the Russians simple demands haven't changed much….

What Are the Chances for a Negotiated End to the Ukraine War? It’s Complicated.

A diplomatic settlement to bring the war in Ukraine to a close won’t be easy. But it’s not impossible.

At this stage, most informed observers agree that the Ukraine war will either end at the negotiating table, or remain a bloody stalemate that drags on indefinitely. So what are the prospects for some kind of diplomatic solution to the fighting?

BY BRANKO MARCETIC

On the surface, there’s little hope to think the two sides will reach agreement anytime soon, with both governments publicly rubbishing the prospect of negotiations. Russian officials have blamed the Ukrainian side for the lack of progress on talks and charged that any peace will be “on our terms,” while Ukrainian officials all the way up to President Volodymyr Zelensky insistthere can be no negotiated settlement as long as Moscow occupies Ukrainian territory, and allegedly plan a major counteroffensive to that end. More recently, Zelensky has threatened to abandon negotiations altogether if Moscow tries the POWs it captured in Mariupol in May.

Making things even more fraught, both have broadened their war aims in recent months. Zelensky has now pledged to retake Crimea — illegally annexed by Russian president Vladimir Putin back in 2014 — while Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov declared last month that his country’s forces would conquer Ukrainian land west of the breakaway territories of Donetsk and Luhansk, in response to the use of longer-range weapons that Washington has been supplying to Kiev since June.

As such, a recent meeting between Zelensky, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and UN secretary general António Guterres reportedly yielded no progress on the subject of peace, while in a widely cited report, Russia’s permanent representative to the UN, Gennady Gatilov, ruled out hopes of a diplomatic solution in the near future. Washington, meanwhile, has just approved the single largest package of military aid to Ukraine yet.

It’s pretty bleak stuff for anyone hoping for a resolution to the war. Yet look past some of these recent attention-grabbing headlines, and there’s actually some reason for optimism.

Encouraging Signs

To begin with, the past months have seen important progress on diplomatic engagement. In July, Russia and Ukraine signed a Turkish and UN–brokered dealto allow export ships carrying grain and other agricultural exports from Ukrainian ports to be guided by the country’s vessels unmolested through the mine-riddled Black Sea. The deal has somewhat alleviated a food crisis caused by a combination of a Russian blockade, and the laying of mines in the water body by both governments.

Even though the two sides signed the agreement while sitting at separate tables — and even though Moscow followed it up by attacking Ukrainian port facilities in Odessa within a day of signing — the deal has so far been successful. As of August 23, thirty-three cargo ships carrying nearly 720,000 tons of food have left Ukraine under the deal, the country’s agriculture ministry reported.

The agreement has defied the understandable early pessimism that Putin’s missile attack signaled a lack of Russian seriousness about the deal. More importantly, it represents the first talks between the two countries since revelations of the Bucha massacre scuttled promising, Turkish-mediated negotiations in April, and the first agreement signed between the two countries since Moscow’s invasion in February, potentially laying the groundwork for further diplomacy. Erdogan pointed to the deal after his meeting with Zelensky and Guterres, revealing the three had discussed using the positive atmosphere it had created to push toward peace.

At the same time, there’s the possibility of a US-Russia diplomatic opening in the ongoing talks over a prisoner swap deal to free former US marine Paul Whelan and WNBA star Brittney Griner.

Negotiations over the swap led to the first talks at the end of July between Lavrov and US secretary of state Tony Blinken, the United States’ top diplomat, since the war began, in which they agreed to continue negotiations over the issue. And while they didn’t discuss Ukraine, it’s a positive step that Washington and Moscow have reestablished even limited, high-level contacts, after months of nothing.

“US involvement in any future negotiations is a prerequisite for their success.”

This is critical because, as a number of voiceshave pointed out, US involvement in any future negotiations is a prerequisite for their success, for several reasons. One is that the United States, through its support for Ukraine’s war effort, including intelligence assistance in targeting Russian generals and warships, is a de facto cobelligerent in the conflict, with even some US officials admitting Washington is engaged in a “proxy war” where the aimis to “see Russia weakened.” More than that, there are certain things only the United States can offer in talks, from sanctions relief for Russia, to security guarantees for a neutral Ukraine.

“Russians believe the US calls the shots,” veteran US diplomat Chas Freeman said back in May. “Therefore, talking to those who take direction from the US is unlikely to yield anything useful.”

Russian officials themselves have indicated their belief in Washington’s key role. The February invasion was preceded by an overture Moscow put to the Biden administration, centered on limiting NATO expansion, which the White House rejected. State Department official Derek Chollet admitted the administration refused to put the issue on the table before the war, and a recent Washington Post report based on US official accounts revealed that at least four times before the war, Russian officials tied their invasion threat to NATO’s enlargement. In one case, Putin flatly told Biden that “the eastward expansion of the Western alliance was a major factor in his decision to send troops to Ukraine’s border,” according to the report.

