The frozen conflict: the Crimea region of Ukraine potentially more dangerous for the West than Syria and Iraq.
IT IS THE SECOND anniversary of Russia's annexation of Crimea and the start of war in Ukraine's eastern oblasts. The bitter conflict has pitted neighbour against neighbour, and over 8,000 people on all sides have lost their lives since fighting erupted. As Canadian Press defence reporter Murray Brewster found out during a recent trip to Ukraine, the war is nowhere near as eye-catching and lurid as what's going on in the deserts of eastern Syria and northern Iraq, but it is potentially more dangerous for the West.THE UKRAINIAN ARMY armoured unit that arrived at Warrant Officer Vitaliy Omelchenko's border post near Donetsk in early July 2014 was a mess.
They had a mishmash of kit, poor leadership and--perhaps most significantly for the seasoned border guard--no accurate maps or local contacts. Before long, the 39-year-old was dragooned by the officer in charge to act as a guide.
Omelchenko was invaluable because he'd lived all of his life in the area, and knew every twist, turn and hiding spot along the rural roads. Each forest and field was like the back of his hand. He also knew the fading industrial city of nearly one million people, where boarded up factories and businesses mushroomed in the aftermath of the 2008 world financial crisis.
The commander wanted to patrol down a country road that ran parallel with the Russian border. It was still early days in the conflict and stopping the flow of arms and equipment to Moscow-backed separatists was paramount. Omelchenko told the officer it was a bad idea to proceed without engineers. The soldier didn't listen.
The patrol ran into an anti-tank mine. Omelchenko was riding on the outside of the APC and the explosion blew him 15 metres into a field on the opposite side of the country road.
His wife had no idea he had been pulled so close to the action, and only learned he'd been wounded days after when word came in a telephone call from a relative who started the conversation by saying: "He's alive."
That summer Ukraine was on the brink. The kind of incompetence and ineffectiveness that killed some of the soldiers on that patrol and irrevocably changed Omelchenko's life was rampant. Although many Canadians probably know their troops are training Ukrainian soldiers, many would be shocked at how bad off the country's army was at the outset.
When I sat with him months after the explosion at a shaded rehabilitation centre in the leafy outskirts of Kyiv, Omelchenko seemed resigned, not bitter about his fate.
It was a sad, uncertain time, he said.
Crimea had fallen only months before to Russia and the increasingly disgruntled eastern oblasts of Donetsk and Luhansk erupted in protest and escalated into an armed separatist insurgency.
Being a Ukrainian government employee Omelchenko and his family had been targeted in the weeks leading up to his disastrous patrol. His car had been burned and house vandalized by pro-Russian supporters. Neighbours he had known all of his life treated him and his wife as though they were strangers.
We can debate the political and economic causes of the rebellion until we're blue in the face, but what's rarely appreciated is how the fabric of society in eastern Ukraine has been shredded by the war. The conflict has largely been overshadowed--or perhaps taken for granted--in the western media. Iraq and Syria--with their mind-blowing, ghastly violence--are always more top of mind.
What also isn't appreciated is how close Ukraine came to collapse because its corrupt, inefficient, top-down, Soviet-style army couldn't get itself together in the aftermath of Crimea. Privately, some of NATO's senior leadership will tell you they expected the insurgency to spread to the Dnieper River and the gates of Kyiv by the fall of 2014 and were actively gaming out what that would mean.
It was into that breech that Ukraine's reviled paramilitary battalions stepped and, in many cases, it was a devil's bargain for the new government of President Petra Poroshenko.
What is also not widely understood in Canada, the U.S. and elsewhere in the West outside of military circles is the role those citizen militias--many of them populated with rabid ultra-nationalists and the politically disenfranchised--played in preventing a catastrophic collapse of the country.
In Ukraine, many of them were and are still labelled as heroes. But elsewhere in the world their extremist views have meant a more sinister branding. Some of it has been helped along by Russian propaganda and the sophisticated information warfare being carried out by Vladimir Putin's regime.
Some of them are truly frightening.
Dmytro Korchynsky, a long-time political agitator who founded the St. Mary battalion which fought in Donbass, told Reuters last summer his intent was to create a Christian "Taliban" to reclaim eastern Ukraine as well as Crimea.
