Having reached what I believe will be an interesting juncture in my extended comments on Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, I am going to take a pause to reflect back on the problem of Ukraine, in light of the apparent shooting down of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 some 25 miles west of Ukraine's border with the Russian Federation. In this regard, I am going to reiterate (with a vengeance!) my relative ignorance on circumstances in eastern Ukraine that might have led to downing of this airliner. As such, I do not know who to believe in the conflicting assessments of blame that are being issued by the Obama administration, the Ukrainian Poroshenko government, the United Russia government of Putin, and, now, the rebel leadership (such as it is) of the "People's Republic of Donetsk." Part of what has been complicating assessments for me have been the efforts of Stephen Cohen, Professor Emeritis in Russian history and an expert on Stalinism from Princeton and New York University, to interject what, in my view, appears to be a very plausible argument concerning the use of force against rebels in built-up urban areas of the Don basin by the Ukrainian government, in its project to regain control of Donetsk and Lugansk oblasts from pro-Russian militias, and the impact of such tactics in creating an environment in which 298 passengers and crew from countries not otherwise involved in the conflict could have their lives taken from them. This post will seek, very briefly, to advance what I think I may actually know about the situation and, not incidentally, comment on the peculiar nature of media coverage in a site of geopolitical importance, contributing to my larger frustration about not knowing, among divergent voices, who to believe.
A Synopsis: What Seems Reasonably Clear about Ukraine
On June 30, a ten-day long, sporadically observed, cease-fire between the Ukrainian government and pro-Russian militias in Donetsk and Lugansk oblasts ended, despite the best efforts of the French, German, and Russian governments to secure an extension. Since then, pro-Russian militias surrendered the previously held stronghold of Slovyansk, digging in more resolutely in Donetsk against anticipated assaults by Ukrainian government forces (see Carol J. Williams, "Ukraine cease-fire ends with little headway in effort to broker peace," in Los Angeles Times (30 June 2014), at: http://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-ukraine-russia-peace-efforts-20140630-story.html). In anticipation of the end of the cease-fire, substantial numbers of civilians from targeted areas of the Don basin fled their homes, in many cases seeking the safety of the bordering Russian oblast of Rostov. Apparently, according to U.N. sources, some 160,000 civilians have fled Donetsk and Lugansk oblasts over the last few months, with 50,000 seeking the safety in other parts of Ukraine (see Hal Foster, "Thousands of refugees flee fighting in east Ukraine," in USA Today (2 July 2014), at: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2014/07/02/ukraine-war-refugees/11927955/). Moreover, since the end of the cease-fire, the nature of the struggle over remaining militia strongholds appears to have accentuated the role of indirect fire (i.e. mortar and heavy artillery), in conjuction with the use of air power (i.e. ground attack by fighter jets and attack helicopters) by the Ukrainian government. The war between Kiev and pro-Russian militias is increasingly being fought out by forces in tanks, with heavy artillery, supported on the Ukrainian side by ground attack aircraft and attack helicopters. Hence, the rise in civilian casualties and flow of refugees from contested areas.
Emphatically, the use of air power by the Ukrainian government explicitly introduces a dilemma for pro-Russian forces in the Don basin. If they are not going to surrender their defenses and sue for peace in their struggle with Kiev, then they must procure Russian military assistance to serve as a counterbalance against the government's use of air power. For the Putin government, to the extent that it is still aiding pro-Russian militias, two options are available. The Russian Federation can intervene directly with air interceptors to establish air superiority over Donetsk and Lugansk. However, this option really is not on the table because such an intervention must become immediately clear to the rest of the world, including the U.S. and EU - aircraft taking off and landing from Russian air force bases in areas inside the Russian Federation implies a direct intervention by a third party into a civil war between Ukrainians. It is an open invitation for the West to impose a more stringent regime of economic sanctions against Russia, even if much of Europe knows that this is against their short term economic (energy market) interests. The other option is for Russia to increase the number and sophistication of ground-based anti-aircraft systems, to include both man-portable (i.e. shoulder-fired) missiles capable of engaging, in particular, with rotary-wing weapons platforms and diverse vehicle-mounted systems, capable of engaging a range of different types of aerial targets at different altitudes and different speeds. I have some familiarity from U.S. military training with older generations of Soviet-era surface to air weapons, particular the SA-2 Guideline and the SA-6 Gainful (integrated w/Straight Flush radar system - missiles are radar guided to targets rather than heat-seeking). I am not as familiar with the SA-11 Gadfly/SA-17 Grizzly (the Бук weapon systems - another radar-guided system), apparently the technological successor to the SA-6 Gainful, a medium altitude, high-speed anti-aircraft system designed to target higher-speed interceptor aircraft.
