Love and respect to the people of Ukraine. While Putin indulged in his latest version of talk show Francoism (Russia's siloviki-plutocrats have turned the Russian economy into a stagnant, lower middle-income semiperiphery masquerading as a Great Power), Ukrainians are slowly but surely putting their country back together.
This is not to downplay the threat of Putinism's crime spree. There is incontrovertible proof that Russian agents ambushed and murdered one of Ukraine's top anti-terror officers in the countryside near Slaviansk (you can listen to a tape recording of the thugs bragging about the murder here).
This is a despicable act of war by a sovereign nation against another sovereign nation.
Instead of imploding, Digital Ukraine has been slowly but surely rebooting the entire country. The citizens of Kharkov, Odessa and Kherson all rejected Putinism's Russo-imperialism from the very beginning. Now Luzhansk and Dnipropetrovsk have organized themselves via citizen mobilizations against Putinism's destabilization campaign. Former Ukrainian oligarchs have turned into patriotic, socially responsible entrepreneurs, legendary Ukrainian special forces officer Vasyl Krutov (the Ukrainian equivalent of Lt. Col. Campbell in Kojima's Metal Gear Solid, for those of you familiar with that franchise) has returned to organize Ukraine's counter-terrorism efforts, citizens who were protesting against the Yanukovych government are now staffing roadblocks to ensure public order, and ordinary Ukrainian soldiers have been acting with dignity and restraint. Most remarkable of all, town square meetings are now taking place in Luzhansk and Donetsk, as Ukrainian citizens are beginning to take their destiny into their own hands.
Putinism is now faced with a startling lack of support in all the major cities -- not even Donetsk, Yanokovych's old turf and the least happy with the Ukrainian revolution, wants anything to do with becoming a Russian province. Putinism's next tactic was to incite mayhem in small towns around the cities, most obviously Slaviansk and Mariupol. Typically, they used covert squads of infiltrators (mostly GRU and Spetznaz soldiers) who blend in with the local population. Once there, they armed, financed and commanded local separatists to wreak havoc. The aim was to create enough bloodshed and mayhem to justify further colonial adventurism.
Here, too, Putinism's tactical ability to create spectacular, short-term media stunts recoiled into complete and abject long-term failure. While the media was focused on Slaviansk, where armed separatists hijacked a few APCs, an attempt by a violent rent-a-mob to overrun a military base near Mariupol during the night of April 16 was defeated and a number of thugs were arrested. Krutov's team has been arresting Putinism's infil squads with precision and efficiency, and with an absolute minimum loss of life.
We'll see what Putinism's next move is, but time is running out on their infil tactics. The longer this goes on, the more of their agents will be caught and exposed, the more thuggish their infil tactics will have to become, and the angrier they will make ordinary Ukrainians who, more than anything else, just want Russia to leave them the &%* alone.
EDIT: The above was posted a couple hours before a Geneva conference between Russia, Ukraine, the US and EU. The result was a complete and total Ukrainian victory. Putinism is calling off its attack dogs, all peaceful demonstrators will be reprieved, and Ukraine will be left alone to solve its own problems. My best guess: in just 48 hours, Krutov's capable team had completely demolished the spy network Putinism had spent fourteen years constructing in Ukraine, and was about to go public with embarrassing details on dozens of captured GRU agents. That would have triggered massive sanctions on Russia's already shaky economy.
Thank goodness it's all over. Now Ukraine can start to fix its problems, and Russia's citizens can start to press for genuine democratic change.
No comments:
Post a Comment