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The “West’s” Dilema After Debaltseve: What To Do About Poroshenko?
Despite the best that has been done by everyone — the gallant fighting of the military and naval forces, the diligence and assiduity of Our servants of the State, and the devoted service of Our one hundred million people — the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage, while the general trends of the world have all turned against her interest.
Emperor Hirohito acknowledging Japan's defeat
The Ukrainian puppet president Poroshenko should have delivered a similar speech. Indeed the war situation in Ukraine has developed not necessarily to his governments advantage. But the speech Proshenko gave (see below) was even more delusional than Hirohito's whitewashing.
Since six days ago several thousand Ukrainian government troops were surrounded in the Debaltsevo pocket. The only road out towards friendly lines was mined and under direct and indirect opposition fire. Several attempts to break out and also into the pocket were defeated with lots of lives and material lost.
Since yesterday and after severe artillery preparations the federalist troops are storming the city. They claim that some 3,000 government troops died there and some 1,000 capitulated (vid) and went into captivity. A few hundred sneaked out at night mostly by foot and today reached the government controlled Artemivsk some 30 kilometers to the north of Debaltsevo. Others fled south away from their own lines and deeper into the pocket. They will be mopped up in due time. Huge amounts of weapons and ammunition was left behind for the federalists to pic up. Reporters in Artemivsk observed some 40-50 dead and some 200 wounded arriving. These were, reporters said, mostly casualties of the escape under fire, not of the earlier fights in Debaltseve. Those who made it out alive are in seriously angry about their higher-ups.
The Minsk-2 meeting was urgently arranged by the German chancellor Merkel when the situation around Debaltsevo deteriorated. But during the negotiations in Minsk Poroshenko insisted that there was no pocket and that his troops were in total control of the situation. The French president Hollande tried to explain the real situation to him but to no avail.
The ceasefire was arranged but the Debaltsevo pocket was not mentioned in the protocols. The federalists reasonably concluded that the pocket was within their acknowledged lines and could be eliminated without breaking the general agreed upon ceasefire. Over the last days we have heard very little protest against this move from the "western" side. Was there a silent agreement to make Poroshenko eat his necktie over the issue like his new adviser Saakashvili once did?
Now the above is the reality. And here is Proshenko's delusional version delivered in a speech today:
I can inform now that this morning the Armed Forces of Ukraine together with the National Guard completed the operation on the planned and organized withdrawal of a part of units from Debaltseve. We can say that 80% of troops have been already withdrawn. We are waiting for two more columns. Warriors of the 128th brigade, parts of units of the 30th brigade, the rest of the 25th and the 40th battalions, Special Forces, the National Guard and the police have already left the area.
…
We were asserting and proved: Debaltseve was under our control, there was no encirclement, and our troops left the area in a planned and organized manner with all the heavy weaponry: tanks, APCs, self-propelled artillery and vehicles.
…
It is a strong evidence of combat readiness of the Armed Forces and efficiency of the military command. I can say that despite tough artillery and MLRS shelling, according to the recent data, we have 30 wounded out of more than 2,000 warriors.
Many "western" journalist are no streaming into Debaltsevo and their will soon be reports about the real disaster and the real losses the Ukrainian government troops had there. Those will be hard to hide.
It will then be difficult for the "west" to continue working with Poroshenko. He has now been shown to be completely off his rockers. He can no longer be sold to the public as the bearer of the truth, the sincere white knight against the dark forces of Russia.
How will the "west", Obama and his neoconned State Department react to that? Will they prepare a coup against Poroshenko or do they have other means to get rid of their useless puppet or to save the situation?
Now back to our irregular, unscheduled postings.
J. Hawk’s commentaries on If not Poroshenko, who? and Semenchenko announces “Volunteer Movement Coordinating HQ” suggest that Poroshenko remains a useful, viable figurehead. He will be kept, but stripped of what little power he holds. The classic “good tsar, bad boyars” line, no? No tsk, tsk’ing from my fellow Westerners. Good king, bad advisors a staple here do. See present incumbent of the White House — well, so thought in some quarters.
Semenchenko’s shadow General Staff is a rival to Yarosh and Pravyi Sektor’s earlier, similar creation. Hawk says of Semenchenko’s new formation, “The objective is not to overthrow Poroshenko. That would be overly provocative to the West. Instead, the objective is to purge the people close to him (they are the ones who are “worse than the FSB”), weaken all other state institutions, and usurp their authority. A revolution from within.”
The article on possible successors has Biletsky, of the Azov Brigade, as a strong contender. Their recent walkabout outside of Mariupol burnished their reputation, at least in pro-regime circles, it seems. The authors, Yekaterina Roshuk and Petr Terentyev, suggest that he owes more to his patron, Avakov, Minister of the Interior (and in control of the police) than to other leaders, and that Avakov is distancing himself from the Maidan activists, with ambitions of his own.
They would discourage this, as they conclude:
Nothing good would come from an early departure of Poroshenko, rather the opposite—it would deepen the country’s political crisis. After all, it can’t be taken for granted that the world community recognizes the coup and the new government. It would mean the end of economic and political cooperation.
For all his weak spots, Poroshenko’s strong spot is his predictability. Moreover, he is someone who is acceptable to both Russia and the West.
