By Dmitri Kovalevich, Multiplural World, 5/19/24

(Dmitri Kovalevich is the special correspondent in Ukraine for Al Mayadeen English. He writes situation reports from there twice per month. This report appeared originally in Al Mayadeen English on May 18, 2024.)

In early May, the Ukrainian army continued to gradually retreat and lose territory in the former Ukraine oblast of Donetsk in the Donbass region. In some cases, units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) have fled the advancing Russian military, as happened during the recent capture of the town of Ocheretino in what is today the Donetsk People’s Republic of the Russian Federation. The town is located some 35 km north of Donetsk city.

Retreating Ukrainian troops are complaining of no prepared defense lines for them to fall back upon when they are forced to withdraw. This is a repeat of events during the losses of the city of Artyomovsk (called ‘Bakhmut’ in Ukraine) in 2023 and Avdeevka in Donetsk in 2024, both situated further north and east of Donetsk city. It turns out that many of the funds allocated for the construction of defense lines for Ukraine have been stolen or otherwise appropriated. But that is only one problem. The main problem is the fact there are too few construction brigades in Ukraine available to actually build any defensive lines.

“The reason why Russians are able to undertake quick and successful offensives such as at Ocheretino is simple; it is because of ongoing plunder of financial resources for the construction of defenses,” writes the Ukrainian telegram channel ‘First News, War’. Referring to the Western-armed-and-financed governing regime in Kiev, it writes, “Zelensky and Co. are doing everything possible to fill their pockets, up to the creation of one-day companies winning state tenders.” The Associated Press wrote in early May, citing Ukrainian military officials, that Ukraine’s allocation of $960 million for the construction of defensive structures is hampered by corruption.

In reality, instead of a complex network of tunnels and fortifications, a few holes have been dug in the ground. All the fortifications shown to Ukrainians on television in videos produced by the government do not exist. There is hardly a single, fully-fledged defensive barrier along Ukraine’s second line of defense in Donbass.

The Russian army is now coming up against the main defensive line of Ukraine, between the towns of Pokrovsk and Kurakhovo, some 40 km west of Donetsk. This line protects the entire eastern front of the AFU, as explained by the ‘PolitNavigator’ Telegram channel (which is based in Crimea). The reason this is happening, according to another report on PolitNavigator, citing Russian military correspondent Marat Khairullin, is because the Russian military-industrial complex has saturated the area with attack drones. “The drones are being delivered every month by the thousands, both from official military sources and from volunteers organized in companies of 12 or 15. This is how the work with these drones is organized now, for each brigade. There used to be a problem with drones, but now there are plenty of them and there are no problems at all,” Khairullin is cited.

Ukraine, on the other hand, has proven unable to produce large numbers of drones, according to Yuriy Butusov, a Ukrainian military expert and editor-in-chief of the anti-Russia Censor online publication. “Neither the financing nor the placing of orders for drones has been organized in time. As a result, we had only a paltry number of drones delivered in the past three months. The state delivered a little more than 20,000 FPV [first-person-view] drones in this time.” Also, according to him, even the arrival of Western military aid will not alter the situation on the battlefield.

The difference in approach between the two warring sides is also due to the fact that the war in Ukraine is very much a war against Russia incited and driven by the NATO countries. Whereas Russia is fighting with its own citizens and voters, the NATO countries are fighting using expendable Ukrainians who, moreover, do not elect the president of the United States nor the chancellor of Germany and therefore cannot call them to account.

It is impossible for Ukraine to conscript yet more men into its army while seeking to step up military production at the same time. Ukrainian MP Roman Kostenko explains on Telegram how Ukraine is conscripting workers and engineers away from military production enterprises. According to him, the phones of conscripts are taken from them and they are left to leave a message with family as they are spirited away for military training.

Russian Colonel Gennady Alekhin writes in Ukraine.ru that the only means of warfare at Kiev’s disposal these days are the work of military conscriptors and the human beings they seek out for forced military service. However, the humans available for military service are quickly running out; as a result, in Alekhin’s opinion, a military-political situation is emerging in which Ukrainians will begin fighting among themselves within their own country for survival. “Today, the survival of each person being conscripted depends on one thing – whether he can jump off the train taking him to join a group of poorly-trained fighters on the front lines. Knowledge of this uncomfortable fact is becoming universal in Ukraine, and this is even more palpable than the fear of Russia’s goals of denazification and demilitarization of the country.”

Without human rights in a land of ‘democracy’

In May, amendments to the Labor Code of Ukraine come into force giving to employers the right to fire those workers who may have relatives or friends in Russia, especially in what the Ukraine regime calls “occupied territories”. These are the territories such as Crimea and Donbass which rejected the legitimacy of the government born of the coup in Kiev in February 2014 and which have voted to join the Russian Federation as constituent republics. Bill 7731, also called the ‘collaboration law’, was submitted back in 2022 by a group of people’s deputies from Zelensky’s ‘Servant of the People’ political/electoral machine. The main initiator of the bill was Galina Tretiakova, who in 2020 complained that too many children of ‘very low quality’ were being born in Ukraine to families in need of financial assistance and were thus increasing Ukraine’s already excessive social welfare burden.

