Ukraine War Thread

[The Romulan Republic]

Sounds good, but I don't know all the details.

[Pelranius]

I assume the 3 year special status applies only to areas currently under rebel control?

[K. A. Pital]

Point of contention: the rebels want it to extent to all the territory of the rebel regions, Kiev wants it to extend only to de-facto rebel-controlled territory and not a mile further.

[Pelranius]

Point of contention: the rebels want it to extent to all the territory of the rebel regions, Kiev wants it to extend only to de-facto rebel-controlled territory and not a mile further.

Well, that might lead to a resumption of hostilities, unfortunately...

It seems there was a pretty big peace rally in Moscow today.

Going back to the ceasefire, I wonder if China has been asking Putin to deal things down a bit (though Beijing doesn't have very much in the way of flexible leverage over him).

[mr friendly guy]

I doubt it, because as you noted China doesn't have much leverage. In any event I have no doubt China's ability to negotiate with all sides involved (Russia, EU, Ukraine) and continue business as usual plus more deals. This means there is less incentive for China to intervene (even if its just a asking one of the sides to tone things down), and lots of incentives to not intervene ie raising the ire of either Russia or Ukraine/EU/USA etc.

[Thanas]

A belated update regarding the downing of MH17 - new work done by British and German Journalists show that the famous launcher with the missing rocket definitely came from Russia and was - according to all interviews with seperatists - operated by Russian officers at the time of the downing.

http://www.tagesschau.de/ausland/mh-siebzehn-103.html

[Dominus Atheos]

Here is a link to the report in english.

https://mh17.correctiv.org/english/

[Flagg]

So the victims families can expect a continued middle finger?

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Russian regulars, or the Great Don Host?

[Thanas]

Russian regulars, or the Great Don Host?

Russian regulars from the 53rd air brigade out of Kursk.

Excerpts from the link:

Bellingcat was also able to determine the missile launcher’s origin. Every BUK has an identification number. Based on an analysis of launch-vehicle photographs posted in the internet, Bellingcat investigators concluded that a BUK launcher with the identification number 3*2 (* stands for an illegible number) was photographed while traveling in June with a convoy from western the Russian city of Kursk to the Ukrainian border. Later on July 17th the same BUK, now with is identification number 3*2 painted over, was photographed by the Paris Match photographer in eastern Ukraine.

Bellingcat investigators based their conclusion on an analysis of photographs of the BUK launcher in Russia and later in Ukraine. The dents and scratches on the launcher are identical—like a fingerprint.

The convoy was part of a unit dispatched by Russia’s 53rd Air Defense Brigade which is based in Kursk. At the end of June, the convoy drove to the Ukrainian border. CORRECT!V fact checked the Bellingcat results, their finding are convincing.

And there are further peculiarities. A sergeant of the 53rd brigade who is particularly active online posted numerous pictures of his unit on his page on Vkontakte (vk.com), the Russian clone of Facebook. The sergeant’s name is Ivan Krasnoproshin. Among his pictures is a photo of a document reporting his discharge from the Russian army in mid-June. The photo showing a page in his unit’s logbook lists the names of the soldiers reporting for the evening roll call. Number one: Sergeant Krasnoproshin, followed by 13 privates. Every day is crossed off. The last entry is on June 13th. Then there is a hand-written note behind Sergeant Krasnoproshin’s name: “Discharged due to completion of service period according to order no. (illegible).”

Indeed, according to the logbook, Sergeant Krasnoproshin was not the only member of his unit to be suddenly discharged from the Russian military on that day. Three additional soldiers in Sergeant Krasnoproshin’s unit—including Sergeant Krasnoproshin nearly one third of the unit’s members—were discharged on the same day and for the same reason.

Discharges of this type raise questions. The Committee of Russian Soldier Mothers has reported that many soldiers are required to sign discharge papers before they are sent to fight in Ukraine.

In the middle of June, several days after Krasnoproshin and his comrades were discharged, the long convoy of the 53rd air defense brigade made its way towards Ukraine. Again someone posted a photo in a social network. Again we can see the same BUK launcher 3*2.

There is little doubt: it was the 53rd Russian air defense brigade from Kursk that took position in Snizhne in eastern Ukraine on that fateful afternoon.

This witness completes the picture: it was a BUK M1 rocket that brought the passenger plane out of the sky – brought into position by soldiers of the 53rd air defense brigade from Kursk who were in the city of Snizhne without national markings to protect Russian tank units.

Only one question is still open. Who gave the command to shoot? A Russian officer? A pro-Russian separatist?

