Dmitri Kovalevich
Russian Soldiers in Avdiivka
And ten years since the coup in Kiev that started it all…
Russia’s military intervention into Ukraine on February 24, 2022, is a direct consequence of the illegal and violent coup in Kiev in February 2014 and the far-right, war-making regime that the coup-installed.
The end of February 2024 marks the tenth anniversary of the pro-Western coup in Kiev, Ukraine that overthrew the country’s elected president and legislature. It is also the second anniversary of Russia’s entry into the civil conflict in Ukraine that has raged ever since the 2014 coup. Russia’s ‘Special Military Operation’, as the Russian government and people call it, is a direct consequence of the coup and the deep divisions in Ukrainian society that the coup brought to the fore and deepened.
The main trigger of the coup was the violent overthrow of the elected president of Ukraine and, shortly after, its elected legislature. The coup touched off a violent and unrelenting ideological and institutional drive to suppress the multinational character of Ukraine, as inherited from the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the decades of progress and development during Soviet Ukraine before and after World War Two. All things ‘Russian’ were henceforth targets for elimination by an emboldened Ukrainian ultranationalism on the march.
Since 2014, television and media outlets in the Russian language have been banned. Political parties that opposed the 2014 coup have been banned. Writers and activists have been driven underground or abroad. Some have been massacred, as in the city of Odessa on May 4, 2014. Monuments and place names honoring Soviet Ukraine’s past have been dismantled, in many cases replaced by monuments honoring the Nazi collaborators of the World War Two era. Glorification of, and monuments to, Ukrainian Nazi collaborators from those years is now common.
Ten years ago, days before the actual coup, unknown snipers began shooting both protesters and police officers in the battleground of Kiev’s central square, commonly called ‘Maidan’ Square’. (The name ‘Maidan’ came to describe the pro-coup movement as a whole.) According to victims’ testimonies, some of which were voiced at the flawed and drawn-out trials in which few of the trigger-pullers were charged and none convicted, the deadly fire came from the roofs of buildings seized and controlled by the coup’s far-right, paramilitary shock troops.
The ‘Maidan Massacre’ on February 20, 2014 was a key moment in justifying the coup before the populations of the Western countries because Western media and governments immediately blamed anti-coup forces (so-called ‘pro-Russians’) for the deaths that occurred. They waged a frenetic propaganda drive to turn the tide of public opinion and convince it that supporters of the president and legislature being targeted by the coup were responsible for the more than 100 shooting deaths that occurred that day.
Radical ultranationalists were the strike force of the new, pro-U.S., and pro-European Union government that came to power. Resistance against them was concentrated in Crimea, in the industrial working-class regions of Donbass in the east of the country, and in the city and surroundings of Odessa in the country’s southwest.
Resistance to the coup and to the far-right paramilitaries took some months to develop in Donbass because there were no governing structures there to which the population could turn for protection in the highly centralized, post-1991 Ukraine.
In the city of Odessa, resistance to the coup was tragically suppressed in a massacre of protesters in the city center on May 4 that killed more than 40.
Crimea resisted and survived the coup thanks to the existence of an autonomous, regional government to which the population could turn for protection. Crimea was the only region of Ukraine to have such an autonomous government. This was and remains a legacy of the self-determination policies of the 1917 Russian Revolution. The ‘Autonomous Republic of Crimea’ survived the secession of Ukraine from the Soviet Union (USSR) in 1990-91 and became a thorn in the side of the nationalist government in Kiev that oversaw the transition of Ukraine’s planned economy under Soviet rule to today’s disastrous capitalist economy. Today, Ukraine’s economy is utterly subordinate and beholden to the United States, Britain, and the large powers of the European Union.
Over the past ten years, millions of former citizens of Ukraine have migrated to Russia from eastern and central Ukraine for safety and for better social and economic opportunities. On the western side of the country, millions have migrated to countries of the European Union, continuing and accelerating the trend of Ukrainians escaping the disaster of the country’s post-Soviet, capitalist economy and social system.
