Send lawyers, guns and money... - TTG

Pro-Moscow rebels, backed by what NATO says is the open participation of Russian troops, pressed on with their offensive on Sunday after restarting the war in eastern Ukraine with the first all-out assault since a truce five months ago. 

U.S. President Barack Obama said Washington was considering all options short of military action to isolate Russia. The European Union called an emergency meeting of foreign ministers of its 28 member states. "We are deeply concerned about the latest break in the ceasefire and the aggression that these separatists -- with Russian backing, Russian equipment, Russian financing, Russian training and Russian troops -- are conducting," Obama told a news conference during a visit to India. "I will look at all additional options that are available to us short of military confrontation and try to address this issue. And we will be in close consultation with our international partners, particularly European partners." 

NATO accuses Moscow of sending troops to fight on behalf of rebels in territory the Kremlin has dubbed "New Russia" in a war that has killed more than 5,000 people. In some of the strongest language ever from Brussels, Donald Tusk, the former Polish prime minister who now presides over EU summits European Council president, denounced "appeasement" of Moscow, a word with unmistakable World War Two connotations. (Reuters)

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The Ukrainian army is essentially a ‘NATO legion’ which doesn’t pursue the national interests of Ukraine, but persists to restrict Russia, President Vladimir Putin says. “We often say: Ukrainian Army, Ukrainian Army. But who is really fighting there? There are, indeed, partially official units of armed forces, but largely there are the so-called ‘volunteer nationalist battalions’,” said Putin. He added that the intention of Ukrainian troops is connected with “achieving the geopolitical goals of restraining Russia.” Putin was addressing students in the city of St. Petersburg. According to Putin, the Ukrainian army “is not an army, but a foreign legion, in this case a foreign NATO legion, which, of course, doesn’t pursue the national interests of Ukraine.”

Kiev has been reluctant to find political solutions to the crisis in eastern Ukraine and only used the ceasefire to regroup its forces, the president stressed. “Unfortunately official Kiev authorities refuse to follow the path of a peaceful solution. They don’t want to resolve [the crisis] using political tools,” Putin said, adding that first Kiev authorities had first used law enforcement, then security services and then the army in the region. “It is essentially a civil war [in Ukraine]. In my view, many in Ukraine already understand this,” Putin added. (Russia Today)

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That pretty much sums up where the politicians stand now that last September's Minsk Protocol has collapsed so spectacularly. The Prime Minister of the Donetsk Peoples Republic (DNR), Alexandr Zakharchenko emphatically declared that there will be no more ceasefires. What's happening on the ground? It's difficult to know from day to day. Both sides push their own versions of reality. However, I think the photo at the top of this post sums up the current situation on the ground in Novorossiya. At center front, with his fist in the air is Matros, a company commander in the DNR Sparta Battalion. Behind him and two of his soldiers stand a number of Ukrainian prisoners, probably from the 93d Brigade, the “cyborgs” that held part of the airport since last summer. This picture was taken at the airport a few days ago after it was finally captured by the rebels. This video was probably made shortly after the above photo was taken. The words of Matros ring truer than those of any politician... "It's only the beginning."

Let's listen to words of some of the men at the heart of this battle to better understand  what's going on. In addition to Matros, hear the words of Motorola (Arseny Pavlov) and Givi (Mikail Tolstoy). Motorola is the 32 year old commander of the Sparta Battalion. He served in the Russian naval infantry in the 2nd Chechen War, but was a stone cutter before he joined the fighting last year. Givi commands the Somali Battalion. He served in the Ukrainian Army from 1998 to 2000 as a conscript tanker. After that he worked in a sling rope factory. Neither individual was a professional military man. They fought beside Strelkov at Slaviansk and were instrumental in closing and reducing the Iliovansk cauldron last August.

In this 16 January interview with Motorola, he describes how the Ukies launched an attack on his position at the airport and were repulsed before his battalion began the assault on the new terminal. 

In this 17 January interview Givi describes the airport battles, the importance of suppressive fires and acknowledges the strength of the Ukies and the difficulties of the battles ahead. On 18 January he describes how he repulsed a Ukie attack that attempted to outflank the airport. 

This is an interview with Givi and Matros in a more relaxed moment on 18 January.  Soldier talk. I miss it.