The president and his team ought to work on their mistakes and prevent unrest in the country. Rocking the boat in various directions may lead to it sinking.
Hawk agrees. “The commentary at the end of the article is spot on. An outright Nazi takeover of Ukraine would be hard for the West to accept, and it would greatly strengthen Russia’s international position. Therefore the more likely outcome is that Poroshenko will stay on, diabetes and all, but most of the decisionmaking will devolve to someone else. Who that someone else will be is another question.” And, how they obtain that preeminence, as well.
Posted by: rufus magister | Feb 21 2015 3:39 utc | 163
D at 174 — Coups are not really that hard to execute. See Edward Luttwak’s handy guide, Coup d’État: A Practical Handbook (1968). I read it long ago, bought the re-issue a no. of years back. You’d think there’d be a “how-to” course, at least for intelligence officers.
I knew it would come to this, damn it.
Here’s Democracy Now’s transcript of their interview with Stephen Cohen (funding no doubt provided by General Dynamics and Koch Industries). I posted it before, but it seems like guest77 and I were the only people who actually read it and/or watched it.
Many people have argued that the United States organized a coup in February to overthrow the president of Ukraine and bring to power of this new pro-American, pro-Western government. I do not know if that’s true. But what Obama said leads people to think that’s what he was acknowledging. He wasn’t.
The transcript includes Obamas’s statement. If you parse closely the segment on the coup, it is clear. Cohen doesn’t say it’s not a coup, nor even that it was not American-ordered (“American inspired” I think is fairest). Only that we do not know this with absolute certainty (true), and what some took as Obama’s admission of involvement was not so.
Let’s take a good look at what else Cohen had to say, one can see if he’s pure and perfect enough for one’s own exalted and indisputably correct standards of enlightenment. Emphasis added throughout is mine.
Five million people, approximately, live in this area of eastern Ukraine. They’ve lived there for centuries. Their grandfathers, their parents are buried there. Their children go to school there. That is their home. Do they have no humanity or agency? [he’s gettin’ “pwogwessive” academics were they live with that one – rm] We’ve taken — not I, but the main press in this country is referring to them as “Putin’s thugs.” Where is the humanity of these people who are dying, now nearly 6,000 of them? A million have been turned into refugees. These are people there.
Who’s doing the fighting? Primarily, the folks, the adults, of these people. Have they had Russian assistance? Absolutely. Has Kiev had Western assistance? Billions of dollars…. Both sides are involved militarily. But make no mistake: If there was not an indigenous rebellion in eastern Ukraine, there would not be a Ukrainian civil war. Is Putin abetting the east? Yes. Are we abetting the west and Kiev? Yes….
Now, you referred to me as emeritus. That means old. That means I remember things. And I remember that when we hit these kind of Cold War extremes back during the last Cold War, people spoke out in opposition in this country, not only folks like the three of us, ordinary folks, but I’m talking about senators, members of Congress — even the administration was divided — The New York Times, The Washington Post. We have the silence of the hawks now. The American war party is on the march. You can see how close we are to, literally, a military confrontation with Russia. And there is not one word of establishment, mainstream opposition in this country.
So, is this good or bad? Do we go to war? Did we have a debate before we invaded Iraq? We did. And those of us who opposed it lost the debate. But we had a debate. That “democracy now,” not today, not in the United States. There is no debate whatsoever. So, the danger is great. There is no opposition. All these people you’re showing — Strobe Talbott [a venerated fount of received wisdom on Russia, rm], General Hodges, anybody else you put on the screen, because only they speak to the American people — they’re on the march….
How to get out of it? It’s the same solution we talked about here on this broadcast months ago: a ceasefire; withdrawal of artillery so the cities of Donetsk, where the rebels are, are not being bombarded; Kiev’s willingness to sit down, at a table about this size, under the auspices of the great powers, and talk to the rebels. What home rule will they be given? Some kind of federalism, some kind of devolution of authority….
But you know how you get this? You get it through leadership. Where’s the leadership? Where’s President Obama? Where’s Chancellor Merkel? And the leadership in Ukraine — I mean, Poroshenko, he’s the president of the country. He has no power. He has no power. He’s not the leader. The power is with the people in Ukraine who control the fighting battalions and what’s left of the army. So, we don’t even know what kind of regime or leadership is possible in Kiev now.
And this was two weeks ago, before Debaltsevo. Sounds exactly like what they want us to hear inside the Beltway, right? He may be overstating the “debate” before Iraq, but even that minimal consideration has been dispensed with now.
Of course, it doesn’t go far enough. Mozgovoy’s sort of social revolution, over all of the Ukraine, would be a good start. But I’d settle for an independent People’s Novorossiya with Odessa, Kharkov, Mariupol and Dneprpetrovsk. FWIW. Though I dare say the immediate priority has to be humanitarian assistance to the survivors within the war zone.
and ps — he’s been involved with Katrina van den Heuval of The Nation since at least the mid-eighties. I spotted them at the AAASS convention, she is a striking woman, I thought, and a number of years his junior, I think. You seem to have changed since you chided me a no. of months ago for calling him a “bourgeois academic.”
Posted by: rufus magister | Feb 22 2015 7:47 utc | 178
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