Pravda.co.ua reported on April 29, “In a letter dated April 4, 2024, which was not reported until recently, Ukraine informed Strasbourg [the European Parliament] that in the future, the obligations of the Ukrainian government to comply with Article 8 (respect of private and family life), Article 10 (freedom of speech), and Article 11 (freedom of assembly and association) of the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, as well as Article 2 of Protocol 4 of the Convention [right to free movement of people].”

Such changes are a gross violation of basic human rights as they introduce criminal liability based on the fact of blood relationship, not on acts committed. The Ukrainian authorities are now actively seeking channels and tools to influence Russian citizens, including for the commission of terrorist acts. They seek out relatives of Ukrainian citizens for this purpose, and this is why the amendment to the Labor Code was introduced.

At the end of April, it also became known that Ukraine has submitted a written statement to the Council of Europe announcing a partial and self-declared exemption from the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Freedoms. The statement said that during martial law, human rights provided for by a number of articles of the Ukrainian constitution may be restricted. This includes the right to free elections, inviolability of the home, secrecy of correspondence and telephone conversations, the right to freedom of speech and freedom of movement, education, entrepreneurial activity, and labor. In practice, all these freedoms have been restricted in Ukraine since the 2014 coup, but they are now being officially abandoned. Nevertheless, the Western media still refers to Ukraine as a ‘democracy’ that is ‘fighting for democracy’ against ‘authoritarian Russia’.

In May in the Odessa region, for example, a lawyer was forcibly removed by police from a client’s home as the police were conducting a search of the home. When the lawyer arrived at the house, the police informed him that he should urgently go to the local military enlistment center, but he declined to do so, asking for proper notification for such a request. Minutes later, 15 armed and masked men arrived in a minibus, rounded up the lawyer, and took him away by force.

Videos of forced abductions of civilians by military conscriptors are spreading across Ukraine every day. In response, the government introduced criminal liability in May for those videotaping the work of military recruiters. The penalties are up to eight years in prison.

In early May, a resident of Odessa received the same prison term of eight years, in that case for posting symbols on a social network of the former Soviet Union and Soviet Ukraine, namely, images of a hammer and sickle and a red star.

Zelensky wanted

In early May, the Russian Federation officially declared Vladimir Zelenskyy to be wanted by the Russian criminal system as of May 20, along with a number of other Ukrainian politicians who came to power during the ‘Maidan coup’ of February 2014. The date May 20 marks the end of Zelensky’s five-year election term as president. But the U.S. and the large countries of Western Europe (all members of NATO) want Zelensky to remain in his post for the time being because their war-financing schemes are tied to him, according to explanations by the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service.

These words are ironically interpreted by Ukrainian political scientist and former ombudsman representative Mykhailo Chaplyga, writing on Telegram. He writes, “Aha, so it seems our presidents are to be chosen by MI6  [Britain’s secret police service], all very ‘sovereign’ decision-making, to be sure.”

Ukrainian political scientist Anton Gura wrote on Telegram on April 29, “The deadline for our president is May 20. Beyond that, he becomes a target for the Russian legal system.” To date, when Zelensky has appeared near the front lines, Russian troops have temporarily stopped firing while drones were only used to film him.

The legitimacy of any political power is determined by its ability to hold onto its power. Today, Zelensky, with the help of Ukraine’s security service (political police), is actively purging the leadership of law enforcement agencies as well as bloggers who dare to question his legitimacy.

In early May, the Security Service of Ukraine announced that it had uncovered a plot to eliminate Zelensky, which allegedly involved two colonels of the State Protection Directorate of Ukraine, the service that guards the president. But Zelensky routinely speaks to Western media of various schemes to assassinate him, and what’s more, he uses different numbers. In November 2023, he said there had been five or six assassination attempts against him since the start of Russia’s military operation in Ukraine in February 2022. By January 2023, his claim had risen to 12 assassination attempts against him organized by Russian troops.

The claims of assassination attempts are no doubt an effort to arouse the sympathy of Western audiences for Zelensky, portraying him as a victim of Russian aggression and seeking to draw attention away from the large, global events unfavorable to Western interests that are occurring in the Middle East, Africa, or elsewhere.

The fact that the Russian Federation will not recognize Zelensky’s legitimacy after May 20 means that the Russian Federation will have no one with whom to sign a peace treaty. This was noted in April by the president of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko. “Today, we could sign an agreement with him [Zelensky], some kind of agreement, let’s say. But then someone else would replace him in power and decide he or she doesn’t like the agreement. They know how to do this in Ukraine–just look at the Minsk agreements [of September 2014 and February 2015]. A new president will say that whatever agreement was signed, it was signed by an illegitimate president and is therefore not recognized.”

If Ukraine does not recognize the legitimacy of an agreement signed by its head of state, then any agreement signed by that person with the Russian Federation can be subsequently challenged. Thus, any rejection by Ukraine of a constitutional limit of Zelensky’s term would become another step to perpetuate NATO’s proxy war against the Russian Federation and its allies.

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Related reading:

Ukraine’s divisive mobilization law comes into force as a new Russian push strains front-line troops, report by Associated Press, May 19, 2024