Eurasia note #41 - Ukraine's Battle for Kramatorsk Looms

Dozens killed by missile at railway station, as civilians flee next stage of fighting

Attention switches to the fight for Donbas as Russian troops withdraw from Kyiv.
Securing Mariupol and Kherson gives Russia partial control of coastline above Crimea.
Next phase of fighting anticipated around Kramatorsk and the southern Bug river.
Fifth round of sactions and bureaucratic expulsions suggest frustration at impact.

Western media starts to acknowledge Azov brutality as Ukraine forces grow desperate.
Holes appear in the butchers of Bucha narrative and focus switches elsewhere.
It’s not about predictions, or who’s right or wrong, but seeking to reduce ambiguity.(About 2,800 words, 12 minutes’ read.)

Civilians leave Kramatorsk this week, before Friday’s attack

Tbilisi, Apr 8, 2022 (1100 GMT)

UPDATE 1300 GMT, Preface:

I had chosen, for my newsletter, the image of civilians fleeing via Kramatorsk railway station just an hour before it was hit, this morning, by a missile.

This is one of those times when one feels that we are, indeed, in this together. The civilians knew that Kramatorsk is within the ‘cauldron’ pincered by Russian troops. That’s why they were trying to leave.

They knew even more keenly that Azov Battalion and the AFU are cornered — because this is the area where they’ve been seated since 2014 in a war that’s eight years old.

I didn’t foresee but I felt in the pit of my stomach they could be next: the children and the families clutching their suitcases and pets.

I don’t predict – that’s a mug’s game – it’s more likely that I write through tears.

It’s common knowledge where AFU is entrenched and thus where Russia will attack. If Ukraine can’t win the ground war, they will try even harder to win the propaganda war. Objectively, the massacre is consistent with other moves to stop civilians fleeing. We have seen them tied to lamposts outside shopping centers as human shields. Even the NYT is beginning to acknowledge that brutality has more than one face.

Photographic evidence suggests a Tochka-U missile which is no longer used by Russia but still by Ukrainian forces. The same type of missile killed 17 people in Donetsk on Mar 14. Ukrainian forces blame Russians.

Two wars rage in Ukraine: one in the media; one on the ground. Even worse, the media war is for us in the West to rage, confound our enemies and ruffle our smug sense of virtue.

But we are in this, more deeply than we know. If the aim is to make the home population so desperate it demands revenge upon Russia in a wider war, this is one way to go about it. We have already passed the stage of war as catharsis: the release of pent up anger after two years of lockdown.

As China’s foreign minister noted today the West can’t logically call for peace while it pours weapons into the conflict. 

It bodes worst for Ukraine’s civilians, and soldiers, too, in a war that looks as deperate as it is, ultimately, one-sided. 

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Original article:

Ukrainian news agencies say many people died at Kramatorsk railway station just hours ago, as they tried to leave the city that is the next front in the battle for Donbas. As the propaganda war continues, and recent atrocities have shown, the sane approach is to take care to identify who killed whom.

Russian military said fragments identified at the station came from a Tochka-U tactical missile, which is used only by the Ukrainian army. The same type of missile killed 17 people in Donetsk on Mar 14. Ukrainian forces blame Russians.

The city in northern Donetsk oblast is reported by both sides to be the next likely clash. A Russian pincer move is seeking to dislodge Azov Batallion and Armed Forces of Ukraine who have made the border zone of Donetstk and Lugansk their base for attacking Donbas since 2014.

Early reports said 30 had died. Pictures show Azov Battalion walking between corpses. These forces have previously obstructed the evacuation of cities like Mariupol. It is reckless to jump to conclusions. The battle for perceptions remains uppermost, even as real lives are lost.

Greeks recoil

A public relations disaster unfolded in the Greek parliament on Thursday as Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy introduced members of the fascist-aligned Azov Battalion — in a country that still remembers its brutal treatment by the Nazis in WW2, followed in the1960s by the CIA-backed junta of the “colonels.”

Several Greek MPs walked out and opposition parties protested when Zelenskiy on Apr 7 introduced a video address by Azov including a Ukrainian fighter of ethnically-Greek descent named Michail, who described himself as a defender of Mariupol. [1]

The Azov leadership apparently wants its voice to be heard and its influence raises questions about Zelenskiy’s room for maneouvre.

Indeed the last round of talks in Istanbul on Mar 29 failed to progress into a second day. Beforehand Zelenskiy had offered concessions; in the meeting room his representatives seem more entrenched. The sudden lack of urgency suggests the U.S., Azov, or both are influencing negotiators as we pointed out Mar 31, Eurasia note #38 - Putin's Narrowing Window in Ukraine

Moscow continues to demand demilitarization and denazification, the independence of Donbas and recognition of Crimea as part of Russia.

