Amnesty International has accused Ukraine of war crimes during its ongoing military conflict with invading Russian forces.
The humanitarian organization said in a release on Wednesday that the Ukrainian military’s tactics “violate international humanitarian law and endanger civilians” by operating weapons out of bases established in residential areas while civilians are present.
Russia has previously been accused by Amnesty International of violating multiple international laws during the war. The organization on Wednesday said that Ukraine’s alleged violations “in no way justify Russia’s indiscriminate attacks.”
“We have documented a pattern of Ukrainian forces putting civilians at risk and violating the laws of war when they operate in populated areas,” Amnesty International Secretary General Agnès Callamard said in a statement. “Being in a defensive position does not exempt the Ukrainian military from respecting international humanitarian law.”
While conducting an investigation of Russian attacks in the Kharkiv, Donbas and Mykolaiv regions of Ukraine between April and July, Amnesty International researchers said they discovered that the Ukrainian military was operating out of civilian buildings in at least 19 towns and villages. The discovery was corroborated by satellite images, according to the release.
The organization said that Ukraine committed “a clear violation of international humanitarian law” by basing at least five military facilities in civilian hospitals. Russian airstrikes on health care facilities have resulted in a significant number of civilian injuries and deaths during the war, according to the World Health Organization.
Amnesty International also discovered that Ukraine had installed military bases in 22 out of 29 schools visited in the Donbas and Mykolaiv regions during the investigation, according to the release. The organization said that Russia later launched strikes on many of the same schools between April and late June, resulting in multiple deaths and injuries.
Following the destruction of schools in at least three towns, Ukraine’s military is accused of moving bases to schools in different areas, putting the community surrounding the new bases at risk for similar attacks.
While the bases in schools may not themselves be in violation of international humanitarian law because the schools were not in session, the organization said that Ukraine put bases in schools near houses and apartment buildings without warning the residents or helping them to evacuate.
In some instances, the laws of war dictate that schools and hospitals can become legitimate targets for military attacks, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Amnesty International said that its investigation “does not in any way justify indiscriminate Russian attacks,” while urging the Ukrainian military to “distinguish between military objectives and civilian objects and take all feasible precautions” and immediately stop operating out of civilian-populated areas.
“The Ukrainian government should immediately ensure that it locates its forces away from populated areas, or should evacuate civilians from areas where the military is operating,” Callamard said. “Militaries should never use hospitals to engage in warfare, and should only use schools or civilian homes as a last resort when there are no viable alternatives.”
Amnesty International said that it notified the Ukrainian government about the findings of its investigation on July 29 but had not heard back as of Wednesday.
Newsweek reached out to the Embassy of Ukraine in Washington, D.C., for comment.
Western leaders, led by US President Joe Biden, have opted for an eternal proxy war against Russia at least until Ukraine ‘wins’ the war started when Russian forces invaded its western neighbor on February 24th. Biden let the cat out of the bag when he stated the goal of massive Western military and financial assistance to Kiev is to spark regime change or at least the the removal from power of Russia’s popular, if authoritarian president, Vladimir Putin. However, as Ukraine’s military forces are slowly whittled away, there is a growing evidence of major regime splitting, a precondition for military or state coups, revolts, revolutions, and other forms of regime change.
The destabilization of the Maidan regime can be expected extrapolating from some factors and is being increasingly evidenced by several others. The expectation of destabilization is supported by: (1) the historical pattern of military defeats leading to regime destabilization and sometimes state coups or revolutions and (2) Zelenskiy’s actually weak popular support. Evidence of regime destabilization is can be seen in the state’s growing authoritarianism and in splits within the regime’s elite. These trends will only deepen as Kiev faces further military defeats and perhaps collapse of the Ukrainian army and affiliated neofascist dominated national battalions, likely candidates to organize a coup or societal uprising.
Military defeat is often a death knell for political leaders, regimes (types of rule), and even states. To find evidence of the volatility caused by military defeat one need go no further than local history in and around Ukraine, whether as part of Imperial Russia or the USSR. Russia’s defeat in the 1904 Russo-Japanese War led to violent social upheaval in the ultimately failed but widespread and nearly successful 1905 ‘revolution’ that forced regime transformation-like changes such as the installment of a parliamentary State Duma, free elections to the Duma, and the declaration and implementation of many civil, political, and human rights. Russia’s military failure in World War I led to the February 1917 Revolution. In summer 1917 the failed ‘Kerenskiy Offensive’ and the Germans’ march on St. Petersburg led to the collapse of Alexander Kerenskiy’s quasi-republican Provisional Government and the successful Bolshevik coup in October. The turmoil in Ukraine during the revolution, coup, and civil war of 1917-1921 was a devilishly dizzying whirlwind of chaos and violence brought forth by a myriad of competing warlords, ideologies, and movements, perhaps a foretaste of the future in today’s Ukraine. The failures of Soviet troops in Afghanistan in the early 1980s, leading to their subsequent withdrawal in 1985, was an important factor in the Soviet communist Party-state regime’s decision to move towards reforms, Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika, which ultimately led to the collapse of both the Soviet party-state regime and the breakup of the Soviet Union that produced today’s independent Ukrainian state. There can be little doubt that Russia’s February invasion casts doubt on and may very well have been intended by Russian President Vladimir Putin to destroy the Maidan regime’s weak legitimacy, stability, and viability.
The Maidan regime had limited legitimacy from the start. One needs only recall its founding act – the 20 February 2014 Maidan sniper’s massacre – which saw the neofascist wing of the Maidan movement fire on the security forces of Viktor Yanukovych’s corrupt administration but more importantly also on the Maidan demonstrators themselves. The knowledge within elite circles of the truth of this false flag operation has been a hidden landmine that could explode the Maidan regime at any moment. Indeed, during his presidential campaign now sitting Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskiy himself referred cryptically to the Maidan regime’s illegitimacy and the snipers’ terrorist attack. In an apparent cryptic reference to his opponent, President Petro Poroshenko (who actually may have opposed the shootings) and the snipers’ massacre of 20 February 2014, Zelenskiy commented: “People whom came to power on blood are profiting on blood” (www.pravda.com.ua/news/2019/02/26/7207718/). Later, he decried the ‘disappearance of documentation regarding the massacre (https://interfax.com.ua/news/political/640586.html?fbclid=IwAR0K4kGEZPEfsmOQActT7UXn3A3yRBmawO5MuqcYe6OiIEQMa_JbxrZOHuU). It was such seeming candor that led to Zelenskiy’s landslide election to the Ukrainian presidency. Some day it may get him killed, and Ukraine’s neofascists are first on the list of possible perpetrators.