It’s nighttime, Khodakovskiy drives a heavy all-terrain vehicle through pitch-dark Donetsk. He commands the Vostok battalion; the 42-year-old is proud to be the principal leader of the separatist army.
[...]
Then Khodakovskiy says: “I know for sure that the popular militia did not shoot down the Boeing.”

“Why not?”

“We don’t have and didn’t have specialists who can operate such high precision weapons systems.”
[...]
The air combat expert Rupert Smid has no doubt: “Russian missiles are only fired on the command of Russian officers,” he says.

July 17th did not begin well for the crew of BUK 3*2. That morning, the Ukrainian Security Council reported the destruction of three Russian tanks – which officers of the 53rd air defense brigade are tasked to protect. The Russian soldiers had failed, and they were under pressure not to allow a repeat incident.

The BUK is outdated, but it is a highly complex and deadly system; its mastery requires continuous training. During the Soviet era soldiers learned how to operate the guided missile system at the Institute for Missile Technology in Kiev. The training took five years. The institute in the Ukrainian capital was closed in 1995. Russia continues to train soldiers at missile schools, including one in Smolensk. Many of the former graduates in Ukraine have left the service, but they remember their time as students.

“It’s not like riding a bicycle,” says one former graduate from the missile institute. The BUK squad needs to be a well-rehearsed team that continuously trains the process. “Even veterans lose touch quickly,” says one former soldier. Today he is a businessman. He does not want his name to be printed.

Viktor Kusovkin, a comrade of Ivan Krasnoproshin, confirms these statements. Kusovkin served in the 53rd Russian air defense brigade in Kursk. After four months of training he was allowed to drive the BUK launcher tow vehicle. We reach him via telephone, Viktor Kusovkin had posted his number on Vkontakte (vk.com). Firing a BUK? That never even came into question for him. “Of course not. You don’t let conscripts fire. That doesn’t work. You have to graduate from a military institute first,” said Kusovkin. “That’s a pretty difficult task. Only officers can do it.”

We asked many experts who could have fired the missile that destroyed MH17. We spoke to separatist leaders: military commander Chodavskij and the deputy prime minister of the self-named Peoples Republic of Dontzk Andrej Purgin. We also asked our international air warfare experts and our witnesses at the site of the launch. We heard the same from graduates of the Institute for Missile Technology in Kiev and former soldiers of the 53rd Air Defense Brigade in Kursk. They all agree, the separatists did not have the know-how to fire a BUK missile. There is hardly any doubt: a Russian officer must have given the order to shoot down MH17.

[Simon_Jester]

Do they mean, "could not have physically ordered the system to launch a missile?" Or "could not have launched the missile in the reliable expectation of it hitting an evading/maneuvering/fast target?"

[The Duchess of Zeon]

That doesn't change the fact that the separatists at the time understood the chain of command to the unit (which was discharged from the Russian army legally) to a sotnia of Don Cossacks in the region. Most of their commanders (those of the Don Cossacks) are retired military officers of Cossack extraction. The actual firing order may have been given by a man who until a few days before was in the Russian army, but the chain of command almost certainly at that time rested with the Great Don Host, and as their behavior over the course of the war demonstrated, it is unclear that Putin's government has any real control whatsoever over them. If charges could be brought in an international court the Russian government could only be easily proved as engaging in reckless endangerment by proliferating the equipment with full knowledge of what could result from which a dissolute and informal command structure possessing such weapons.

This of course doesn't dispute the point that the Russian government is guilty to the point of owing reparations. We would need to know much more about the exact circumstances of the firing to know if criminal charges could be brought against the personnel. Without a full radar suite the identification may well have been visual and thus profoundly and legitimately inaccurate. The knowledge required to make that determination will frankly probably never exist.

And of course the aircraft should have never been flying there in the first place, so the Ukrainian government should also see charges of negligence brought for failing to close the airspace over an aircraft zone of combat.

[Thanas]

Do they mean, "could not have physically ordered the system to launch a missile?" Or "could not have launched the missile in the reliable expectation of it hitting an evading/maneuvering/fast target?"

Could not have operated the system to launch the missile? It's pretty clear really from the statements that the quick action of snapping radar on, then fire and then go dark again requires teamwork and timing and a lot of technical expertise which you don't get unless you have a trained team that continually practices.

That doesn't change the fact that the separatists at the time understood the chain of command to the unit (which was discharged from the Russian army legally) to a sotnia of Don Cossacks in the region. Most of their commanders (those of the Don Cossacks) are retired military officers of Cossack extraction. The actual firing order may have been given by a man who until a few days before was in the Russian army, but the chain of command almost certainly at that time rested with the Great Don Host, and as their behavior over the course of the war demonstrated, it is unclear that Putin's government has any real control whatsoever over them. If charges could be brought in an international court the Russian government could only be easily proved as engaging in reckless endangerment by proliferating the equipment with full knowledge of what could result from which a dissolute and informal command structure possessing such weapons.

