Earlier today, I slugged a post — the “link” that follows this — “Mariupol Under Fire”, which related articles I went a seeking. I wasn’t too far off the mark:
However, what I ended up doing was scraping and posting news clips, and “Mariupol” was forgotten, except in the slugged title and on Twitter. My apologies then to those who today had been seeking similar data on the appearance of Russian military assets in the Ukrainian battle space.
Now, the slug that Twitter treated as a header as turned true!
Or more true than was suggested earlier. The following is about an hour old from the Los Angeles Times:
“It is a totally new game,” said Oleg Odnorozhenko, deputy commander of the volunteer Azov Battalion, adding that the city’s fighters are now certain they are being attacked by regular Russian army troops, not just mercenaries and homegrown separatists.
To be sure, this has been Mr. Putin’s war from the beginning. After Victor Yanukovych fled Kyiv in late February and the parliament appointed an acting government in his place, it was Mr. Putin’s order that sent “little green men”—professional soldiers in Russian-style combat fatigues but without identifying insignia—to seize the Crimean peninsula, the most blatant land grab in Europe since World War II.
The ragtag battalion was hurriedly put together from a group of civilians including a piano teacher, bulldozer operator, steel worker and bodybuilding instructor as pro-Russian rebels advanced on Mariupol over the past week.
Renewed shelling of the city on Thursday, despite hopes that a ceasefire might be agreed on Friday, meant Ukrainian troops continued to organise defences in case of an all-out assault by pro-Russian separatists Kiev says are backed by Moscow.
A day before a planned ceasefire in east Ukraine, Russia-backed rebels edged closer to Mariupol, threatening a final push against the strategic port city, which the Ukrainians have promised to defend at all costs.
It was unclear whether the rebel advance was merely a show of force, or the prelude to a proper attack on the city, but as night fell, shelling was audible from the city centre.
“Ukraine exists,” was the understated but undeniable election slogan of the (failed) 2010 Yushchenko presidential campaign. Crimea, Ukraine’s most restive and most beautiful area, was finally settling in for the long haul—better to be a strange, anomalous, mostly Russian-speaking Ukrainian appendage than to be inside a paranoid, authoritarian Russia. That the revolution against Yanukovych, a triumph of human fortitude, should result in the loss of territorial integrity is sad but comprehensible. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, and here is this one.
Gazprom’s natural gas production fell 19.6 percent last month compared with the same period last year, as the state-owned behemoth struggles in the face of increasing competition at home and declining exports that are due in part to a breakdown in the political relationship between Moscow and Kiev.
“The open aggression from the Russian side against sovereign countries means the there is an attack not only against Ukraine, it is an attack against the peace in Europe,” Grybauskaitė said in Tallinn on Wednesday.
I cannot vet field videos from the Ukraine conflict but may note that they’re popping online rapidly from wherever there has been activity. Of course, people post as today’s video yesterday’s destroyed bridge. 😦
Scrolling news for Donetsk at ostro.org, 8/30/2014/1833 ET.
“The mindset of war must change,” Mr Bush said on Wednesday. “It is a different type of battlefield. It is a different type of war.” The battles, he said, “will be fought visibly sometimes, and sometimes we’ll never see what may be taking place”.
Thirteen years and less than 11 months later, it is turning out that the full suite of contemporary wars are “a different type of war”.
Syria’s frustrated revolt cum civil war has turned out a battle between autocratic personalities, or a frankly whacked out dictator against equally savage Islamists, in large part, and the country and its people be damned, which they have been.
Ukraine’s revolt against Russomafia don Yanukovych played to the script but — this as infant governments often do — invited obvious nibbling by the colonel president emperor chief in Moscow, who also appears to have programmatically returned the once modern RT to old Pravda days (while also creating an FSB internal security service more populated per Russian than the old KGB), and today we’re almost back to “conventional war”, except that learning about the Severtsky Donets River, which first entailed learning about its existence, I have well out in the provinces outside of Washington, D.C., broadband, Google Maps, some kind of translator, and instant access to Russian language publications online.
This “different type of war” has created a different type of war tourism, also commentary, and reportage.
Where are we going?
