Ukraine Falters in Drive to Curb Unrest in East
KIEV,
Ukraine — Ukraine’s failure to enforce its own ultimatums and its
appeal on Monday to the United Nations to send peacekeepers laid bare a
grim reality for the shaky government in Kiev, where political leaders
and security forces have few reliable ways to confront Russian-backed
separatists in the restive east.
A
deadline set by Ukraine’s acting president for the start of a
“large-scale antiterrorist operation” in the east passed without any
clear police or military intervention. Meanwhile, pro-Russian militants
seized yet another government building in the Donetsk region, bringing
to at least nine the number of eastern towns now swept up in an
insurgency.
The
country’s acting president, Oleksandr V. Turchynov, asked the United
Nations to send peacekeepers. But the move was widely viewed as an act
of desperation, given that Russia holds a veto at the United Nations
Security Council and is unlikely to assent to a such a request.
The
confused and passive response underscored Kiev’s limited options in
challenging pro-Russian militants and their backers in Moscow. Too
assertive a response could cause heavy civilian casualties and play into
Moscow’s narrative that Russians and Russian speakers in Ukraine are
threatened and need protection. Too timid a response risks inviting more
meddling from Moscow or giving free rein to local armed militants.
Ukraine’s
armed forces, demoralized and underequipped, are so short of funds that
when the government ordered them on high alert last month as Russian forces seized Crimea,
a Ukrainian billionaire had to buy the military fuel. The businessman,
Ihor Kolomoysky, now the governor of the Dnipropetrovsk region next to
Donetsk, said he put up around $5 million of his own money to pay for
gasoline and batteries so that Ukrainian military vehicles could leave
their garages and helicopters could get off the ground.
Ukraine’s
intelligence agency, the State Security Service, known as the SBU, is
so riddled with Russian informers that when John O. Brennan, the C.I.A.
director, visited Kiev over the weekend on a supposedly secret trip,
Russian state news media swiftly revealed his visit and declared it
evidence that Washington was calling the shots in Ukraine and pushing
for a crackdown in the east.
Even
Alfa, an elite Ukrainian special forces unit that takes pride in taking
on perilous missions, has appeared feckless in its response to the
unrest in the east.
It
lost an officer on Sunday to gunfire, apparently from the pro-Russian
side in Slovyansk. The force has made no headway since in entering the
city, never mind freeing government buildings there from unidentified
gunmen.
As
with other arms of Ukraine’s security and intelligence services, some
members have divided loyalties and seem disinclined to engage in a fight
against pro-Moscow militants that would put older women and other
residents who support the gunmen in the line of fire.
Alfa,
under investigation for its role in cracking down on protesters in the
capital during the uprising against the ousted president, Viktor F.
Yanukovych, did not deploy, as expected, to remove pro-Russian militants
from Slovyansk on Monday.
The
government’s failure to take back control of Slovyansk and other
eastern towns has humiliated and infuriated Ukrainians who had hoped
that the ouster of Mr. Yanukovych would allow their country to move out
of Moscow’s shadow toward Europe.
“We
have been left defenseless,” shouted a uniformed Cossack from a stage
in Kiev’s Independence Square, the focal point of three months of
protests against Mr. Yanukovych and now a magnet for those unhappy with
what has happened since he fled to Russia in February. “I ask the
government to give us arms — what we need is this,” he said, waving a
Kalashnikov rifle to cheers from the crowd.
Photographs
posted on social media websites on Monday showed Ukrainian tanks
purportedly on the main road north of Slovyansk, suggesting that the
Kiev government was gearing up for a counterattack or at least a show of
force to appease critics who say that it has not done enough to protect
eastern Ukraine from the fate of Crimea, which Russia annexed last
month.
The
rebellion in Donetsk and other eastern provinces presents Kiev with a
choice of using extensive force that might only expand so far modest
public support in the east for the militants or of simply pleading for
calm, a course that has so far only emboldened the pro-Russian rebels.
It is a dilemma that would not be easy even if Ukraine had a loyal
security and military machine, but not having one makes the choice far
more difficult.