What does the future hold? For men like Givi, Motorola and Matros hard battles are ahead. Putin appears to be solidly behind the rebels military offensive since he is keepng the voentorg supplies flowing. This is more important than any political support at the moment. Perhaps most important is whatever training and advisory support Russia is providing. The polite men in green seem to be going a bang up job and they certainly know how to STFU. I have no proof of this, but my experience tells me it is so. I'm envious of their expertise and success. This clearly contrasts with whatever training and advisory program is in place for the Ukrainian Army. 

How far will Washington and the EU go to support the junta in Kiev? We had Standard and Poor cut Russia's credit rating to junk today. I seriously doubt this move will close the voentorg. If the rebels close and reduce a new cauldron at Debaltsteve, will the Ukrainian conscripts desert and/or defect en masse? Will Pravy Sektor and Svoboda overthrow the current junta in Kiev? Will the US and EU continue to support Kiev in that case? I have a feeling we'll have answers to these questions before General Mud arrives on the steppes of Ukraine.

TTG

 

Comments

[The Twisted Genius]

Tyler,

The 81s were company level assets just like the 60s are now. There were 4 four deuce tubes in the battalion level mortar platoon. But I hear what you're saying about battalion level assets. One year we started off our training on the big island with a road march from Hilo Airport to Pohakuloa Training Area, 50 miles from sea level to 6,800 feet. Every swing dick in the battalion walked. Not one man in our company dropped out, not even in the weapons platoon. They didn't carry their mortars or TOW systems. That would be too much. HHC lost a bunch. That was to be expected. Combat support company also lost a lot. That included the scout platoon and the four deuce platoon. I guess they spent too much time on their quarter tons. We ended the march with company live fires.

[The Twisted Genius]

Booby and Tyler,

Mortars may not be emphasized in Infantry Officer Basic Course like they once were. Qualifying on every weapon in a rifle company was a major part of the course when I went through. That included the 81 mortars, TOW and Dragon AT systems. We only familiarized with FAC procedures. Only those going to mech units spent much time with the M-113s. Us light infantry types spent more time with the Hueys... and being chased by tanks.

[alba etie]

We shall see..

[William R. Cumming]

Some of the best Eastern Rites celebrations and sales are held by the Greek Orthodox churches in the DC area. I attend many and have always assumed gifts and purchases from Greek-American citizens passed on in part to Greece and their homeland relatives. I also use the many Greek restaurants in the DC area. And Lebanese and other countries that were once Greek colonies.

All of the above paid out of my small federal pension after 34 YEARS AS A FEDERAL LAWYER!

[William R. Cumming]

Citizens and residents of the EU that are culturally and linguistic Germans paint a complicated picture. Little analysis exists in English of that diaspora!

[Aka]

bwilli123 ,
So at the end of the day, this article is also suggesting that US should do "something" in Europe to counter Russians. What that "something" is,is not discussed. Sometime back there was a another article which spoke about this "something".

And Does Putin really believes US is clueless? Obama may be clueless but there are US officials who were at the forefront of the current Ukrainian crisis.

I mean after-all it was a US official who said "Fu*k EU". Not the other-way around.

[David Habakkuk]

Babak Makkinejad, bwilli123, aka,

The Walter Russell Mead article is fascinating, but not because it tells us anything very illuminating about Putin.

So Mead (or should it be “Russell Mead”?) attributes to Putin a ‘long-term project of rebuilding the Soviet Union at Western expense.’

One problem with this frequently-recited mantra is that it is not clear what it means, another that, as is usual, not an iota of evidence is presented by Mead in support of the claim being made. Indeed, conspicuous by its absence in the article is any discussion whatsoever of Putin’s – voluminous – expositions of his views or of analyses by informed experts.

Like many others, Mead commits one of the most basic intelligence mistakes that can be made – assessing the capabilities and intentions of others in terms of one’s sense of the weaknesses of one’s own side.

As an account of a key weakness of the West – the imbecility of much of its elites – the comments of Mead (or should it be ‘Russell Mead’) could hardly be bettered:

"The trouble is that the contemporary Western mind has a hard time grasping a basic truth about both Putin and ourselves; we are not the world, and Putin is not us. There are three subjects on which virtually everybody in the Western policy and intellectual establishments agree: think of them as the core values of the Davoisie: The first is that the rise of a liberal capitalist and more or less democratic and law-based international order is both inevitable and irreversible. The second is that the Davos elite – the financiers, politicians, intellectuals, haute journalists and technocrats who manage the great enterprises, institutions and polities of the contemporary world – know what they are doing and are competent to manage the system they represent. The third is that no serious alternative perspective to the Davos perspective really exists; our establishment believes in its gut that even those who contend with the Davos world order know in their hearts that Davos has and always will have both might and right on its side."

