Simon Shuster
Ukraine and pro-Russian forces are arming for
the next round of conflict
The shelling of Mariupol, a city on the front
lines of the war in eastern Ukraine, resumed in earnest at the end of October,
just as the country had finished electing a new parliament. It has not let up
since. “Day and night, they have been bombing from two directions,” says Vasyl
Arbuzov, an adviser to the local authorities in Mariupol, referring to the
pro-Russian rebels who have approached the city from the east. “So most people,
yes, are preparing for an invasion at any time, from minute to minute.”
If some of the locals still believed in the
conflict’s cease-fire — the so-called Minsk protocol signed on Sept. 5 — they
have been forced in the past week to part with their illusions. Both the
Ukrainian forces and the pro-Russian separatists have been mobilizing troops
and weapons for another round of vicious fighting, and the truce has all but broken
down in the war that has already claimed some 4,000 lives since April.
“We will
continue intensive reinforcement,” President Petro Poroshenko told the
Ukrainian people in a televised address on Monday, referring to the rebel
leaders as “bandits, terrorists and interventionists.” The following day, he
announced during a meeting with his security council that several new military
units had been formed to aid in the defense of Mariupol and two other cities
near the war zone. The forces in Mariupol, he said, have built three lines of
fortifications around the city and received “modern offensive and
reconnaissance weapons” from the Ukrainian military.
But it is far from clear whether that will be
enough to defend the city of nearly half a million people, a strategic port and
industrial powerhouse on the coast of the Azov Sea. Its defenders barely
managed to repel the last attack in August, when NATO officials observed
thousands of regular Russian troops rushing across the border in an apparent
effort to take the sea’s entire northern coast. They managed to seize the
seaside town of Novoazovsk, securing access to the sea for the breakaway rebel
enclaves in eastern Ukraine. But they were stopped at the outskirts of
Mariupol.
“We barely held on,” says Serhei Taruta, who
was then serving as the governor of the region that includes Mariupol, his
hometown. A former mining tycoon and engineer, Taruta told TIME in September
that he managed to scrounge up a stock of enormous steel plates from the city’s
industrial forges, working with a group of paramilitary fighters to turn them
into a system of bomb-proof bunkers at the edge of the city. The Russian
forces, he says, “would try to clear a path with intensive shelling, but the
bunkers stood firm.” As the Russian forces approached, he recalls, the
Ukrainian fighters would jump out of the steel boxes and fire on the advancing
Russian columns with shoulder-mounted rocket launchers. It went on like this
for several days, Taruta says, before the assault subsided.
Since then, the pro-Russian militias have been
preparing for another round. U.S. Air Force General Philip Breedlove, the supreme
commander of NATO forces in Europe, said on Monday that the border between
Russian and Ukraine has become completely porous, allowing Russian troops and
weapons to pass freely into the rebel territory with reinforcements. Since
August, Russia has sent six massive convoys of trucks, hundreds of them in all,
into the rebel strongholds, carrying what Moscow claims to be humanitarian aid.
None of them have been inspected by Ukrainian authorities, who have lost
control of the roads leading into rebel territory from Russia, so the
government in Kiev suspects the cargo could be loaded down with heavy weaponry.
But it wasn’t the flow of supplies from Russia
that led to the erosion of the cease-fire. It was the rebels’ decision on
Sunday to held elections on the breakaway territories that run along the
Russian border. Touted as a sign of their independent statehood, the ballots
were meant to legitimize the rebel leadership with titles such as “President”
and “Minister” in the regions they control. The day after the results were
announced, Ukraine’s President called them “pseudo elections” and pledged never
to recognize the “coronated” men. “They may even call themselves kings or
emperors,” Poroshenko said in his televised address. “Still, no matter what
they put on their heads, they will remain occupants, criminals and militants.”
In response to the rebel ballot, he ordered
parliament to revoke the key concession that Poroshenko made in September to
secure the cease-fire. The so-called special status law was meant to give broad
powers of autonomy to the disputed regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, where the
rebels have set up little protectorates of Moscow. That act of appeasement from
the Ukrainians was enough to slow the fighting over the past two months. But
Poroshenko now wants the law to be repealed. Instead, a new law must delineate
a clear border for the separatist regions and cut them off from all support
from the central government in Kiev. “It will let these districts be
responsible for their self-funding,” Poroshenko said. “Everyone will be judged
by his work.”
If this is an attempt to starve the rebel
leaders into submission, it is not likely to work. Russia has proved willing to
support them with cheap fuel and other supplies as long as they keep up their
rebellion against the government in Kiev. As the peace deal breaks down, they
will be tempted to expand the territories they control, thus forcing Poroshenko
to cede more and more land to the rebels whenever a new round of peace talks
begins.
Oleg Tsarov, who took the title of “Speaker” of
the separatist parliament after the weekend ballot, has already hinted that
such an offensive was in the works. The pro-Russian uprising, he said in a
statement emailed to TIME on Wednesday, began six months ago with the deadly
street clashes between protesters in the port city of Odessa, which has
remained under Ukrainian control. “I am certain that we must close the circle,”
Tsarov said in his statement. “The civil war that started in Odessa must end in
Odessa as well.”
A look at the map of Ukraine leaves little
doubt of his intentions. In order for the pro-Russian forces to attack Odessa,
they would need not only to overrun Mariupol but nearly all of southern Ukraine
as well. Russia would then be able to secure a land bridge to the southern
region of Crimea, which it invaded and annexed at the outset of the conflict in
March. For the military hawks in Moscow, that has been the great temptation all
along.
But Tsarov, when reached by phone on Wednesday,
tried to ease up on his threat. “We are not preparing an imminent march on
Odessa,” he tells TIME. Instead they will bide their time and continue laying
down the roots of statehood on their territory, he says. “But if the Ukrainians
attack us, they should know that we will not just defend ourselves. We will
counter attack.” And if the Russian military once again comes to support them,
it could mean the fall of Mariupol fairly quickly, though not without a pile of
bodies on both sides.
Simon Shuster, TIME online, November 5, 2014
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