More toward the despotic than democratic, I would say given that there are simply more governments internally operating along feudal rather than modern democratic lines, and these may have recognized in one another — as with the dictator Putin-Assad-Khamenei, an axis in conflict if ever there was — mutual interest in the defense of political absolutism.
Last week, in what strikes me as an echo of Putin-Medvedev, former Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan became President Erdogan in the presence of a cooperating Prime Minister Davutoglu. Such personalities would seem other than get-along, compromise, facilitate, and cooperate kind of guys. They’re more “or else!” in the way of malignant narcissists elsewhere and, unfortunately, everywhere.
The shades and shadows of the former Soviet Union may be living on in Russia’s assault on Ukraine. The deception and lying on the part of the Kremlin, which denied a military presence in Ukraine up to the moment (and beyond) in which the same became implausible, and since I have read that “Novosvitlivka”, about an hour west of the Severtsky Donets River that serves as a border between Russia and Ukraine, has been flattened by tanks — every house shot at — I should hope the “implausible denial” stage has been passed and Russia’s Putin may admit plainly, but with his customary charm, to playing at war — and not just war as usual, but his own “different kind of war”.
While that different kind of war takes shape, this perhaps different kind of writer will be watching it with you . . . on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ (perhaps), the World Wide Web (where else?), and across numerous foreign publications either in English or roughly translated to it.
We’re getting close to real-time reportage too, i.e., from battlefield to me to you inside of 30 minutes. The big guys get to do that. We little guys still get to figure it out.
Colonel President Emperor Putin has placed self-propelled artillery in several locations around Ukraine’s border, and with paratroopers, among other methods, he has probed Ukraine’s and NATO’s defense reflexes. Probably, he has found the knees weak in response to and by comparison with his ambitions.
Although most world leaders have not actually come out and said so, Ukraine is being invaded. That’s according to Ukrainian politicians and military officials, NATO representatives, and, privately, officials in Washington.
Mr Putin does the big lies, while his foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, trudges on a treadmill of deception that never stops. He was labouring along as usual yesterday, dismissing reports that Russian regular troops were fighting in Ukraine as “conjectures”. Not once, he continued in his po-faced way, “have any facts been presented to us”. Why Europe and America have to some extent gone along with this chicanery is not that mysterious.
The presence of Russian military personnel in Ukraine is now beyond dispute, everywhere except in Russia. On Thursday, NATO released satellite imagery of Russian combat troops operating inside Ukraine’s borders, prompting mild international expressions of concern about the deteriorating situation. Russian paratroopers have been filmed discussing their operations in Ukraine. In a press conference on Wednesday, captured Russian soldiers said they entered Ukrainian territory “in convoys. Not on the roads but through the fields.”
I may suggest this: the dictators Putin, Putin-Assad-Khamenei, Putin (Yanukovich yesterday, perhaps Orban tomorrow) do not come equipped with off switches or reverse gears: they will run their interior programs and scripts forward until impeded, stopped, reversed, and destroyed while their enterprises are transformed.
If enabled forward, their programs will end in the control and subjugation of others and that too, as with ISIS, will end in the destruction of humanity with unbridled sadism.
It may not look so bad at first, but cast a glance at Syria with Sochi by its side: tell me what you see.
(Russia pledged $10 million for Syrian humanitarian relief during the run up to the Olympic Games; Putin then spent $51 billion on the games).
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday said that Crimea is “indispensable to Russia,” reminding listeners that “Russia is one of the most powerful nuclear nations.”
Ukraine’s president today declared that a “Russian invasion” of his country was underway and the United Nations’ Security Council called an emergency session to discuss the latest crisis involving allegations of Russia’s overt support for Ukrainian rebels.
“There is no doubt that this is not a homegrown, indigenous uprising in eastern Ukraine. The separatists are backed, trained, armed, financed by Russia,” Obama said.
Russian actions will be a main topic for the summit of NATO leaders next week in Wales, Obama said.
“Russia doesn’t make anything,” Mr. Obama went on. “Immigrants aren’t rushing to Moscow for opportunities. The life expectancy of the Russian male is around 60 years old. The population is shrinking.”
