The Ukrainian government has delivered a 48-hour ultimatum in Donetsk, demanding that protestors occupying the regional government building there move out or face the use of force.
In Donetsk, the government building was a swirl of activity as scores of people came and went all day, threading their way through elaborate, labyrinthine barricades that have grown substantially since the building was seized on Sunday. Men continued to reinforce the barricades outside the ransacked building, using car bumpers, bags of cement, tires and concertina wire. Paper signs taped to tires read in Russian and English, “We’re not separatists—we’re for peace and Slavic friendship” and “Russia is our friend. USA go home!”
However, the Ukrainian government is divided as their own governor believes that the situation can be resolved peacefully.
Earlier, Sergei Taruta, the recently appointed head of the Donetsk regional government, met with representatives of the separatist council at a hotel across town. Speaking to reporters afterward, he said the talks were constructive, and that he opposed any “forceful measures” to be taken against the separatists. He also downplayed any speculation that the separatists were being backed and guided by Moscow, saying they had legitimate complaints about the economic situation in the region, and fears about nationalist policies that would limit the use of the Russian language. “I don’t see any unresolvable problems here,” he said.
The question is whether the people of Ukraine will accept the new government's authority. Rights belong to the people to be given to a civil government in order that a society may function. We all give up certain rights no matter what country we live in. But if the people don't accept a government's authority, then it is inevitable that the government will collapse.
There is speculation that Khazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan might be Russia's next targets. In the former, they have walked back efforts to deemphasize the Russian language.
Until very recently, Igor Rotar says in a Rosbalt.ru commentary, “Kazakhstan had pursued the most aggressive policy” of having Kazakh displace Russian as the language of government and had refused to give Russian official status even though a significant portion of the country’s population speaks it.
But now in the wake of Crimea, Nazarbayev has said that “it is clearly written in the Constitution that discrimination against anyone for religious, nationality or linguistic reasons is prohibited,” a shift that many see as pointing Kazakhstan in an entirely different direction that will be less problematic for local Russians and for Moscow.
According to Rotar, “many political experts continue to consider that Northern Kazakhstan is one of the more probable regions for a repetition of the ‘Crimean scenario,” and he cites US expert Martha Brill Olcott’s view that that region is “the most probable ‘target for Putin’” but only after Nazarbayev himself leaves the scene.
And Kyrgyzstan has seen pro-Russian agitation.
Pro-Moscow groups in Bishkek are actively promoting the idea that “Kyrgyzstan is tired of being independent,” that the West is the source of all its problems, and that it is time “to sign everything that is required” in order to have once again a comfortable life, according to Edil Baysalov, an advisor to that Central Asian country’s president.
Such messages have become so frequent and widespread that they now “form the main information background” for everything else, he continues, and as a result, an increasing number of people assume that “normal people and healthy patriots are in a terribly small minority” and are asking themselves what can be done.
And on the basis of these suggestions and apparently with an eye on joining Kyrgyzstan to Russia, Baysalov says, some deputies in the Kyrgyzstan parliament are pushing initiatives which “word for word repeat the xenophobic practices introduced in recent months by the State Duma of the Russian Federation.”
And Russian nationalists like Alexander Dugin are trying to throw gas on the fire.
“The paradox of the situation in the South East [of Ukraine] is that in order to receive the maximum (annexation to Russia) and the minimum (status for the Russian language, it is necessary to spend THE VERY SAME efforts: form a political force, seize power and defend it with weapons in hand. Euromaidan was not staged at all in order to gradually return the whole situation to the model Kuchma-Yushchenko-Yanukovich. The junta seriously intended to repress the South-East. To cut everyone off at the root. And it constantly openly declares this. In such a situation, one can only rely on oneself and on Russia. Aksyonov correctly said: It is hard for Putin to make a decision fraught with world war. But by force of circumstances, he is compelled to do this. Russia will not abandon its own.”
It will be pretty difficult for the Donetsk protestors to back down and come out of the building if they believe that Russia will come to their aid if Ukraine should follow through and storm the building. Given the fact that their fortress is expanding, it is likely that they will not surrender.
