. The first, according to Putin, is that Ukraine needs money, and this is somehow easier if Ukraine’s portrays itself as a victim of aggression.
The second is that Ukraine, apparently, backed the losing party in the U.S. presidential election, and now needs to get a dialogue going with the new administration. The only reason Putin is saying this is that he knows Trump is watching, and he’s hoping that The Donald will fall for this crude lie, which was only fabricated to bring about an end to U.S. support for Ukraine.
Putin then projects that Ukraine is doing this to divert attention away from domestic problems, as using military adventurism to mask real social problems is something that comes naturally to him.
Lastly, in this combination of garbage from the Russian president, Ukraine has done this because Ukraine doesn’t want to fulfill the Minsk Agreement. It is, of course, Russia that has not kept its end of the Minsk bargain since the day it was signed. Nothing that Russia says can be taken at face value, have we not learned that much yet?
As Brian Whitmore said today in an excellent episode of his Daily Vertical show, “the only reason there’s a war in the Donbas, the only reason, is because Russia wants there to be a war in the Donbas. This is not a civil war, this is not a conflict where culpability is shared by both sides, this is a manufactured war, and Russia manufactured it.”
Avdiyivka is Ukrainian territory. Defending this town, as Ukraine has been doing for a significant period of time, is not a provocation. The youngest Ukrainian hero who was killed in recent days was just 23 years old. He had enrolled in the army almost as soon as his country was attacked by Russia. His name was Andriy Kisilo. He is survived by a wife and an infant son.
And he didn’t die in a civil war. He died in Russia’s war on Ukraine.