At the same time, we often hear that President Zelenskiy’s popularity ratings have attained Putinian levels since the Russian invasion. This, however, must be unpacked a bit to provide a clearer and deeper picture. On the war’s eve, the Zelenskiy administration was extremely weak as was Ukraine’s overall state apparatus, divided by contentious political, ideological, oligarchic and criminal factions. The entire Ukrainian polity by then was opposed to Zelenskiy. His popularity ratings had plummeted to 25-30 percent. According to polls on the war’s eve, Zelenskiy would receive 23 percent and his predecessor on Bankovaya, Petro Poroshenko – 21 percent. Zelenskiy’s ‘Servants of the People’ or ‘Slugy naroda‘ party led all parties with 19 percent, but that is compared to 70 percent when the Rada was elected and 14 percent for Poroshenko’s ‘European Solidarity’ party (http://www.kiis.com.ua/?lang=ukr&cat=reports&id=1090&page=1&fbclid=IwAR0-qs5D-9Hli6YNeKunjtR9N-cAnTSISnB2vn5ot3PXmvd4Q5YGoqFxJwA). This means that Zelenskiy’s present wartime high popularity ratings are almost certainly thin and therefore highly vulnerable to the continuing stream of bad news from the front, despite Zelenskiy’s tightening of the screws on and manipulation of information on the situation at the front. Moreover, Zelenskiy is certainly giving the impression of being in and in fact seems very involved in the formulation of Ukraine’s war strategy. He makes frequent public military and strategic announcements and nightly reports on the front and geopolitical situation. This forward-leaning position makes the president even more vulnerable to the political risks surrounding military failure. There is and will be plenty more bad news.
Before the war, media manipulation, outright disinformation, and lies have been a hallmark of the actor/producer Zelenskiy’s regime—a regime filled with producers, scenario writers, and PR professionals. Zelenskiy’s masking of reality with the by now ubiquitous postmodernist virtuality and ‘strategic communication’ falsehoods are being exposed and exacerbate the delegitimizing effect of the war. Virtual simulacra, however, is absent when it comes to the Maidan’s growing authoritarianism both before the war as Zelenskiy’s ratings sunk and after the war as a knee jerk reaction to the threat to regime stability posed by the war.
Before the war, Zelenskiy had proven expert at alienating every political force in the country from his team and his ‘Slugi naroda’ party, named after his hit television program about a Ukrainian president. Zelenskiy banned opposition television stations, his prosecutors indicted former President Petro Poroshenko with treason and put him under de facto house arrest, he refashioned the Supreme Court in violation of the Ukrainian constitution, and he signed laws discriminating against the Russian language and effectively banning oligarchs from politics. The only part of the political spectrum he was able to find a modus vivendi with was Ukraine’s more prominent neofascist parties. For example, neofascist founder of the extremist Right Sector, party, commander of the semi-autonomous Ukrainian Volunteer Army, and mastermind of the 2 May 2014 Odessa terrorist pogrom Dmitro Yarosh became an official advisor to the Chief of the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces on Zelenskiy’s watch.
After the war began, Zelenskiy placed all television channels under a single command with uniform broadcasting that offered hardly any dissenting voices. He banned all opposition parties except Poroshenko’s sufficiently nationalist ‘European Solidarity’ party as well as the numerous if small ultranationalist, neofascist. The parties banned were: the Opposition Party — For Life, Shariy Party, Nashi, Opposition Bloc, Left Opposition, Union of Left Forces, State, Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine, Socialist Party of Ukraine, Socialists Party and Volodymyr Saldo Bloc. “Any activity of politicians aimed at splitting or collaborating will not succeed,” Zelensky explained (https://news.yahoo.com/ukraine-ban-11-political-parties-141310973.html?fr=sycsrp_catchall). But Zelenskiy has been playing with fire, since the radical parties have been preparing to seize power in a ‘nationalist revolution’ ever since the first sniper salvos echoed across the Maidan. The war may provide the opportunity for a coup as the Zelenskiy administration helps establish authoritarianism for the neofascists and as mounting defeats and retreats at the front undermine the Maidan regime’s legitimacy.
There are unmistakable signs of growing factionalization, polarization, and splitting within the Ukrainian elite, prompting Zelenskiy to take authoritarian countermeasures. The most recent sign of the growing rifts was the publication by a former Rada deputy close to Zelenskiy, Sergei Leshchenko, of a draft presidential decree that would strip Putin’s {sic] [I think the author meant to say Zelensky – NB] business and political patron Ihor Kolomoiskii of his citizenship. Wanted for various crimes in the US, Kolomoiskii ran afoul of Zelenskiy’s predecessor, Poroshenko, and was stripped of his main holding, Privat Bank. In addition to Kolomoiskii, Hennadii Korban and two others were included in the same draft decree. Korban, like Kolomoiskii was a patron of the neofascist volunteer battalions manned by Right Sector and other neofascist types during the first Donbass war that have recently morphed into the Ukrainian Volunteer Army and National Korpus. Thus, Yarosh signed a petition along with 115 other members of the Ukrainian elite, including the powerful mayor of Kiev Vitaliy Klitchko, addressed to Zelenskiy to refrain from taking such an action against Korban (and by implication Kolomoiskii as well) on the grounds that such an action violates the constitution (https://www.facebook.com/dyastrub/posts/pfbid0vA6f26FMacYCyPwpmvtUhhLUqiLRwrRsk3kNcXUYvKo6BejDtagx9frbQcMpF4pgl). This episode can be another exacerbating Zelenskiy’s sometimes testy relations with the ultranationalists and neofascists even before the war.