RT reports that Kiev has gone even farther and ordered "state protection" of the regional headquarters.
Ukraine’s coup-imposed president Aleksandr Turchinov has ordered the protester-held local govt HQ in Donetsk to be taken under ‘state protection’ as armed personnel and armored vehicles have been reported moving into the eastern region of Ukraine.
One of the protestors repeated the allegation that Blackwater was involved.
About a hundred fighters from the newly-formed Ukraine’s National Guard reportedly arrived in the airport of Donetsk, the deputy director of a local group called People’s Militia of Donbas, Sergey Tsyplakov, told Ria Novosti.
“In Donetsk airport about a hundred of people from the National Guard have been housed,” Tsyplakov said. “Around a hundred of Right Sector thugs are also in the city, as well as a hundred employees from a private US military company operating under contract with Kiev junta.”
The article says that two buses of unidentified armed men were blocked; the men refused to speak or identify who they were; it provided a picture of the incident.
RT interviewed Daniel Patrick Welch, who believes that Kiev is losing legitimacy as a government.
Daniel Patrick Welch: I think the junta [in Kiev] is holding on to power very tentatively, although the people who took over the Lvov prosecutor's office seem to be fascists as well, that’s what people in Kharkov and Donetsk are telling me. They see it more as an inter-fascist squabble. But the important thing that you can see from it is that they are having trouble holding power even in the West where they should have firm control.
RT: The protesters in Kiev were calling the former government corrupt. But now we see the new authorities appointing officials with questionable reputations. Why are they making such moves?
DW: They are simply trying to hold power. And I think they are losing legitimacy at an alarming rate for them. The point of Maidan was against corruption but it also had the element of a foreign intervention, as we know from Victoria Nuland’s involvement in the famous EU phone call. So what’s happening in the east is significantly different from that.
RT: Let's take a look at Eastern Ukraine now... The authorities have called the recent crackdown on anti-Kiev activists in Kharkov an ‘anti-terrorist’ operation. What does that harsh rhetoric mean?
DW: They always use ‘terrorists’ when they want to demonize the people. These are either Ukrainians who do not like to be ruled by fascists from Kiev and they are rising up because they are awake and they see who their enemy is, and they are not going to back down. The use of the word [terrorist] is always a political trick.
But to be fair, Russia is doing the same thing alleging "Neo-Nazis" in an effort to delegitimize the Ukrainian government. That doesn't mean that there aren't Neo-Nazis and far-right nationalists trying to take advantage of the situation
(there are), but it does mean that propaganda is flying both ways. For any such allegations from either side to be legitimate, they need to be documented.
Welch offered his own take last month, in which he believes that the rest of the world is finally tiring of endless US wars.
I mean look at them flail, beating their chests, nostrils flaring, teeth bared, yet with perfectly coiffed hair hiding perfectly empty rhetoric and even emptier threats. Despite how scary these men are, and notwithstanding the horror they are capable of unleashing, it is a very good thing that their hypocrisy and their true agenda are laid bare. To the people outside the bubble of the west, they look for all the world like the lunatic zealots they are, bent on world domination with only the most thinly disguised motives. Increasingly, it is to be hoped, those of us inside the bubble who have been speaking out will be seen to have been telling the truth, canaries in a coal mine, as it were.
But for the rest of the world, the jig is up. No one with any sense buys the newest color revolution scheme, and they need not be swayed by timeworn, photoshopped images of people power. From this moment on there will be no daylight whatsoever between Russia and China on issues of any strategic importance, with the others in the BRICS coalition and across the Global South glad for this protection. Their very survival is at stake, and they know it. In response to US and EU threats to impose financial punishment on Russia, China has indicated that, in it may need to call in U.S. debt obligations, and from now on may require gold instead of the Fed's "debt tenders" or worthless dollars based on nothing but trust and the US government's own say-so. Other reports seem to suggest that China has convinced Turkey not to allow NATO ships through the Bosporous. Sometimes what a bully needs is just to punched in the face--hard--once and for all, before the rest of his terrified victims gang up and close in for the kill.