It’s likely that all these are among the reasons that Zelensky himself has repeatedly urged Western governments to be more involved in negotiations to end the war, with British defense minister Ben Wallace accidentally revealing in March that he knew there was “a desire for the UK and US” to be at the table, to avoid another Minsk. That doomed peace agreement was jeopardized by the absence of both countries and the lack of US support for implementing it, with Zelensky left to try enact his peace platform in the face of domestic political opposition and threats to his life from fascist groups.

This would be an important shift, because Washington has until now been less inclined to back a settlement. One senior US official told CNN in March that Washington was focused on keeping its European allies united on economic pressure and military support, knowing that some would pressure Ukraine to sue for peace. In May, the Wall Street Journal reported that a split that had opened up in the West, with the United States and UK at the head of a bloc made up mostly of former Eastern Bloc states who favor prolonging the war until a hypothetical Ukrainian victory, versus a French- and German-led bloc favoring negotiations.

Meanwhile, Turkish officials have repeatedly charged that unnamed governments wish to prolong the war to weaken Russia, and even sought to block the grain deal Erdoğan had brokered.

Ambiguities and Uncertainties

There remains well-grounded skepticism about the viability of a settlement, and not just in circles reflexively opposed to diplomacy. Last month, Rajan Menon, director of the grand strategy program at Defense Priorities, argued in the Nation that “there is not a shred of evidence that shows that Moscow and Kyiv are prepared to even start preliminary negotiations aimed at ending the war, let alone agree to a cease-fire.” Each side is convinced it will win the war, he writes, so the war will go on “until at least one side concludes that fighting will prove fruitless, perhaps even disastrous.”

“There have been signs that, despite Russia’s territorial gains in the war and its officials’ public posturing, Moscow is more inclined to negotiate than it might seem.”

Yet there have been signs that, despite Russia’s territorial gains in the war and its officials’ public posturing, Moscow is more inclined to negotiate than it might seem. In June, Russian ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Antonov, was overheard by a Politico reporter in a Georgetown restaurant agreeing that “we need an agreement” to end the war, in the words of his dinner companion, a former US ambassador to the UN under George W. Bush.

In early August, former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder — a longtime Putin ally since the Russian president’s early attempts to align Russia with the West, and who until May sat on the board of Russian state-owned oil firm Rosneft — said he had met with Putin in Moscow and discussed the war. “The good news is that the Kremlin wants a negotiated solution,” he relayed to German magazine Stern.

Liberal opposition outlet Meduza has reported that Putin is committed to a “long war,” but also that Russian leadership is concerned about a rise in discontent come fall, and that, besides the hawks, there is a loose peace camp that contains some members of Putin’s inner circle, along with those who are less outspoken and going only grudgingly along.

Even UN representative Gatilov’s recent dismissal of the prospect of talks was less emphatic than headlines made it seem. That dismissal came as he complained that the UN wasn’t acting as an effective mediator, and that Russian diplomats “do not have any contacts with the western delegations,” and “simply do not talk to each other” — in other words, that his pessimism about talks was based on a lack of diplomatic engagement with the West. Gatilov also accused Washington and other NATO governments of pressuring Ukraine to walk away from talks, something there’s no evidence yet that the Biden administration has done, but which UK prime minister Boris Johnson successfully did after talks made progress in April, as reported by the pro-Western Ukrainska Pravda newspaper.

Washington, Kiev, and a host of East European governments have frequently characterized negotiations as a Kremlin ruse to get the upper hand in fighting, and that any peace deal would be used by Putin to buy time, regroup, and launch a renewed assault. “Peace talks are just one more element of Putin’s concept of multi-dimensional warfare,” said Don Jensen, the United States Institute of Peace’s Russia expert and former John Kasich advisor, earlier this year.

Yet even after the atrocities at Bucha helped make peace talks a nonstarter for Kiev in April, Zelensky has continued to call for negotiations. At least four separate times the following month, Zelensky publicly made clear his desire to talk directly with Putin, though couching the politically risky proposal in maximalist rhetoric around Ukrainian victory and negotiating demands.

In June, Ukraine’s top negotiator said talks could restart by the end of August, and that Kiev “could consider some kind of political agreement, like the one we proposed in Istanbul,” which Moscow had found acceptable at the time, because it left out Crimea — though this was also premised on a Ukrainian counteroffensive that it’s not clear is actually happening.

