Wednesday, May 14, 2014

Ukraine SITREP May 14th, 14:14 UTC/Zulu: from tragedy to farce

Short news highlights:
This last news item made me smile because of something the Banderastan's junta probably did not realize: there is a sweet irony in the fact that helicopters allocated to missions in Africa are now operating in Banderastan.

[note on terminology:  I call "the Ukraine" the state which existed for 22 years;  I call "Banderastan" the ugly little neo-Nazi statelet which the junta is trying to built on the rump-Ukraine].

The latest "sort of development" is that the OSCE's roadmap has been accepted by all parties, at least according to the OSCE.  "Iats" clearly feels otherwise.  The plan is pretty minimalistic and obvious: it calls on all sides to refrain from violence, urges disarmament of illegal armed groups, amnesty and national dialogue on decentralization and elections.  There are, of course, two major problems with that:

1) The junta does not want to talk to the Donbass resistance at all, while the latter does not want to talk to the junta as long as the junta does not withdraw all of its repression forces from the Donbass.

2) All the junta needs to do to bypass its obligations under the OSCE roadmap is to declare any paramilitary death-squad as legal as it has already done with the so-called "National guard" or the "Dniper special battalion".  And since the junta has appointed various oligarchs as "governors" all these oligarchs have to do to legalize their own, personal, death-squads is to also declare them legal like, for instance, the "Donbass Volunteer Battalion" of Kolomoiski.

So while this OSCE initiative is reasonable, the US-backed junta still seems to be in a state of deep denial about the severity of the crisis it is facing.  As for the US, suffice to say that the Vice-President is more interested in putting his offspring in control of Banderastani's gas than to deal with the mess the Obama administration has created.

Frankly, the Ukrainian tragedy is now turning into a farce.

Take for example the upcoming Presidential elections: they are going to be held in a country plunged into a Somalia-like chaos, they will be managed by neo-Nazis and they will either nominally include the participation of two parties about to be banned (Communists and Party of Regions) or, even worse, they will be held after the ban of these parties.  And since Crimea and the Donbass will not vote at all, the outcome obvious: the "victory" of an oligarch backed by neo-Nazis and Mafia clans internally, and by the USA and its propaganda machine (a la Amnesty International) externally.  Last, but not least, the Ukrainians will be voting for a President whose actual powers have yet to be defined by a Constitution which will be adopted only after the Presidential elections. 

Even in Africa they would be embarrassed by such a brazen parody of an election, but apparently not in Washington, DC.

The Saker