Three commentaries from the Washington Post and The Guardian are enclosed.
1. Downing of Flight 17 should trigger talks, not more violence
By Katrina vanden Heuvel, July 22, 2014, published in the Washington Post, July 22, 2014
The violence in eastern Ukraine has now claimed more innocent victims, with 298 dead in the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. Children, scientists headed to an AIDS conference, families on vacation — their deaths add to the hundreds of civilian casualties and tens of thousands of refugees victimized by the spreading conflict, which the Kiev government is now escalating.
The shooting of a civilian airliner is clearly a tragic mistake that no one wants to own, but that comes all too often in war zones. Currently, the Dutch government —193 of its citizens perished in the crash — said it “would hold off assigning blame as it pursues its top priorities of recovering the victims’ bodies and conducting an independent investigation of the crash site in eastern Ukraine.”
However, in the United States, the tragedy has triggered a ferocious chorus of media and political condemnation of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. Putin is called the “puppet master” or worse, with commentators asserting that he can end the war at will. The separatist militias in the east are scorned as Moscow’s pawns. The Kiev government’s bombing of its own cities and people is treated as a necessary response to Russian provocation.
All this ignores the context of this crisis and worse seems designed to fan the flames of the conflict. Already the United States has imposed new sanctions on Russia and is pushing its reluctant European allies to join. The Russians have responded with sanctions of their own. The Ukrainian government’s attacks in the eastern regions continue, with U.S. aid and involvement certain to increase.
But rather than a trigger for new violence, surely the deaths of the innocents ought to be the occasion for a cease-fire and a renewal of talks. The core elements of any settlement would include:
1. An end to the violence. The German, French and Russian governments all urged Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko to extend a cease-fire in June. His government terminated the cease-fire and chose instead to resume military assaults on separatist forces. Surely, in the wake of this tragedy, all should push urgently for a cease-fire, not merely to recover the victims, but to open the way for broader discussions and bring an end to the Kiev government’s attacks on cities that have created a humanitarian crisis.
2. Ukraine must remain an independent and unified country. It is dramatically and historically divided by language, culture and political orientation. The western provinces are largely Catholic, speak Ukrainian and look to Europe and the United States. The eastern provinces are largely Russian-speaking, Russian Orthodox in religion and look to Russia.
Any attempt by either wing of this country to impose its will is destabilizing. The effort last November by the West to expand its economic and military sphere of influence to include Ukraine, forcing the Ukrainian government to choose between Europe and Moscow, triggered the current crisis. The question now is how to move to a peaceful settlement that keeps Ukraine intact and independent. That surely requires the United States, its European allies and the Russians to join in talks with the Ukrainian government and representatives of the eastern region to create a federated or decentralized union that provides guarantees on religion, language and culture. Both Russia and the United States will have to twist the arms of their allies to make this happen.
3. Ukraine can prosper only as a bridge between Russia and the West, not as an outpost of either side. This formulation by Henry Kissinger is clearly right. The West simply will not go to war with Russia to defend Ukraine, so it should not be part of the NATO alliance. The West will not provide Ukraine with tens of billions of dollars in subsidies, as Russia has, so it will not fare well without good relations with the Russians. Indeed, if Ukraine has any chance of recovery, economic relations and assistance from both the West and Russia will be necessary.
In short, the best model for Ukraine is something like modern Finland — fiercely independent, but carefully attuned to the sensitivities of its large neighbor.
It is time to lower voices and halt the bellicose posturing. The hawkish clamor for more escalation, for sending arms, putting NATO on alert or dispatching troops to neighboring countries is as wrong-headed as calls for making or escalating war in Syria, Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan. The rising nationalist fervor being stoked by Russia’s leaders can only impede a sensible settlement. The Kiev government’s “anti-terrorist” campaign against its own citizens, virtually unreported in the U.S. media, can only deepen the humanitarian catastrophe in southeastern Ukraine. Too many have already died. It is time for a cease-fire, for negotiations to find a sensible settlement, and for reasoned voices to take the place of escalating violence.
Katrina vanden Heuvel writes a weekly column for the Washington Post and is the editor and publisher of The Nation.