Even Washington has started to signal its interest in a negotiated peace. Both NATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg and Blinken said in June the war would end at the negotiating table. When asked directly in June whether Ukraine would have to cede territory to achieve peace, Biden pointedly didn’t rule it out, and affirmed that “at some point along the line, there’s going to have to be a negotiated settlement here.” Later that month, US officials told CNN they were increasingly pessimistic Ukraine would win back the land it had lost to Russia, and were debating whether and how Zelensky needed to redefine his concept of “victory.”

Of course, later that month at the NATO summit in Madrid, Biden struck a less dovish tone, insisting that the United States would continue backing the war effort “as long as it takes.” Since then, the administration has supported Ukraine’s strikes in Crimea, a significant escalation in the war.

Clearly, the prospects for a negotiated settlement are highly uncertain and ambiguous. Yet there also seems to be more to the story than the tough public rhetoric of officials in the three countries, which journalists have a tendency to take at face value. This is particularly so when the leaders of each are having to navigate markedly jingoistic domestic political climates, sometimes of their own making, and calibrate their public messaging to it.

Zelensky, for instance, said early on in the war he would “compromise” on the status of the contested Donbas region, before swiftly reversing himself and insisting on Ukraine’s territorial integrity. Months later in May, Zelensky again insistedthat “there are things that can only be reached at the negotiating table” and that fighting “will only definitively end through diplomacy,” before one of his own underlings contradicted him, charging that “the war will not stop (after any concessions),” but merely lead to an “even more bloody and large-scale” Russian offensive. Even before the war, Zelensky had been a dovish outlier in the increasingly nationalistic climate that had enveloped Ukraine since 2014, and it wouldn’t be surprising if those pressures still exist.

But at least in the United States, the political climate may be slowly changing. House Armed Services Committee chair Representative Adam Smith (D-WA) recently noted a poll carried out in his home turf of Seattle, which found 53 percent of likely voters saying the United States should enter negotiations to end the war even if it means making compromises with Putin, while 66 percent think the US has a leading role to play in making negotiations happen. Smith said that a movement in Congress to push the administration to pursue peace “helps” and that he is already part of it, with certain caveats.

Inching Toward Peril

Meanwhile, as the war has dragged on, the potential for disaster and escalation has only heightened.

June and July saw a fortuitously defused standoff between Russia and NATO member Lithuania, over the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad sandwiched between the latter and Poland. After Lithuania announced it would ban Russian goods from moving through its land toward the Russian territory, Moscow threatened the country with “serious consequences” that “won’t” be diplomatic. Any attack on a NATO member would trigger the alliance’s collective defense clause, potentially leading to a wider war between Russia and NATO, which could quickly turn nuclear. Moscow has now sent MiG warplanes with hypersonic missiles into the territory.

“July saw no military aid come from the six largest countries in Europe, whose commitments for such support have been steadily drying up since the end of April.”

Over the past six months, Russian missiles have repeatedly struck Ukrainian territory near another NATO member Poland, and it’s carried out military exercises simulating missile attacks on Estonia, a fellow NATO state, whose airspace was violated by a Russian helicopter in June. Meanwhile, it remains to be seen how the Kremlin responds to recent Ukrainian attacks on Crimea and the murder of the daughter of prominent Russian ultranationalist thinker Aleksandr Dugin. Kiev has denied Moscow’s accusation of its involvement in the killing, but it’s nevertheless led Russian hawks to harden their war demands, even accusing Estonia of sheltering the assassin and threatening military action.

Arguably the most alarming reminder of the war’s combustibility, however, has been the crisis over the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, which Russian forces seized in March. The plant, Europe’s largest, has come under shelling for the past week, sparking fears of at least a Fukushima-like catastrophe and urgent calls to end fighting around it. At this point negotiations appear to be opening the door to a visit by the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency, which may defuse the crisis.

Meanwhile, it’s unclear how long the Western appetite for backing Ukraine will maintain. July saw no military aid come from the six largest countries in Europe, whose commitments for such support have been steadily drying up since the end of April. The continent is currently buckling under political instability and a building economic crisiscaused by Russia’s retaliatory cuts to gas exports, one that has hit Germany, Europe’s biggest economy, particularly hard. Meanwhile, Republicans are poised to take the US House in November at a time of rising right-wing skepticismtoward aid for Ukraine, raising the distinct, if still narrow, possibility of the country losing its chief military patron.

