KIEV – ANTI separatist protesters attack a Russian owned bank in Ukraine’s capital. Russian backed rebels seized control of Luhansk and Donetsk in Eastern Ukraine after Russian tanks moved into Crimea.
UKRAINE, EAST – Chris Garrett, 31, British tree surgeon ‘training’ Azov battalion now the best equipped and most fanatical fighters in Ukraine army. And below Milutin Malisic, veteran of Yugoslav wars, a Serbian Chetnik, and now a ‘commander’ of pro-Russian forces in Crimea. The map shows the areas of East Ukraine lost to pro Russian separatists – Donetsk and Luhansk.
EAST UKRAINE – UNHCR says a ceasefire between eastern separatists and Kiev has reduced the number of casualties. However, the UN warned, a humanitarian crisis was unfolding in East Ukraine. The Ukraine conflict began when Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, and ended with the fall of the strategic railway hub of Debaltseve in Feb 2015. By that time the rebels had also seized Donetsk airport.
NEMTSOV REPORT says the Kremlin spent more than a billion dollars financing the rebellion in eastern Ukraine. The report commissioned by opposition leader Boris Nemtsov says at least 220 Russian soldiers died in fighting in two battles. 150 soldiers were killed in fighting at IIoviask, a small town in Donetsk last year and seventy lost their lives in fighting for Debaltseve in February after the Minsk treaty was signed. Nemtsov was shot dead in front of the Kremlin on February 27, 2015.
PUTIN -WAR report published on the OPEN RUSSIA WEBSITE
ANALYSIS – Vladimir Putin is reported to have remarked that it must be tough to lose to men that were once farmers and miners as Ukraine’s troops pull out of Debaltseve. But that tells you everything about the nature of the enemy that opposed Kiev’s European leaning government and how hard they were prepared to fight for territory that is going to become ‘New Russia’. Europe and Nato never really understood what Crimea and the Russian speaking lands of Ukraine meant to the regime in Moscow. On a practical level, every modern nation needs an airport and transport links to function – that’s why Donetsk airport is in ruins and Debaltseve would have been flattened, much like Grozny, had President Petro Poroshenko not pulled back his men. And on a higher more historical level, for Putin and the men backing him, Russia’s history is an ongoing phenomenon stretching back more than six hundred years – it was built on the conquests of Vikings and has continued to this day through Chechnya, Georgia and now Ukraine. That’s why today’s appeal to the Russian backed rebels to pull back from all of Ukraine’s sovereign land – including Crimea – and to honour the second broken truce will fall on deaf ears. For Europe, in Moscow’s eyes, is weak and unable to stand up for itself without Washington – that was the perception formed during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s when American bombing saved Nato from the kind of defeat it has suffered today in east Ukraine. And as for Washington who has played the role of outside superpower its diplomacy has completely failed to convince Russia to alter course and as a consequence it has learned much like the European powers did in the Crimean war of the 1855 that there are limits to what it can achieve – even if it is a superpower that is currently planning a three-year war against ISIS that recognises no geographical limits.
