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| Pack up your troubles; a Ukrainian soldier departs Crimea |
MAJORITY OF UKRAINIAN MILITARY IN CRIMEA
DEFECT TO RUSSIA:
Of the 25,000 Ukrainian troops remaining in Crimea this week only 4,300 want to return to Ukraine. The rest have defected to Russia.
This is a stunning defeat for the schemes of EU/NATO to provoke confrontation in Crimea
and frighten the newer east European members of NATO into increasing their military budgets and strengthen their links with US Imperialism and its global warfare agenda. The peoples of these countries will not benefit, only the US/EU military corporate businesses will do so.
Distintegration of the remaining Ukrainian military in
Crimea after the region rejoined the Russian Federation last week puts in
question once again the competence and lack of ability of the Kiev Junta to
have any kind of effective government in the country, a shame and a crime
against the Ukrainian people who deserve better than a motley collection of
EU/NATO muppets, including some dangerous neo-nazis, jumping up and down in the
few streets of Kiev they have control over while the rest of the country faces
economic ruin. Those who protested legitimately over past months are now
beginning to realise that you can’t eat EU/NATO promises, you can only
contemplate at leisure your mistakes in believing them in the first place.
The rump parliament in Kiev accepted the resignation of
acting Defence Minister Ihor Tenyukh over his handling of the Crimea crisis and
approved the nomination of General Mykhaylo Koval as his replacement. Koval was
one of the Ukrainian military briefly detained by pro-Russian forces some weeks
ago before the independence referendum decided in favour of Crimea rejoining
the Russian Federation which was legally sealed in Moscow last Friday. Tenyukh submitted his resignation on March 25 amid criticism that he had failed
to give timely orders to Ukrainian military units in Crimea during the recent events
in the peninsula. Junta appointed interim president, Oleksandr Turchynov had
requested that Tenyukh be relieved of his duties.
The departure of Tenyukh, a politician who belongs to the
right-wing neo-nazi Svoboda party, and his replacement by Col. Gen. Mykhailo
Koval, came as the depth of the defeat in Crimea and the Junta’s inability to
respond to the crisis despite EU/NATO diplomatic and political support with
promises of financial aid, but mostly high-pitched belligerent rhetoric, left
the Junta wallowing in its own bullshit as the Ukrainian military stationed in
Crimea rapidly disintegrated in face of the objective fact that Crimea was now
Russian territory again.
The Junta Defence Ministry said it expected only 4,300 of
the troops who were stationed in Crimea to remain in the Ukrainian
military – less than 24 percent. Others said they expected that most of the
rest would join the Russian army, which has offered much higher pay and more
generous retirement benefits to any Ukrainian soldier who chose to join the
Russian forces..
“They are Russian, and they will serve Russia,” said Sergey
Kunitsyn, a former mayor of Sevastopol in Crimea who’s now a member of
parliament representing the region. “What else would they do? They speak
Russian. Their heritage is Russian. They accept Russian culture. Their loyalty
was to Crimea, not Ukraine.”
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| More Ukrainian troops departing Crimea |
The Junta in Kiev apparently has no plan for absorbing the
few Ukrainian soldiers who are expected to come to the mainland, and no plan
for their evacuation from Crimea. Reports circulating in the city said 400
soldiers had banded together in Crimea to try to escape to Ukraine amid
expectations that they would attempt to drive out. It was uncertain, if they do
make it out, whether they have military jobs waiting for them or housing for
their families. Several parliamentary figures called the soldiers’ coming to
the mainland “a personal decision, not a policy one.” “These soldiers have
family and homes and, in many cases, heritage in Crimea,” said David Zhraniya,
a member of the parliament. “It’s a personal decision.” Despite the apparent
disarray in Ukraine’s military,most interviewed after the vote installing Koval
in the post, said Tenyukh had done the best he could with a military they
admitted was in a shambles. “He wasn’t
to blame but it was a catastrophe and someone had to fall on the sword,” said
Kunitsyn, the former mayor of Sevastopol.
