The sealing off of Crimea continues. Reporters (including Associated
Press and Canadian CBC) are being targeted, their cameras taken by force or
blocked.
Ukrainian military bases continue to be raided by armed, masked, men
overnight. They wear no insignias and refuse to identify themselves, while they
forceable take away weapons from the Ukrainian troops. There were no reports of shooting or injury,
but all of Ukraine's military bases in Crimea that have not yet surrendered to
the pro-Russian side are understood to be under siege.
Armed men have also stopped a team of military
and civilian observers from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in
Europe (OSCE) from entering the peninsula. The Russian foreign ministry said
the group was stopped because it had not secured "official
invitations" from Crimean authorities.
The main fear many
people in Crimea voice, is that that agent
provocateurs working for
pro-Russia nationalists or Kremlin security services, could launch attacks or
fire shots that would be used to justify Russian military intervention. But
this justification is already being assumed, in spite of no precedence of
actual conflict in the Crimean peninsula or actual threats to Russian speakers
or citizens residing there. Crimean people are organising themselves into
unarmed patrol groups. They know they are no match for Russia-backed militias
or regular soldiers, but they are determined to prevent escalation.
An overwhelming sentiment in Crimea and Kyiv
is that the growing conflict and tension is between Russia and western powers.
Ukraine and Ukrainians are being used, prodded, and provoked by foreign powers
in an attempt to tear apart small communities in Crimea and the entire nation.
Excerpts from Julian Evans (British travel writer and biographer,
published in New Statesman March 7,
2014):
What we, “concerned outsiders, careful diplomat, pragmatic politician,
deep-thinking strategist, denizens of all shades of eastern and western foreign
policy”, must understand is the response to the decades of ‘abusive
relationship’ between Russian and Ukraine.
It is a moral vacuum they need to get rid of in their country, not the
political. The moral vacuum is ‘the only vacuum that matters’.
The people in Maidan began with a mission that has not yet been
achieved. In the words of an anonymous female Maidaner, on twitter the day the
new government of unity was to be announced: ‘We haven’t won yet. All the
politicans in power during the last ten years must go.’ ... It is not a
political reaction, nor a particularly political one. It is the final,
unreflecting “Enough”.
Nationalists, ultra-nationalists and the motley crew of right-wing
survivalists and anti-Semitic groups represented by Svoboda, Right Sector and
others all made themselves visible on the Maidan. But their prominence, like
that of genuine separatists or Putin’s stooges in Crimea or Kharkiv, could –
with tactful handling – have been diminished to the margins where, even in the
most balanced societies, they will always exist. The nationalism of most
Maidaners is that of the care of Ukrainians who, from the 18th
century onwards, ... , began to cultivate a sense of nation as a cultural,
literary and social rebuttal of their suppressed status.
All this is now significantly more complicated by Putin’s invasion of
Crimea. We should have forseen it; the abusive partner never wants to let the
other one go, or, put it another way, Putin’s very Soviet cynicism understands
how little the west wants to take in on.
... What we must not do is fail to give strong support, and so embitter
Ukraine’s new-found belief in European ideals. We must not, from neglect or
pious realpolitik, act as we did previously and let it slip back into its old
abusive relationship and subservience, subject to Putin’s violent but oddly fey
muscle-flexing.
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