Ukraine. Discuss. nt

[TBF]

5. I unlocked this thread because I finally found someone

on DU willing to answer the question. Thoughtful, factual, provocative. The type of writing we need to see more of on DU.

Jack Riddler's complete post: http://www.democraticunderground.com/10025267434

Just a few of his points:

The clumsy “kill-terrorists” anti-Russian rhetoric and repression pursued by Kiev also opened the way for an alternate thuggishness in the Ukrainian east, an armed resistance among the large ethnic Russian population there. To see this as the result of a process driven by largely bad actors and the dynamics of fear and hatred on both sides is not to take either side. I am not “pro-Russian,” or in favor of the “Ukrainian” side, and to adopt these terms uncritically plays into the mechanics by which the citizens of a formerly multi-language secular republic are being turned into ethnically motivated antagonists. This has happened before, in Yugoslavia, where many of the young literally were forced to remember that they were supposed to be not Yugoslavians but Serbians or Croatians at each others’ throats, now fight or die. Our own country’s government, unfortunately, has been relentless in taking Kiev’s side, even dispatching CIA and FBI personnel and private mercenaries to assist Kiev in its pacification campaign.

And here we may disagree about what has followed. You may see a strategy of infiltration and material backing of the “Donetsk Republic” by a Russian state aiming at conquest of eastern Ukraine. You may even think that was Moscow’s master plan since the beginning of the Maidan uprising, or even years ago. Whereas, unlike with Crimea, I see no credible gain for Moscow or Putin in an attempt to absorb a territory with a mixed population and a civil war underway – a territory from which the best economic exploitation for Russia would actually follow simply from stabilizing the situation and making Ukraine pay its Russian gas bills with money borrowed from the EU-IMF (said money then to be owed back to EU-IMF for all eternity, but hey, that’s what a working class is for). By the way, to oppose EU policy and the current dominance of neoliberalism and authoritarian governance within the EU during this period of internal economic crisis and class warfare is not to be “anti-European,” and no more valid than the other false dichotomies I’ve mentioned. I consider my stance to be pro-European, and I also see realpolitik for Moscow in continuing to strengthen its economic dealings with the EU and especially Germany.

The alternative for Moscow, i.e., the aggressive strategy attributed to it by the neocons and others in the West, would be to receive hundreds of thousands of refugees from the Ukraine and to generate an endless new Yugoslavian-type war on its borders, in the process physically separating itself from Europe: a war that can have no winners on the ground, only graveyards in different colors, but one that may, indeed, serve some sick geopolitical aim hatched by schemers in more than one far-away capital. Say what you will of Putin, and he may be even worse than you think, but since his bloody rise he has acted not as a chaos agent – this is not a realpolitik interest of Russia’s, and it certainly wasn’t working under Yeltsin – but as a stabilizer of Moscow’s power and rule. At the same time, his own power though great is hardly without any condition. He depends on the nationalist and conservative currents and tropes he rode to greater power (and that he appears largely to believe in), and he can hardly have his base see him as selling out ethnic Russians being massacred by the upstart Kiev “fascists,” or be too vigorous in preventing help to the Ukrainian Russians from Russian citizens; not to mention Russia’s own bloody mercenary-militarist elements. The best chance for reining the latter in, actually, may be coming right now in the wake of the MH17 shootdown and resultant death of hundreds of completely uninvolved and innocent foreigners, mainly Dutch and Malaysian. This is a time when a Western realpolitik that favors peace and not more war should not be scoring cheap points in demonizing Putin, but encouraging him to seize the opportunity of stopping Russian support for Donetsk, ending the conflict, establishing peaceful conditions. Who doesn’t want that?

With regard to the airliner, a rational person should rule out nothing as the events unfold and the seemingly tainted investigations proceed, and there are legitimate questions to ask (such as why passenger flights were still going over a warzone that had seen multiple downings of aircraft, but I figure the answer lies in corporate fuel costs and not a conspiracy). The fact is that until that moment Kiev militarily controlled the airspace, and the Donetsk militias were the ones trying to shoot down planes. Thus it is near-certain they used one a BuK array captured from the Ukrainian military to mistakenly target MH17. Since then, the Kiev government has broken out into a rabid display of rhetoric about “terrorists” run directly by Putin (sadly echoed here on DU) with the implication of an intentional strike on foreign civilians, as insanely counter-productive as that would have been for Moscow and the rebels. In this behavior, as with earlier moves, Kiev seems to want to stoke hostility between the West and Moscow. Yet it’s the Donetsk side who have shown the actions of a guilty party in the question of who shot down the plane, and it’s been a truly ugly and inhumane display.