If you believe the Russians put a retired military officer in command of the buk without giving the real commanders the final say-so then I think you are very naive. I am pretty sure that even if the seperatists said that they have have to shoot down the plane final authority rested with the local Russian regulars.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

If you believe the Russians put a retired military officer in command of the buk without giving the real commanders the final say-so then I think you are very naive. I am pretty sure that even if the seperatists said that they have have to shoot down the plane final authority rested with the local Russian regulars.

You are ascribing far too much structural functionality to the Russian government, particularly in the south around Rostov-on-Don. The area has become a Cossack feudatory of Putin's regime; they cannot even police it without the assistance of the Ataman. And once in combat in the Ukraine with formal discharge papers in hand, those men would know their lives depend on the Cossack infantry and artillery around them against the Ukrainians. They'd shoot at anything flying overhead if ordered.

Even if the officer on the scene confirmed the order, so what? The men involved had been legally discharged, and while you may think that is a farce, I suspect the truth is far worse and that, as a matter of fact, those men were functionally mercenaries under the command of the local Cossack detachment and knew that they were mercenaries under that command.

At any rate, I remain personally convinced that Strelkov's filibustering expedition was a forcing of Putin's hand by ultranationalist elements and that he may have partially lost control of the army in the course of events in the Donbas. The mass sacking of the rebel leadership was accompanied by several high-ranking resignations in the military leadership of Russia which collectively imply that Putin may have been forced to scramble to regain control over a sort of patriotic mutiny more akin to Garibaldi's Sicilian expedition or the Jameson Raid than a planned act of irregular war.

[Thanas]

You are ascribing far too much structural functionality to the Russian government, particularly in the south around Rostov-on-Don. The area has become a Cossack feudatory of Putin's regime; they cannot even police it without the assistance of the Ataman. And once in combat in the Ukraine with formal discharge papers in hand, those men would know their lives depend on the Cossack infantry and artillery around them against the Ukrainians. They'd shoot at anything flying overhead if ordered.

I think you place way too much trust in those nostalgic tribal ties. This seems way too rooted in a romanticized past of the cossack hordes doing stuff. I would not believe the Cossack's suddenly acting independently without any sort of proof.

[Simon_Jester]

Duchess, could you expand on the "Putin can't even police the area without the Ataman?" bit?

[The Duchess of Zeon]

But the Don Host declared Antratsyt a Cossack republic and held it separately for six months. That's just a fact. The Novorossiyan troops were sent to take it in late November and fought a battle with Kozitsyn's men. And the Terek Wolves are actively in support of the same anti-communist organization which participated in the formation of the SS Cossack Division in the Second World War, and were involved in the initial seizure of the town of Slavyansk.

Strelkov himself is a monarchist and one of his company commanders in Slavyansk was a man code-named "Nemetsky" (German) who was identified as the descendant of a White Baron living in Germany until the operation -- and the present commander of the All-Russian Military Union endorsed the operation in an extended video interview that's embedded into a documentary on youtube from the pro-Russian point of view, presently.

As for the issue of the south of Russia being ungovernable without the allegiance of paramilitaries to the Russian state;

Starting with 1992 era: http://fmso.leavenworth.army.mil/docume ... ossack.htm When we see the Cossacks start to appear under arms, and without sanction -- but the government is totally incapable of doing anything about it, concluding with this statement:

President Yeltsin is attempting to curry their favor, but is accepting politicized units into his armed forces in doing so. Loyalty to the leader in Moscow has never been the Cossacks long suit. The price of Cossack support may be more than Yeltsin can pay.

Let's go back to 2003: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... Ladas.html

Now, we have the Cossacks circa 2009 maneouvring to seize the entire Caucsasus region as an autonomous Krai governed by the Terek Host: http://www.rferl.org/content/Cossacks_S ... 76701.html

And then we have this report on their activities:

http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htpara/20100917.aspx

More recently, irregular Cossack paramilitaries, said by some reports to have numbered in the thousands, fought on the Russian/separatist side in the 2008 Russo-Georgian War, which saw South Ossetia taken from Georgia and made a de facto part of Russia. Cossack volunteers by the hundreds mobilized during the Georgian attack of South Ossetia and crossed the border to engage Georgian forces. Cossacks in nearby North Ossetia apparently organized a relatively efficient and rapid system for clothing, equipping and transporting their paramilitaries into the breakaway province to feed them into combat. Cossack fighters entered South Ossetia by bus, having been issued combat uniforms and gear on the way to the border, and were issued small arms and light weapons once they arrived in theatre. Cossack volunteers formed the second major paramilitary force in the war, the first being the South Ossetian militias. According to reports, the Cossack forces fought with dogged determination.