All of this makes the need for a diplomatic settlement to the war, one led by and directly involving the United States, all the more urgent. Depending on who you ask, the odds of such negotiations working out are at this point slim to simply nonexistent. But perhaps the more important point is that they haven’t even been tried.

https://jacobin.com/2022/08/ukraine-war-russia-zelensky-putin-settlement-diplomacy

UKRAINE HAS BEEN REBORN AS A NAZI COUNTRY — MINUS CRIMEA AND THE DONBASS REGION. THESE AREAS OF "UKRAINE" ADDED IN 1922 AND 1954 UNDER THE COMMUNIST REGIME OF THE USSR, ARE NOT UKRAINIAN PER SE. THEY DECLARED INDEPENDENT AUTONOMY, THEN COUNTRY-HOOD, BECAUSE THE KIEV REGIME BECAME DESPOTIC, TYRANNICAL, FASCIST, DICTATORIAL AND AUTOCRATIC TOWARDS THE LARGE POPULATION OF RUSSIANS IN UKRAINE. ZELENSKY IS LIKE HITLER, BUT HE IS LESS INTELLIGENT AND MORE STUPID.

THE ONLY PEACEFUL SOLUTION TO THE LEGIT RUSSIAN INTERVENTION IS TO DIVIDE UKRAINE LIKE THE UK DID WITH THE IRISH, BACK IN THE 1920S. ON ONE SIDE THE GALICIANS, ON THE OTHER THE RUSSIANS. THE OTHER SOLUTION WHICH THE RUSSIANS DO NOT WANT TO DO, WOULD BE TO ANNIHILATE THE UKRAINIAN REGIME.

SPEECHES LIKE THAT DONE BY ZELENSKY ARE CRAZY WITHOUT AN OUNCE OF REALITY.

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

By Gus Leonisky at 26 Aug 2022 - 5:22pm
Gus Leonisky's blog
Login or register to post comments

russian security…….

BY Vladimir Odintsov

Since the beginning of the Russian special operation to denazify Ukraine, this issue has been on the front pages of every media outlet in the world and has been actively discussed.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation have repeatedly told the world community that the objectives of this special operation in Ukraine are to ensure the security of Russia and its citizens and to protect the Donbas from the attempts of the Kyiv regime, which with the active support of the West over the past 8-10 years has established a neo-Nazi state that is committing open genocide against the Russian-speaking population of this country. This special denazification operation is carried out in accordance with the UN Charter, within the framework of the rights of any state to protect its security and the lives of its citizens from external threats.

At the same time, it should be recalled that the US authorities, which today are the main accuser of Russia’s actions in Ukraine, have themselves repeatedly used the principle of “protecting national security.” And not even from systematic military actions by the enemy against its own country (as was the case with the Ukrainian Nazis in recent years), but only from pseudo threats, especially from Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan, to justify their open military aggression in the countries of the Middle East.

Having become the mouthpiece and initiator of the neo-Nazi policies of the current Kyiv regime imposed on Ukraine, Washington has been trying for six months to unleash anti-Russian disinformation propaganda through its lackey media, both in the United States itself and outside its borders, in order to create an anti-Russian front in the world.

As the famous American philosopher, historian, and linguist Noam Chomsky noted in his recent article in El Universal magazine, the United States and Europe have begun an unthinkable game against the Russian Federation, they are trying to weaken Russia’s position in the political arena as much as possible. “The position of the US government is very clear. This was clearly announced at a NATO meeting convened by the United States at Ramstein Air Base in Germany a few weeks ago, and then formally confirmed just last week at a NATO summit,” he said. As the American historian clarified, the alliance, including Europe, has accepted the official US position that Russia must indeed be weakened more than the 1919 Treaty of Versailles weakened Germany, so much so that it could not negotiate and engage in diplomacy. In his view, Washington’s apparent desire to involve Kyiv in NATO despite the objections of the Russian Federation and experienced American politicians is a provocation, and Moscow made it clear as long as 30 years ago that Ukraine’s joining the alliance would mean crossing the permitted line, which not a single Russian leader would agree to.

Early on in the Russian special operation, the American Daily Caller wrote that the United States had overestimated its strength, pointing out that events in Ukraine had shaken US confidence in being able to act as a “world policeman.” This was a real shock to the cozy “rules-based international order” that the United States has tried to establish for decades. The publication stressed even then that it is almost impossible to truly isolate a country as large, powerful, and resource-rich as Russia. There will always be those who want to support it as a bulwark against the West.

And this thesis was fully confirmed by the refusal of most countries of the world to condemn Russia for its unconditional right to protect its own security and the lives of Russians from the crimes of the Kyiv neo-Nazis. Just as Moscow has already liberated Europe and the world from the brown plague during World War II, so now it must again start such a war against neo-Nazism and open fascism on Ukrainian territory, which Washington and a number of current Western politicians have revived. It is therefore not surprising that the United States and the Western countries that follow it are today increasingly condemned by the world community as a haven of neo-Nazis who are trying to bring the world to its knees through the actions of a new plague of fascism.