The
plea for help to the United Nations was highly unlikely to be met as
Russia, a permanent member of the security council, would almost
certainly veto any move backed by the West to send peacekeepers. Russia
agreed last month to let the Vienna-based Organization for Security and
Cooperation in Europe send monitors to eastern Ukraine, but they confine themselves to writing reports.
All
this leaves Ukraine largely on its own to fight off a well-coordinated
campaign of attacks on government buildings that it denounces as Russian
aggression but that it has so far been unable to prove incontrovertibly
involves Russian soldiers, agents or money. Having already lost Crimea,
Mr. Turchynov, the acting president, vowed on Sunday that “we will not
let Russia repeat the Crimean scenario in the eastern region of
Ukraine.”
The American, Russian and Ukrainian
ambassadors to the United Nations discussed the escalating crisis in
Ukraine at a Security Council emergency meeting on Sunday night.
Credit Don Emmert/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
But
if Russia is indeed now seeking to repeat its Crimea seizure, something
that Moscow has repeatedly denied, Ukraine’s defenses are fragile.
So,
too, is the government amid rising public anger at its inability to
keep the country together. After another day of bleak news from the
east, protesters set tires on fire late Monday outside the Parliament in
Kiev. They demanded that the acting interior minister, Arsen Avakov,
resign and that Mr. Turchynov explain why things have gone so wrong.
The
SBU, under new leadership since Ukraine’s February revolution, has
repeatedly boasted of catching people suspected of being Russian
operatives in the east, but it has not yet made public any solid
evidence to support Kiev’s assertions that the mayhem in Donetsk and
neighboring provinces has been orchestrated and financed by Moscow. This
has left the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, free to taunt
Kiev and the West for making accusations they have not yet
substantiated. It has also compromised Ukraine’s efforts to compete, at
least in eastern Ukraine and in Russia itself, with Moscow’s own
narrative of Western meddling.
Ordered
on Sunday to retake the town of Slovyansk, Alfa quickly backed off the
mission after one of its officers was shot and killed as he walked away
from negotiations with the rebels. A full-scale assault by Alfa, Mr.
Skorokhvatov cautioned, might free the occupied Slovyansk police station
but would not end the crisis. “Alfa is a scalpel, but it is impossible
to use it cut down a tree,” he said.
Ukraine Crisis in Maps
Many
of the senior security officials who served Mr. Yanukovych have been
dismissed and, in some cases, have fled to Russia, but the legacy of
more than two decades of close cooperation between Kiev and Moscow on
security issues remains embedded in a security apparatus established and
controlled by Moscow under the Soviet Union. Such links raise questions
about loyalties.
Among
those who took refuge in Russia is Alexander Yakimenko, the former head
of Ukraine’s State Security Service, the post-independence successor
organization to the Ukrainian branch of the K.G.B. While Mr. Yakimenko
is gone, the agency he left behind is infested with informers and agents
whose loyalties lie more with Moscow than Kiev.
“We
can’t change this overnight,” said the deputy defense minister, Leonid
Polyakov. “The system was so deeply penetrated by the Russians. We have
to operate in this environment.”
This
helps explain why Ukraine’s government has been caught flat-footed
repeatedly by events in the east, where buildings that were obvious
targets for attacks by pro-Russian militants were left guarded by just a
handful of local police officers, who, outnumbered and outgunned, often
ran away.
Independence
Square in Kiev has echoed in recent days with angry denunciations of
the authorities for their failure to crush separatists in the east and
calls for citizens to take up arms to defend the country.
A
recent opinion poll in Donetsk suggested that less than a third of the
population wants to join Russia, far less than the proportion that wants
Ukraine to remain intact. Donetsk residents who support Kiev
increasingly wonder why a pro-Russian minority has been able to run
amok.
“The
ball is now on the side of Kiev,” wrote Oleksandr Honcharov, a lawyer
from Donetsk, on his blog. “If the government cannot stabilize the
situation, does it deserve to be called the government at all?”
Print this page
0 komentar:
Posting Komentar