[News] Understanding the War in Ukraine
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Thu Mar 10 11:53:02 EST 2022
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*Understanding the War in Ukraine*
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*By Vijay Prashad*
The war between Russia and Ukraine began much before February 24,
2022—the date provided by the Ukrainian government, NATO and the United
States for the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. According
to Dmitry Kovalevich, a journalist and a member of a now-banned
communist organization in Ukraine, the war actually started in the
spring of 2014 and has never stopped since.
He writes to me from the south of Kyiv/Kiev, Ukraine, and recounts an
anecdote: “What’s there at the front line?” asks one person. “Our troops
are winning as usual!” comes the response. “Who are our troops?” the
first person inquires and is told, “We’ll soon see…” In a war,
everything is in dispute, even the name of Ukraine’s capital (Kyiv in
Ukrainian, and Kiev in Russian, goes the debate
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online).
Wars are among the most difficult of reporting
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assignments for a journalist. These days, especially, with the torrent
of social media and the belligerence of network news television
channels, matters on the ground are hard to sort out. Basic facts about
the events taking place during a war are hard to establish, let alone
ensuring the correct interpretation of these facts. Videos of apparent
war atrocities that can be found on social media platforms like YouTube
are impossible to verify. Often, it becomes clear that much of the
content relating to war that can be found on these platforms has either
been misidentified or is from other conflicts. Even the BBC, which has
taken a very strong pro-Ukrainian and NATO position on this conflict,
had to run a story
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about how so many of the viral claims about Russian atrocities are
false. Among these false claims, which have garnered widespread
circulation, is a video circulating on TikTok that wrongly alleges to be
that of a “Ukrainian girl confronting a Russian soldier,” but is instead
a video of the then-11-year-old Palestinian Ahed Tamimi
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confronting an Israeli soldier in 2012; the video continues to circulate
on TikTok
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with the caption, “Little [girls] stand up to Russian soldiers.”
Meanwhile, disputing the date for the beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian
war as February 24, Kovalevich tells me, “The war in Ukraine didn’t
start in February 2022. It began in the spring of 2014 in the Donbas and
has not stopped for these eight years.” Kovalevich is a member of
Borotba (Struggle), a communist organization in Ukraine. Borotba, like
other communist and Marxist organizations, was banned
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by the previous U.S.-backed Ukrainian government of Petro Poroshenko in
2015 (as part of this ongoing crackdown, two communist youth
leaders—Aleksandr Kononovich and Mikhail Kononovich—were arrested
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by Ukrainian security services on March 6).
“Most of our comrades had to migrate to Donetsk and Luhansk,” Kovalevich
tells me. These are the two eastern provinces of mainly Russian speakers
that broke away from
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“Ukrainian government control in 2014” and had been under the control of
Russian-backed groups. In February, however, before the Russian invasion
of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin recognized
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these “two breakaway regions in eastern Ukraine as independent,” making
this contentious move the stepping stone for the final military invasion
by Russia. Now, Kovalevich says, his comrades “expect to come back from
exile and work legally.” This expectation is based on the assumption
that the Ukrainian government will be forced to get rid of the existing
system, which includes Western-trained-and-funded anti-Russian
right-wing vigilante and paramilitary agents in the country, and will
have to reverse many of the Poroshenko-era illiberal and anti-minority
(including anti-Russian) laws.
*‘I Feel Nervous’*
“I feel quite nervous,” Kovalevich tells me. “[This war] looks very grim
and not so much because of the Russians but because of our [Ukrainian]
armed gangs that are looting and robbing [the country].” When the
Russians intervened, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy handed out
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weapons to any citizen who wanted to defend the country. Kovalevich, who
lives in central Ukraine just south of the capital, says, “My area was
not affected by military actions—only by the terror of [right-wing]
nationalist gangs.”
During the first days of the Russian military intervention, Kovalevich
took in a Roma family who had fled from the war zone. “My family had a
spare room,” Kovalevich tells me. Roma organizations say
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that there are about 400,000 Roma in Ukraine, most of them living in the
western part of Ukraine, in Zakarpatska Oblast (bordering Hungary,
Poland, Romania and Slovakia). “The Roma people in our country are
regularly assaulted by [right-wing] nationalists,” Kovalevich says. “The
nationalists used to attack them [Roma] publicly, burning their
encampments, calling it ‘cleansing garbage.’ The police didn’t react as
our far-right gangs always work in cooperation with either the police or
with the security service.” This Roma family, who was being sheltered by
Kovalevich and his family, is on the move toward western Ukraine, where
most of the Ukrainian-Roma population lives. “But it is very unsafe to
move,” Kovalevich tells me. “There are nationalists [manning these]
checkpoints [along] all roads [in Ukraine, and they] may shoot [anyone]
who may seem suspicious to them or just rob refugees.”