Even the US Marine Corps, which openly fights on the side of Ukrainian neo-Nazis, confirming the turn of the United States into a party to the Ukrainian conflict, is increasingly coming to understand the justification of Russian actions, the falsity of the propaganda campaign of the US authorities on this issue and the fact that it is precisely the policy of Washington, and not Moscow, that is criminal there. This is exactly what the journalist and former marine who left for the DPR, John Mark Dugan, said recently.

US President Joe Biden’s administration and bipartisan lawmakers have already allocated more money to Kyiv in four months than the United States spent in Afghanistan in its first five years, according to US media. This situation and Washington’s policies have been heavily criticized in American society. In a July 9 op-ed, The New York Times argues that the United States and its allies are unlikely to be able to sustain current levels of support for Ukraine for long: “President Biden has pledged to support Ukraine “for as long as necessary,” but neither he nor anyone else can say at this point how long that will last or how much more the United States and its allies can do from this distance, short of direct military intervention. Officials concede that US and European weapons stockpiles will eventually be exhausted. Although the United States has approved $54 billion in military and other aid to Kyiv, no one expects another $54 billion check when that money runs out.”

The funds Washington has approved as “aid” to Ukraine are actually returning to the United States without reaching the recipient, a former adviser to US Defense Secretary Colonel Douglas MacGregor said on July 30 in an interview with Judging Freedom: Most of the money does not reach Ukraine, with vast sums ending up in Pentagon’s pockets as compensation to the armed forces for the fact that equipment and resources have been transferred to Europe.”

In early August, the CBS News channel aired the documentary “Arming Ukraine,” the trailer to which explained why most of the billions of dollars in military aid the United States sends to Ukraine does not arrive and only about 30% of the weapons reach the country. However, in order to clearly conceal the crimes taking place in Ukraine under the auspices of the US military, this announcement was soon removed under pressure from “influential forces in Washington.” However, US House of Representatives Representative Lauren Boybert (R-Colorado) has already criticized Washington’s military assistance to Ukraine, stating, “How many people have been called Russian bots for saying the same thing since March? Now that CBS has shown it, it’s completely normal. Whatever it was, I am glad the facts are out now. A lot of the aid to Ukraine is fraud.” A critical response followed from House Republican Marjorie Taylor Green (from the state of Georgia), “This is one of the reasons I voted against military aid to Kyiv. This aid has never had anything to do with the Ukrainian people.”

Back in early May, CNN reported that sources close to US intelligence agencies admitted that a large number of weapons supplied to Ukraine had entered the black market. At the same time, the publication stressed that more than 20 countries that have supplied billions of dollars worth of weapons to Ukraine should understand that a large part of the supplies never reaches the recipients. Moreover, there is an active resale of Western humanitarian and military aid in Ukraine. Therefore, journalist Ross Douthat’s call in the New York Times on June 5 for the United States to stop its financial support and arms deliveries in the current situation around Ukraine is not surprising.

In an interview with GaS Digital Network, a retired US Army colonel, former senior advisor to the Acting US Secretary of Defense Douglas McGregor emphasized that American society has yet to reconsider its views on the course of Russia’s special operation in Ukraine. Public opinion may not only be influenced by reports of massive Ukrainian casualties, but also by reports of the brutality of the treatment of Russian prisoners.

That US President Biden is already tired of Ukraine and that he does not need Zelensky is already openly written by many American media. In particular, the National Review points out that Biden sees where the conflict in Ukraine is heading and probably just wants to get rid of this “mess.” Even if Kyiv has to make “territorial concessions” to do so.

In an appearance on the talk show Piers Morgan Uncensored, American political commentator Ann Coulter accused the West of “neglecting the Russians for a very long time.” She stressed that Western countries should take care of their “own problems” and not get involved in supporting Ukraine, as it has “historically been a part and a zone of influence of the Russian empire.” In this context, she urged rejecting Ukraine’s admission to NATO, saying that after the collapse of the USSR the alliance’s existence had lost all meaning.

The unbearable living conditions in Ukraine and the mass exodus of Ukrainians from Kyiv-controlled areas to the Kherson region liberated by Russia were reported by CNN. Judging by the budget of the Kherson region for August, the region gets twice as much as it could expect under the Kyiv regime: Pensions in the liberated districts of the Zaporizhzhia region are already higher than the average Ukrainian and low compared to Ukrainian electricity and water bills disprove the claims of Ukrainian propaganda and prompt the people of Ukraine to support Russia’s policy en masse.

Vladimir Odintsov, political observer, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”

https://journal-neo.org/2022/08/24/us-citizens-and-media-on-russia-s-actions-in-ukraine/

READ FROM TOP...

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW......@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@!!!

By Gus Leonisky at 26 Aug 2022 - 6:22pm
Login or register to post comments

celebrating independence….

