Ukraine Crisis - Page 568

On May 31 2014 18:24 nunez wrote:


chief of investigative comission has already confirmed that the bullets were not berkut ammo, there's no forensic evidence connecting berkut to the killings. it was posted not long ago. the police were actual people who were being sniped as well. the police were even the actual people who were shot at first, according to same chief.

Six Ukrainian separatists killed around Donetsk airport

(Reuters) - Ukrainian separatist leader Denis Pushilin said on Saturday six rebels had been killed while trying to collect the bodies of comrades who had died under Ukrainian army fire earlier this week close to Donetsk airport.

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"They died trying to take back the Ukrainian airport, and our boys were trying to get their bodies out," Pushilin said over the telephone, without giving further details of the violence. He said the six had died during the day on Friday.

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Regional newsagency Interfax cited the prime minister of the self-styled Donetsk People's Republic as saying the separatists will ask the International Red Cross to remove corpses by the aiport. It was unclear how many remained.

A spokesman for the Kiev-led "Anti-terrorist operation" or ATO said earlier in the day two new attacks on the airport had been repelled by Ukrainian forces with no injuries to their side, Interfax reported. It was not clear whether the attacks were in fact attempts by separatists to clear bodies.

Source

Separatist leader says six insurgents killed in attempt to collect bodies at Donetsk airport; military says they attacked

DONETSK, Ukraine - Alexander Borodai, the self-proclaimed prime minister of the self-declared Donetsk People's Republic, claims that six separatist fighters were killed in the early morning hours on May 31 in an attempt to evacuate the bodies of comrades shot dead in a battle for the Donetsk airport on May 26.

"We tried to collect the bodies from the airport territory, but the Ukrainian army fired at the militiamen and an ambulance, killing six. The bodies of those killed are still there," Interfax-Ukraine reported Borodai as saying.

His remarks contradict those of the Ukrainian military, which said that armed separatists had launched two fresh assaults on servicemen guarding the airport territory.

"There were two attempts to storm the Donetsk airport, at 5 [a.m.] and 7 o'clock in the morning. Illegal paramilitary forces attempted to seize the airport, but both attempts were repelled by paratroopers who are part of the counterterrorist forces," military press officer Oleksiy Dmytrashkovsky told Interfax-Ukraine.

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Borodai, however, insisted that his militiamen were simply trying to recover the bodies of their deceased comrades and not launching new assaults. Now the Donetsk People's Republic leadership will ask the International Committee of the Red Cross to help retrieve the bodies from the airport territory, he said.

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Borodai told the Kyiv Post on May 29 that 33 rebels killed were Russians. Their bodies, riddled with bullets and mangled from mortar and rocket blasts, were kept overnight in a Donetsk ice cream factory that was seized by the Vostok Battalion on May 28 before being placed in red coffins, loaded into a truck, driven across the Russian border and repatriated on May 29.

Source

On June 01 2014 02:15 Mc wrote:
@sgtnoobkilla

There have been a variety of sources linking the 33 killed to Russia directly. Here is a vice news article that confirms the bolded part that you are sceptical about.

https://news.vice.com/article/ice-cream-corpses-and-the-big-bear-repatriating-dead-russians-from-ukraine

I admire the skepticism though It's good to have in a war of words!

On June 01 2014 02:26 kukarachaa wrote:


There was a statement from the morgue, out of the dead, 33 people were identified, 8 out of 33 were from Russia ( out of those 8, 1 was from Chechnya ), rest from Ukraine. Even the article that you linked states that only some of the dead were from Russia.

Each casket is marked with the red, black, and blue flag of the DPR — Donetsk People’s Republic. But the 30 men stretched out in these coffins are not from the fledgling rebel-state they laid down their lives for; they travelled here from Russia.

What’s happening in Eastern Ukraine is very simple, rational, and straightforward

...

After Crimea showed, or seemed to show, how easy it was to secede from this vindictive Ukrainian regime and rejoin Russia, ethnic Russians in Donetsk, Sloviansk and other Eastern cities naturally attempted to duplicate the quick, easy separation Crimea accomplished.

That didn’t happen because Putin infiltrated the ranks of the Eastern Ukrainian Russian militias. We’re seeing ridiculous stories to that effect, like one in the New York Times headlined “Russians Revealed among Ukraine Fighters.”

No kidding—Russians are among the members of an ethnic-Russian militia in a Russian-majority area of Ukraine, bordering Russia? Scary stuff!

Some of these Russians, the NYT discovered, come from Grozny in Chechnya, or Crimea, or other areas now outside Russia. That’s hardly surprising, because when the USSR dissolved itself in 1991, huge areas with ethnic Russian majorities were abandoned to the tender mercies of other ethnic groups which began enforcing anti-Russian policies. Russians in Kazakhstan, the Baltic States, and even lowly Moldova encounter daily hostility, paying for decisions the Soviet Union made without consulting them as it played Great-Power politics.