*Minsk Agreements*
The war in the Donbas region that began in 2014 resulted in two
agreements being signed in Belarus in 2014 and 2015, which were named
after the capital of Belarus, and were called the Minsk agreements
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These agreements were aimed at “[ending] the separatist war by Russian
speakers in eastern Ukraine.” The second
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of these agreements was signed by two leading political figures from
Ukraine (Leonid Kuchma, the president of Ukraine from 1994 to 2005) and
from Russia (Mikhail Zurabov, the ambassador of the Russian Federation
to Ukraine, 2009-2016), respectively, and was overseen by a Swiss
diplomat (Heidi Tagliavini, who chaired
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the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Conflict in
Georgia, 2008-2009). This Minsk II agreement was endorsed
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by the UN Security Council resolution 2022 on February 17, 2015. If the
Minsk agreements had been adhered to, Russia and Ukraine would have
secured an arrangement that would have been acceptable in the Donbas.
“Two Ukrainian governments signed the Minsk agreements,” Kovalevich
tells me, “but didn’t fulfill it. Recently Zelenskyy’s officials openly
mocked the agreement, saying they wouldn’t fulfill it (encouraged by the
U.S. and the UK, of course). That was a sheer violation of all rules—you
can’t sign [the agreements] and then refuse to fulfill it.” The language
of the Minsk agreements was, as Kovalevich says, “liberal enough for the
government.” The two republics of Donetsk and Luhansk would have
remained a part of Ukraine and they would have been afforded some
cultural autonomy (this was in the footnote to Article 11
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of the February 12, 2015, Minsk II Agreement). “This was unacceptable to
our nationalists and [right-wing nationalists],” Kovalevich says to me.
They “would like to organize purges and vengeance there [in Donetsk and
Luhansk].” Before the Russian military intervention, the UN High
Commissioner for Human Rights found
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that more than 14,000 people had been killed in the ongoing conflict in
Donetsk and Luhansk despite the Minsk agreements. It is this violence
that provokes Kovalevich to make his comments about the violence of the
ultra-nationalists and the right-wing paramilitary. “The elected
authorities are a cover, masking the real rulers of Ukraine,” Kovalevich
says. Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy and his allies in the parliament do
not drive the governing process in their country but have “an agenda
imposed on them by the far-right armed groups.”
*Peace?*
Negotiations are ongoing
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on the Ukraine-Belarus border between the Russians and the Ukrainians.
Kovalevich is, however, not optimistic about a positive outcome from
these negotiations. Decisions, he says, are not made by the Ukrainian
president alone, but by the right-wing ultra-nationalist paramilitary
armed groups and the NATO countries. As Kovalevich and I were speaking,
the Washington Post published a report
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about “Plans for a U.S.-backed insurgency in Ukraine”; former U.S.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton implied
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an Afghanistan-style guerrilla war in Ukraine, saying, “We have to keep
tightening the screws.” “This reveals that they [the U.S.] don’t really
care about Ukrainians,” Kovalevich says. “They want to use this as an
opportunity to cause some pain to the Russians.”
These comments by Clinton and others suggest to Kovalevich that the
United States wants “to organize chaos between Russia and the
Europeans.” Peace in Ukraine, he says, “is a matter of reconciliation
between NATO and the new global powers, Russia and China.” Till such a
reconciliation is possible, and till Europe develops a rational foreign
policy, “we will be affected by wars,” says Kovalevich.
/*Vijay Prashad* is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a
writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter
<https://go.ind.media/e/546932/2022-03-10/mz6jrk/1011380940?h=Ogc1qvuOolw5nRLbfP5SqjuBywLAXOEssWc5Emm4wZ4>.
He is the chief editor of LeftWord Books
<https://go.ind.media/e/546932/2022-03-10/mz6jrm/1011380940?h=Ogc1qvuOolw5nRLbfP5SqjuBywLAXOEssWc5Emm4wZ4>
and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
<https://go.ind.media/e/546932/2022-03-10/mz6jrp/1011380940?h=Ogc1qvuOolw5nRLbfP5SqjuBywLAXOEssWc5Emm4wZ4>.
He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial
Studies
<https://go.ind.media/e/546932/y2hdjcpo/mz6jrr/1011380940?h=Ogc1qvuOolw5nRLbfP5SqjuBywLAXOEssWc5Emm4wZ4>,
Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books,
including/ The Darker Nations
<https://go.ind.media/e/546932/1595583424--tag-alternorg08-20/mz6jrt/1011380940?h=Ogc1qvuOolw5nRLbfP5SqjuBywLAXOEssWc5Emm4wZ4>
/and/ The Poorer Nations
<https://go.ind.media/e/546932/1781681589--tag-alternorg08-20/mz6jrw/1011380940?h=Ogc1qvuOolw5nRLbfP5SqjuBywLAXOEssWc5Emm4wZ4>/.
His latest book is/ Washington Bullets
<https://go.ind.media/e/546932/catalog-product-view-id-21820/mz6jry/1011380940?h=Ogc1qvuOolw5nRLbfP5SqjuBywLAXOEssWc5Emm4wZ4>/,
with an introduction by Evo Morales Ayma./
To find out more about Globetrotter and its latest work, click here
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