Unchain Ukraine

Peter Brookes cartoon


The Ukranian President, Petro Poroshenko, has issued a statement claiming that 9,000 Russian troops and 500 tanks are on his country's soil, in a flagrant breach of international law.

In the past the Russians have not denied these claims, saying in response that these troops are not there officially as soldiers but as 'volunteers' who have taken leave of absence or holidays to support Russian speaking separatists in the east of Ukraine.  

Lies and nonsense, of course, because in every other army in the world soldiers can only leave their post with the permission of a commanding officer and when did you ever hear of soldiers going on 'holiday' accompanied by weapons of war.  

Having a Laugh (31 August 2014)


I came across the following reasons offered up by Russia by way of explanation as to why many members of the Russian armed forces (plus equipment) have found their way into Ukraine in recent weeks. 

The one that takes the biscuit for me is that Russian soldiers in the Ukraine are supposedly 'on holiday', as if they are free to wander away  from their barracks with their weapons and equipment in tow - and their commanding officers have nothing to say.

Now no army in the world operates that way, not even the Red Army.  

1. They were volunteers

"There are Russian volunteers in eastern parts of Ukraine. No one is hiding that."

Russia’s ambassador to the UN, Vitaly Churkin

2. They are from video games

Russia’s foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, commenting on reports about the satellite images on Friday said previous imagery was from video games and the Nato photos “happen to be much the same quality”.

“It’s not the first time we’ve heard wild guesses, though facts have never been presented so far,” he said according to Russia Today.

3. It was an aid convoy

Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko accused Russia of a “flagrant violation of international law” when its aid convoys entered Ukraine without its permission, the BBC reports.

4. It was an accident

After Ukraine said they had captured ten Russian soldiers in Ukraine, near the Russian border, Russian officials said the whole thing was a misunderstanding, reports the BBC.

The soldiers really did participate in a patrol of a section of the Russian-Ukrainian border, crossed it by accident on an unmarked section, and as far as we understand showed no resistance to the armed forces of Ukraine when they were detained.

Russian defence ministry source to Russian news agency RIA Novosti

5. They were on holiday

Pro-Russian separatist Alexander Zakharchenko claimed Russian soldiers in Ukraine were just “on holiday", the Guardian reports.


"And moreover, I’ll say it openly, we also have current soldiers, who decided to take their holidays not on the beach, but among us."

Alexander Zakharchenko

Self-Determination (8 September 2014)

While the Guardian's comment editor, Seumas Milne, continues to peddle his bizarre Soviet era politics in the opinion pages, the newspaper's real journalists are filing their reports from the front line which tell a very different story to the role of the Russian army in Ukraine. 

Ukraine is the second 'independent' country from the old Soviet Union bloc to strengthen its links with the political culture and outlook of the west, but as happened recently in Georgia as well, the right to self-determination is presented as a threat to Russia's national interest and results in military force. 

How strange that the 'west', in Scotland for example, we can deal with these issues in a peaceful and civilised way while in the east of Ukraine they result in a great loss of life, huge destruction and terrible incidents like the shooting down of Flight MH-17. 

Russian soldier: 'You're better clueless because the truth is horrible'

Despite Moscow denials, Ukrainian troops give accounts of fighting Russian army in Ilovaysk outside Donetsk

By Shaun Walker and Oksana Grytsenko in Komsomolske, Leonid Ragozin in Moscow - The Guardian

Ukrainian servicemen rest in a school building in the devastated eastern Ukrainian town of Ilovaysk near Donetsk. Photograph: Stringer/REUTERS

Bloodied, dirty and stinking, the Ukrainian soldiers who passed through the town of Komsomolske on Saturday morning made for a sorry sight. But they were the lucky ones, who had managed to escape alive from an assault they say involved regular units of the Russian army.

Having fled from encirclement in the town of Ilovaysk, their column of 70 armoured vehicles and hundreds of soldiers was ambushed and shelled, according to one soldier. "Our vehicles were colliding with one another and our tracks were running over our own fighters," said Taras Samchuk, 28, whose 51st brigade was one of the units surrounded.

Many died, some were captured, and about 100 soldiers survived, often "with legs broken or smashed, with shrapnel in our hands, legs, bodies, with smashed teeth and broken noses", he said.

Two weeks ago, Ukraine looked as if it was winning its battle against Russia-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine, but the tide has turned in recent days, with the encirclement at Ilovaysk a key moment. Samchuk, like many Ukrainian fighters, said there is only one reason for this. Instead of fighting a ragtag group of rebels, the Ukrainians have suddenly found themselves fighting the regular Russian army.

Samchuk, who worked as a barman in the western Ukrainian city of Lutsk before being recruited to the army, said he and his comrades rescued a Russian in an armoured vehicle they destroyed near the town. "He told us he served in 8th Chechen brigade [possibly the 8th mountain motor-rifle brigade, based in Chechnya] and he claimed he thought they were sent here for exercises," Samchuk said, adding that the soldier was now being treated in a Kiev hospital.

