Ahead of the controversial Crimean referendum taking place Sunday, March 16, the Ukraine interim government claimed Saturday that its forces had repelled a Russian military operation to invade Strikove in the Kherson province adjoining the peninsula. This province is strategically valuable because it is the source of Crimea’s water and electric power, which Kiev could cut off. But only in theory, because then Moscow would equally cut off gas to Kiev.
The Kiev claim of a military engagement with the Russians is roughly as credible as its account of 80,000 Russian troops massed on the borders of Crimea and poised to invade additional parts of eastern Ukraine Monday, the day after the referendum. The interim parliament was accordingly summoned into emergency session Monday at 10:00 a.m. Kiev time.
DEBKAfile’s military sources report this figure is highly inflated. There are no signs of an imminent Russian invasion; nor a call-up of reserves to fill out the Russian units permanently stationed in areas close to the Ukrainian border. The Russian army’s only unusual posture in the days leading up to the referendum was to stage military exercises and keep the small units taking part constantly on the move – so as to create the impression of a large army in motion. They also ran convoys of 10-15 armored trucks back and forth, which look massive when filmed.
These movements were intended as psychological pressure to deter Kiev and the West from any plans they might entertain to disrupt the referendum or interfere with its outcome.
Moscow’s only blatant military act in the run-up to the vote occurred Friday, March 14, when a Russian cyber unit intercepted a US MQ-5B Hunter drone 12,000 feet over the Crimean peninsula by using radio-electronic technology to break its link with its US operators. The drone was downed almost intact.
This was a hands-off warning from President Vladimir Putin to Washington on the Crimean referendum. It underlined the message Foreign Minister Sergey Lavov carried to US Secretary of State John Kerry when they met in London Friday, which was: “We must respect the will of the Crimean people in the forthcoming referendum” – meaning its will to join Russia.
Kerry repeated Obama’s message that the US deemed the referendum illegal and would not accept its outcome.
After talking for six hours, the two ministers were unable to bridge the gap. They could only agree to pick up their dialogue from Monday, when the vote was out of the way, when Putin’s intentions for Ukraine’s future became know and after the European Union’s ruling institutions had met to punish Russia by fairly limited sanctions.
After that, the two big powers might take another stab at reaching a compromise for Ukraine.
Meanwhile, neither was giving any quarter. Saturday night, the US tabled a resolution at the UN Security Council declaring the referendum invalid and urging countries not to recognize the results. Russia predictably cast its veto and China abstained. US Ambassador UN Samantha Power said the vote highlighted Russia’s isolation.
By Sunday, the Crimeans were set for their referendum with no discernible obstacle to deter them.
Our military sources saw no evidence of unusual military preparedness among Ukraine’s European neighbors to the west, in US bases on the continent, or in the Ukrainian army. No one in the West is sure up until now what proportion of its commanders will obey the interim government at crunch time and carry out its orders.
Partly, because of this uncertainty, President Barack Obama turned the Ukraine Prime Minister Arseniy P. Yatsenyui down during his visit to the White House Wednesday, March 12, when he requested US weapons and financial aid for his armed forces. He also asked for access to US intelligence coverage of Russian military movements.
All that the US president was ready to offer was iron rations for Ukrainian troops. If nothing else, at least they won’t go hungry.
But one or more of the forces currently in suspended animation may snap into unforeseen action during the referendum or after it’s over..
Russia and its Eurasian Customs Union now have the initiative, and I do not think the break-up of multinational Ukraine will end at the Kherson peninsula that attaches Crimea to the mainland to the north. News reports coming out of Ukraine’s eastern oblasts, which also have majority Russian and Russian-oriented populations, show those people are organizing to push for the same kind of referendum that has overturned the post-1991 politics and borders of Ukraine. Obama and Kerry indeed will issue warnings and threats. But the Russian national temperament is made of tough fiber. Push them with threats, and they respond with force.
Putin’s Kremlin knows the character of men such as Obama and Kerry, and he also knows that most of the USA now holds these two men in general contempt. Putin also knows the USA will not provide military support to the Banderisti fascist gang that hijacked the last legally-elected government of Ukraine. Putin also knows what Obama and Kerry seem to be disregarding, which is that Russia and her Eurasian Customs Union is the world’s greatest storehouse of buried mineral wealth on this planet. A trade war with the increasingly enfeebled West will cause more damage to the West than to the Eurasians. Moreover, any such trade war will push together Russia and China, which is possibly the most foolish move that Obama and Kerry could make, given the balance of forces and economies.
I think the West began this struggle against Russia a few years ago, when the international oligarchs who own most of the wealth and industry of this country saw the Eurasian Customs Union as a threat to their own dreams of worldwide economic supremacy. That was why they started nudging the Ukrainians to apply for European Union membership. It was exactly that which caused the last legal presidential election in Ukraine to be won by the Russian candidate rather than by the Ukrainian candidate.
Now, I think, Putin will put to further Russian nationalist use the leverage he has won without loss of a single Russian soldier. That leverage will mean the ingathering of a number of additional countries in south central Asia, all of whom set up independent states when foolish Gorbachev and his drunken clown successor caused the USSR to collapse. Most of them will now join the Eurasian Customs Union, and the tighter-organized Eurasian Union that will follow within a couple of years.
Now, more than ever, the time has come for Israel to get closer both to Russia and China, and get out from under this clearly-fading American empire.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
The referendum has created a new political and social reality in Ukraine. Its one thing to denounce it as “illegal” – its another matter to disregard people in Crimea peacefully turning out enmasse voting to leave Ukraine.
They can only be kept in the country by force now. Both Ukraine and the West should be preparing to negotiate with Crimea and Moscow a peaceful divorce so Ukraine can get on with the business of rebuilding its economy and joining the West.
Being held hostage by Russia is not what neither Ukraine and the West want so if the mostly Russian Crimeans want to rejoin Russia, its not like its drastically redrawing the post-Soviet space and borders that existed prior to the Soviet breakup in 1991.
The referendum simply reverses Nikita Khruschev’s 60 year old “gift” of Crimea to Ukraine and restores the peninsula to Russian rule as it was before 1954. Russia is going to lose Ukraine, so this is already a face-saving exit out of the crisis for the Kremlin.
Today the West picked up a major geopolitical prize in Ukraine and Russia has been expelled from the West. Assuming Russia is not going further, while Ukraine and the West won’t formally recognize the Crimea takeover, there is no point to shedding blood here for something always historically Russian. You have to know when its more of a win for the West than for Russia to halt further confrontation between both sides and unless developments take an unexpected turn in the future, I expect the current crisis to soon recede.