Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has sought to integrate separatist-occupied areas back into Ukraine by granting special legal status, but the concession of autonomy has failed. The week’s developments have shown that some parts of the Donbas are drifting further away from Ukraine and becoming isolated frozen conflict zones.
On Nov. 2, separatists in parts of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts elected leaders in a poll denounced by Ukraine and the West as an illegitimate farce.
The elections dealt a further blow to the Sept. 5 Minsk cease-fire deal among Ukraine, Russia and the separatists. Aside from continued fighting since the agreement, many question whether Russia and their sponsored separatists are interested in peace.
In response to the election, Ukrainian authorities announced plans to cancel the “special status,” or autonomy, for separatist-held areas. Ukraine’s government will also stop payments to those areas out of the national budget. They also plan to set up border checkpoints around them, requiring people to show passports for travel. The measures add up to de facto recognition of these parts of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts as occupied territories.
But another recent election on Nov. 4 – the one that vaulted the Republican Party into solid control of both chambers of the U.S. Congress – gave Ukraine hope for more active assistance from America in its efforts to fight Russia and Kremlin-backed insurgents, including supplying Ukraine with weapons and money in its war.
“Now, cancellation or relaxation of sanctions is impossible,” says Taras Berezovets, a political analyst at Berta, a private consultancy. He says for the Kremlin, the decision to back the separatist election was a mistake.
The elections coincided with a Russian and separatist military buildup, according to NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg, who said Russia has moved troops closer to Ukraine’s border.
In the meantime, Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council and the Cabinet of Ministers made a number of decisions on Nov. 4-5 to cut the secessionist areas of Donbas from budget support and strengthen Ukraine’s military stance.
Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk said that the Cabinet has halted all budget payments to the parts of Donbas where the separatist elections were held, following the decision of the security council not to give a penny to the enemy.
The government is also setting up border check points along roads leading to the parts of the Donbas which voted for secessionist leaders.
“While parts of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts are controlled by various impostors, the central budget will not send money there,” Yatsenyuk said. “The government will not finance terrorists and impostors.”
The Cabinet’s annual subsidies to these territories stand at Hr 19.6 billion for Donetsk Oblast and Hr 14.6 billion for Luhansk Oblast, according to government data. The remaining parts of the same regions will receive all budgetary payments, or some Hr 22 billion per year.
Yatsenyuk said that the government will pay the back wages and pensions to those living in occupied territories as soon as the “terrorists are out.”
He said, however, that electricity and gas supplies will continue to the occupied regions. “There are our citizens there, we will not allow them to freeze because it would lead to a humanitarian disaster,” Yatsenyuk added.
At the NDSC meeting on Nov. 4, the government also decided to issue an ultimatum to the government employees who live and work in the Donbas: get out within a month, or face an official dismissal from your jobs.
However, people in the occupied territories of the Donbas complain that the government is cutting the livelihood to the most vulnerable groups of the population who are dependent on budgetary payments, such as pensioners, without offering a real alternative for resettlement and return to the free parts of the country.
On Nov.1, a day before the separatist elections, Donetsk resident Polina Viktorovna, 54, said she equally distrusted both insurgents and the Ukrainian government. “They hate us, they abandoned us,” said Polina, who did not give her name for fear of reprisals.
She said her daughter and son-in-law left Donetsk last summer, but they had to come back several months later because they could not find jobs in other parts of Ukraine.
They also returned because they felt other Ukrainians were aggressive towards them, Polina said. “Are we guilty that we were born and live here?” she asked.
Despite effectively creating a frozen conflict zone in some parts of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts that call themselves people’s republics, the NSDC decided not to denounce the Minsk cease-fire agreement. Its implementation is supposed to be monitored by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
Poroshenko said Ukraine will continue to act along the agreements laid out in the Sept. 5 pact and the follow-up protocol, despite the fact that Russia and insurgents in the east have broken many parts of the deal, most recently by holding the Nov. 2 elections.
“We put in too much effort and time into achieving these agreements to allow ourselves to throw them away,” Poroshenko told U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry in a telephone conversation on Nov. 5. Poroshenko did say, however, that he will ask parliament to revoke the Oct. 16 law on special status of the Donbas region that allowed it to function as a special entity under Ukraine’s laws.
Instead, parliament will be asked to approve a bill expected to mandate businesses operating on separatist-held territories to re-register and pay taxes in other parts of Ukraine, particularly if they are export-oriented and want to receive end-user certificates from the Ukrainian government. Some of the richest oligarchs in the country, including Rinat Akhmetov, might be affected by this law if it’s approved.
At the same time, the NSDC made a decision to build fortifications to defend the country from Russia, and improve coordination and decision-making in the security sector. Despite the fact that Ukraine has been at war since February, it still has no war room and single center for processing information and reacting to challenges.
The NSDC approved a long list of defense and security-related measures, according to Poroshenko’s press service. In particular, the government was instructed to revise the procedure for signing defense-related agreements with third parties, as well as procurement of supplies for the army. Poroshenko said 3 percent of next year’s gross domestic product will be spent on defense.
Vitaliy Bala, director of the Situation Modeling Agency, a political consultancy, criticized the authorities’ response to the separatist elections as weak and inappropriate, saying that Poroshenko’s whole strategy of appeasing separatists was only whetting Russian President Vladimir Putin’s appetite. “The authorities are making one mistake after another,” he said.
But, despite the authorities’ presumed mistakes in dealing with Russian-backed insurgents, a beacon of hope emerged as the Republican party extended their majority in the U.S. House of Representatives and won control of the Senate in the Nov. 4 election, with strongly anti-Kremlin Senator John McCain likely to become chairman of the Armed Services Committee.
Analysts said that the outcome of the election could speed up the passage of several bills to provide direct military aid worth $100 million to Ukraine and give it the status of an exclusive non-NATO ally.
Bala joked that the “Right Sector won in the U.S. Election,” referring to a right-wing paramilitary group. He said that, to have a good chance of winning the 2016 presidential election, the Republicans would have to do their best to aid Ukraine and withstand Russian aggression.
Kyiv Post staff writer Oleg Sukhov can be reached at [email protected]. Kyiv Post deputy chief editor Katya Gorchinskaya can be reached at [email protected]. Kyiv Post staff writer Oksana Grytsenko contributed to this report.