The military’s disorganisation was a reflection of a general
sense that Junta which installed itself in office contrary to the Ukraine
Constitution on 22 February 2014, is falling apart. “This parliament is absolutely
not prepared to govern in this crisis”, said Zhraniya, “We don’t have the
experience, we don’t have unity and we don’t have the support,” he said.
“Everyone here thinks of themselves as a short-timer, so there’s no long-term
planning, and our day-to-day plans lack consistency.” Zhraniya’s views were
repeated with slightly different phrasing again and again at the Rada. Every
member of government has the term “interim” in front of his title. The members
who make up the ruling coalition seem to change vote to vote.
“Our government is
weak, and corrupt, and the reality is that right now we really have no state,”
said Yegor Sobolev, a leader of the months-long Maidan protests who’s now a
member of a government watchdog commission. “We have an enemy at the gate, but
we have no army. Everything is a mess, and it is likely that even this
government will fall. But if it falls, we have absolutely nothing. So, against
all odds, we need our wreck of a state to function.”
As if to underscore the disarray, dozens of members of the
Right Sector, a right-wing group that’s blamed by many unbiased observers for
much of the violence during protests in Kiev and is considered the military
wing of the Svoboda political party, gathered in front of the Rada to protest
Tenyukh’s resignation. The protesters said they were also angry over the
killing Monday of Oleksandr Muzychko, a leader in the group. He was shot
outside a cafe in Rivne in western Ukraine after an argument that news reports
said involved several groups.
The appearance of the Right Sector in the square prompted a
line of uniformed security volunteers to form in front of the Rada building,
and for a tense half-hour there were fears that the building might be stormed. In the event, there was no confrontation but the danger remains of further provocations since the rump parliament remains factionalised and divided polticallly.
DISSOLVED:
Ukraine’s maritime forces have been mostly dissolved in
Crimea, with 12 of its 17 major warships and much of its naval aviation assets
falling under Russian control. Almost every Ukrainian naval base and ship on
the peninsula has been sequestered by Russian forces or local pro-Moscow self
defence units. The scale of the crisis facing the Ukrainian navy is apparent
from the fact that around 12,000 of its 15,450 personnel were based in Crimea.
Over the past three weeks, the majority of the Ukrainian military personnel on
Crimea have defected to the Russian military or resigned from military service.
In Sevastopol, the Russians obtained intact four major warships, the Grisha
V-class frigates Ternopil and Lutsk , the Pauk-class
corvette/patrol vessels Khmelnytskyi , and the Bambuk-class command ship
Slavutych , as well as Ukraine’s only submarine, the Foxtrot-class Zaporizhzhia
. Also acquired in Sevastopol was the ocean-going tug Korets .
Most of Ukraine’s Navy was stationed in Crimea including
12,000 out of a total of 15,400 Navy personnel. The remaining naval
forces are stationed in Odessa.
The rump of the Ukrainian navy is now concentrated at the
service’s Naval Base North at Odessa. This force boasts less than half a dozen
large surface combatants as well as several small patrol craft. Russian naval
patrols have also blockaded the access to the Sea of Azov to the east of
Ukraine, cutting off military and civilian access to ports in the east of the
country.
Speaking before the referendum result in Crimea, Canadian diplomat, James Byron Bisset, onetime Canadian Ambassador to Yugoslavia, Albania and Bulgaria, gave a sober analysis of the situation:
"I think they (the events in Ukraine) are very tragic but, almost inevitable.
I think that you have to go back to the collapse of the Soviet Union, and I
think that the West made a fatal mistake there, a historic mistake: instead of
offering help to the Russians, as we had done with the Germans during the
Marshall Plan (we won the war and did everything to help the Germans recover),
we didn't do that. On the contrary, we had NATO do everything it could to
threaten the Russians. We expanded eastward and broke our promises to Gorbachev,
who said that if he allows a united Germany entering into NATO, NATO would never
advance eastward. But, of course, they did do that and they did it in 1999 by having the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland enter NATO. Since then, they
have, in effect, encircled Russia with NATO countries, some of who had missiles.