Office of the President spokesman Alexei Arestovich’s ineffective often flagrantly absurd and outrageous strategic communications, including numerous fake news stories about the war, have discredited the military and civilian leaderships and signaled possible early development of a rift between them (https://gordonhahn.com/2022/04/15/kvartal-22-zelenskiys-simulacra/). Since spring, there have been rising tensions reported between the civilian and military leadership, as the Russian withdrawal from north of Kiev led to a new strategy and centralized focus on the Donbass eastern front and Novorossiya southern front along the Azov and Black Sea coasts. Russia’s capture of the Azov seaport of Mariupol’, the exposure of war crimes by the neofascist Azov Battalion, and the long Russian siege of the Azovstal’ Steel Plant where Azov fighters held out and pressured the regime and military to send forces to break them out from the Russian encirclement created civil-military tensions and scapegoating and exacerbated regime tensions with the neofascists. During the siege of Azovstal’ that sealed the fate of Mariupol, the deputy commander of the neo-fascist Azov Battalion fighters there criticized politicians like Arestovich who warned the Azovtsy to “mind their own business.” There was widespread dismay across the Ukrainian social net that the civilian authorities were not doing enough to break the encirclement either militarily or through negotiations (https://strana.news/articles/390297-ukrainskaja-oppozitsija-obvinjaet-ofis-prezidenta-v-dopushchenii-okkupatsii-territorij-ukrainy.html). The Ukrainian Defense Ministry’s statement that a military operation to break the Azovstal’ encirclement was not possible could be seen by some to have been the result of the generals’ breaking under civilian pressure (https://strana.news/news/390472-v-minoborony-schitajut-chto-azovstal-nevozmozhno-deblokirovat-voennym-putem.html).
Civil-military tensions became more generalized in early May. Arestovich openly criticized the military leadership, referring to “criminality” and “treason” that need to be investigated and punished. Indeed, he criticized the entire state bureaucracy in response to charges of incompetence at the presidential level: “And 360 thousand bureaucrats between us and the land? They are who? Do they have anything to answer for? And the military command, to which there are already many questions?” Voices representing the military and indicted opposition leader, former president Poroshenko, shot back, criticizing Arestovich and other civilian critics. One military voice reported to be close to chief of the Ukrainian armed forces general staff Zalyuzhniy asserted: “Hundreds of killed and wounded men and women every day are securing (your) tasty coffee in sunny Kiev. Every day. And to search today for someone to blame among them is far from the best idea. The guilty are not in the army, though there are some who can answer for something, the guilty are in the high offices that formed the budget policy and determined who would serve in key posts.” One Ukrainian journalist predicted that if the Office of the President continued to criticize the military, the consequences for the critics would be “devastating” (https://strana.news/articles/390297-ukrainskaja-oppozitsija-obvinjaet-ofis-prezidenta-v-dopushchenii-okkupatsii-territorij-ukrainy.html).
In early June, Zelenskiy and commander of the Ukrainian Armed Forces Viktor Zalyuzhniy differed over the timing of withdrawal from Severodonetsk and where to form a new defensive line against the Russian offensive in Luhansk and Donetsk Oblasts. Zelenskiy demanded that the army hold out as long as possible in Severodonetsk and creating a defensive line close to the city, risking encirclement of thousands of troops, while Zalyuzhniy called for puling back forming a defensive line running north-south through Kramatorsk (https://strana.news/news/394302-zelenskij-prokommentiroval-situatsiju-v-severodonetske.html?fbclid=IwAR0aJ4UE07ep1mLoeV1tsI48kqicxIX_uvcLFnPnnC7cWFsObmyHh28RF9w).
The civilian leadership is further plagued by defections and corruption in the intelligence and law enforcement organs. On July 17th Zelenskiy fired the head of Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) Ivan Bakanov and Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Irina Venediktova, blaming them ostensibly for the large number of defections to Russian among security and law enforcement officials. He announced that “651 criminal proceedings were registered for high treason and collaboration activities by employees of the prosecutor’s office, pre-trial investigation bodies, and other law enforcement agencies. In 198 criminal proceedings, persons were noted for suspicion, and more than 60 employees of the bodies and the SBU remained in the occupied territory and are working against our state.” The firings were apparently a response to what Zelenskiy called “an array of crimes against the foundations of the national security of the state and the connections recorded between the employees of the law enforcement agencies of Ukraine and the special services of Russia.” Bakanov’s assistant and former head of the Crimean SBU Oleg Kulinich was arrested for espionage (https://strana.news/news/399930-zelenskij-rasskazal-ob-uvolnenijakh-venediktovoj-i-bakanova-video.html, https://strana.news/news/399927-zaderzhanie-eks-hlavy-sbu-kryma-i-konflikt-s-ermakom-podopljoka-otstavki-bakanova.html, and https://vesti.ua/strana/est-sereznye-voprosy-prezident-obyasnil-kadrovye-resheniya). The next day Zelenskiy fired 28 SBU officials (https://strana.news/news/400073-zelenskij-nameren-uvolit-28-sotrudnikov-sbu-video-18-ijulja.html). On July 20th, Zelenskiy fired the SBU’s deputy head and the SBU regional heads in Kharkiv, Sumy, and Poltava. The seriousness of this crisis cannot be overstated. Bakanov and Zelenskiy are friends going back to the same neighborhood in the city of Kryvyi Rih. Bakanov then ran Zelenskiy’s entertainment company as well as his presidential campaign in 2019. Then Zelenskiy appointed Bakanov to lead the SBU in 2019. It may be that at least some of these firings are the result of a failed intelligence operation to convince several Russian pilots to defect with the warplanes, for which seven Russian military men were arrested, as announced on July 25th. The Russian reports claim that in the process the Ukrainian intelligence operatives’ talks with the Russian pilots, apparently monitored by Russian intelligence, the location, structure, and other details of Ukraine’s air defense system were revealed to Russia. But most are the result of the defections to Russia Zelenskiy noted; something that would hardly be chosen as an alibi to cover the failed operation or something else, as it greatly discredits his administration if not the Maidan regime itself.