Some estimates place Ukraine’s current population at 28 million, down from some 45 million at the time of its 1991 secession from the USSR. But no one knows for sure because, conveniently for the coup leaders and their Western sponsors, the last census conducted by the Ukraine government was more than 20 years ago, in 2001.
The betrayal by the Western powers of the Minks-2 peace agreement of 2015
In February 2015, a major ceasefire and peace agreement was agreed to by Ukraine, following a major military defeat it suffered in Donbass, in and around the small city of Debaltsevo. The ‘Minsk 2’ agreement (text here) was a political settlement that would grant autonomy to the two Donbass republics of Donetsk and Lugansk. It could have served as a model for other regions of Ukraine with large populations of Russian language and culture or with smaller populations of national minorities, such as the restive people of Hungarian origin living for centuries in what became western Ukraine in the 20th century.
The autonomy provisions of Minsk 2 resembled the powers exercised by states in the U.S. and provinces in Canada. Co-signing the agreement as guarantors were Russia, France and Germany. It was endorsed by no less than the UN Security Council five days later, on February 17.
But the Kiev regime never lived up to Minsk 2. It was encouraged by ‘co-guarantors’ France and Germany to ignore it. The regime spent the years following 2015 refusing to implement the agreement while militarily reinforcing the Donbass territory it continued to occupy, all in anticipation of relaunching a war against all those Ukrainians resisting the 2014 coup regime and its far-right ideology. As it did this, the regime received more and more financial and weapons support from the West. Today’s destruction of cities such as Mariupol and Bahmut (Artyomovsk to Russians) and of districts on the western edges of Donetsk city, such as Adviivka, are precisely a consequence of double-dealing over Minsk 2, by the Kiev regime and its Western backers.
On the two-year anniversary of Russia’s 2022 intervention, President Vladimir Putin explained how the Russian Federation waited patiently for the implementation of Minsk 2 and felt deeply betrayed by the failure of Kiev and the Western powers to do so. He said, “The Russian Federation did not know that European partners were not going to fulfill the Minsk agreements. We tried hard to implement them.”
A world in which treaties are coming to mean nothing
The events of the last decade have shown that in today’s world of Western powers feeling omnipotent, signed treaties may be disregarded, in violation of long-established principles of international diplomacy. Russian writer Ivan Lizan argued on Telegram on February 19: “Treaties must be honored, Pacta sunt servanda (‘Agreements must be kept’). So sounds like the cornerstone principle of civil and international law. But the period from 2014 to 2022 has shown that treaties are no longer necessarily respected by the Western powers, in the belief that the promised, binding pledge to fulfill them is nothing more than mental inertia amidst a tendency to preserve the existing status quo and refuse to revise them.”
In the Russian Federation, entire teams of lawyers continue to work diligently to comply de jure with every letter of a treaty signed by the country. But Western ideologues, including the liberal variant, are increasingly manipulating the moral and ethical dimensions of diplomacy in order to revise existing or future agreements in their favor.
Indeed, the Ukraine coup ten years ago took place one day after then-President Viktor Yanukovych had signed an agreement to resolve the political crisis in the country that burst into the open in November 2013. At that time, it seemed that Ukraine was in the final stage of an agreement for ‘economic association’ with the European Union, but Yanukovych and his government wanted time to further consider the negative, long-term consequences for economic relations with the Russian Federation. Additionally, Russia was offering better financial assistance, including improvements to then-existing financial agreements, in order to avoid painful and very disruptive reductions of economic ties between the two countries.
A political agreement to resolve the exploding crisis in Ukraine in February 2014 was mediated by the foreign ministers of Germany, France, and Poland. It envisioned presidential elections in the fall of 2014, one year before they were constitutionally due. Yanukovych pledged he would not take any forceful action against the pro-Western and pro-coup protesters that were violently disrupting Kiev and cities in western Ukraine. But the coup’s rightist paramilitaries simply proceeded to storm and occupy central Kiev and force Yanukovych to flee for his life, all in violation of the agreement reached one day earlier!
