What's Next For Ukraine

Ukraine And Russia: Battering On -- The Economist

The fighting in eastern Ukraine intensifies as pro-Russian rebels lose ground, raising fresh questions over the plans of Russia’s Vladimir Putin

IN A dusty Russian field close to the border with Ukraine, a fleet of nearly 300 trucks sit under the hot summer sun. Their arrival on August 14th was a sideshow to the war inside Ukraine, a piece of political sleight-of-hand that was neither a true humanitarian mission (as Moscow presented it) nor a prelude to invasion by Russian “peacekeepers” (as Kiev feared). The trucks and their contents are not decisive in themselves, but they could be part of the endgame to a conflict that has stretched over three months and cost some 2,500 lives.

The war is reaching a crunch point. Pushing forward with artillery and bombing raids, Ukrainian forces are recapturing territory and closing in on rebel forces in the east. The mood in Kiev, as Olexsiy Melnyk of the Razumkov Centre sums it up, is to “go to the end”—to finish the war by force. In a purely military contest, without an influx of heavy weapons or ground troops from Russia, the anti-Kiev insurgency would lose. The human cost could be high, but it would give President Petro Poroshenko a battlefield victory without making concessions to Moscow.

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My Comment: The paragraph that caught my attention in this post from The Economist is the following ....

.... The language of war casts those who support the rebels as terrorists or Russian mercenaries. Post-war reconciliation in Donetsk and Luhansk will thus be exceptionally difficult. In a hospital bed on the Russian side of the border, an injured 52-year-old rebel named Yuri, from the Luhansk region, says that even if Kiev considers him a terrorist, there are “millions of people like me.”

For there to be peace in eastern Ukraine .... reconciliation and compromise must be the rule rather than the exception. Kiev must find a way to accommodate the millions of Russian - Ukrainians who believe that their interests are not respected in Kiev and/or ignored. And on the other side .... pro-Russian separatists must accept the fact that their vision of an independent state and/or being incorporated into the Russia Federation is not going to happen .... certainly not in the foreseeable future. Absent these conditions .... conflict will be the rule ....and this conflict has the potential to last for generations.