Foreign actors, most notably the United States, can complicate the polarized multi-level chess game that Ukrainian politics is becoming in the heat of this war. On July 8th, less than three weeks before the SBU and other siloviki firings, Ukrainian US Congresswoman Victoria Spartz requested the Biden Administration “to brief Congress on the performed due diligence and oversight procedures related to President Zelensky’s Chief of Staff, Andriy Yermak, at the scheduled classified congressional oversight briefing on July 12, 2022. Based on a variety of intelligence and actions by Mr. Yermak in Ukraine, Congress needs to obtain this information urgently.” Spartz emphasized that Yermak’s activity “raises many concerns with a variety of people in the United States and internationally,” though Yermak is “highly regarded” by Biden’s National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan. Spartz’s reference to “intelligence” actions supposedly taken by Yermak suggests that Zelenskiy’s chief of staff may be suspected of botching or directly undermining security, including around the operation to co-opt Russian air force pilots along with their planes (https://spartz.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/spartz.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/Spartz%20Letter%20to%20Biden_Yermak%20_red.pdf). Recall that there were similar charges made against Yermak when Ukrainian intelligence’s effort to capture Russian Wagner fighters headed to Syria went awry in 2021 and they instead were ‘detained’ in Belarus after Zelenskiy cancelled the operation and Yermak tipped off Belarussian authorities of the Wagner personnel’s presence in their country (https://uawire.org/ukrainian-journalist-accuses-zelensky-s-administration-head-of-derailing-special-operation-to-detain-wagner-mercenaries).
In addition to the civil-siloviki tensions and the grave political consequences of banning more than ten political parties and presumably all of Ukraine’s powerful oligarchs from politics, Zelenskiy created a new cohort of enemies when he announced plans to be implemented this year to reduce the Ukrainian state bureaucracy by two-thirds. This will put hundreds of thousands of embittered officials with intricate knowledge of state organization, function, and financing out of work and on the streets looking for jobs in a war-torn country that has mobilization legislation requiring all able-bodied male citizens to serve in the armed forces, with legislation bringing women into the equation supposedly pending. These outcasts retain contacts with former colleagues in the bureaucracy and can carry out intrigues to undermine Zelenskiy, his policies, and the regime itself.
Although it may be early to conclude a high level of civil-siloviki tensions, the same cannot be said of the political struggle between Zelenskiy and former president Poroshenko and with other oligarchs. Poroshenko could be a particularly dangerous opponent. He had good relations with Biden when the latter was US vice president and led Obama’s Ukraine policy and is backed into a corner having been indicted and forced to flee abroad. His supporters remain in country, and Zelenskiy’s thin support and purge of the political landscape has created a plethora of enemies, whom Poroshenko can win over or buy off. An exacerbated Zelenskiy-Poroshenko conflict could draw in General Zalyuzhniy. He has frequent contacts with Washington and Brussels who some day might tire of Zelenskiy as the war drags on. All this becomes a likely explosive dynamic, if the situation at the front continues to deteriorate for Ukraine. Add into this mix the pro-Russian factor (in the broad sense that encompasses pro-Russian language sentiment, Russian ethnic claims to a right to live in and shape Ukraine, as well as pro-Russia sentiment), invigorated by the arrest of the pro-Russian Opposition Bloc leader Medvedchuk, and there is the real risk of a repeat of the country’s collapse through coup or revolution into warring factions as occurred post-1917 (https://strana.news/articles/analysis/392270-pokazanija-medvedchuka-na-poroshenko-naskolko-verojaten-arest-pjatoho-prezidenta.html). In this case, regions could devolve to the control of modern warlords representing these various trends backed by oligarch and various interested outside parties.
Then mix in as well the neofascists’ separate game of national revolution and their anger over the death and capture of the core of the neofascist Azov Battalion and continuing battlefield losses in general. Arestovich alluded consciously or unconsciously to this neofascist revolutionary threat, when he noted in May the “not so clever narrative: ‘heroes in the battlefield against traitors in the Office (of the President) and fat, dense generals in the staffs’” (https://strana.news/articles/390297-ukrainskaja-oppozitsija-obvinjaet-ofis-prezidenta-v-dopushchenii-okkupatsii-territorij-ukrainy.html).
Moreover, Ukraine’s GDP will contract by nearly 50 percent this year, and a quarter of Ukrainian businesses have closed down, with Russia seizing the country’s coal, agricultural lands, and seaports, comprising some 60 percent of Ukraine’s economy. Much is being written about the energy crisis in Europe and America as summer turns to fall and temperatures begin to drop. Less attention has been given to the consequences of energy deficits in Ukraine itself. The war-torn country will certainly be cutoff from Russian gas, oil, and coal, and its own coal in Donbass is under Russian control. Its energy sector is on the brink of default as residential and business customers lack the funds to pay their bills. A freezing, hungry nation losing a war will be inclined to blame Zelenskiy and the ‘democratic’ Maidan regime and to follow less than desirable leaders. They will be susceptible to demagogues, and Ukraine’s all too numerous neofascists could fit the bill. The latter are now even better-armed than they were before the war and are praised at home and in the West as heroes who defended Azovstal, Mariupol, Kiev, and Kharkiv. The Ukrainian Volunteer Army of Ukraine’s neofascist Right Sector (the former commanded and the latter founded by advisor to Zalyuzhniy, Dmitro Yarosh), the National Corps (led by founder of Azov, the neofascist Andriy Biletskiy), and other ultranationalist and neofascist groups continue to sacrifice themselves at the front in sharp contrast to those sipping coffee in Kiev and doing photo shoots in glossy Western magazines for women, as the Zelenskiys just did.