Ukraine’s not-so-subtle threat in early 2022 to acquire ire nuclear weapons
At the annual Munich Security Conference in February 2022, the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, voiced the possibility that his government may scrap its commitment to relinquish nuclear weapons, as agreed in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum (which was subsequently implemented by Ukraine). He said, “If we do receive the security guarantees we seek, then we reserve the right to withdraw from the Budapest Memorandum.” This set off alarm bells at the highest levels in an already apprehensive Moscow. The following day, the leaders of the autonomous governments of Donetsk and Lugansk (soon to become fully constituent republics of the Russian Federation, as per the long-held wishes of the populations there, announced the beginning of mass evacuations eastward of their citizens, away from the lines of military contact between the two republics and Ukraine. Five days later, Russia launched its military operation.
This year, at the same conference in Munich, Ukrainian MP Oleksiy Honcharenko pointedly asked U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken whether Ukraine could expect an invitation to join NATO within a reasonable duration of time. He wrote on Telegram on February 18, “A nuclear state is fighting against us, so we either become NATO members, allied with nuclear-armed states, or we have to work on restoring our nuclear potential.” His Telegram message noted that Blinken failed to answer his direct query. Honcharenko is an ally of former president Poroshenko (2014-19, defeated in the 2019 election.)
According to the Financial Times, the overall sentiment of conference attendees in Munich this year was changed compared to the previous year’s conference. “Twelve months ago, delegates at the Munich Security Conference radiated optimism about the prospects for Ukraine, as the West vowed to back Kiev for ‘as long as it takes’ in its war with Russia. This year, with the conflict tilting in Russia’s favor and with faith in Western support ebbing away, that optimism has flipped into unremitting gloom.”
The retaking of Avdiivka and the flight of Ukrainian troops
At the end of February 2024, while Zelensky was expounding at the Munich Conference about Ukraine’s vital role in “defending Europe”, the Russian armed forces, including large detachments from the former self-defense forces of Donetsk and Lugansk, were raising a red flag with a hammer and sickle over the newly retaken Avdiivka, on the very spot where Zelensky had issued public relations statements only days earlier.
In 2014-2015, Avdiivka, close enough to Donetsk city to qualify as a suburb and with an estimated pre-war population of 30,000, was one of the centers of popular resistance to the Ukrainian ultranationalists and paramilitaries. In 2015, there were regular mass rallies against the presence of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the city and region. At the time, the AFU was undergoing a fundamental transformation, with rightist paramilitaries taking over important, leading positions and with their units acquiring semi-formal status. Soldiers and officers of the soon-to-be transformed AFU who were reluctant to open fire on their fellow citizens and enter into civil war were being purged.
By February 2024, only some several hundred residents were still surviving, somehow, in the city, perhaps as many as 1,000. For almost two years, they had been hiding in basements, evading mandatory evacuation orders by Ukraine, and suffering the shelling by Russia needed to suppress the AFU’s constant shelling of Donetsk city and districts.
Tatyana, one of the residents of Avdiivka who stubbornly refused to leave, spoke about her ordeal, as reported by the Russian Ministry of Defense and cited in the February 20 edition of the Russian weekly newspaper Argumenty i Fakty. “It was a very scary time. We lived in basements, we could only go out to gather water when there was a calm, but even then we always had to duck down… ”
“The day before yesterday when we went out, we saw military people but didn’t understand right away who it was. And then I saw red ribbons! [Russian soldiers wear red ribbons on their sleeves while Ukrainian soldiers wear blue or yellow ribbons]. We couldn’t believe our eyes! We told them how happy we were to see them.”
Since 2015, the AFU has turned Avdiivka into a large, underground, fortified bunker. Ukrainian political scientist and historian Konstantin Bondarenko was cited on the Telegram messenger service on February 19 explaining, “Avdiivka is the settlement that allowed us to shell Donetsk [city] for ten years.”
On the eve of the loss of Avdiivka, in anticipation of its loss, Zelensky changed the commander-in-chief of the AFU. General Valeriy Zaluzhny was out, replaced by General Oleksandr Syrskyy. The new commander-in-chief has long been called ‘The Butcher’ by Ukrainian soldiers due to his record of sacrificing thousands and thousands of their lives in order to hold positions. In the spring of 2023, he commanded the Ukrainian troops tasked with holding the city of Bakhmut (called Artyomovsk in Donbass and Russia, located some 70 km north of Donetsk city, prewar population of 70,000) and the nearby town of Soledar. Both were lost.