Vladislav Ugolny: The real root of the Ukraine conflict goes back 100 years and is misunderstood in the West

Ukraine is celebrating a major holiday. But ahead, only hard times await.

By Vladislav Ugolny, a Russian journalist based in Donetsk

Here's how the current narrative goes: Ukraine is at its peak on its 31st Independence Day.

Thanks to euphoric national unity, the state was able to resist the Russian army. Kiev is still its capital, Odessa remains under its control and there’s are plenty of fortifications in Donbass for the Ukrainian army to hide behind. However, its eastern fortress is not Mariupol or Severodonetsk anymore, but Avdeevka. Although they prefer to omit this fact.

This outcome of the first six months of Russia's military operation may seem like a convincing argument for those who believe Ukraine has a glorious future. Kiev managed to mobilize its defenses in the early days by hectically handing out arms to anybody interested, amassing experienced nationalist fighters in Donbass and bribing regional elites which may have been ready to take Russia’s side – or threatening them.

In reality, this is the result of a policy of violence, coercion, deceit, manipulation and alienation, continuously conducted since 1991. It could’ve been called colonial policy if Ukraine were independent from the influence of the Atlantic agenda. But this is ultimately the victory of the pro-Western bloc over their pro-Russian fellow citizens.

We have seen this before during the Anglo-French standoffs in America and India. And how did it end for Native Americans and Indians? Not good.

And there’s nothing good in store for Ukraine either.

Eight years ago, it lost Crimea and the natural resources of Donbass. Today, the former is many things at once: a rapidly developing showcase of the ‘Russian world’ and a constant military threat, as the Black Sea Fleet regularly strikes Ukrainian military targets with Kalibrs.

The most successful offensive was also the one launched from the peninsula, giving Russia control over Kherson, Melitopol, Berdyansk and Mariupol.

With just half of Donbass lost in 2014, Ukraine has found itself on the brink of an energy collapse, as its unified coal mining and thermal energy complex was ruined. The need for corrupt schemes to buy coal from Donbass republics arose, making fortunes for oligarch Rinat Akhmetov and ex-president Pyotr Poroshenko. The rebellious Donbass also posed a constant military risk to Ukraine, bringing forth the current war.

The most daring and motivated infantry also comes from the region. Both republics have artillery and tanks, but their infantry will be remembered for achieving the impossible for six months already, breaking through the Ukrainian defense in depth.

Now in 2022, Ukraine has lost Kherson, half of its Zaporozhye Region and a third of the Kharkov Region. These territories have now been cut out of the Ukrainian economy. No more Kherson watermelons – the delicious sweet fruit ripening under the southern sun. The largest nuclear power plant in Zaporozhye is now controlled by the Russian army, although it still provides electricity for Ukrainian towns. You can’t rush things when it comes to nuclear energy, but the day will come when Ukrainians will lose every watt of energy from the Zaporozhye facility. And that is a force majeure situation.

Trying to overcome these circumstances, the Ukrainian nation has spent thirty years in preparation for a conflict with Russia. According to Alexey Arestovich, an ex-spy and now the most popular Ukrainian pundit, this is a ‘meta-historical’ conflict, the climax of a 400-year-long war, after which Ukraine will either be victorious or forgotten. Arestovich is a continentally-inclined philosopher, so he uses some abstruse wording to communicate the same things that Ukrainians are used to hearing in less sophisticated terms – from oligarchs with their criminal 1990s past and former Soviet officials with their Communist party rhetoric. The most concise message would be the typical ‘Glory to Ukraine’ salute which was originally popular in Galicia but was recently adopted more widely.

Billionaire criminals, politicians and officials, residents of Galicia – that is the ‘Ukrainian nation’ that is celebrating the anniversary of usurping institutional power and getting privileges, not the country’s independence.

Some received the privilege of getting unique access to the privatization of Ukraine’s economy with the right to lobby the interests of their multi-billion-dollar businesses: metallurgy, energy, the food industry, the chemical sector, amber mining, alcohol and tobacco manufacturing, banking, etc. Yes, there are foreign investors in Ukraine, but it’s the local oligarchs that control the most profitable industries. Not sharing the Ukrainian market with other competitors, especially from Russia, has always been their vital interest.

They had help from politicians and officials, making the citizens of Ukraine their main source of building wealth. They stole government funds, smuggled contraband, manufactured counterfeit goods, and had their share of the drug and human trafficking market, as well as gambling. The unitarian structure created a situation where government offices could be bought, which helped them make money in the Odessa port or extort it from Kharkov businessmen promising them pain-free tax audits (you needed to have connections in Kiev, where these jobs were distributed). That’s why the authorities always ignored the demands for federalization – the idea of losing the monopoly on the decision-making process freaked them out, especially if it could potentially benefit Moscow.

