Like most Ukrainians, I am very, very frustrated the response to the Russians seems so slow and chaotic right now. I am not excluding the possibility the response looks that way, on the Ukrainian side, because the national government is just not competent to deal with the Russians.
That said, if I have to make the guess right this second, my conclusion is the Ukrainians are in fact preparing a concerted, systematic response to the Russian terrorist invaders (no hyperbole, just a statement of fact), and that is heartening. Provided the Russians don’t invade, I bet it will work. But many tense days are ahead of us.
I’ll start with a rundown of the scary stuff:
– Ukraine’s interior minister who appears complicit in ordering snipers to kill 100 protesters in Kyiv, Zakharchenko, went on Russian TV and “appealed” to Ukrainian troops not to respond to “border provocations”. This is a Soviet-clumsy hint that just maybe the Russians will invade and shooting at the Russian army is a bad idea.
– Along the same lines, I read that on a major Russian TV channel a weatherman called eastern Ukraine “very disturbed” and predicted “major changes” for the regon.
– The Russians and their separatist/terrorist allies have grabbed something like a dozen public buildings in Donetsk, and since Saturday, generally speaking, and in a general sense it really looks like the Ukrainian government isn’t doing anything about it.
– Russian special forces, perhaps by themselves and perhaps with help from their local buddies, ambushed what appears to be three vehicles carrying Ukrainian anti-terrorist troops, killing one and injuring nine. The implication is that if this is what happens when Ukraine’s best troops contact the Russians, what possible use can the Ukrainian military be?
– Internet reports say about half of the police in Donetsk Oblast have gone over to the separatists.
But the point of this essay is, the news is not all bad.
The Americans have picked a side
According to Ukrainian news reports, the head of the CIA was in Kyiv over the weekend, and now US officials from FBI, finance et al. are planning assistance to Ukraine.
The key is the CIA; I think that once the technical issues are sorted, we can assume the US will be providing Ukraine limited intelligence on the Russians, but at least early warning on any Russian military moves.
This is a real brake on Russian invasion planning as an unprepared, confused enemy is usually considered a prerequisite before kicking off an attack.
Although everything the Americans collect on the Russians won’t be turned over to the Ukrainians, now, in my judgement, the National Security Agency is on the side of the guys that eat salo.
This all puts a lot of pressure on European governments that want to wish the problem away which, according to Ukrainian media (I assume courtesy Baltic or Polish diplomats) are France, Italy, Spain and Germany.
The serious uprisings are serious, but they are containable because Donetsk Oblast is the heart of the problem.
My impression is Luhansk and Kharkiv oblasts are places the Russians tried to raise the flag of separatism and on a wide scale failed.
It is also worth noting that in one place – Krasny Liman – police and national guard chased off terrorist/separatists trying to take over government buildings and a chemical factory that, according to reports, produces explosives.
In Zaporizhe crowds surrounded several dozen separatist thugs and ran them out of town, and it might have been worse had not police intervened to prevent a lynching. This simplifies the main task before the Ukrainian government, which is supressing the terrorist/separatists the Russians are supporting in Donetsk province. I’ve seen reports of milita units forming in Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk, among other places, to help the government watch the roads. Only in Donetsk province do the police appear to have gone over to the Russians in great numbers, according to one report about every other officer.
Ukrainian troops are on the move
Ukrainian media has placed a Ukainian airmobile brigade is parked on the outskirts of Sloviansk. These are professional soldiers who work on contract, and most non-commissioned officers and officers who did tours in Iraq.
They might not be on par with the Russian special forces inside the city on a one-to-one basis, but they have about a bazillion times the firepower even before you start talking major support weapons. They are more than enough to smash a bunch of retired veterans and cops armed with automatic rifles and pistols. I would assume, therefore, that President Turchinov’s “secret anti-terrorist” order signed on Monday evening gives the army clearance to fight an internal enemy, which normally is banned by the constitution.
Battle for roads to Sloviansk is on
Reports are coming in of separatist road checkpoints outside Sloviansk getting hit by unknown persons. It seems like 1-2 separatist road checkpoints got destroyed by organized Ukrainian forces backed with armored personnel carriers. According to one very unconfirmed report, specifically a Ukrainian MP posting on her Facebook page, Ukrainian partisans killed ten separatist in an attack on a Slavyansk road checkpoint. I don’t believe the last bit and it’s clear that at least some roadblocks are still manned by the separatists. But keep roadblocks and checkpoints in in mind when reading the part below about the SBU.