To conclude, there is significant evidence that the Russo-Ukrainian war is destabilizing the hybrid republican-oligarchic-ultranationalist Maidan regime–one riven by political, ideological, and oligarchic factionalism from the start. Below the apex of the Maidan’s quasi-republican regime headed by a thinly popular frontman lurks malign forces of oligarchic corruption and criminality and of radical nationalism and neofascism. The war temporarily papered over the ruling groups’ internal divisions, uniting them despite their multifarious interests, goals, and conflicts. However, over time the war and slow moving rout of the Ukrainian military will wear away the thin coat of plaster uniting these groups in their fight against the Russians. At the same time, corruption, criminality, and multi-nationality in Ukraine make the Maidan regime susceptible to infiltration by the Russian state. Moreover, the war along with limited commitment to republican government within the Ukrainian elite are exacerbating the country’s conflictive environment and political culture. Being comprised of competing and increasingly violent oligarchic and ultranationalist clans, Ukrainian culture will be increasingly likely to yield growing intra-national violence and political upheaval. This trend will intensify with particular vigor if or when the war becomes clearly lost and the West begins to abandon the Ukrainian cause or desperately attempt salvage it through a decisive political intervention such as a coup. Numerous coup or revolutionary scenarios are now part of picture, and contingencies should be planned for.
Russia’s Defence Ministry has accused Ukraine of deliberately targeting a prison in Donbass where it knew dozens of its own POWs were being held.
The Ukrainian authorities were aware that their soldiers, who surrendered to Russian forces at the Azovstal steel plant, were being held at the prison in the village of Yelenovka, as Kiev itself insisted on them being placed there, Russian Deputy Defense Minister Aleksandr Fomin said on Wednesday.
The shelling of Correctional colony No.120 in the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) in late July killed 50 inmates and left 73 others wounded. The facility held members of the infamous Azov neo-nazi battalion, who were captured in May after being holed up for weeks at the Azovstal steelworks during the Russian siege of the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol.
“On May 20, 2022, the surrendered servicemen of the Azov nationalist battalion were taken to the pre-trial detention center in the village of Yelenovka. The Ukrainian side insisted on this particular place for their detention,” Fomin said during a briefing for foreign military attachés in Moscow.
Kiev’s attack on the prison was deliberate, with “the Ukrainian leadership giving the order to carry out the missile strike because the Azov fighters started giving testimonies exposing their crimes, including those perpetrated against peaceful civilians,” he insisted.
Another reason for Ukraine hitting Yelenovka was to scare its own troops on the battlefield and “deter them from surrendering,” the Russian defense official said. Many Ukrainian soldiers have been recently laying down their arms, he added.
Aleksandr Fomin denied Ukraine’s “groundless” claims that Moscow struck the prison itself to pin the blame on Kiev, saying all the evidence shows that the missiles came from the north-western direction, where Kiev’s forces were located.
Last week, RIA Novosti news agency cited an unnamed high-ranking Pentagon official, who suggested that if Ukraine did shell the prison in Yelenovka, then it did so unintentionally.
The Russian deputy defense minister insisted that those words were nothing but “a clumsy attempt to justify the provocation by the Kiev regime.”
The attack on the detention facility was carried out with HIMARS multiple rocket launchers, supplied to Ukraine by the US, and the Americans have been claiming that those are “high-precision systems, which hit the targets they were meant to hit,” he said.
Also, in planning its strikes, the Ukrainian military actively relies on space and air reconnaissance data provided by the US and its allies, Fomin added.
In a bid to curb further speculation, the Russian Defense Ministry said on Sunday that it had officially invited experts from the UN and the International Red Cross Committee to carry out an impartial investigation into the incident in Yelenovka.
Russia sent troops into Ukraine on February 24, citing Kiev’s failure to implement the Minsk agreements, designed to give the regions of Donetsk and Lugansk special status within the Ukrainian state. The protocols, brokered by Germany and France, were first signed in 2014. Former Ukrainian President Pyotr Poroshenko has since admitted that Kiev’s main goal was to use the ceasefire to buy time and “create powerful armed forces.”
In February 2022, the Kremlin recognized the Donbass republics as independent states and demanded that Ukraine officially declare itself a neutral country that will never join any Western military bloc. Kiev insists the Russian offensive was completely unprovoked.
Related piece of interest below. Bolding for emphasis is mine. – Natylie
US Department of Defense, July 29, 2022
Senior Defense Official and Senior Military Official Hold a Background Briefing (excerpt)
Q: Yeah, thanks. Just one quick follow-up on the prison and then I have an unrelated question.
I know you can’t say definitively what happened but one of the claims is by the Russians that a HIMARS system was used to strike the prison. Can you say definitively that HIMARS were not used?
SENIOR MILITARY OFFICIAL: I don’t know that we can say definitively about any of it. I — but, you know, what I will — and listen, I haven’t seen all of the reporting but I am told that the Russians, you know, have made claims that they have pieces of HIMARS that were used in the strike. Listen, the Russians have a lot of pieces of HIMARS, right?
I mean, the Ukrainians have been, you know, sending a lot of HIMARS their way. So that would not surprise me. What would also not surprise me is if the Russians would — would lead us astray, in terms of information, and tell us that the Ukrainians had done this.
Here’s the last thing I’d say, if it happened to be a Ukrainian strike, I promise you, number one, they didn’t mean to do that, right? They certainly care about their own people and they care about the civilians and military in uniform of their own army.
And then the last piece would be, just from a practical perspective in terms of our conversations, whenever we talk to the Ukrainians, we’ve spent a great deal of time back and forth about, you know, reassuring — or them reassuring us about the loss of land warfare. They clearly understand that.
So anyways, we’ll see where this goes but I would just tell you, as you approach this in your reporting, you know, we’ll find the right side of this but I wouldn’t believe it’s the Russians right away.