2. Punishing Russia for the MH17 tragedy will not help Ukraine
By Oliver Bullough, The Guardian, July 20, 2014
Until Thursday, the world was ready to let Ukraine fail: hollowed out by corruption, dismembered by Russia, given up on by western countries. The downing of flight MH17 has changed that.
Visitors can be forgiven for not realising quite how wrecked Ukraine is. Kiev has all the car showrooms, restaurants and elegant architecture of a European capital, but last year Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index rated Ukraine 144th in the world, level with the Central African Republic.
Ukraine’s orgy of kleptocracy reached its riotous peak under Viktor Yanukovych, leaving the country incapable of defending itself, or even of holding itself together. Tax officials trying to make sense of Yanukovych’s greed estimate that around £18bn a year was stolen from Ukraine’s coffers under his rule – almost a fifth of gross domestic product. No country can survive that.
Washington and the European Union are rightly punishing Russia for undermining Ukraine. Since the destruction of MH17, western anger at Russia’s actions has gained a harder edge, particularly while its proxies in eastern Ukraine blocked access to the wreckage. New sanctions are just a matter of time.
That will not help Ukraine. To do so we have to examine our own actions as much as we examine Russia’s. Without western bank accounts and shell companies, Ukraine’s leaders could never have undermined their country the way they did.
Yanukovych’s Sukholuchya hunting lodge, set in a forest that he privatised via a murky process that appears to have been illegal, was owned via a shell company registered on Harley Street. That fact alone should embarrass every British policymaker, but has gone largely unremarked. Dmitry Firtash, a billionaire who made a fortune as an unnecessary intermediary in the Russian-Ukraine gas trade, met the Duke of Edinburgh in the autumn, and was welcomed as a donor by Cambridge University. He is now on bail in Austria, fighting extradition on US bribery charges.
Our banks, lawyers and others have enthusiastically laundered the proceeds of Ukraine’s looting. Anti-money laundering regulations are supposed to oblige our banks and other institutions to check whether such money is legally obtained, but there are few signs that is being done. Yes, we have frozen millions of pounds in bank accounts linked to the old regime, but why did we wait till Yanukovych had fallen before doing it?
There are many reasons for Ukraine’s corruption: low wages; excessive regulations; reliance on Russian gas; murky government spending; crooked judges. These are Ukrainians’ problems to solve. As a doctor there told me recently: “The west cannot do our homework for us.”
But people do not steal things if they cannot keep them, and Ukrainian officials have for too long enjoyed ownership rights in the west, while denying those same rights to their own citizens.
My doctor friend earns £180 a month. He has £1.8m worth of machines in his intensive care unit, but no money to maintain them. Either they break and his patients die, or he takes bribes to maintain the equipment, and they live. He can be a doctor, or obey the law, but he cannot do both.
Ukraine is not a poor country; it’s just that the money that should be maintaining his equipment – and equipping Ukraine’s army, and guarding its borders, and so on and so on – has been spent in our shops. Ukrainians’ loss has been westerners’ gain.
The price of Ukraine’s disintegration was already too high before 298 people got blown out of the sky. The tragedy of MH17 should make us realise how complicit we are in creating the circumstances that allowed it to happen.
Oliver Bullough was a Reuters Moscow correspondent, and is now Caucasus Editor for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting. His book Let Our Fame Be Great: Journeys Among the Defiant People of the Caucasus is published by Penguin.
3. MH17 and its aftermath: ‘ordinary Russians are horrified and frightened’
By Natalia Antonova, The Guardian, July 19, 2014
‘So will the Americans attack us now?” At my dentist’s surgery in Moscow I am used to being the one nervously asking questions. Yet on the day after flight MH17 was brought down, everyone here – including my dentist, the receptionist and the guy fixing the receptionist’s computer – wants me to tell them what will happen next. “You’re a journalist. You probably know something we don’t know,” says the receptionist. “And I don’t trust the television,” says the receptionist.
