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”.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/sep/21/afghanistan.september1113 – 9/21/2001.
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.
Other Reference
http://www.ostro.org/donetsk/culture/articles/221448/ – 7/28/2011: “Seversky Donets, Ukraine and Russia will clean together.”
Novosvitlivka, Luhanski Oblast, Ukraine, and Russian Border:
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2014/08/29/turkey-new-prime-minister-davutoglu-announces-government/ – 8/29/2014.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/sep/21/afghanistan.september1113 – 9/21/2001.
http://www.pri.org/stories/2014-02-27/how-team-ukrainian-journalists-rescued-documents-yanukovych-s-house – 2/27/2014.
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