According to Mead, Putin believes ‘the whole post-historical Western consensus’ to be ‘a cocktail of ignorance, arrogance, vanity and hypocrisy’, creating weaknesses he hopes to exploit in the furtherance of his supposed ‘long-term project of rebuilding the Soviet Union at Western expense.’

For this assessment, not an iota of evidence is offered – and Mead, quite as much as any of the ‘Davoisie’ he criticises – makes no attempt whatsoever to see Putin in the context of Russian history.

On this historical background, one of the best Western authorities is the historian – and former British Army Intelligence officer – Paul Robinson, now teaching at Ottawa. His writings bring out the fact that Putin’s thinking is rooted in the ideas of Russians who, before and during the Russian Revolution, realised that the then equivalent of the views of the ‘Davoisie’, applied to Russia, was self-contradictory in way fraught with potential for catastrophe.

In an article back in 2004, Robinson summarised the views of two key ‘White Russian’ intellectuals, Petr Struve and Ivan Il’in:

"Both men understood that the intelligentsia's obsession with liberating the people was unleashing forces which would eventually destroy all liberty in Russia. Only an authoritarian government, they decided, could protect individual freedoms in the absence of a political culture that accepted basic ideas such as property rights. A society whose people understood legal rights and duties could successfully govern itself. One that did not must be ruled by a powerful individual, who would educate the people in its legal consciousness until such time as it was fit for self-rule."

(See http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/10th-january-2004/18/putins-might-is-white .)

In fact, however, even in societies with an apparently much more favourable ‘political culture’ than that of late Tsarist Russia, projects of liberation have not uncommonly ended up producing tyranny: think France after 1789, and Germany and Italy after 1918.

The question of the preconditions for a successful working liberal society, and what to do absent those preconditions, was the central question which Tocqueville addressed in his analyses of the American and French Revolutions, just as much as it was the central preoccupation of Il’in – who Robinson describes as ‘Putin’s favourite philosopher.’

Far be it from me to suggest that all Putin’s statements should be taken at face value, or to underestimate the immense problems of Russian society, of which the weakness of the rule of law – among governors as well as governed – remains a central one. But the questions with which the thinkers to whom Putin harks back attempting to address are real ones – with which the ‘Davoisie’ are simply unprepared to grapple.

Moreover, not only the ‘Davoisie’ but figures like Mead simply cannot grasp that Putin certainly did not start out as a revolutionary figure, seeking to undermine the order of the post-war ‘Pax Americana’. Like the thinkers to whom he looks back, he is instinctively conservative. The emerging Chinese-Russian alliance may certainly want to challenge the power of the West – but in the case of Russia at least – this is because they have been pushed into it.

[LeaNder]

MRW, strictly Switzerland is much more safe concerning money then Germany, always was and still is.

The Euro spins downward since Switzerland decided to not to sustain it any longer. Good business across the borders in the German south again, I hear.

[LeaNder]

Babak, you're such a bore with your stereotypes, if I may. Your Persian bonus has evaporated a while ago.

How is business in the US?

[Babak Makkinejad]

Thank you for your comments.

My sense of the statement "..long-term project of rebuilding the Soviet Union at Western expense.." is that this is the phraseology that is needed to get you published.

Like many texts in the Soviet Union that had to pay the obligatory homage to Marx, Lenin, Stalin in the works of fiction.

Per Confucius (and later Orwell) the language is corrupted and the words do not convey the true meaning of things.

Do you seriously expect him to get published if he wrote something like: "...he is pushing against us because we are trying to get Russia ejected from Europe"?

Look at Patrick Buchannan who has been thoroughly marginalized in US.

In regards to Mead's attribution of the statement: "... the whole post-historical Western consensus to be..." to Putin - yes, I agree that he does not know and no one knows Putin's mind. But I have read a similar - but not identical - description of Putin in an essay by Trenin (if my memory does not fail me.)

Whether Putin thinks that or not, I think Mead is accurately characterizing NATO states - raring to go to war against any and all - in the far corners of the world.

I might be wrong but perhaps Mead is hiding behind this attribution to Putin in order to get published - to get a hearing - as it where.

I think my views in regards to Liberal Democracy, as you name it, have evolved to the point that I am now convinced that certain countries will take centuries - if ever - at reaching such a state - or may be they never will.

