James Doogue

This is my response to a correspondent who claimed:

'...the Russians really had no choice but to invade to liberate the people of the Donbas and establish the neutrality of Ukraine into the future. They had been extremely patient, as had the Donbas people, but after 8 years of Kiev refusing to implement the Minsk 2 agreement and deliver some sort of autonomy to the breakaway republics it obviously wasn't going to happen ……….,.......... ..........

Zelensky was a puppet, and Ukraine was preparing for war with Russia over Donbas and the Crimea anyway, all with NATO and no doubt CIA support. Crimea was and will now always be Russian so it is no longer an issue. Ukraine was, prior to the war, recognized for what it is — the poorest and most corrupt country in Europe,.....'

Given past criticism of US imperialism, I daresay you wouldn't support a Western country doing what Russia has done. After WWII all the colonial empires eventually agreed to the general rule of self determination and independence for most of their empire. I don't see them trying to rebuild their empires via invasion the way Putin is.

You might well consider that Crimea and areas in the Donbas are 'historically' part of the greater Russian Empire, but that doesn't escape the fact that Ukraine is a sovereign nation with internationally agreed borders and does not have to answer to Russia on their internal affairs.

Every former member country of the USSR will have some cultural and language ties to Russia. Some areas feel that connection more strongly than others. Particularly if those areas were stocked with workers from Russia during the Soviet era. As happened in both Crimea and the Donbas.

If this action by Russia succeeds and is given some legitimacy by the international community, it's likely Russia will follow the same playbook in future. That is, supply and fund a separatist movement. Include insurgents and ratchet up the violence and force a mock referendum to gain autocracy/self rule, and then expand further.

If that doesn't work, then invade, claiming it is to liberate the people. It helps if the violence of the insurgency, forces the people not aligned with the aggressor to flee. That helps with the mock referenda or election. Before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, some 3 million people had already fled the Donbass region and would be unavailable to take part in separatist controlled referenda or elections.

I've travelled to plenty of places in the world which were inside the borders of one country, but were ethnically, culturally and linguistically more like the country on the other side of the border, or for that matter, more like their former colonial masters. Harbin in norther China is more Russian than Chinese. Miami Florida in some places is more Cuban than North American. Many of the US southern border cities and towns feel more Mexican with Spanish more widely spoken than English. Quebec City feels more French than Paris. There are plenty of places in South East Asia which feel more like The Middle East than SE Asia. Eventually some of the many areas in the world may strive for and gain autonomy because they don't feel they belong as part of the country. But that should be an internal matter. As part of a humanitarian effort the UN might agree to send peacekeepers at the request of the sovereign country. But don't get me started by the uselessness of that organisation. I can speculate that if Russia was not a permanent member of the UN Security Council, the UN would have voted for an international peacekeeping force to attempt to enforce the Minsk ceasefire at the request of Ukraine and a war could have been avoided.

You say Russia had no choice but to invade and liberate the Donbas. If they felt that were true, Russia would have limited their invasion to that region, but they invaded Ukraine across the length of its border with Russia, Belarus and most of the Black Sea coastline. That's clearly not an action to 'liberate' the Donbas.

It's not like we ever hear the truth from the Kremlin. Remember as they massed hundreds of thousands of troops along Ukraine's borders, Russia insisted they had no plans to invade.

I read a lot of your posts and like the information and often the humour you put into them. It hasn't seemed to me that you went from a position of neutrality, to one where after consideration of the facts you came down in the side of Russia.

If I remember correctly when the initial troop buildup was happening on the border, you felt the warmongers in the West were wildly exaggerating the implications. Then in the weeks before the invasion you justified Putin's actions as being a reasonable response to NATO's push east. Then after the invasion you indicated that all Zelensky had to do to stop the invasion happening was to tell Putin Ukraine would never join NATO. Then you pivoted from justifying Putin's invasion due to security issues about Ukraine joining NATO, to the same reasons Moscow provided for their special military operation. That is to give the Russian people in Donbas their autonomy and to free them from their Nazi persecutors. (Not in those words).

You claim it was Ukraine which failed to meet the obligations under Minsk (the first and second), and they lost patience. But the real reason Russia invaded Ukraine was revealed in a Putin essay some time ago. He always intended to reclaim Ukraine.

Theres no doubt that Putin felt after the election of Joe Biden, the bungled withdrawal from Afghanistan, Biden's lack of global leadership and the signal Biden gave that a small incursion might be tolerated, Putin had a window of opportunity to invade and quickly install a Belarus/ Chetnya type puppet government without much of a response from the West.

Putin miscalculated on three fronts. Foremost, the resolve and capacity of the Ukraine defence forces. Second the ability of Zelensky to gain global media attention and widespread public support for Ukraine, and therefore extract promises of loans, grants and weapons for his country, and quite harsh sanctions against Russia. Thirdly the willingness for European countries to dramatically reduce the their reliance on Russian oil and gas.

On the matter of corruption, I find it slightly amusing that you paint a picture of Ukrainians wanting to break free from a corrupt shithile and run into the arms of their Russian saviours.

I don't question that Ukraine was/is corrupt. But is Russia any less corrupt? It has been claimed for good reason, that Putin is possibly the wealthiest person on the planet. And how did most of the Russian Oligarchs acquire their wealth? I've spent enough time in Russia to directly observe the corrupt activities of police and public officials - that's another story!

According to Transparency International, out of a score of up to 100 being the least corrupt and 0 being the most corrupt, Australia scored 73 and is ranked 18th out of 180 countries monitored. By contrast, Ukraine scored just 32 out of 100, and is ranked 122nd. Russia is more corrupt scoring just 29 out of 100, and is ranked 136th.

Clearly your assessment of Ukraine as a corrupt country is spot on, but by all measure used by Transparency International, Russia is even more corrupt.