And yet ethnic Russians, both in Putin’s constituency in Russia, and among ethnic Russian communities shut out of the Russian Federation, like the cities of Eastern Ukraine, continue to be willing to give their lives for Russia. Their grievances, their love for Russia, and their courage are real, not the creation of SpetzNaz or security-service infiltration as jingoistic American journalists like Eli Lake keep claiming.

But those noble qualities, and the lives of the people who hold them, are just expendable assets—straw dogs—to cold-eyed practitioners of Great-Power politics like Putin. They’re fighting at this moment to form a Russian secessionist republic in Eastern Ukraine, but the odds they’ll meet anything but betrayal from Moscow are very dim.

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On June 01 2014 03:53 nunez wrote:
another gary 'the war nerd' brecher piece on ukr out:

pando

he so cool.

That doesn’t mean Moscow will totally abandon its proxies there. It will do what any traditional Great Power would do: Let some of them die, keep promising to help—and providing some help, a few advanced weapons and a few squads of Chechen mercenaries—but just enough to keep things stirred up. Then, if there’s another problem with Ukraine—say something in Kharkov, another hot spot—Moscow activates its local allies, who can be counted on to be as gullible and eager to die as ever.

Sure, Putin could end the fighting, but that would be a waste of combustible human material—and it’s a rule of Great Power politics that you never burn your straw dogs wastefully. Like Poroshenko says, Russia’s goal here is not to annex Eastern Ukraine—not at the moment, anyway. In the long run, perhaps. But it’s too soon to send tanks over the border with the Russian flag flying. Much better to stir this new Kashmir, let it simmer, use its misery.

When pro-Russian separatists stopped Oksana, a lawyer who identifies as a lesbian transsexual woman, at a checkpoint in eastern Ukraine earlier this month, they pressed a gun to her head and called her “pedik,” a Russian word for “fag.” The next day, two people tried to attack her on the street.

Oksana, who is transitioning and taking hormones, is used to getting negative attention for her looks. But with armed, masked men patrolling the streets in her home region of Donetsk, she says being different now feels more dangerous than ever before. “In the last month I have heard more insults and threats about my appearance than in my entire previous life,” she told BuzzFeed by e-mail.

Ukraine’s conservative, industrial east has never been an easy place to be LGBT. In Soviet times, it was a crime. Today many there follow the resurgent Russian Orthodox Church, which condemns homosexuality. In the coal mines that drive the region’s failing economy, the worst insults are crude anti-gay slurs. And as eastern cities have slipped out of Kiev’s control and casualties mount, many LGBT people feel increasingly under threat.

“When local law enforcement bodies have stopped their work or gone over to the side of the separatists, local homophobes have worked their way in,” Oksana said. “We are afraid to speak to the police and we are afraid to leave the house, insofar as we may not return alive.”

Read the rest here.

Those who read comments posted under articles about Ukraine on news websites will have noticed in recent months that they have been filled with missives that always seem to follow the same line of argumentation. Moscow's independent business daily Vedomosti reported recently that, since the start of the Ukraine crisis, the presidential administration in Moscow has been testing how public opinion in the United States and Europe can be manipulated using the Internet and social networks. The paper reported that most of the professional comment posters active in Germany are Russian immigrants who submit their pro-Russian comments on Facebook and on news websites.

In addition, journalists and editors at German websites and publications report receiving letters and emails offering "explosive information about the Ukraine crisis" on an almost daily basis. The "sources" often mention they have evidence about the right-wing nature of the Kiev government that they would like to supply to journalists. The letters are written in German, but appear to include direct translations of Russian phrases. They would seem to have been written by mother-tongue Russian speakers.
Read the rest here.

On May 30 2014 05:55 Ghanburighan wrote:


Just posted a comprehensive article on this on the previous page while you were typing. Basically, Kadyrov's forces have taken over from the local militia.

MOSCOW (AP) — Russia's Foreign Ministry criticized a suggestion by an official that an international monitoring body could withdraw its observer mission from Ukraine because of safety concerns, as shooting between government troops and pro-Russian rebels continued in the region on Saturday.

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe says it lost contact on Thursday with a group of five monitors in separatist eastern Ukraine. Another four-member team has been held by eastern rebels since Monday.

Wolfgang Ischinger, the OSCE's negotiator on national dialogue in Ukraine, told German broadcaster ZDF this week that the monitor mission might have to withdraw if the organization fears for its employees' lives.