One has to accept that and move on.

On a side, I was intrigued by Professor Robinson's writings that you had quoted - indeed they perfectly described the situation in Spain in 1933 when the Republic was declared; civil war was only a matter of time.

Putin is not a Revolutionary, I agree; NATO states are.

[Babak Makkinejad]

I take it you think Thessaloniki is just like Heidelberg?

When was the last time that a German mayor from a small town had amassed 150,000 Euros in a bank account?

[Babak Makkinejad]

I take it you are not sending any money to Greece personally.

Good.

[LeaNder]

Babak, I would object that "German culture", whatever you have in mind in mind, went hand in hand with it's national expression or the unification:

"19-th century in creating a German National Culture"

Kant wasn't a 19th man, neither was Goethe. To pick some of the better known.

Question: can Charlemagne be reduced to a purely French tradition?

[Charles]

Well a whole country is up for grabs.

[LeaNder]

Thanks, WRC, the populist take, no doubt.

Merkl as the new Hitler, trying to reign Europe.

[Charles]

Imho the soft underbelly of Europe is going to be refugee flows heading north by the millions in coming decades.

[LeaNder]

WRC, I was confronted with my only brother voting the AFD during the recent elections. Fact is, yes the Euro was not so good for us versus the DM.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_for_Germany

Now on the surface they cater on resentment in that context. One of its operators not quite so visibly is a longtime representative of the German industry. I never liked.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Olaf_Henkel

[rjj]

But it is the Davoisie (Faustian wankers in the service of overmighty subjects - now called citizens), who are the revolutionaries.

[LeaNder]

I realized I was not responding to you. Strictly, the German sections of Belgium or "ethnic overlaps" both way in Denmark come most prominently to mind.

You possible are able to understand that there always was a lot of exchange and motion between Switzerland and Austria and France over the centuries? Once Austria was resized to it's present state in a different ways circumstances then France. In neither of these countries it would matter what your precise ethnic origin is. ... I can assure you that even the people of my wider family have adopted to Swiss German or French over the decades more or less. But only very few kids in America or Austria understand German anymore.

Do you think we could possibly have an interest in protecting "ethnic German" everywhere? And that is our core motive for the European vision/utopia? Some different type of European reign?

Since Helmut Kohl invited Russians with German roots back in? Well no one ever suggested to invite Australians or Americans or any others people with ethnic German roots back in. And Kohl's decision may well have coincided with preferences for Jewish Russians at the time. But I never really thought about that. ...

[Babak Makkinejad]

We must agree to disagree.

Charlemagne was a Medieval French speaker but was not French; just like Khwarizmian Kings were not Iranians.

[Babak Makkinejad]

Schiller, Kleist, Fichte, Wagner, Schubert?

[LeaNder]

Babak, no doubt the bureaucracy must be a real disaster, some Germans with roots there told me. I've seen documentaries of what this means on the ground of for the average tax or crime investigator. It's a real alp. Since that time, I complain a lot less about our own bureaucracy. Believe me.

But whenever I think about Greece, I think about a Greek author, a sociologist, if I recall correctly. He created a character, a police investigator, and wrote a series of thrillers. I forget his name, one of the books I never got back. And it was quite good. ...

Before that I had wondered about the names, or two opposing family dynasties in politics. But I forget now. Oh, Jeb Bush is considering running as president.

In my own limited way: Loads of money flowed into there, and a lot of people got rich based on it. But just as in Russia they have transfered their assets by now into safe heavens. if they need to do this at all. The problem is, and no, there is no law yet to deal with that, the majority that did not profit in any way, quite the opposite that had to pay bribes apparently for the most simple administrative tasks, has to pay the bill.

In other words I seriously object to your blaming the Greek collectively. But no doubt there is high-time for populist slogans. The chance to pay more attention on the basis, the bureaucratic structure, everyday life and corruption, has definitively passed a long time ago. ...

[rjj]

above is response to DH posted before BabMak's had been cleared.

[rjj]

devolutionaries might be a better term.

[LeaNder]

Ok, Babak, with Schiller you are lucky, he died in 1805. Does that make him a representative of 19th century nationalism? I don't think so.

Charlemagne, was the King of the Franks, if you think they can be reduced to royal ancestors of present France, or simply the French, you're welcome.

I wouldn't satisfy you with my knowledge in support of the Makkainejad thesis either.

Němec Todesca