Going back to the Minsk agreements and your claim that Russia and the Donbas people had been patient, I think there's a bit of revisionism going on there.

As you know there are two Minsk Agreements. The first "Minsk Protocol” was signed on September 5, 2014. It mainly consisted of a commitment to a ceasefire along the existing line of contact in the Donbas, which by all reports, Russia never respected.

By February 2015, fighting had intensified to a level that led to renewed calls for a ceasefire, and ultimately led to the second Minsk Agreement, signed on February 12, 2015. Even after this agreement, Russian-led forces kept fighting and took the town of Debaltseve six days later. That offensive move is a matter of record. Hardly abiding by a ceasefire.

The two agreements are cumulative, building on each other. That is important because as mentioned, the first agreement called for an immediate ceasefire olus full monitoring by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), including on the Ukraine-Russia border, as fundamental to the subsequent package of agreements.

Russia is a Party to the Minsk Agreement despite Putin and his foreign minister claiming in recent times that they were not. The original Minsk signatories are Russia, Ukraine, and the OSCE. Russia were a protagonist in the war in Ukraine in the East and a South East areas, and were fully obliged to follow the terms. Putin pretends Russia were just facilitators and the real agreements are between Ukraine and the "separatists,” who call themselves the Luhansk and Donetsk Peoples’ Republics (LPR and DPR).

The LPR and DPR are not recognized as legitimate entities under the Minsk Agreements. The signatures of the leaders of the so-called Luhansk and Donetsk Peoples’ Republics were added AFTER the agreement s had already been signed by Ukraine, Russia, and the OSCE. They were not among the original signatories, and Ukraine say they would not have signed had their signatures been part of the deal. There is nothing in the content or format of the Agreement that legitimizes these entities and they should not be treated as negotiating partners in any sense. Russia alone controls the forces which occupied parts of eastern Ukraine.

Russia was in violation of the Minsk Agreements which require a ceasefire, withdrawal of foreign military forces, disbanding of illegal armed groups, and returning control of the Ukrainian side of the international border with Russia to Ukraine, all of this under OSCE supervision. Russia did none of that. It had regular military officers as well as intelligence operatives and other unmarked personnel seen in the military forces in Eastern Ukraine. The LPR and DPR forces are by any definition "illegal armed groups,” that have not been disbanded. The ceasefire was barely been respected by the Russian side for more than a few days at a time.

From my research it is clear that Russian-led forces prevented the OSCE from accomplishing its mission in Donbas as spelled out in the Minsk Agreements. Russia approved the mandate of the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission (SMM) in Ukraine when it votes in Vienna, but then blocked implementation of that same mission on the ground in Ukraine. Because Russia is a member of the OSCE, and the SMM wanted to preserve what little access it has to the occupied territories, the mission is guarded in what it says about ceasefire violations and restrictions on its freedom of movement. However, they acknowledged that some 80% of such violations and restrictions come from the Russian-control led side of the border, and those that occur on the Ukrainian side are largely for safety reasons (e.g., avoiding mined approaches to bridges.)

Ukraine implemented as much of Minsk as can reasonably be done while Russia still occupies its territory. The agreements required political measures on Ukraine’s side, including a special status for the region, an amnesty for those who committed crimes as part of the conflict, local elections, and some form of decentralizatio n under the Ukrainian constitution. But the form of these measures was not specified, and Ukraine had already passed legislation addressing every point. It has passed – and extended with renewals – legislation on special status and amnesty, and already had legislation on the books governing local elections. It had passed constitutional amendments. The Minsk Agreements do not require Ukraine to grant autonomy to Donbas, or to become a federalized state. It is Russia’s unique interpretation that the measures passed by Ukraine are somehow insufficient, even though the agreements do not specify what details should be included, and Ukraine had already complied with what is actually specified to the degree it can.

What is lacking in Ukraine’s passage of these political measures is not the legislation per se, but implementation — which Russia itself prevented by continuing to occupy the territory. For example, international legal norms would never recognize the results of elections held under conditions of occupation, yet that is exactly what Russia sought to do by demanding local elections before it relinquished control. That is why the referendum held in Crimea is not recognised by the UN.

You have often quoted the high popular support in Crimea to become part of Russia. But the mainstream media obligingly reported the Kremlin's account. The truth seems to be only 15% - 30% of the Crimean residents voted for unification with Russia. You can read more about that in Forbes,
https:// www.forbes.com/ sites/ paulroderickgreg ory/2014/05/05/ putins-human-rig hts-council-acc identally-posts -real-crimean-e lection-results -only-15-voted- for-annexation/

Moreover, the proposed elections would not have been for positions in the illegitimate LPR and DPR "governments” established under Russian occupation, but for the legitimate city councils, mayors, and oblast administrations that exist under Ukrainian law. Who would vote in such elections? Ukrainian law says all displaced citizens should vote. But would Russian occupation authorities allow this? These were matters for resolution under international supervision – not for Russia to dictate terms.

Some form of neutral peacekeeping or policing force could help bridge between Russian control and Ukrainian control of the occupied territory – but Russia had consistently rejected such proposals. Because of the impossibility of Ukraine implementing political measures while Russia still occupies its territory, the United States — as well as Ukraine, with support from others —proposed deployment of an UN-mandated peacekeeping force to Donbas, so that Russian forces could withdraw, and an UN-backed force could deploy, without an immediate hand-over to Ukrainian control. This would have allowed time and space for local elections to occur, and for the implementation of special status and amnesty legislation. Russia, however, has consistently rejected such proposals, even labeling an UN-supported peacekeeping force a "military takeover” of the region, when of course it is Russia that has actually taken over the region militarily and unilaterally.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 08:08 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 2366 words, total size 16 kb.