In 2015, Syrskyy commanded the Ukraine’s military operation around the small city of Debaltsevo, which ended in a stinging defeat for Ukraine and which set the stage for Kiev to grudgingly sign the Minsk 2 agreement.
The retreat of the AFU from Avdiivka took on the character of a panic flight in its closing days. Russian war correspondent Alexei Zhivov reported on Telegram, “There is a big difference between an organized withdrawal of troops to pre-prepared positions, and a disorderly flight. Avdiivka is the first time we have seen a panic flight of Ukraine’s troops. This phenomenon is not so much military as sociological. It is connected with a rising panic among the Ukrainian population as a whole.”
There are about 460,000 Russian troops in Ukraine, according to calculations by Ukrainian experts. Zelensky says Ukraine still has an army of “one million”. The ratio of drones in Ukraine today is three to one in favor of Russia, according to Ukrainian military officials, while the ratio of artillery fire is ten to one in favor of Russia. Russia has complete air superiority, though Western-supplied missiles remain a serious threat.
Racism to please Western creditors
The mobilization of Russian society in support of its war effort has been greatly boosted by the racist and anti-Russia ideology that has become dominant in the governing circles of Ukraine since 2014. That ideology is all too well known in Russia, says Ukrainian economist Oleksiy Kushch. He writes in a lengthy entry on Telegram: “Our government propaganda and public mainstream have given to Putin a truly royal gift through their dehumanization of all things Russian: racist theories about the ‘inferiority of Russia’ as a nation; negative and racist language describing Russians as a ‘Finno-Uralic’ people (the languages of Finland and Hungary have distant, common origins in the ‘Uralic’ family of languages); and terms such as ‘hordes’ and ‘Asiatic’ to describe Russians. People in Finland, Hungary, and Kazakhstan and elsewhere in Asia obviously take offense.”
He continues, “Even those Russians who sympathized with Ukraine could not understand why they were seeing the demolition of Pushkin monuments in that country.” (Alexander Pushkin is a celebrated and revered poet of the 19th century in today’s Russia and neighboring republics; his great-grandfather was African.)
Ukrainian millionaires profiting from war
The head of the Verkhovna Rada Committee on Finance, Tax and Customs Policy, Daniil Getmantsev of Zelensky’s ‘Servant of the People’ political party apparatus recently said half the Ukrainian economy operates in black market conditions, including trade in goods and gambling.
A small number of wealthy Ukrainians continue to benefit from the conflict with Russia. Ukraine’s economy has declined sharply since Russia’s military intervention, and this was preceded by the emigration of millions of economic migrants to Western Europe in 2014. Thousands of enterprises have closed, and thousands of square kilometers of precious agricultural land have been mined or are otherwise unusable. Yet the number of millionaires in Ukraine grew by 16 percent in 2023, as reported by the Ukrainian edition of Forbes Magazine in late February 2024, citing the aforementioned Getmantsev. Forbes says the information is drawn from official tax returns and adds that many wealthy Ukrainians avoid submitting tax returns altogether.
A significant part of Ukrainian business has realized that it is more profitable to produce anti-Russian rhetoric and take control of Western aid supplies than to produce locomotives and tractors or raise chickens in commercial henhouses. But for this to happen, workers ‘freed’ from working and earning incomes must be herded into the trenches of war. An old Russian and Ukrainian proverb says: “To some, war is hell. To others, it is a kindly mother”.
Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine will end sooner or later. However, we can already say that part of Russia’s goals have been achieved. Ukraine has already been ‘demilitarized and denazified’ to some degree, having lost a significant part of its territory, military arsenal, and neo-Nazi shock troops. Western military arsenals are gradually being emptied as well.
At some point, Kiev will be abandoned, just as the former pro-American government in Afghanistan was abandoned in 2021. Before that happens, many Ukrainian officials will have escaped untouched to the West, along with their ill-gotten wealth and valuables.
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