You're reading: No Peace: Putin keeps up fight as peace talks fizzle

The New Year began with the resumption of fierce fighting in the Russian-backed war against Ukraine as peace talks continued to go nowhere.

Despite international condemnation of the deaths of 12 civilians killed in an apparent separatist attack on a passenger bus at a Ukrainian checkpoint, planned talks by heads of state in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, were postponed indefinitely. German Chancellor Angela Merkel insisted that Russia first implement the September peace accords reached in Minsk, Belarus.

The war’s death toll now stands at roughly 5,000 people.

With Russia showing no willingness to abandon the military campaign it sparked April, leaders in both nations focused on strengthening their armed forces.

Hot on the heels of a Jan. 12 Berlin meeting of foreign ministers, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg told reporters that the 28-nation military alliance had activated a rapid response force on Jan. 14, able to deploy several thousand troops from Germany, Norway, the Netherlands and others in a matter of days.

Fierce fighting 

Kremlin-backed separatists launched between 60 and 90 daily attacks on Ukrainian positions in the past week, according to the Ukrainian military. Journalists in Donetsk reported several districts of the city were repeatedly shelled by Ukrainian artillery, killing at least one civilian besides the bus passengers killed.

Live video streams captured near-constant fighting at the contested Donetsk airport, where at least six Ukrainian servicemen have been wounded in the past week. Soldiers claim that the Russian-backed fighters issued them an ultimatum to leave the airport by Jan. 13 at 5 p.m. or suffer further casualties. The airport’s control tower, eviscerated by months of artillery, rocket and small arms fire, finally collapsed the same day during the heaviest fighting seen since a ceasefire was introduced on Sept. 5.

Separatist leader Denis Pushilin claimed his forces had seized key parts of the airport and had opened a corridor for Ukrainian troops to withdraw from the airport.  “This doesn’t mean we’re forcing the troops out of the airport in any way because that’s a gesture of goodwill on our part,” he said. “We’re doing everything in our power to preserve the lives of the Ukrainian military people since we don’t want any victims among them.”

In one of the most tragic incidents of the war to date, 10 people were killed instantly, two died later and another 18 wounded when an exploding Grad rocket ripped through the side of a civilian passenger bus at a Ukrainian checkpoint outside Volnovakha, Donetsk region.

A video of Grad rockets raining down on the checkpoint shows they were fired from the direction of separatist-held territory and a “Novorossiya” social media posted in the immediate aftermath celebrated the destruction of a Ukrainian checkpoint. The post was later removed and separatist authorities first claimed Ukrainian forces had fired on their own position, then that a Ukrainian mine had exploded next to the bus.

Kyiv responded to the attack by sealing off a number of roads leading into areas of the Donbas occupied by pro-Russian forces.

“Due to the terrorist attack, we must enhance restrictions on movement across the line, beyond which Donbas areas controlled by militants are located,” President Petro Poroshenko said in a television address to Ukrainians on 13. Jan.

Western leaders quickly condemned the attack and reiterated their call for Russia to cease arming the insurgents.

“Another 11 lives lost, 17 injured by Russia-backed separatist shelling of a passenger bus in Ukraine,” Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, tweeted after the attack. “Russia must end its military support.”

Yet Russia remains intransigent on its support for the self-proclaimed people’s republics so long as Ukraine refuses to accept ceding constitutional powers to insurgent leaders.

After the abortive Berlin talks, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov continued to insist on the federalization of Ukraine: “A political process, a constitutional reform process should create a framework that… grants special status to the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics,” the minister told reporters.

Mobilization

Now Russian President Vladimir Putin plans a 36 percent increase in spending on the country’s armed forces over the next two years, rising from 2.49 trillion rubles this year to 3.38 trillion rubles (more than $50 billion) in 2016.  According to Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu, Russian armed forces are set to receive an additional 700 armored and 1,550 other vehicles, 126 planes, 88 helicopters, and two Iskander-M missile systems.

Publicly, the military resources are slotted for Russia’s European exclave Kaliningrad and to further entrench its position in the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea, occupied by Russian troops since March last year. Yet sophisticated Russian military hardware is increasingly turning up in Ukraine. In the past two weeks, open source analysts at The Interpreter have observed a noticeable build-up of Russian units and fighters from the Russian Federation in Ukraine’s Donbas region.

Valeriy Zubkov, 60, one of the passengers wounded when a bus carrying civilians was shelled on Jan. 13, gestures as he speaks in a hospital in the eastern Ukrainian city of Volnovakha on Jan. 14.

“New Russian weapons have been deployed in Ukraine and the mix of Russian soldiers and Russian-backed insurgents have been heavily mobilized in the buildup to this latest round of intense fighting,” the website’s editor, James Miller, told the Kyiv Post.

“In the last month we have seen several videos of separatists operating the BPM-97, a Russian armored vehicle exclusively used by the Russian border guard. The Interpreter was able to prove that one of those videos was taken in Krasnodon. The vehicles were part of a very large convoy including other weapons which the Ukrainian military does not use: T-72 battle tanks, which we’ve seen many times in this war,  and GAZ Vodnik armored transport vehicles, which we’ve never seen before. The  GAZ Vodniks and the BPM-97s are likely new to this conflict, they only showed up right before the heaviest fighting broke out.”

U.S. General Philip Breedlove, the supreme NATO commander for Europe, said the alliance had observed “continued resupply, continued training, and continued organization of forces east of the line of contact…There is increasing capacity in the east [of the front line].”

NATO’s response has been to develop a rapid reaction force that can be sent to at-risk members at short notice. Approved by NATO leaders in September 2014,  that force is now ready for action – albeit temporarily until a permanent force is in place.

“An interim solution is in place and we are focused on a more permanent high-readiness force,” NATO chief Stoltenberg told reporters as the force was activated.

NATO has also noted a marked rise in the number of Russian incursions into members’ airspace and a spike in military maneuvers around the Baltic Sea, causing the alliance to adapt its program of military exercises there.

“We want to group some of the existing exercises together so that we can get bigger, more complex exercises to better prepare our forces,” General Breedlove said. “We are looking at increasing some exercises. Because we have taken on new mission requirements, and we want to address some Article 5 [common defense] capabilities and capacities.”

Ukraine will feature prominently in NATO’s exercises this year, taking part in 11 of the organization’s war games. Four of these – Rapid Trident, Safe Skies, Sea Breeze and Sea Shield – will take place on Ukrainian territory.

“The exercises will be the final stage of combat training for the forces, promoting their active use of standards of NATO member countries,” Ukraine’s assistant defense minister Viktoria Kushnir explained.

Meanwhile, Poroshenko approved a new wave of mobilization on Jan. 14. His decree calls into active service a further 50,000 individuals of military age, with more waves planned to bring another 54,000 into the conflict during the course of 2015. Ukraine plans to spend Hr 90 billion ($5.6 billion) on defense this year, despite hovering on the verge of default as it struggles to pay its international debts.

Kyiv Post editor Maxim Tucker can be reached at [email protected] or via twitter @MaxRTucker