Although they express themselves differently, the notion of restoring Ukraine's pre-March 2014 borders run deep among many of the nearly 44 volunteer battalions, almost all of which have been absorbed into the country's Interior Ministry right alongside the national guard, police and intelligence service.
Russian propaganda and western dismay is often focused on the politically charged notion that the battalions, which are considered among some of the most effective infantry units, are populated with neo-Nazis. Some, such as the Azov Regiment, don't do themselves any favours by parading around with Nazi-era symbols either tattooed on themselves or their helmets. They argue the Nazis "appropriated" ancient Slavic symbols, which have been worn for centuries with pride.
Alexander Alferov, a spokesman for the regiment, seemed weary about fending off the claims when we met last summer. He claimed the label was a construct of the international media, which had been bought off by Russia. He wasn't able to explain how that was possible in the western media where heated anti-Putin rhetoric Is served up almost weekly.
It became abundantly clear while interviewing Alferov, a low-key, soft-spoken doctor of Russian and Ukrainian history, that these battalions, regardless of whether they had been absorbed by the official structure--or disbanded--were committed to fighting until every square centimetre of Ukrainian territory is reclaimed. And they would fight whatever the means--conventional or insurgency.
We had a visceral demonstration in November when "anti-Russian activists" sabotaged four power lines running into Crimea and that was followed by a fresh disruption on December 31. In the second Incident, explosives were used.
That is a recipe for the long-term, generational kind of conflict we witnessed in Afghanistan and Iraq. I'm not sure how well understood and appreciated that is in the West.
Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan, in recalibrating Canada's anti-Islamic State mission, talked a lot about getting at the root cause of instability, and preventing countries from becoming failed states. In making those remarks, he was talking about the Middle East and Africa, but he could just as easily been thinking about Ukraine under the right circumstances.
Let's tick the boxes. We have an economy that's in the toilet and entrenched interests fighting reform; rampant corruption with tentative steps towards improving the rule of law; a huge internally displaced population (estimated at 1.4 million in August 2015); a low-grade, Russian-sponsored insurgency in the eastern regions that shows no signs of abating.
The Minsk II process was a start, but it is a fragile arrangement, which some have dubbed the "ceasefire illusion," given how often it is violated. The deal leaves many of the tough political, social and economic questions for later resolution, according to an analysis by the U.S.-based Brookings Institute. Much of what has been done to date is no substitute for a long-term political solution, something no one seems to be talking about, even in the enlightened halls of Canada's new Liberal government.
What makes this potentially more frightening than the Middle East is that the West is dealing with a nuclear-armed Russia, which will in all likelihood never give Crimea. Without some kind of negotiation, somewhere, the people of that region are condemned to a frozen conflict that could last a generation or more.
Ordinary Ukrainians, like Vitaliy Omelchenko, are already wondering what Is to become of them. His concerns are more immediate than altruistic. He conceded he can no longer work as a border guard and will always walk with a cane. Ukrainian officials promised him a desk job, but he said he'll wait and see. At the time we spoke, he hadn't finished his rehabilitation and wouldn't be able to apply for social benefits until then.
Caption: BELOW: A shot of the Maidan in Kyiv, where the anti-government protests took place, (murray brewster)
Caption: ABOVE: Warrant Officer Vitaliy Omelchenko is a veteran border guard stationed near Donetsk, his hometown, which is located near the border with Russia. In July 2014, at the height of the tension between Ukraine and Russia, Omelchenko knew that going down a small country road along the border was a bad idea, (murray brewster)
Caption: ABOVE: Alexander Alferov, a doctor of Russian and Ukrainian history, is a spokesman for the Azov Regiment. It and the nearly 43 other volunteer battalions are committed to fighting until every square centimetre of Ukrainian territory is reclaimed. (Murray brewster)
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| Title Annotation: | PERSPECTIVES |
|---|---|
| Author: | Brewster, Murray |
| Publication: | Esprit de Corps |
| Geographic Code: | 4EXRU |
| Date: | Apr 1, 2016 |
| Words: | 1534 |
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