Finally, the residents of Galicia – formerly part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire – joined Ukrainians and became citizens of one country only in 1939. These people were separated from the rest of the nation by religion, dialect, values and history. Galicia had very few industries. The only valuable things about the region were its Polish and Austrian architecture (or what was left of it), a couple of resorts, woods (which have thinned out significantly by now due to uncontrolled deforestation), and a proximity to the EU border that made smuggling and labor migration much easier. This is nothing compared to the riches in the south and east of Ukraine.

Galicians soon realized that they possessed the ultimate resource that could secure their region's status as the cultural center of the country: their history, a history that could legitimize both Ukraine’s drive to distance itself from Russia and its attempts to stay independent by assimilating its Russian population – even if it’s exactly the kind of ‘colonial’ policy they often complained about.

Galicians became the crusaders of Ukrainization, a restless minority clamoring for its rights. It seemed logical: “We live in Ukraine, so we must speak Ukrainian, mustn’t we?” But there’s only so much time in the school curriculum, so Ukrainian language, literature, and history came to be studied at the expense of other subjects, including Russian. Then the Ukrainian government introduced a unified entrance test for universities, and having a good command of Ukrainian became obligatory for any student-to-be. Children of Russian-speaking families became less competitive. If anyone said that the Russian and Ukrainian languages should have equal footing, Galicians answered that it would lead to the extinction of Ukrainian since it would not be able to compete with Russian. This is only one of the examples of institutional discrimination against the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine.

Any political force that tried to protect the rights of Russians was destroyed. Yevgeny Kushnaryov, the former governor of the Kharkov Region, who nearly separated the area from Ukraine in 2005, died on a hunting trip under mysterious circumstances. The ‘Party of the Regions’, which had used his ideas, came to power after his death but didn’t keep its promises to protect the Russian-speaking regions. Neither did it make the Russian language a state language, as it pledged.

Another story is the demise of the Rodina party in Odessa, which had been represented in the Odessa city council and whose leader had served in the national parliament. Even the party’s name bears witness to Ukraine’s chauvinistic policy: The names of parties were to be registered in Ukrainian, so the Odessa party had to find a Russian word that would sound exactly the same as a Ukrainian word. As a result, “Fatherland” in Russian had to pretend it was “Family” in Ukrainian. The party was wiped out by the end of 2013, with its leader, Igor Markov, sent to prison and other key figures forced to either emigrate or go into hiding. No one except the people of Odessa spoke up in protest: Rodina was deeply foreign to the Ukrainian state. By the way, repressions against the party came on the orders of the allegedly “pro-Russian” president Yanukovich.

As a result, the Russians of Ukraine were left without political representation in a country that had set its sights on assimilating them. By the time Maidan happened, it was clear that Russians in Ukraine faced an uncertain future. Each of them had a choice: run, fight, or surrender. Many chose the first option: From 2015 to 2018, over 400,000 Ukrainian citizens received a Russian passport. For a period after that, the figure is even higher, but that is due to the mass granting of Russian citizenship to the people of Donbass who had stayed on their native soil. Many took up arms after Crimea and the Donbass republics exercised their right to self-determination and used violence to suppress protests in Kharkov, Odessa, and Zaporozhye, driving large numbers from these regions to volunteer.

Some have remained and are now waiting for the Russian army to liberate their cities and towns. Video reports from Svetlodarsk and Severodonetsk have captured moments when militiamen’s families see their sons for the first time in eight years and cry tears of joy. Many have given up, however. Not everyone is born a hero and not everyone is prepared to leave everything behind or live a dissident’s life in a hostile environment. This is the tragedy of Russians in Ukraine.

This tragedy is the triumph of the Ukrainian state, which took Russian Ukrainians hostage and turned them against Russia.

How did it come to pass? Let’s say a long time ago, a small boy dreamed of serving in the military one day. He eventually became a Ukrainian officer and took the oath, making his mom and dad proud. Let’s assume that we’re talking about a Russian-speaking family from Kharkov. The Ukrainian government then started a war in Donbass and called on the boy, now a grown man, to do his duty. The Ukrainian government interpreted the oath to protect the Ukrainian people as a promise to crush the Russians who had risen up in Donbass. The officer faced a dilemma – what was good and what was evil? Some made the right choice and refused to go to war, others made a mistake. Sometimes they had the good intention of trying to prevent greater bloodshed and taking care of conscripts. There were Ukrainian officers in 2014 who avoided escalations and just wanted to save the lives of their subordinates, who had been thrown into the frontlines. Yet, as the war dragged on, people kept dying and the stakes got higher.

While children were being killed in Donbass by the Ukrainian army, Russian-speaking Ukrainian servicemen’s friends and colleagues were losing their lives at the hands of the people’s republics’ militias. So the conflict acquired a personal dimension for them. The Russians who made different choices and found themselves on the opposite sides of the divide were killing each other, while the Ukrainian government was celebrating victory.