The “security dilemma” is a central concept in the academic study of international politics and foreign policy. First coined by John Herz in 1950 and subsequently analyzed in detail by such scholars as Robert Jervis, Charles Glaser, and others, the security dilemma describes how the actions that one state takes to make itself more secure—building armaments, putting military forces on alert, forming new alliances—tend to make other states less secure and lead them to respond in kind. The result is a tightening spiral of hostility that leaves neither side better off than before.
If you’ve taken a basic international relations class in college and didn’t learn about this concept, you may want to contact your registrar and ask for a refund. Yet given its simplicity and its importance, I’m frequently struck by how often the people charged with handling foreign and national security policy seem to be unaware of it—not just in the United States, but in lots of other countries too.
Consider this recent propaganda video tweeted out from NATO headquarters, responding to assorted Russian “myths” about the alliance. The video points out that NATO is a purely defensive alliance and says it harbors no aggressive designs against Russia. These assurances might be factually correct, but the security dilemma explains why Russia isn’t likely to take them at face value and might have valid reasons to regard NATO’s eastward expansion as threatening.
Adding new members to NATO may have made some of these states more secure (which is why they wanted to join), but it should be obvious why Russia might not see it this way and that it might do various objectionable things in response (like seizing Crimea or invading Ukraine). NATO officials might regard Russia’s fears as fanciful or as “myths,” but that hardly means that they are completely absurd or that Russians don’t genuinely believe them. Remarkably, plenty of smart, well-educated Westerners—including some prominent former diplomats—cannot seem to grasp that their benevolent intentions are not transparently obvious to others.
Or consider the deeply suspicious and highly conflictual relationship among Iran, the United States, and the United States’ most important Middle East clients. U.S. officials presumably believe that imposing harsh sanctions on Iran, threatening it with regime change, conducting cyberattacks against its nuclear infrastructure, and helping organize regional coalitions against it will make the United States and its local partners more secure. For its part, Israel thinks assassinating Iranian scientists enhances its security, and Saudi Arabia thinks intervening in Yemen makes Riyadh safer.
Not surprisingly, according to basic IR theory, Iran sees these various actions as threatening and responds in its own fashion: backing Hezbollah, supporting the Houthis in Yemen, conducting attacks on oil facilities and shipments, and—most important of all—developing the latent capacity to build its own nuclear deterrent. But these predictable responses just reinforce its neighbors’ fears and make them feel less secure all over again, tightening the spiral further and heightening the risk of war.
The same dynamic is operating in Asia. Not surprisingly, China regards America’s long position of regional influence—and especially its network of military bases and its naval and air presence—as a potential threat. As it has grown wealthier, Beijing has quite understandably used some of that wealth to build military forces that can challenge the U.S. position. (Ironically, the George W. Bush administration once tried to tell China that pursuing greater military strength was an “outdated path” that would “hamper its own pursuit of national greatness,” even as Washington’s own military spending soared.)
In recent years, China has sought to alter the existing status quo in several areas. As should surprise no one, these actions have made some of China’s neighbors less secure, and they have responded by moving closer together politically, renewing ties with the United States, and building up their own military forces, leading Beijing to accuse Washington of a well-orchestrated effort to “contain” it and of trying keep China permanently vulnerable.
In all these cases, each side’s efforts to deal with what it regards as a potential security problem merely reinforced the other side’s own security fears, thereby triggering a response that strengthened the former’s original concerns. Each side sees what it is doing as purely defensive reaction to the other side’s behavior, and identifying “who started it” soon becomes effectively impossible.
The key insight is that aggressive behavior—such as the use of force—does not necessarily arise from evil or aggressive motivations (i.e., the pure desire for wealth, glory, or power for its own sake). Yet when leaders believe their own motives are purely defensive and that this fact should be obvious to others (as the NATO video described above suggests), they will tend to see an opponent’s hostile reaction as evidence of greed, innate belligerence, or an evil foreign leader’s malicious and unappeasable ambitions. Empathy goes out the window, and diplomacy soon becomes a competition in name-calling.
To be sure, a few world leaders have understood this problem and pursued policies that tried to mitigate the security dilemma’s pernicious effects. After the Cuban missile crisis, for example, U.S. President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev made a serious and successful effort to reduce the risk of future confrontations by installing the famous hotline and beginning a serious effort at nuclear arms control.
The Obama administration did something similar when it negotiated the nuclear deal with Iran, which it saw as a first step that that blocked Iran’s path to the bomb and opened up the possibility of improving relations over time. The first part of the deal worked, and the Trump administration’s subsequent decision to abandon it was a massive blunder that left all the parties worse off. As the former Mossad chief Tamir Pardo has observed, Israel’s extensive efforts to convince then-U.S. President Donald Trump to withdraw from the deal was “one of the most serious strategic mistakes since the establishment of the state.”
As the writer Robert Wright recently pointed out, then-U.S. President Barack Obama’s decision to not to send arms to Ukraine after the Russian seizure of Crimea in 2014 showed a similar appreciation of security dilemma logic. In Wright’s telling, Obama understood that sending Ukraine offensive weapons might exacerbate Russian fears and encourage the Ukrainians to think they could reverse Russia’s earlier gains, thereby provoking an even wider war.
Tragically, this is pretty much what happened after the Trump and Biden administrations ramped up the flow of Western weaponry to Kyiv: The fear that Ukraine was slipping rapidly into the Western orbit heightened Russian fears and led Putin to launch an illegal, costly, and now protracted preventive war. Even if it made good sense to help Ukraine improve its ability to defend itself, doing so without doing very much to reassure Moscow made war more likely.
So, does the logic of the security dilemma prescribe policies of accommodation instead? Alas, no. As its name implies, the security dilemma really is a dilemma, insofar as states cannot guarantee their security by unilaterally disarming or making repeated concessions to an opponent. Even if mutual insecurity lies at the core of most adversarial relationships, concessions that tipped the balance in one side’s favor might lead it to act aggressively, in the hopes of gaining an insurmountable advantage and securing itself in perpetuity. Regrettably, there are no quick, easy, or 100 percent reliable solutions to the vulnerabilities inherent in anarchy.