Russians step on a rake, play Cold War
The Russians decided to buzz the USS Donald Cook in the Black Sea with an Su-24 martime strike bomber. Such a moronic move: Russia’s activites in Ukraine are getting very little play in international media, and here Russian Putin Vladimir Putin decides to fly a bomber over an American warship, according to the Associated Press, 12 times.
You watch, we are going to see pictures of US warships, the Black Sea, Marines and maps of Crimea and Ukraine and west Russia with big red blobs for the Russian troops all over Fox/CNN/NBC in about 12-24 hours.
It may even replace that jet in the Indian Ocean as the major US international news for awhile.
I am about 90 percent sure the Russians did the overflight so they could feed some nice anti-American material into their own propaganda machine, and about 10 percent because the Russian military is always interested to see when and where American air defense networks turn on their radars.
That’s great 20th century thinking. But 21st century, off-hand, I couldn’t have imagined a better way to force a media event into the news cycle so the Europeans and Americans determined to ignore events in Ukraine get a good look at Russians acting out in tried-and-true Cold War tradition.
It is also worth noting that the USS currently has two destroyers (Donald Cook and Truxton) floating around in the Black Sea on “regularly-scheduled training,” and both of them have two basic jobs: carry a bunch of cruise missiles to shoot things with, and carry a bunch of radars and sonars to watch things that might come and shoot them.
NATO also is flying AWACs air observation planes up and down the Polish and Romanian borders; AWACs can see thing flying 1,500 kilomters away, and more important, they can transmit information about what they see to an entire air defense network. So all in all Vladimir Putin gave NATO’s southern air defence command a very useful, real-life workout.
I think the SBU is mad
Ukrainian defense media is reporting that, although the government isn’t fully organized on dealing with the separatists, the national intelligence service (the SBU) is getting that way.
Further, yesterday members of an SBU anti-terrorist unit got ambushed/dry-gulched by the separatists or Russian special forces, or both, and there is some evidence the attack took place as the SBU guys were trying to negotiate. In other words, the Russian/separatists murdered the SBU officers while pretending to be peaceful. I can’t say what the truth to that is but an upshot is, as one report puts it, now the SBU is “very dedicated to dealing with the separatist terrorists.”
This is SBU speak for “out for blood, since the Russians took theirs.” Now, Ukraine’s government is far from efficient, and some of it – like the Donetsk police force – may be fairly called rotten and corrupt.
But the SBU is a different animal, and I would not want them mad at me.
But of Ukrainian government organizations, almost any Ukraine observer will say the SBU is the most professional and contains the highest-quality staff. This is a simple continuation of the Soviet KGB professional standards. It is worth noting that, during both the Orange and Maidan revolutions the SBU in great part avoided taking sides. The reports in Ukrainian defense media (for instance, Konflikty i Zakoni) say that the SBU is taking the lead in dealing the the separatists, and that the operation will be systematic and “at times be a complete surprise for the terrorists.”
What I think this means is that the SBU will stick to the generic KGB uprising supression playbook. The first step is an information offensive to undermine the morale of the insurgents/terrorists. I suspect the report of the 10 separatists shot dead at an unknown Slavyansk checkpoint we might well credit to an SBU planner. It is hard to think of a rumor that would make a guy, usually a local cop or former military guy who has thrown his lot with the separatists, more nervous about manning a checkpoint out in the middle of an irate population. Like I say, these guys are smart.
Colorados
And a final note. Ukrainian media is getting tired of writing “separatist” and moving towards “terrorist” in describing the people the Russian regime is mobilizing in the east. Another term I’m seeing cropping up more and more often in the Ukrainian blogosphere, and now sometimes in conventional media, is the expression “Colorados,” as in “Colorados armed with Kalashnikovs just captured a police station and beat up the people inside.” Why Colorados? Well, this is a reference to the Colorado Potato Beetle, which is widely considered vermin in Ukraine (and Russia too) because it is foreign origin and eats the country’s most important staple food. This is, of course, a step towards dehumanizing an enemy, but also it is appropriate. The only ways to deal with a Colorado Potato Beetle is to poison them or squish them. You can’t reason with them and if you let them take over, they will.
Stefan Korshak is a former Kyiv Post staff writer.
