By Sputnik News, Andrew Korybko
Homes damaged in Donetsk after shelling by Ukrainian forces. Photo courtesy of RIA Novosti © / Mikhail Parkhomenko.
Kiev’s forces began heavy shelling in Donetsk over the weekend, with Poroshenko dismissing Putin’s emergency peace plan thus restarting the conflict in East Ukraine. The offensive now appears poised to expand from a battle for the airport to an entire regional operation, with no weapons off-limits.
While news reports suggest that Kiev has recaptured most of the heavily contested Donestk airport, it doesn’t appear to have stopped there. Stories are coming in telling that Kiev has begun shelling residential areas in the city as well, to say nothing of the 500kg bombs it is accused of dropping on nearby Gorlovka. Poroshenko may have been encouraged to restart and expand the war because of the support he’s been receiving from both the US government and Blackwater. It may turn out to be that Kiev uses the recently reclaimed airport as a gateway to fully expanding the war all the way up to Russia’s borders, thus raising the risk that the civil war may become an international one.
A New War For A New Year
The resumption of open conflict in Ukraine (which never truly ‘ceased’ in the first place) looks to be the first ‘new’ war of the year, and it’s entirely Washington-backed. The US has been using Ukraine as a proxy against Russia ever since the EuroMaidan Color Revolutionaries seized power last February, so it’s not surprising that it would have an interest in the current hostilities. In fact, Congress even voted to send weapons to the country last month in a move that was guaranteed to destabilize the situation sooner or later. On the ‘non-governmental’ front, Blackwater has taken to training an ‘experimental battalion’ of 550 soldiers for Kiev. Mixed together, the combination of US support and Blackwater training is a surefire recipe for disaster in any country of the world.
The Air Gate
Since Kiev’s ‘justification’ for resuming the war was that the East Ukrainian self-defense forces had gained control of Donetsk airport, it’s important to look at exactly why this location is worth fighting over in the first place. Some analysts have decried the strategic attention being given to it by either side, but they’re missing the larger picture – the airport serves as the logistical bottleneck for projecting major force in the region, and Kiev’s control of this valuable asset would allow it to not only dominate the city of Donetsk, but potentially the rest of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics through massive shipments of troops and equipment. During such an operation, it may relapse back into its illegal habit of dropping cluster bombs and white phosphorus on civilians, too.
This explains the proactively defensive reasoning over why the East Ukrainian forces urgently needed to gain the upper hand and prevent Kiev from conquering the airport in the first place (hence the earlier fighting), and conversely, why Kiev absolutely has to control this position in order to win the war in its favor (hence the renewed offensive). If the self-defense forces could have ‘corked the bottle’, then they would have increased the chances that Kiev’s imminent offensive could have potentially been delayed and their own security thus prolonged. From Kiev’s perspective, the longer the self-defense forces controlled the airport, the less likely it was that Kiev could eventually re-establish its control over the region. Both sides knew that the three-year ‘special status’ clause for the Donetsk and Lugansk regions in the Minsk Protocol wouldn’t last and was only a temporary solution at best, so they were basically jostling for the best position possible for whenever hostilities inevitably re-erupted, and this was the Donetsk airport.
To The Fringe
Considering the enormous military-strategic importance attached to the Donetsk airport, its occupation by Kiev’s forces will likely foreshadow a larger war either now or sometime in the near future. Nobody disputes the fact that Kiev and Washington were unhappy with the conflict’s previously ‘frozen’ (however thawed) settlement, as both entities have as their primary objective the elimination of the self-defense forces and the neutralization of Eastern Ukraine’s resistance to the EuroMaidan authorities.
Given this vision, it’s assured that Kiev will sooner or later (with support from its American patrons) use its newly acquired position to try to destroy the opposition once and for all. This could conceivably take the war up to Russia’s borders and predictably bring with it a host of provocations. If the US can trick Russia into conventionally intervening in the Ukrainian Civil War or engaging in an outright Russian-Ukrainian War on Washington’s terms, then it might finally succeed in its objective of entrapping Russia in a Brzezinski-esque spiral of peripheral destabilization that could bog it down for years.
The statements, views, and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of EMerging Equity.
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