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Ukraine: West Point Graduate Dies in Botched Attack
The Ukrainian army and the oligarch funded right-wing “national guard” volunteers are not making the progress they claim to make.
On the ground, fighting raged unabated, with Ukraine’s interior minister, Arsen Avakov, asserting that Ukrainian forces had entered the town of Ilovaysk, about 11 miles east of Donetsk, the rebels’ biggest remaining stronghold in eastern Ukraine.
But that attack on Ilovaysk was repelled:
At 22:00, the “soldiers of the Donbas battalion withdrew from battle near Ilovaisk,” the press release stated. Four soldiers of the battalion were killed by militants and the battalion commander Semen Semenchenko was wounded.
One of the dead Donbas fighters was a U.S. citizen:
An American has reportedly become the first foreign casualty on the Ukrainian side of the military conflict against Russian mercenaries and Kremlin-backed forces in eastern Ukraine.
Identified only under his nom de guerre of “Franko”, he reportedly died from heavy artillery fire while trying to free the town of Ilovaisk in Donetsk Oblast on Aug. 19 while serving in the volunteer Donbas Battalion, Liviy Bereg photographer Maks Levin stated on Facebook, citing another photographer, Maks Dondiuk, who has embedded himself in various Ukrainian service units.
…
“There is no way for them to get out of Ilovask,” wrote Levin citing his colleague. He added that two other volunteer battalions, Azov and Dnipro, managed to leave the area earlier in the day.
Three battalions, a brigade equivalent, was repelled by heavy artillery fire from the insurgency side.
The U.S. citizen who died was one Mark Paslavsky
Mark Paslavsky aka @BSpringnote, 55. American who got Ukr citizenship so he could fight in Donbas battlion KIA today pic.twitter.com/EqAyvpFzKg
Paslavski was once interviewed by Vice and he claimed to have once served in a “professional military”. This seems to confirm the claim:
.@WestPoint_USMA cc @USArmy: class of 1981 West Point graduate Mark Paslavsky has been #KIA in #Ukraine fighting against #Russia‘s invasion.
There seems to be little other information available about Paslavski. One wonders what his real name was and how a West Point graduate ended up, at the age of 55, dying in a botched militia attack in east Ukraine.
@demian #58
You said: “Your points are well taken. I’m confused, however, by your saying that “‘white’ Russians still consider most all ex-Soviet citizens to be ‘Russians’ in a generic sense.” White Russians are Russians who fought against the Bolsheviks in the civil war that was fought after the Bolshevik Revolution. Today, they exist almost exclusively as descendants of the first wave of Russian emigration, which occurred after that revolution. Any White Russians who remained in Russia with the end of the civil war in effect turned into Soviet Russians.
So by “White Russians”, I think you mean just “Russians”. Being Russian is a question of cultural identity; there are Ukrainian, Latvian, Estonian,… Russians who are not Russian citizens.
A different distinction is that between Russians and Rossiyani. (The latter term does not exist in English.) Rossiyani are citizens of the Russian Federation. Obviously, they are not necessarily Russian: they can be Tatars, Chechens, etc. This may be tendentious on my part, but I would say that Russia is one of the few successful multiethnic states. Russian culture is obviously the dominant culture in the RF, but the identity of other peoples is recognized and respected. (Obviously, there are limits: if your region gets taken over by Muslim fundamentalists, for example, there will be trouble.)”
Not quite. Yes “White” was one of the factions (the losing one) in the November Revolution, but I think this terminology can safely be discarded now. What I referred to are Russians – those living in the present boundaries of Russia who are (according to their own definition) “white” (as opposed to cherno or asiatic).
Yes, there are absolutely millions of “non-white” Russians living in Russia. It is safe to say, however, that these tend to hold somewhat different views than the “white”, if for no other reason than they don’t like being “little brothers” as opposed to full members of society. From what I can see, however, acting Russian is generally sufficient to be treated Russian, as opposed to the ghettos that exist which are comprised of ethnic ex-Soviet groups like Dagestanis, Tatars, Chechens, etc – although I am equally sure there is all sorts of overt and covert discrimination at least by certain segments of the population. Much like you might see in heterogeneous societies everywhere.
Thus what I refer to as “white” Russian is neither Rossiyani nor Russian in the sense you refer to above. I use the quotation marks because this is not my personal definition – as a fully non-white person, I am constantly amused by what Russians consider “cherno”. For that matter, actually black personages range from “festival children” on towards various other slang monikers even as the cherno term seems to mostly refer to Caucasus ethnicities.
@demian #58
You said: “A basic problem with the Ukraine is that since the Ukrainians (assuming for the sake of the argument that such a people exists) never had their own state, they have no experience with governing a nation which contains multiple ethnicities (not just Russian/Ukrainian, but also Hungarian and Polish). Thus, the current fascist junta can tolerate no ethnicity other than the fictional Ukrainian ethnicity, and wants to Ukrainize all its citizens. This is one of the major problems with the failed state formerly know as the Ukraine, but the Western media completely ignores it. (Noirette did an excellent job of summarizing some economic problems.)”
I would certainly agree with that, but then again, lack of experience and/or skills has never been a barrier to would-be sovereigns before. I’ve noted before, elsewhere that Ukraine contains not just large numbers of ethnic Russians, but smaller yet still significant numbers of Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Moldovans, and so forth. In fact, there are regions even in West Ukraine where Russian isn’t spoken much, nor is Ukrainian.
Then again, what’s at work here isn’t truly ethnicity, competence or even economic opportunity – it is Uncle Sam’s dollar fist enclosed in an Ukrainian junta glove.
Posted by: c1ue | Aug 22 2014 10:42 utc | 65
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