Observing that even in the 2008 war, the Cossacks were not equipped by the state when they went into battle, but by their own organizations. This is a textbook example of, at best, a tributary organization. So they're not an arm of the government--they are able to mobilize and support themselves in battle without government assistance. They are a power unto themselves.

And in the exact same way that Chechnya was brought into Russia. The Russian government has no authority there; Putin simply found collaborators willing to maintain nominal Russian sovereignty for their own enrichment, and they keep the people down. Many of the Russian autonomous republics are now functionally tributary vassals of Moskva rather than integral parts of a modern nation state.

And now we see the same thing in the invasion of the Ukraine, where the Cossacks acted more or less autonomously. The Great Don Host finally brought most of its men under Novorossiyan control--but not before actively fighting them! Strelkov himself was a Tsarist filibustering adventurer, and the Terek Wolves are also an actively Tsarist and revanchist organization with blatant ties to a fascist tradition.

Putin's control over Russia is massively overrated in the western media.

[K. A. Pital]

Hey Duchess, thumbs up for what you said here. When I try to explain to people that the degradation of the Russian state is very much like the Pakistani 'state', it is very much dysfunctional and in parts of the country it isn't even controlling the territory, but rather paying local warlords to control it, they cannot understand how this could be. That is because none of them have lived through the collapse and felt just how massive its effects were.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

People in the west don't believe that this could be true because they have been trained to think that the breakup of the USSR and the rise of "democracy" was an inherent good. Of course the reality is that the way Gorbachev undertook his reforms was not to institute democracy, but to instead institute the end of the state structure. The fact that even before the USSR had fallen active warfare was breaking out between republics is part of this. There was no democracy for Putin to destroy. Give the man some credit, though. He is holding together the appearance of an edifice out of improvisation and sheer ruthless cunning, but there is nothing below it -- the Tywin Lannister at the end of central authority in the Seven Kingdoms, not the ruler of an obedient modern nation-state.

(my only disagree with you, Stas, is that I think Putin isn't really in the pocket of the kleptocrats so much as that even the limited authority he has took enormous effort, so that he cannot possibly move against them without collapsing the entire edifice. I am reasonably confident he would crush the entire bandit capitalist system if he could. In two hundred years people will write grand tragedies about these events; right now, people will die.)

[Thanas]

Meh. I am not convinced. This reeks too much of one of the oldest tools of Imperialism - find some semi-independent allies and then let them loose with tacit approval, allowing you to deny their actions while profiting from them. This whole thing was created by the Russian state, there were regular Russian units ("discharged", please) fighting among them. If Russia had no control over them they would not have sent military vehicles to support them.

[K. A. Pital]

Meh. I am not convinced. This reeks too much of one of the oldest tools of Imperialism - find some semi-independent allies and then let them loose with tacit approval, allowing you to deny their actions while profiting from them. This whole thing was created by the Russian state, there were regular Russian units ("discharged", please) fighting among them. If Russia had no control over them they would not have sent military vehicles to support them.

After making a grand promise to 'protect Russian speakers wherever they are', it is kind of hard to go back on it without looking completely idiotic and keep it without actually supporting an intervention with equipment and manpower.

[Thanas]

That doesn't actually contradict anything I wrote.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Strelkov and his cossacks forced Putin's hand. Certainly Putin aided them after that, because he had to conciliate the far-right to a certain degree before finding leverage to eliminate the threat from them that the situation created. Russia's right wing is mostly calling Putin a traitor right now for not directly engaging in a military showdown with the west or properly supporting Strelkov back in June. Putin did the very least he could without risking his regime stability.

Anyhow, the point about the men on leave is that they no longer had a concrete chain of command stretching back to Russia in an identifiable way. And there's nothing wrong with proliferating defensive weapons*, the problem strictly came from the fact that whomever was operationally in charge and ultimately culpable had no functional system of command and control.

* In a strictly legal sense. I understand it was situationally problematic.

[K. A. Pital]

That doesn't actually contradict anything I wrote.

Does Pakistan control islamists in Afghanistan?

[Kane Starkiller]

It's interesting how, with the deterioration of Russian economy, Novorossia suddenly became Donetsk Republic and Luhansk Republic and then simply "eastern Ukraine" in the Russian media. Suddenly neither Ukraine nor Russia are too keenly interested in the area and taking responsibility for footing the reconstruction bill.