Both SA-6 and SA-11/SA-17 are sophisticated, track-mounted, radar-integrated systems. It goes without saying that it takes skilled personnel to operate a system as technologically advanced as either SA-6 or SA-11/SA-17. I have never read emissions from, say, a Straight Flush targeting radar. I do not know how easy or difficult it is to discern the differences between a military transport aircraft and a commercial airliner. I imagine it must be much easier to identify a propeller-driven crop duster or a supersonic fighter jet. Moreover, it is (or was) apparently the case that the airspace above the Don basin is a heavily traveled corridor for commercial aircraft between Europe and South/Southeast Asia. I can imagine that placing a sophisticated surface to air missile system into the hands of crews with tangible quantities of training but little practical battlefield experience in a tense environment, characterized by significant enemy employment of both air transports and fighter aircraft, might be a recipe for disaster. Apparently it was.
What I Do Not Know, But Can Imagine, Concerning the Downing of MH17 and Its Relationship to the Conflict in Ukraine
To be quite succinct, I think I get the circumstances that lead us into a catastrophic civil air disaster in relation to the military confrontation in the eastern oblasts of Ukraine. Being an irritating Althusserian-Marxist overdeterminist, I cannot extract this event from its larger context, involving the renewed offensive of the Ukrainian government to regain control of the Don basin from pro-Russian militias and the aggressive use of air power by Kiev to achieve its military objectives. Such tactics were bound to produce a response from the other side, especially if Russian authorities on the other side of the frontier were faced with an influx of refugees decrying the carnage that they had left when they abandoned their homes to seek shelter! I have little doubt that SA-6 and/or SA-11/SA-17 systems quietly made their way across the border, accompanied by diverse shoulder-fired surface to air weapons, mothballed surplus T-64 main battle tanks, antiquated 122mm howitzers, and diverse mortars. Whatever Putin could help out with without being explicitly noticed by the EU and U.S., he was going to send. And, in the case of the SA-6 and SA-11/SA-17 batteries, he was obviously going to send trained personnel (i.e "military advisors") along for the ride. Having said that, war is obviously an extremely peculiar environment, even for trained military personnel. As someone who used to inhabit one end of the gun within the U.S. military, albeit never in a wartime situation, I can imagine the stress and uncertainty experienced by the men in the trenches, even when those trenches are manifest in the padded seats of a tracked radar surveillance vehicle, operating in conjunction with an SA-11/SA-17 battery.
Apparently there was some online bragging about having shot down what was assumed to have been a military target last Thursday. Again, I can understand, especially among individuals, both within the pro-Russian militias and among clandestine Russian military forces engaged in the Ukrainian conflict inside Donetsk and/or Lugansk, pressed with the responsibility to fend off the air forces of the Kiev government. They got one! It attests to the single-mindedness of military personnel (professionals as much as amateurs) in doing their jobs and, further, attests to the overall tragic and insane stupidity of war, per se!!