Instead, governments must try to manage these problems through statecraft, empathy, and intelligent military policies. As Jervis explained in his seminal 1978 World Politics article, in some circumstances the dilemma can be eased by developing defensive military postures, especially in the nuclear realm. From this perspective, second-strike retaliatory forces are stabilizing because they protect the state via deterrence but do not threaten the other side’s own second-strike deterrent capability.
For example, ballistic missile submarines are stabilizing because they provide more reliable second-strike forces but do not threaten each other. By contrast, counterforce weapons, strategic anti-submarine warfare capabilities, and/or missile defenses are destabilizing because they threaten the other side’s deterrent capacity and thus exacerbate its security fears. (As critics have noted, the offense-versus-defense distinction is much harder to draw when dealing with conventional forces.)
The existence of the security dilemma also suggests that states should look for areas where they can build trust without leaving themselves vulnerable. One approach is to create institutions to monitor each other’s behavior and reveal when an adversary is cheating on a prior agreement. It also suggests that states interested in stability are usually wise to respect the status quo and adhere to prior agreements. Blatant violations erode trust, and trust once lost is hard to regain.
Lastly, the logic of the security dilemma (and much of the related literature on misperception) suggests that states should work overtime to explain, explain, and once again explain their real concerns and why they are acting as they are. Most people (and governments) tend to think their actions are easier for others to understand than they really are, and they are not very good at explaining their conduct in language that the other side is likely to appreciate, understand, and believe. This problem is especially prevalent at present in relations between Russia and the West, where both sides seem to be talking past each other and have been surprised repeatedly by what the other side has done.
Giving bogus reasons for what one is doing is especially harmful, because others will sensibly conclude that one’s words cannot be taken seriously. A good rule of thumb is that adversaries will assume the worst about what you are doing (and why you are doing it) and that you must therefore go to enormous lengths to persuade them that their suspicions are mistaken. If nothing else, this approach encourages governments to empathize—i.e., to think about how the problem looks from their opponent’s perspective—which is always desirable even when the opponent’s view is off-base.
Unfortunately, none of these measures can fully eliminate the uncertainties that bedevil global politics or render the security dilemma irrelevant. It would be a more secure and peaceful world if more leaders considered whether a policy they believed was benign was unintentionally making others nervous, then considered whether the action in question could be modified in ways that alleviated (some of) those fears. This approach won’t always work, but it should be tried a more often than it is.
In his monthly report from Ukraine, Dmitriy Kovalevich provides details of the military and political situation in Ukraine during July including from the Russian and Ukrainian perspective.
July was the sixth month of full-scale war in Ukraine. Russia calls its intervention a “special military operation”. In late June, the entire territory of the former Luhansk region of Ukraine was taken by Russian and Lugansk defense forces. The fall of the twin cities of Severodonetsk and Lysichansk sealed the victory for the Lugansk People’s Republic, which was declared in 2014 and took full shape in the years following Ukraine’s refusal to implement its side of the ‘Minsk 2’ ceasefire agreement of February 2015.
Russia has taken an operational pause following the heavy fighting in Lugansk in June. But its operation to take the Donetsk region of Donbass, together with Donetsk republic defense forces, continues. Rocket attacks by Russian forces have become more frequent as ground combat has lessened. Throughout Ukraine, air raid alerts are sounding four or five times a day. Russia’s main targets, according to its military command, are the depots storing Western weapons, especially the American ‘HIMARS’ multiple rocket launchers and their ammunition. These have begun to cause trouble for the Russian military, forcing it to disperse its own ammunition depots.
Using its missiles, Russian forces are trying to strike U.S.-supplied weapons at the point of transportation once they arrive in Ukraine. They are using intelligence received, in part, from the Ukrainian security forces. Constant leaks of information from Ukraine government agencies led to the dramatic firings in July of the heads of the SBU (Ukraine’s security service), the prosecutor general and a number of heads of military departments.[1] The formal reason for the firings is the high number of Ukraine personnel in these departments said to be cooperating with the Russia military and thereby disrupting the military operations of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
Announced ‘counteroffensives’ by Kiev
Ukraine authorities continued in July to promise a military counteroffensive, continuing similar promises made since April. Richard Moore, the head of the UK spy agency MI6, has lately joined in making these promises.[2]
Kherson city and region are said to be the main target of the planned counteroffensive, recognizing that Russian military forces are concentrating their efforts further east in the Donbass region (now focused on the Donetsk republic). Russian forces grouped on the right (west) bank of the Dnieper River are said by Ukraine to be vulnerable and could be partially cut off if bridges across the river are destroyed.
Kherson city lies on the Dnieper River. It was founded by Russia as its first port and shipbuilding center on the Black Sea, nearly 250 years ago.
The strangest thing in the Ukrainian announcements of such ‘counteroffensives’ as in Kherson is their prolonged duration. According to the logic of military operations, such announcements should be kept secret and not announced days or weeks in advance. Yet the promised, imminent ‘counterattack’ on Kherson has been announced almost every day for the past three months. For Ukrainians, it has become a joke.
To launch its ‘counteroffensive’, Ukraine would need a minimum threefold superiority over Russia in manpower and weapons. On the manpower side, the simple numbers may be there for the Armed Forces of Ukraine. But Ukraine’s soldiers are inexperienced, with many unwilling to fight. Many have been forcibly seized on the streets as part of Ukraine’s obligatory military service. Meanwhile, in firepower, Russian forces have multiple advantages, allowing them to move forward even in the midst of their declared, operational pause.
The state of the Ukrainian military
In an interview for a Ukrainian publication at the end of July, an officer of the Armed Forces of Ukraine spoke about the real state of affairs in southern Ukraine. He said, “The Russians have concentrated their forces on our sector of the front and they are significantly superior to ours–in the number of personnel and, especially, in the number of artillery pieces, tanks and other heavy weapons.
