Ukraine Thread

[Kralizec]

Hardly. Minsk agreement was broken a long time before with neither side respecting ceasefire.

Ukrainian law obviously doesn't provide enough autonomy for them. So far, it was the rebels who were calling for a dialogue, and Kiev has consistently been refusing. A great chance was missed to have a dialogue, establish an acceptable level of autonomy and have new elections after that. Not only Kiev refused, they physically isolated them from the rest of the country, thus alienating even the most moderate people there.

The alternative to that is Kiev crushing them militarily, which is a laughable idea. Ukrainian foreign currency reserves are nearly depleted, their gold reserves are almost gone, hryvna losing value constantly and the Ukrainian army is still reluctant to do anything major, forcing Kiev to rely on ultranationalist paramilitary groups. They can't make a sustained effort, and even if they gain an upper hand for a short time, Russia just needs to up its support for that much.

At this point, I'd support Kiev if they could pull a clean and efficient military operation to regain control with minimal civilian casualties, but they can't even do that AND they've been consistently closing all possible avenues for dialogue. What's Kiev strategy? To physically isolate that part of the country? To starve and freeze them to compliance? Despicable. And I'm truly amazed that some people's fear or hatred of Russia stop them from seeing that. They only need to start catapulting bodies with plague to go fully medieval at this point.

Both sides have broken the ceasefire repeatedly, so that's neither here nor there.

Neither side has disavowed the Minsk agreement, though. Ukraine went ahead and passed legislation giving Donbass autonomy. I don't know if the Minsk agreement specified the level of autonomy; as far as I know there's no English version of the text. Nevertheless, if the separatists thought it wasn't enough to be acceptable they should have demanded more, and failing that, declared that they no longer see the Minsk plan as being valid.

Russia could almost certainly have kept the separatists from holding "elections" if it wanted to. But far from that, they immediately recognised the results and called on the rest of the world to do the same. The whole charade was overwatched by a bunch of stooges flewn in by Russia so that they could say "foreign observers" were present. Everything about it smells of bad faith.

Shortage of supplies and heating gas - honestly, did they expect the country they violently seceded from was going to allow free traffic of goods and energy? How is this Ukraine's fault? If we're talking about humanitarian trouble, I'd be a lot more concerned about the political repression and lawlessness that pervades these "people's republics".