But the Russian ministry said in a statement Saturday that "amid Kiev's intentionally intensified punitive operation in the east of the country, it is essential to step up the work of international observers."

Earlier this week, as Europe was preparing for continent-wide parliamentary elections that delivered 25 percent of the seats to the anti–European Union populist right and left, Hungary was busy asking the EU Parliament to revoke diplomatic immunity for Béla Kovács, a prominent representative of Hungary’s far-right Jobbik party, in order to charge him with spying on the EU for Russia. Kovács is also accused of channeling Russian funds to support the establishment of Jobbik, which burst on the Hungarian political scene in 2009 with a suspiciously well-financed campaign for the EU Parliament.

The charges were inflammatory, although perhaps not surprising. In the run-up to this month’s election, Russia is known to have supported anti-EU parties on the far right and far left in an attempt to influence and even undermine the union. One of those parties is Jobbik, which is Hungary’s second-largest party, and whose supporters dress in Nazi-type uniforms, spout anti-Semitic rhetoric, and express concern about Israeli “colonization” of Hungary. And Jobbik’s pro-Russia stance has never been hidden. Its 2010 election program described the establishment and maintenance of good relations with “an increasingly influential Russia” as vitally important. In May 2013, in a lecture at Moscow’s Lomonosov University, Jobbik party leader Gábor Vona characterized Russia, as opposed to the “treacherous” European Union, as the guardian of European heritage.

It has also long been known that Kovács, now known as KGBéla in the Hungarian press, has close ties to Russia. For one, he went to university in Moscow and apparently made a fortune working for a Russian foreign trade company in the mid-1980s and after, returning to Hungary in 2003. Since his election to the European Parliament in 2009, he has often lobbied on behalf of Russian interests in Brussels, where he served on the EU-Russia Parliamentary Cooperation Committee and as treasurer of the Alliance of European National Movements, a European collection of pro-Russia far-right parties and parliamentarians. Kovács was a vocal supporter of Russia during the Crimea crisis and served as an international observer of its farcical referendum on joining Russia.
Source.

On June 02 2014 00:25 Ghanburighan wrote:
On other news, it looks like the ATO is taking a weekend break. No news of major confrontations.

Insurgents attack border guards in eastern Ukraine

MOSCOW — Ukraine’s border guard service says a number of servicemen have been injured in an insurgent attack on their camp in eastern Ukraine.

The officials said in a statement Monday that some 100 armed insurgents attacked the border guards’ camp in Luhansk, a major eastern Ukrainian city not far from the Russian border, in the early hours. Border guards responded with fire on the attackers whose numbers swelled to 400 a few hours later. The fighting was still ongoing, the border guard service said.

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Source

The Obama administration is trying to shore up international support for a growing arsenal of financial weaponry aimed at hitting foreign adversaries with limited cost to allies.

As the administration prepares for a possible next round of sanctions against Russia, it is increasingly relying on an obscure unit inside the Treasury Department—a group of sanctions architects and financial sleuths in the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence—to play a leading role in U.S. foreign policy.

President Barack Obama is expected to push the office's work in meetings with European leaders and senior officials this week that are aimed at addressing Ukraine's conflict with Russia.

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Still, Mr. Obama last week credited the sanctions and other measures the international community took against Russia with serving as a key "counterweight" to Russian troops on the border with Ukraine, most of which are now believed to have moved away.

With a tough military posture against Mr. Putin off the table, U.S. officials are seeking to hold the line on economic pressure to keep Russia from interfering in Ukraine after the presidential election.

"There is evidence Russia continues to allow the free flow of weapons, funds, and fighters across its border and President Putin's next steps are still not clear," Mr. Lew is expected to say in his speech on Monday.
Read the rest on WSJ
For those that don't know this yet, you can get around the paywall by entering the title of the article as a search in Google News, the link you get will grant access to the entire article.

LUHANSK, June 02. /ITAR-TASS/. The fourth floor of the Luhansk regional administration building was caught by fire after an air strike carried out by a Ukrainian fighter jet. A huge number of ambulances and fire crews have arrived at the scene to extinguish the fire and evacuate the injured.

According to reports, five people were killed and at least 10 were injured in the attack.

Today terrorists attacked the regional State Administration in the city of Luhanks with either RPG or antitank missile. The purposes of this attack were to confront Ukrainian soldiers and create another fake reason to make the Ukrainian and pro-government forces look bad.

But Major Gen. Oleksandr Rozmaznin denied that Ukraine had bombed the building and told Hromadske TV that separatists had aimed a shoulder-fired, heat-seeking, surface-to-air missile at a passing Ukrainian jet. The missile apparently zeroed in on an air-conditioning unit at the government building instead, causing the blast, he said.