To these ends, I would inquire what the hell international aeronautical authorities were thinking in allowing civilian passenger aircraft to fly over a war zone in which both sides should have been assumed to be in possession of surface-to-air weapons capable of taking down medium to high altitude aircraft. The justification that Russian authorities should not have been supplying surface-to air weapons is not a valid excuse if the Ukrainian air force was actively engaged in aerial bombardment of rebel-occupied urban areas of Donetsk and Lugansk. Military experts in the U.S., especially, should have known perfectly well that surface-to-air technologies capable of taking down high-altitude aircraft were going to find their way into the conflict from Russia. At least some of the blame for the MH17 disaster has to be placed at the feet of ICAO and national level aeronautical authorities for not recognizing that eastern Ukraine was a dangerous place to send civilian airliners.
With all this in mind, I am going to acknowledge that I hold some sympathy for pro-Russian groups in the Don basin, especially recognizing the longer history of the region predating the Twentieth century. If the democratic principle enjoys any merit, then Kiev needs to appreciate that majoritarian consensus in the Don basin may be against it, as it proceeds into closer integration with Europe, even if such a move is in the long term interests of the entire region. I do not think that this means that the entire urban agglomeration of the Don basin wants to pick up roots and join the Russian Federation. On the other hand, I do think that the populations here want some fair consideration of what they conceive as their short term and long term interests, being a declining industrial region in historical association with Russia. As such, notwithstanding my agreement with such an unsavory figure as Vladimir Putin, I support the idea of Ukrainian federation with some greater degree of regional autonomy for the oblasts of the Don basin, in the hope that such an accomodation will bring peace to the larger country. Moreover, I think that the U.S. and EU have gone far enough in punishing the Russian Federation through sanctions, at least without any palpable suggestion that the internal politics of Ukraine (including the views of populations living in Donetsk and Lugansk) should be taken into account in the broader resolution of conflict within Ukraine. I have made the point previously that I believe a unitary Ukrainian regime will not survive the current crisis, and I continue to hold this position, if only because I regard such a regime as contrary to the broader principle of democratic sovereignty.
Critically, the world should be outraged about what has transpired in eastern Ukraine over the passed week. On the other hand, we need to acknowledge all of the players whose actions led us to the point at which a missile battery crew, probably staffed with Russian military personnel operating secretively on the behalf of pro-Russian militias in Donetsk and Lugansk, mistakenly targeted a commercial airliner and opened fire. If the Poroshenko government had been a little more serious about engaging in peace negotiations with pro-Russian groups in the closing weeks of June and if the Angela Merkel and François Hollande were a bit more emphatic in pointing out to Putin the potential economic consequences of continuing clandestine Russian military interventions in eastern Ukraine and if the Obama administration had done something tangible to at least acknowledge that there were people living in Donetsk and Lugansk who had legitimate interests in the future of their region even to the extent that they disagreed with Kiev, then maybe the bodies of victims would not be on their way to Karkhiv, en route to the Netherlands for identification today. This is not simply a testament to the problematic character of Russian intervention on the behalf of pro-Russian populations in the eastern Ukrainian oblasts, but also a testament to the fact that the Ukrainian government in Kiev needs to figure out some way to solve its Russian problem in the Don basin peacefully, even if that means that Poroshenko and all of the less liberal, ethnically closed-minded Ukrainian nationalists to his right do not get to have their way unilaterally in determining the future economic and cultural development of the Don basin.
Concerning the Strange Trajectory of Stephen Cohen's Partisan Position on Russia
As an American Marxist in the progressive community of post-structuralist critics of the old Soviet Union, I feel somewhat confident that I know people who probably know Stephen Cohen, although I do not know him myself. Moreover, I cannot remember having sat down to read any of his accounts on the former Soviet Union, the horrors of Stalinism, or the potentiality apparent in the figure of Nikolai Bukharin (the hero of the CPSU right wing, supporting the NEP before the onset of agricultural collectivization and the First Five Year Plan at the end of the 1920s), although I feel rather confident that, at this very moment, one of Stephen Cohen's books is sitting comfortably, in a cardboard box that formerly housed cryovac beef chuck, in my storage box in Hatfield, Massachusetts. With this in mind, the only thing that I really have to go on in evaluating the positions taken by Cohen in regard to the conflict in Ukraine has been a series of interviews with various news sources and articles, some published in the left-liberal American weekly The Nation, edited by Cohen's wife Katrina vanden Heuvel.