In the aftermath of the horrific crash that took the lives of nearly 300 people, from here it looks as if it’s turned a local conflict into a tragedy of global proportions. As the popular political observer Konstantin von Eggert noted in the Kommersant daily newspaper: “It won’t be [the rebels] paying the price, it will be the Kremlin. Because it is Moscow, in spite of many denials issued by representatives, that is believed by the entire world to be [the rebels’] chief sponsor and protector.”
Ordinary Muscovites, meanwhile, are expressing horror at the tragedy even as they entertain some of the wildest conspiracies imaginable. My dentist, Dmitry, has served in the military, and professes scorn for the rebels, whom he refers to as “undisciplined morons”. At the same time, he says there is “another side” to the disaster. “Who benefits from portraying Russia as the monster? The Americans do,” he says. “They want to go to war with the whole world.”
At my local home improvement store, the young manager Vitaly launches into a tirade about how “there is an information war on” and that the US has every capability to frame “either Russia or the rebels.” But he, too, has tremendous disdain for the separatists. “I don’t even know what their goals are. It all seems pointless,” he says. “They’re trying to drag Russia into world war three. Fuck them.”
A curious mixture of conspiracy theory and criticism for the separatists comes up almost every time I strike up a conversation on the fate of flight MH17. “Even if they didn’t bring down the plane, I have no sympathy for these whackjobs,” Konstantin, a man in late middle age who describes himself as “retired military”, tells me as we queue up at the grocery store.
“Separatists mean too much liability – every good tactician will tell you that,” Konstantin says confidently. Like many Russians, he believes that the new Ukrainian government is virulently anti-Russian, pro-western, and corrupt. Still, he doesn’t think that Russia should have taken the “political risk” of supporting the rebels.
For Maria, a woman in her thirties who says she works on the radio, the MH17 disaster has invoked “feelings of a coming apocalypse. It’s bad enough that all of these people are dead,” Maria says. “But what if the war gets worse and more people die? How far will all of this go?”
In stark contrast to western tabloid headlines which speak of “Putin’s missile” and “Putin’s victims,” most of the people I talk to in Moscow stop short of directly blaming the Russian president for the disaster. This is a lot to do with how Russia’s involvement in east Ukraine is perceived to be chaotic and half-hearted to begin with. Unlike the annexation of Crimea, which saw well-trained Russian troops take control of the situation immediately, east Ukraine is a murky misadventure at best.
“The idea that the rebels are reporting directly to Putin is just funny,” Konstantin says.”I don’t even know if there is any kind of established chain of command over there.”
Vitaly is more strident, calling east Ukraine a “failure” from the start, and blaming Putin’s advisers for “not advising properly.” Vitaly doesn’t understand how the president, whom he credits with lifting Russia “from its knees” after the turbulent 1990s, could have wanted to get involved in east Ukraine – unless “the facts were distorted for him”.
Even among strong critics of Putin, there is the sense that the Russian president himself could not have seen it coming. “I never voted [for Putin], he’s not my guy, and I don’t agree with where he’s steering the country,” Yekaterina, a pensioner neighbour , tells me. “But this absolute horror, this shocking tragedy – I can’t imagine he wanted that.”
“Few people want to directly blame Putin,” Maria says. “It makes sense. Russia has improved, but it’s still a chaotic country. It’s important for people to believe in least one person. And you can’t discount the fact that the Ukrainian leadership isn’t 100% trustworthy.”
One would think that in a country where disasters frequently occur due to lack of accountability and poor judgment, more people would be willing to accept that what happened to MH17 was likely a mistake, almost banal in its horror. But for many Muscovites, the notion that some sort of conspiracy is nevertheless at work seems almost comforting, like a drug. Both television and online trolls are eager to provide more quantities of the drug at this time, by highlighting both outlandish theories that crash victims “may have been dead for weeks” and more mundane speculations of the Ukrainian armed forces trying to cover up the real cause of the disaster. “It’s very hard for me to accept that this is all just someone’s mistake,” Vitaly tells me. “I don’t know if I can do that.”
None of this prevents people from identifying with the victims of MH17. “There were many children, I heard,” Konstantin says. “Kids that probably never even heard of Ukraine, or the war, or anything like that. The innocents always suffer.”
Natalia Antonova is a Moscow playwright and journalist.