“Moreover, in some areas, our troops have retreated. These have been short distances – up to 10 kilometers – in what our military calls ‘leveling the frontline’. Every day, our positions are under constant fire. There are days when there is no way to get to the surface for fresh air. We sit in basements and dugouts for days on end, being strongly hit.”[3]
This situation, the officer says, causes problems of psychological fatigue of Ukraine’s military. There are practically no rotations of personnel. In many units, there are personnel shortages of up to 40 per cent due to losses and illnesses. Many fighters, having spent a month or more at the front, become tired, lose their morale and look for any way to get to the rear. Some even refuse orders to advance to front line positions.
The officer explained that many conscripts suffer from serious, chronic diseases. “It is a huge mystery to me how some have passed the medical examination upon conscription. For example, they recently sent me a conscript with minus-mine myopia. Without glasses, he cannot see anything at all. When I asked him how he passed the medical examination at the military registration and enlistment office, he replied that the optometrist did not even examine him.”
Obviously, in this state of affairs a Ukrainian counteroffensive is impossible. Any such attempt would be suicidal. ButUkrainian authorities are under great pressure to report military ‘achievements’ to Western sponsors. This is in order to receive and then plunder Western aid. That ‘aid’ is provided on credit, or with guarantees of repayment using Ukrainian assets as collateral.
Western ‘aid’ finances Ukraine’s military… and its budget deficits
Kiev is drafting Ukrainian men into military service thanks to financial aid from various Western governments and militaries. According to the Ministry of Finance of Ukraine, in the first half of 2022, Ukraine received $12.2 billion for its government budget.[4] Its major sponsors were the USA, at US$4 billion; the IMF and World Bank, $2.3 billion; the European Union, $2.1 billion; Germany, $1.4 billion; Canada, $1.4 billion; Japan, $600 million; Great Britain, $600 million; and France, $300 million.
Here we see the essence of the countries of the Western imperialist elite, whom populations Russians increasingly refer to as ‘The Golden Billion’.[5] President Vladimir Putin himself used the term in his speech to Russian and foreign business people attending the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in June.
Of these Western funds, $ 7.7 billion went directly to payments to the military personnel of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. In other words, the Ukrainian army is not primarily funded by the state of Ukraine but, rather, appears as a group of mercenaries in the pay of the West.
Such funding by Western taxpayers makes Zelensky fawn before the leaders of the U.S., Canada and Britain. Former British prime minister Boris Johnson became a special idol for Zelensky. Some streets in Ukraine have even be renamedafter him. In July, a petition was registered on Zelensky’s website with a proposal to award Ukrainian citizenship to Johnson.[6] But here is the irony: a ‘Ukraine citizen Boris Johnson’ (born in 1964) could be a formally summoned to military service and sent off to the trenches to dodge Russian missiles.
Economic woes
In July, Ukraine’s budget deficit grew significantly. The National Bank of Ukraine was obliged to devalue the national currency by 25 per cent.[7] Accordingly, the prices of most goods have skyrocketed.
Against the backdrop of a US$50 billion budget deficit[8], the devaluation of the hryvnia, rising prices for fuel, goods and services, and a military conflict that is moving into a protracted phase, it is becoming increasingly difficult for Ukraine to pay its state employees. If the conflict escalates, then everything will worsen. Experts are predicting a “hole” in the budget in the amount of $80 billion (which is more than 60 per cent of the country’s GDP). This risks completely destroying the already shaky economy of the country.[9]
Despite sharply rising prices, the Ministry of Finance of Ukraine has no plan to raise the minimum wage. It sits at 6,700 hryvnia ($150) per month. That hasn’t stopped the deputies in the Verkhovna Rada (Ukrainian legislature) from voting in July to raise their salaries (financed by Western financial assistance).[10]
As a result of the worsening economy, the number of Ukrainians traveling to Russian-controlled territory in search of work is growing. Every day, up to 200 cars cross the front lines in the Zaporozhye region. “Ukrainians say they are returning not only to reunite with their families but also in search of work that they could not find on Ukrainian territory,” reports Euronews.[11]
Now that Ukrainians are offered Russian citizenship on a simplified basis (facilitating their search for employment in Russia), Ukrainian authorities are resorting to repression to block this. A draft law has been submitted to the Verkhovna Rada providing for up to 15 years in prison for Ukrainian citizens who accept Russian citizenship.
“Rada deputies are discussing the strengthening of criminal liability for all categories of the population that receive these passports,” said Anatoly Stelmakh, Deputy Minister for the Reintegration of Uncontrolled Territories of Ukraine.[12]“The bill that we are currently processing sets the range of punishment from a fine to 15 years in prison.”
Ukrainian officials allege that Russian authorities are imposing Russian citizenship on Ukrainians by force. But these same officials are threatening 15 years in prison for people they allege were ‘forced’ to obtain the forbidden fruit of Russian citizenship (along with much improved social services, wages, pensions and employment opportunities). Westernmedia does not bother with such logical inconsistencies. The life task of Ukrainians has been set by them as as dying for the interests of Western corporations, and paying for this with loans and accrued interest.
According to an official of Russia’s National Defense Control Center, a total of 2.8 million people have moved to Russia from Donetsk and Lugansk and from other Ukrainian or former Ukrainian territories since the beginning of Russia’s military operation. Many of these movements were made in advance and anticipation of the military operation.
The number of Ukrainians leaving for western Europe or moving internally is also in the millions, though contrary to Western media reporting, these are not all due to the war. Millions of Ukrainians are in year-long queues for work permits and citizenship applications in neighbouring Poland or further west in Europe because they have no faith in social and economic improvements in the country.
RIA Novosti reported on July 28 that some 300,000 Russians have left their country to live in the West. Their average age is 32 and their incomes are higher than the Russian average. The RIA columnist describes the departed Russian citizens as “in love with something imaginary”.
“They loved something imaginary, this ‘European lifestyle’, with its high salaries for ‘creative work’ and its capacity to make one feel like a ‘man of the world’, a ‘cosmopolitan’ surrounded by people like themselves with similar tastes and views. So unlike the many ‘cattle’ they left behind in Russia.”