At the outset, notwithstanding Cohen's stature as an historical scholar of the Soviet Union, I find his present positions on Russian internal politics and foreign policy emphatically peculiar, in the sense that I cannot understand how someone who, like myself, seems to hold so much fascination in the pre-Stalinist Bolshevik legacy, acknowledging its faults, could sympathize so much with the current path taken by the Russian Federation under Putin. Emblematic of Cohen's hyperbolic defense of Putin, United Russia, and the current course of the Russian Federation is an article, in, where else, The Nation (11 February 2014), "Distoring Russia: How the American Media Misrepresent Putin, Sochi, and Ukraine" (at: http://www.thenation.com/article/178344/distorting-russia). This article stands for itself as an extrapolation of unsubstantiated claims that the American media is out to tar and feather Vladimir Putin and everything that he has accomplished for Russia since the tragic dismemberment of the Soviet Union and the corrupt, self-destructive regime of Boris Yeltsin. I would confess that I did not entirely connect with the underlying theme of Cohen's criticism in this article until I read another piece on The Daily Beast by Cathy Young (see "Meet Stephen F. Cohen: Vladimir Putin's Best Friend in the American Media," on The Daily Beast (16 March 2014), at: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/03/16/meet-stephen-f-cohen-vladimir-putin-s-best-friend-in-the-american-media.html#). It is as if Cohen, the great Soviet-era scholar that he is, maintains a personal animus against the forces that he believes accomplished the death of "already-existing socialism," and locates some vindication in the rise of United Russia and Putin, as the saviors of a project of Soviet resurrection! Sadly, Cohen needs to undertake some serious soul searching on the broader partisan objectives of United Russia, its evolving relationship with the Russian nationalist far right, its unvarnished brutality against ethnic minorities, especially in the North Caucasus region, and its willingness to contravene international norms in conflict resolution by intervening militarily in internal disputes, first, in Georgia and, now, in Ukraine. Off-handedly, it is a little shocking that Cohen's wife is giving him a free hand to utilize the venerable publication with which she is associated to pander to the line of United Russia for a left-liberal American audience that might otherwise know better!
Having said all of this, I want to acknowledge that, having watched Cohen on CNN (Fareed Zakaria's GPS broadcast) last Sunday, he makes a valid point that the American media is ignoring the fact that civilian populations in eastern Ukraine are being subjected to the full brutality of war even as select American and international news sources are going out of their way to point out the humanitarian crisis that Israel is in the process of generating militarily out of the Gaza Strip. For my part, I should note the fact that I need to sit down and enunciate a position against the brutality that Israel is inflicting on civilians in Gaza (I have an excuse; I work 46 hours a week doing something other than writing blog posts!!). Cohen is quite correct that the American media is not presenting both sides of the story in Ukraine. On the other hand, I am not entirely certain that the other side of the story in Donetsk and Lugansk is Putin's story or that it can adequately be articulated by parties within the Russian Federation. If I can agree, in principle, that a majority of the population in the Don basin was not enthusiastic about the Euromaiden revolution and that, moreover, a majority would similarly favor some kind of federalization of government in Ukraine, it also seems, from what I have been able to glean from diverse accounts on the conflict in Ukraine, that a majority of this population does not want to suffer annexation by the Russian Federation. Succinctly, I do not think that anyone is truthfully coming to terms with the interests, needs, desires, and hopes for the future of the majority of the population in the urban agglomeration of the lower Don. Like Cohen (apparently), I am confident that the post-Euromaiden government in Kiev is not about to give serious attention to what will be best, at least in the short run, for this region. In this manner, the stakes in the current conflict over Donetsk and Lugansk concern the capacity of the Poroshenko government in Kiev to exercise its will against autonomous self-determination of the course of development in these oblasts by the populations who are living there (and who are increasingly being driven out by armed violence by both the government in Kiev and by armed pro-Russian militias).
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