generalspeaking

The Plot, The Reality

"These guys were fighting here. I don't know what for. They were following the orders of their president, and they respected that order."
"We all are military men here and we have to respect our enemy."
Mikhail Tolstykh, Russian-ethnic military commander, Donetsk, Ukraine

"I recognized them from their clothing. They were my friends."
Sasha, Ukrainian soldier, 90th brigade

Sasha is among those Ukrainian military prisoners of war who have been given the task, or who have volunteered for the grimly necessary task of digging beneath the ruins of the destroyed airport building outside Donetsk, to uncover and recover the frozen remains of Ukrainian soldiers who died in the collapse of the building under relentless shelling from the militias representing the Donetsk People's Republic.

A Ukrainian official had notice that seven Ukrainian soldiers have thus far been retrieved. According to representatives of the secessionists many more soldiers remain buried under the collapsed building. Sasha witnessed two of his friends being drawn out of the debris from among the twisted steel beams and smashed cement walls being sawed into pieces and towed away even as the emerging bodies were being carried off, contorted not in rigor mortis only but by the cold when life left their bodies.

Neither Kyiv nor the Donetsk People's Republic has revealed the number of captives each hold. Journalists saw roughly twenty-five government prisoners working at the airport to release the bodies of their dead compatriots. Last weekend 52 rebels held by the government in Kyiv were returned to the rebels in exchange for 139 captured Ukrainian soldiers.

All this, amid the emerging news that a Russian Oligarch who has been known to fund the rebels, many of whom were former employees of his before becoming movers-and-shakers in the Donetsk People's Republic, had furnished a report given to the Kremlin with the advice that it should annex Crimea along with a large part of southeastern Ukraine, long before the fall of the government of president Viktor Yanukovych.

The report in the form of a memorandum predicted the overthrow of the Russian-backed government, recommending Russia make the effort to take both Crimea and eastern Ukraine. A detailed strategy is carefully laid out in the memo, its details tracing in advance the actual steps that were taken with the fall of the Russian-backed government in Ukraine. Anticipating that Ukraine would break into an EU-aligned west and a Russian-leaning east, Russia it held, should take the initiative.

"The dominant regions for the application of force should be Crimea and the Kharkiv region", stated the memo. The Russian oligarch Konstantin Malofeev, according to Novaya Gazeta which had revealed the contents of the memo, has denied being behind any of these machinations. Russia, according to the memo, should take advantage of the "centrifugal forces" of social unrest and polarized politics to merge the east with the rest of Russia since the country would be torn apart in any event.

And in the event, it was. Thanks largely to Russian direct malicious intervention.

Labels: Aggression, Conflict, Hypocrisy, Russia, Secession, Ukraine

posted by Pieface @ Friday, February 27, 2015