China’s foreign minister Wang Yi said the Ukraine conflict’s primary cause was “an imbalance in the European security system.” It had to recognize countries’ inherrent need for security within a balanced mechanism.

“You can’t call for a ceasefire and at the same time, continue the delivery of a large amount of weapons and ammunition, escalating hostilities,” he said in a telephone conversation with French Secretary of State for European Affairs Clement Beaune.

Binds of history

Azov is not just embedded in the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU). Its tendrils entwine the Atlanticists, through individuals like Victoria Nuland and Chrystia Freeland, both of Ukrainian descent; it also permeates the British-Polish think tanks who are still fighting the last war.

Britain’s SIS/MI6 backed Stepan Bandera after WW2 and his OUN/B faction (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists) until the 1950s, while the CIA went with the ZP/UHVR (Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council) supposedly until the 1980s, though the relationship has continued in one form or another to this day.

See, Moneycircus Mar 18, 2022 — The West's Hypocrisy On Ukraine: White refugees, white supremacists and whitewashed wars

Poland’s Deputy Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski suggested hosting U.S. nuclear weapons and up to 150,000 troops, in an Apr 3 interview with Die Welt. [2]

It would be worth exploring further the common heritage that underpins Galician nationalism in Poland as well as Ukraine.

The former Austrian crown lands of Galizien are known as Halychyna in Ukrainian and Halicz in Polish. Unlike the relatively recent creation of Ukraine, this was a real kingdom with a heritage going back a thousand years. Galicia-Volhynia (or -Vladimir) was a principality that grew out of Kievan Rus’.

The implications are that Poland will remain a potential flashpoint and that Russian plans for denazification — even if they were to advance into western Ukraine and seize Lviv — might only push the problem over the border into Poland.

After that historical detour, we must revisit information that came from a Yahoo news report last month about the CIA training Ukrainian insurgents in the southern U.S., which in turn cited five anonymous individuals supposedly linked to the CIA. Former Marine Corps intelligence officer Scott Ritter told The Duran podcast that Yahoo was likely the victim of propaganda, as such insurgent training would be among the CIA’s most secretive activity and would not be readily admitted by any CIA officer. [3]

On reflection this should not surprise. Think how long it took for the training and arming of Nicaraguan guerillas to emerge in the Reagan years in what was later known as Iran Contra.

This suggests that talk of a guerilla insurgency is wildly overblown. The history of NATO working with fascist stay behind units in Operation Gladio was always a better comparison than Afghanistan. The people blown up by the anti-communist “strategy of tension” were, as a rule, defenceless civilians going about their daily lives.

See Moneycircus, Mar 9, 2022 — Eurasia note #32 - Ukraine May Meet Its Gladio

Virtual war

Two wars rage in Ukraine: one in the media; one on the ground. The Western media is playing a version of fantasy football, in which they pick players and face offs according to imagined rankings and customised projections.

When holes appeared in the narrative of the buchers of Bucha, the press assured us there were more atrocities elsewhere. Of course there are. This is war. It’s just a different war to the one described in the press.

Bucha first. Its mayor made no mention of any atrocity when he smilingly announced the Kyiv suburb’s liberation on Mar 31 — at least four days before photographs appeared in the press of bodies littering the streets.

Ukraine’s press admits that “special police forces are currently clearing the city of saboteurs and accomplices of Russian troops.” Assuming the people were killed on-site in Bucha and their bodies not transported from elsewhere, their deaths coincide with this Ukrainian revenge operation upon anyone who had dealings with the Russians during their occupation of the district. [4]

For almost a month Western media has focused heavily on Kyiv, ignoring much of the fighting talking place elsewhere.

Broadcasters and newspapers wanted to sell a story of the defence of Kyiv, when Russian troops clearly were not trying to take the capital, and for good reason: it would have been their graveyard.

Apart from some fighting in northern suburbs like Obolon, Russian troops never ended the city. It served them better as a distraction while they encircled Donbas. See military update below.

Ukraine’s propagandists, trained among others by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OCSE), failed to get the headline coup they wanted from a Russian attack on the capital — which is possibly why they gave such attention to Bucha.

The narrative fits with the distractions of recent weeks such as the Mariupol theatre, the art school and the maternity hospital which were trumpeted with big headlines and scant evidence, photographic or otherwise.

Ukrainian civilians are suffering terribly, let it be said again. The question is where the fighting is happening and, in some cases, who is killing civilians.

Military update

Russian troops have withdrawn from the capital after sitting outside the gates of Kiev for several weeks. Securing the Dontestk and Lugansk regions remains their prime focus, according to both sides. The AFU says it is holding the west of Lugansk oblast. It is also entrenched to the west of Donetsk oblast where several reports suggest Russian forces are approaching Kramatorsk for the next stage of the conflict.