In 2003 the Americans unilaterally pulled out of the Anti-ballistic Missile
Treaty, so I mean if you look at it, you'll see that NATO has played a very
aggressive and, from a Russian point of view, a very threatening position and it
is inevitable that at some point they were going to go over the line and I'm
afraid they've done it in Ukraine.
Putin was given the opportunity to act because, in effect, what the Americans
have done - and I blame the Americans here because the fact of the matter is
that when Yanukovich rejected the European Trade Association Agreement, Putin
came in and said 'Look, wouldn't it be more sensible to have the three of us
involved (the EU, Ukraine, and Russia)?', the European Union dismissed Putin and
told him "Mind your own business". Regarding the demonstrations that took place
in Kiev, there's very serious evidence to show that many of the protesters were
being paid to protest. In addition to that, you had John McCain, who only met
only with opposition leaders. Also, Victoria Nuland (the head of the State
Department, European Division) made a speech before the Press Club in Washington
that she had made three visits to Kiev in the last five weeks. In a period of 15
or so years, the Americans have spent 5 billion dollars urging opposition
parties to have a pro-European stand. I mean, this is meddling in the affairs of
Ukraine and encouraging Ukraine to break away from Russia.
What does Putin want to achieve? He is basically saying, "Hands off. From a
geopolitical point of view, this is my backyard and you've been meddling in our
affairs for a long time and you threaten our national interest." So, what's
happened really is that the Europeans and the Americans, in combination, have
handed Putin the Crimea, because the inevitable referendum will clearly choose
to go back to Russia. What a lot of people don't mention is that when Khrushchev
did give Crimea to Ukraine, it didn't necessarily mean anything because it was a
decision made within the Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union broke up, Ukraine
retained Crimea but under certain conditions. One of the conditions was that it
would be an autonomous region and secondly, that it would have 25,000 Russian
troops located there. Putin didn't invade Crimea, it already had been invaded.
I don't think he (Putin) 'lives in another world' (a reference to the
comment made by Merkel), I think he is in a very real world and he is a hardcore
realist who's popular in Russia because the Russians see him as protecting their
interests. He didn't start the protest in Kiev. Those protests were extremely
violent. If they had occurred in any American city or Canadian city, the
protesters would have been immediately arrested. They were throwing fire bombs,
some of them were armed, they seized government buildings, I mean, this is an
engineered protest designed to destabilize Ukraine and invite parts of it, at
least, into NATO.
I think they (the West and especially, the White House) are in real jam.
They've overextended their position and they are in a mess at the moment,
Ukraine is in a mess. Putin can sit back, he can get Crimea and he can say to
Ukraine, who totally relies on Russia for economic reasons, 'we'll let the
European Union and Americans resolve the Ukrainians economic problems and we'll
sit back and watch it.' Sanctions never have worked and won't work with Russia
and stopping a few senior Russian officials from travelling is not going to do
any good. The problem is that there is a good part of the government of the new
regime, which the Russians are quite right is illegitimate, that are extremists
and are armed and could cause violence to erupt at any point, and that could
spread and we could have a tremendously dangerous, if not catastrophic situation
in Ukraine.
A lot of double standards are being applied and a lot of
vehement anti-Russian positions in the western media, in particular the United
States', is almost adolescent in its fever. A lot of the facts are not coming
out and I think that's part of the problem. People in Ukraine are being
encouraged that all they have to do is call for help and the United States is
going to come in and provide them with the arms and the materials to take on
Russia. That's a very dangerous position.
One more point, the double standard is so blatant: I mean, here we have the
NATO countries led by the United States taking a big chunk of territory away
from Serbia, bombing Serbia, encouraging the Kosovars to declare independence
without any kind of referendum, all of the western countries recognizing it
despite Putin's warning that doing that is against international law and the
United Nations Charter and would open a Pandora's Box for other countries to do
it and, frankly, to do it himself in some of the countries of the former Soviet
Union, if they continued to recognize Kosovo. So, what goes around, comes around
and we all have short memories, it seems, but what's good for the goose is good
for the gander."
(Transcript of broadcast on Canadian Broadcasting Corporation "Cross Country Checkup" phone-in programme re
Ukraine)
Ukraine: what the public are not being told:
