Farewell To Minsk?

On February 12th (12/2/15) the leaders of France, Germany and Russia along with the Ukrainian government in Kiev agreed a deal in Minsk, Belarus intended to bring an end to what has now been a year of fighting in Ukraine.

Rather then being a simple ceasefire the Minsk agreement - which was originally signed in September 2014 but not acted on - is much more of a comprehensive peace process that begins by freezing the fighting before establishing a political framework to end the internal conflict.

Generally the ceasefire portion of the Minsk agreement has be very successful. There have though been  a few small problems. The main one of these has concerned the city of Debaltseve in the eastern province of Donetsk. 

Despite being surrounded by rebel forces and sitting some 70km (42 miles) beyond the ceasefire line the Kiev forces in the city refused to withdraw in the hope of using it as an excuse to carve out a 700km^2 (420 m^2) chunk of rebel territory. This was very much against the spirit of the agreement and eventually the rebels had to force the Kiev troops to withdraw. There has been a similar problem around the Donetsk City where Kiev forces have been failing to accept that the city is part of rebel territory.

Although I think these problems need to stop I would consider the Minsk agreement to be holding given the circumstances. Despite the way it has been portrayed in the west the conflict in Ukraine is not a symmetrical war with Ukrainian troops on one side and Russian troops on the other. 

Instead it is an internal, civil conflict being fought between disparate militias of the sort seen in nations such as Libya and Syria that have slowly tearing themselves apart over the past 4 years.

On the rebels side the three main groups are the Donetsk People's Republic, the Lugansk People's Republic and the Donbass People's Militia who rarely communicate with each and sometimes end up in direct conflict with each other.  

The Kiev side of things is similarly complicated because although there is a Ukrainian National Army the majority of the fighting is done by groups such as the Azov Battalion which run by Ukraine's Nazi Party Svoboda and the Aidar Battalion and the Dnipro Battalion which are essentially private armies run by Ihor Kolomoyskyi who is the type of Israeli Jewish oligarch that Svoboda despise. 

Although these militia battalions were nominally absorbed into the Ukrainian National Guard as part of an attempt to comply with the disbanding of illegal armed groups clause of the earlier Geneva agreement Kiev's control over them is strictly limited at best.

With the Minsk agreement requiring that the legal status of these militia battalions is eventually resolved there are a lot of people within Ukraine who are very opposed to it. Sadly there are also powerful forces outside of Ukraine who also would love to see Minsk fail. 

For example the day after Minsk came into force the European Union (EU) likely driven by its newer members such as Poland imposed fresh sanctions on Russia presumably to punish them for their role in drawing up a peace plan.

The US has been particularly hawkish on the issue because they engineered the coup that started Ukraine's civil war in order to provide a pre-text for imposing sanctions on Russia for its opposition to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). After all not even the US can formally support a group of maniacs that genocidal. 

As a result the US has made it very clear that no matter what happens in Ukraine they will continue to demand that Russia is punished while screaming about the ceasefire violations in places like Debaltseve without pointing out that it is the people the US are backing who have been violating the ceasefire.

The US' long-term plan seems to be that if the economic and political pressure applied on Russia over Ukraine doesn't succeed in forcing Russia to drop its opposition to ISIL then it will trigger the overthrow of the Russian government. To further this end they've had support from people within Russia itself such as the Human Rights House network and Boris Nemstov who may well have been a CIA asset since he began campaigning to bring down the Soviet Union.

On Sunday (1/3/15) Nemstov had been planning to hold a mass rally in Russia's capital Moscow to protest against economic hardships brought about by the sanctions and in support of Kiev's attempts to purge ethnic Russians from eastern Ukraine. Therefore it seems obvious that Nemstov supports the conflict in Ukraine as if his career depended on it because if the Minsk agreement brings it to an end he'd be a rebel without a cause.

Despite the sanctions and the hardships they bring Russian President Vladamir Putin is actually enjoying record levels of support amongst the Russian population with approval ratings of around 85%. As a result far from being the start of a mass movement that threatens to bring down the Russian government Nemstov's march was likely to be little more then a small group of people wandering aimlessly through the city while everyday Russians threw stones at them.

As such I find it incredibly hard to believe that Putin would have had Nemstov killed on steps of the Kremlin in the very early hours of this morning. Although you may not like Putin and I certainly do not doubt that he is capable of assassination it is clear that he is not stupid. Therefore he would have known that such as public killing of a prominent protest leader at a location that is synonymous with the Russia government would be likely to turn him into a martyr and make his protest movement stronger.

As such I think the finger of suspicion falls much more firmly on Kiev and their associates who very much subscribe to the martyr mentality that we've seen in Libya, Syria and last summer in Gaza. Essentially people have got to thinking that all they need to do is carry out an atrocity such as killing a civilian or carrying out a poison gas attack, blame it on their opponent and the international community will rush to their aid. 

This has worked for Kiev before particularly in February 2014 when the killing of protesters by snipers caused so much outrage it triggered the overthrow of the Ukrainian government 3 days later. Even the UK's BBC now admit that it was the protesters who fired on themselves although I notice they refuse to run the report during primetime.

There have also been warning signs that Kiev would try something like this. Although for the life of me I cannot find a link to it the leader of one of the militia battalions recently warned that they were prepared to take the war into Russia itself by carrying out terrorist bombings. Even as far back as April 2014 Dimitry Yarosh - a member of the Parliament in Kiev - called on Islamists in Russia's Caucus region to carry out terror attacks and has an international arrest warrant in his name because of it although Kiev continues to refuse to allow Interpol to execute that warrant.

The threat from Islamist groups seems to have become the leading avenue in the investigation into who killed Nemstov. Apparently he had been receiving a lot of death threats over his condemnation of the Paris Attacks that began with the attack on the Charlie Hebdo magazine. Also the car used in the killing has been recovered and is registered in Ingushetia which along with Chechnya and Dagestan has become a hotbed of Islamist terror providing ISIL with many fighters and the terrorists who attack Volgograd in the run up the the 2014 Winter Olympics in near-by Sochi. 

17:00 on 28/2/15 (UK date).