The Russians Are Coming, Again
Vladimir Putin violates another peace deal with Ukraine.
May 28, 2015 6:56 p.m. ET
Russian soldiers guard a Ukrainian military base in March 2014. Photo: © Stanislav Krasilnikov/ITAR-TASS/ZUMA PRESS So much for February’s Ukraine cease-fire. Russian proxies on Saturday shelled Avdiyivka, a town in eastern Ukraine held by the Kiev government, killing a Ukrainian service member and a civilian in an attack that also shut down a coke-manufacturing plant. On Sunday pro-Kremlin forces fired on Ukrainian positions near the port of Mariupol, killing a Ukrainian soldier and wounding two.
These are the latest in a growing series of Russian violations of the so-called Minsk II deal between Vladimir Putin and Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko, brokered by François Hollande and Angela Merkel. Main features of that deal included a Russian commitment to remove all “mercenaries” and heavy weapons from the east and creation of a buffer zone between territory controlled by Kiev and that held by pro-Kremlin forces.
Prospects for that deal were never good given that its predecessor, Minsk I, collapsed soon after it was signed in 2014. February’s pact also deferred to the end of 2015 the all-important question of securing Ukraine’s border. Sure enough, as a senior Western diplomat told us Thursday: “The familiar pattern is recurring. Russia makes high-level assurances that it wants peace, and meanwhile stokes the violence on the ground with fighters and arms.”
That stoking is happening on a grand scale. Kiev now documents between 50 and 80 Russian cease-fire violations per day, according to Alexey Makukhin, an adviser to Ukraine’s Defense Minister, ranging from minor provocations to heavy shelling. Mr. Putin’s proxies are using heavy weapons ostensibly banned by Minsk II, including tanks and high-caliber artillery, in addition to mortars, grenade launchers, heavy machine guns and assault rifles. Fighting is now happening along a long front from Stanytsia-Luhanska and Shchastya in the Luhansk region, through the Donetsk region and the towns surrounding what remains of Donetsk Airport, down to Mariupol and its environs on the Sea of Azov.
Russian special-forces operatives also are infiltrating Ukrainian territory. Kiev forces detained two such operatives on May 16 near Shchastya, Mr. Makukhin told us, as they attempted to conduct reconnaissance on the local power station in preparation for its eventual capture. The plan was foiled.
A new report from the Atlantic Council sheds additional light on Moscow’s post-Minsk provocations. Using open-source information and satellite imagery, the report makes clear that Russia continues to amass troops on its border with Ukraine and that “Russian training camps stationed along the Ukrainian border are the staging ground for Russian military equipment transported into Ukraine, soon to join the separatist arsenal, and for Russian soldiers mobilized across Russian to cross into Ukraine.”
As happened with Minsk I, the Kremlin has used negotiations followed by a period of supposed cease-fire to change the facts on the ground while Western leaders congratulate themselves on their latest “solution” to the crisis. Those facts include what can only be described as an invasion of sovereign Ukrainian territory in Europe.
A serious Western response to Russian violations would include arms sales to Kiev so Ukraine could raise the cost of Russian incursions. Then again, serious Western leaders would have taken Mr. Putin’s measure before the Minsk deals started becoming as numerous, and as bad, as “Fast & Furious” sequels.
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