Levada polls conducted in the second week of March show just how effective the state propaganda machine has been: A majority of Russians believe that Ukraine has no legitimate government, that Russian speakers in Ukraine are in danger and that blame for the crisis in Crimea lies squarely with Ukrainian nationalists. Only 6 percent of Russians are “definitely opposed” to a military invasion of Ukraine.
Despite the fact that 70% of respondents admit that they do not understand, do not understand the essence of the processes taking place in Ukraine, the majority (63%) believe that “the federal Russian media as a whole or for the most part objective coverage of events taking place in Ukraine or the Crimea.
Speaking before his cabinet on Friday, Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk said, “The world has not yet forgotten World War Two, but Russia already wants to start World War Three.”
SLAVIANSK – Pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine said on Tuesday they were holding an American-Israeli journalist in the city of Slaviansk and the online news site Vice News said it was trying to secure the safety of its reporter Simon Ostrovsky.
The president of the All-Ukrainian Jewish Congress narrowly escaped with his life on Monday after he was targeted in an assassination attempt in central Kiev.
A local rabbi said the last time he saw a message like this one was in 1941, when Nazi armies occupied Donetsk. It is painful, he told a reporter, to be used by “cynical politicians” who see Jews “as an instrument of their political games.” Secretary of State John Kerry called it “grotesque.”
“As a Jew, what impacts me is how the anti-Semitism that prevailed in that part of the world seems to still be in the gut of some people in that community,” said Jack Rosen, president of the American Jewish Congress.
“Sixty eight years hasn’t changed much,” said Rosen, whose parents were Holocaust survivors.
I think 68 years have changed the world quite a bit, but deeply seeded beliefs and attitudes toward Jews have been distributed across space and down through generations. Anti-Semitism remains a pervasive presence in contemporary political life. Not only in Ukraine or across the arcs of the Arab and Muslim worlds have cultural communications and actions laid out this truth, but even from the heartland of the most inclusive of democratic open societies, the Untied States of America, has come this expression of ever vacuous rage.
(Reuters) – The suspect in the Passover Eve killings of three people at two Jewish community centers near Kansas City is a former Ku Klux Klan leader with a history of spewing vitriol against Jews, law enforcement officials said on Monday.
In numbers — Incidents x (character + intensity) / place + time — what does anti-Semitism look like spatially?
What is the character of the spillover into an aggregated bigotry, the sort signaled by the canard, “What starts with the Jews never ends with the Jews”?
Journalists better funded than I — my beat is broadband; my most cherished resource is my library — may be urged to look into this question about now because the answers may presage greater conflict (or be used to head it off) encouraged by an appeasing diminishment of the significance of anti-Semitic acts, rhetoric, and tactics.
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. . . Ukraine’s prime minister, anxious to maintain U.S. support against Russia, issued a statement accusing Moscow and told a U.S. TV channel he would find the “bastards” responsible.
The righteous of the world — of any creed, ethnicity, race, or religion — need to know more about this kind of hatred NOW, post-WWII, post-Holocaust, and its distribution and intensity in the industrialized world.
President Vladimir Putin, condemned by NATO for annexing Crimea, is now defying the U.S. in Syria by sending more and deadlier arms to help Bashar al-Assad score a string of advances against insurgents, military experts say.
In the middle east, I have for a while characterized the western opposition as “Putin-Assad-Khamenei”; for eastern Europe, I now may blurt “Putin-Napoleon” (in lieu of “Putin-Yanukovych”), for the “vertical of power” appears to be spreading horizontally and quickly using predictably feudal (one almost hears, “Deploy the thugs”) methods.
Putin behind the curtain in Syria has reportedly improved the qualities of arms reaching the Assad regime with the intention of discouraging continued resistance in a convincing way. In Ukraine, The Bear has squatted on Crimea and made camp sufficient to throw around some weight:
A new, leaner and meaner Russian Army has been on display in Crimea and war-gaming on the Ukrainian border over the past month or so. Its vanguard is now made up of just a few elite divisions of highly-motivated, well trained, and fully equipped volunteer soldiers, capable of deploying swiftly anywhere in the former Soviet Union on the Kremlin’s command.
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