Nobody knows how many Ukrainians died in Ilovaysk, but the battle for the small town outside Donetsk is likely to go down as one of the defining moments of the conflict. Some were killed in the intense exchanges of shelling in a battle for the town that lasted a week, while others were picked off as they fled, and many more were taken prisoner – more than 500, according to the Ukrainian official in charge of prisoner swaps. In one video released by rebels, a group of captive Ukrainians from volunteer battalions are forced to jump up and down at gunpoint by rebel commanders, reciting derogatory rhymes.

Russia has flatly denied any of its troops are operating in Ukraine, claiming a group of paratroopers captured by Ukrainians deep inside their territory were on a border patrol mission and crossed "accidentally". President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly said that Russia is not party to the "internal Ukrainian conflict". But the evidence is mounting that an impending rebel defeat pushed Moscow to intervene more overtly in the past two weeks. There have been repeated sightings of Russian army ration packaging and of "green men" without insignia similar to those who took part in the annexation of Crimea, as well as satellite images which, Nato claims, show Russian armour inside Ukraine.

A video posted on YouTube this week showed a huge armoured column that appeared to be Russian moving well inside Ukrainian territory. Inside Russia, a regional newspaper has published a long transcript of what it alleges to be recorded conversations with two servicemen of the 76th Pskov airborne division who returned from Ukraine. In their answers, the soldiers relate the story of a company that was almost completely annihilated by Ukrainian artillery. The men say only 10 out of between 80 and 100 from the company survived the shelling.

Lev Schlossberg, a local Pskov politician who obtained the tapes, told the Guardian the soldiers were Russian servicemen but said he could not reveal the identities of the three men or explain how he got hold of the recordings. Schlossberg is recovering from a beating he links to his inquiries about the fate of Pskov soldiers. He said military authorities are coercing relatives of soldiers believed to be in Ukraine into silence, and only a handful are willing to talk.

The Committee of Soldiers' Mothers, a rights organisation, claims up to 15,000 soldiers have been sent over the border in recent weeks. The newspaper Novoya Gazeta published an interview with the mother of 20-year-old sapper Vadim Tumanov, alongside a photograph of an official notice informing the local military commissar of his death.

The last time she heard from her son, he told her he was near the Ukrainian border and "going to war".

The Guardian has found the social network account of a soldier who appears to be fighting in Ukraine. In a post on the Russian Vkontakte network, dated 31 August, Kirill Zdrok from Nizhny Novgorod said he was determined to fight on out of a sense of duty to his fallen comrades. "You know, I will stay here. I cannot sit idly and watch our guys being taken home as Cargo-200s [a Soviet codeword for coffins] … One day you say hello, talk to them, laugh with them, then the next day you find out it's all over – they are no longer alive, heading home in a metal box." He appears frustrated by the secrecy surrounding his mission and his close friends have no idea what is going on.

"You won't see it on TV, hear it on radio or read it in newspapers. You won't find anything on the internet that explains what is really happening where we are now. Honestly, you're better clueless, because the truth is horrible", Zdrok wrote in a post dated 26 August. He had earlier posted a newspaper article about Russian casualties on the border with Ukraine, remarking that they were reconnaissance soldiers from his 9th motor-rifle brigade, based in Nizhny Novgorod.

Semyon Semenchenko, commander of the Ukrainian Donbass volunteer battalion, earlier claimed the 9th brigade was one of the two Russian units that encircled his men at Ilovaysk. The leader of the Donetsk rebels has admitted there are Russian soldiers in the region but says they are not there on orders of the Russian army but "on holiday".

Having routed the Ukrainians at Ilovaysk and taken back other strategic sites such as Luhansk airport and the coastal town of Novoazovsk, regular Russian soldiers have evaporated from view. Days after the surrender of Ilovaysk, the territory between Donetsk and the port of Mariupol is now an eerie no man's land, dotted with burned-out vehicles and the remains of Ukrainian army checkpoints.

The rebels have slowly advanced down the road, though only in small groups. In the town of Telmanove on Tuesday afternoon, a group of seven rebels, dressed in T-shirts and camouflage trousers, were busy using a digger to move concrete blocks into place to form a checkpoint. There was no other sign of the rebels, and certainly no sign of any Russian soldiers, although further up the road two armoured vehicles were spotted driving along dirt tracks, apparently under rebel control.

It is unclear whether the rebels will heed Putin's appeal to stop their advance. In Mariupol, the presumed next rebel target, the Kiev-appointed regional governor, Serhiy Taruta, promised that the city would be defended if the rebels attempted to take it, and said the Russian regular invasion had completely changed the game in eastern Ukraine.

"Without the troops and armour sent over the border, we would have taken back Donetsk by the end of August," he said.

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