A retailer from Odessa might have also had little admiration for an independent Ukraine, which, in his view, was synonymous with corrupt officials, thuggish law enforcement, and a never-ending economic crisis. Without proper maintenance, his dear city was slowly falling apart. Then the war broke out, making it likely that street fighting would destroy everything he had. What is he to do? Some have resigned to this risk, others hope that the Russians will take Odessa peacefully, while still others have decided (or been told to by Ukrainian radicals) to support the Ukrainian army between Nikolayev and Kherson in the hope that the frontline will stay far away and their livelihoods will be spared.

The Russians who are fighting against Ukraine have many questions and harsh words for those Russians who give in to it and support it.

This is a tragedy. The most capable units of the Ukrainian Armed Forces are made up of Russian-speaking soldiers and officers. Their senior commanders often went to the same military schools as Russia’s senior officers.

The only match for a Russian soldier is a Russian soldier.

This is what happened a hundred years ago during the Civil War in Russia. It's this factor that runs through the present conflict.

“After all, Ukrainians are an interesting and difficult opponent. Probably the most difficult of all possible for us. They are part of the Russian people, only with their brains washed. But at the same time, in other respects, they are carriers of all the same qualities and properties that we have. They know us intimately, as we know them. In terms of psychology and mentality, it’s like being at war with your own shadow,” a Russian soldier wrote in his Telegram blog.

NATO has found the perfect way to introduce a hybrid war against Russia: they have set its twin against it and administered arms so it won’t collapse. For Russians, I repeat again, this is a tragedy and a fratricidal war. However, Russians have no alternative because they cannot abandon Donbass or allow the genocidal assimilation of the Russians of Ukraine to continue.

Nothing good awaits Ukraine. In their confrontation with Russia, Ukrainians have been forced to resort to the help of the West and, consequently, lost their independence. In the short term, this promises benefits in the form of loans, arms supplies, and diplomatic assistance, but you have to pay for everything in the end. By drawing Western influence into the post-Soviet space, Ukraine has raised the stakes by an order of magnitude.

Ukrainians have already lost a lot. Even if the frontline remains as it is now, Kiev will definitely lose the rest of Donbass this winter due to its inability to provide heating there. It will be a snowy field populated by Ukrainian soldiers shivering from the cold, harried by Russian artillery shelling. There will also be vulnerable grandmothers who simply have nowhere to go.

Only the Russian army can save them.

Everything has been decided with Donbass, but not with Kharkov. The mayor of the city glibly reports on the heroic struggle to prepare for the heating season, but there is a possibility that a large amount of the city’s population of one and a half million will not survive this winter. Kharkov is the second most important city in Ukraine. Zaporozhye may experience similar problems. In any case, the humanitarian crisis caused by the failure of the Ukrainian government to shore up the housing and utilities sector (for example, by not mobilizing its workers to the front) will turn the frontline territory into a no man’s land. Ukraine will lose its economic benefits, and receive only new displaced persons in return.

The ‘grain agreement’ allowed the ports of Odessa to hope for the beginning of at least some work, but Ukraine is still under a naval blockade. Trade has risen, but the ports are not actually functioning.

In fact, the Odessa metropolitan area has been deprived of its main sphere of activity, and the Ukrainian government is not able to harness its full potential. The city is suffering losses. Its prospects are unclear. The only thing that is actually moving forward in Odessa is a fight against monuments of ‘Russian imperialism’. Since Ukrainians cannot unblock the port, they want to compensate by demolishing a monument to the city’s founder, Catherine the Great.

This Independence Day is the apogee for Ukrainian statehood. Ukrainian nationalists were able to use three decades to fool and intimidate others, as well as consolidate and bribe radicals. Thanks to this, Ukraine has withstood six months of confrontation with Russia and will endure for some time. But its defensive strategy will only lead to a slow retreat, a loss of territory, and the inability to ensure the proper administration of the frontline territories.

Looking forward, difficulties will only increase and become more complicated, which will lead to a proportional increase in the cost of maintaining Ukraine for the West. Every penny saved means a worsened humanitarian crisis and a further reduction in territory. Where the fear of change initially sparked a national upsurge, now there will be increasing war fatigue, poverty, unemployment, hunger, and cold. In the end, the Russian army will move forward, step by step, with its superior number of artillery barrels, ready to provide humanitarian aid in every liberated Russian city.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

https://www.rt.com/russia/561326-vladislav-ugolny-31st-independence-of-ukraine/

READ FROM TOP.

Primary links

Search

Recent comments

Democracy Links

Member's Off-site Blogs