The Russian Government And Ukraine Separatists Are Not On The Same Page On What To Do Next

A bus rides by a giant poster reading "The fate of the Russian people, to repeat the feats of fathers : defend their native land" in Donetsk, on July 15, 2014. AFP

Paul Roderick Gregory, Forbes: Russia And The Separatists Aren't On The Same Page

Vladimir Putin’s military operations have stretched Moscow’s military to its limits. Russia has mobilized forces from all parts of the Russian Federation for its southeast Ukraine operations. As Putin shifts his attention to shoring up the Assad regime in Syria and ensuring Russia a front seat in any political settlement, he must cut back on military operations in Ukraine. His plans for a greater Russia have been thwarted, and his desire to reinsert the Donbass back into Ukraine as a spoiler requires that he turn from hot war to diplomacy, no matter what his proxies on the ground in Ukraine want. Putin’s turn to Syria could simply mean that he wants to preserve a client state in the turbulent Middle East. Or he may have dreams of a grand alliance with America and Europe to rid the world of Islamic extremism in return for recognition of his Ukraine conquests. If President Obama agrees to a one-on-one meeting at the UN, we might get a better sense for the game he is playing.

As the foreign ministers of Germany, France, Russia, and Ukraine wound up their Berlin negotiations to prepare for the October 2 meeting of the four heads of state on the Minsk 2 peace agreement, a peculiar spat erupted between the Kremlin and its Donbass proxies. Specifically, Russia and the People’s Republic of Donetsk (DNR) offered up different interpretations of a survey concerning the DNR’s “special status” in the amended Ukrainian constitution called for by the Minsk 2 framework.

WNU Editor: I have mentioned more than once in this blog that eastern Ukraine has always been a place that Moscow could never get a handle on .... that the Russian-Ukrainians who live there are "hard-headed, stubborn, frustrating to deal with, and uncompromising" ... in short, they remind me of my Ukrainian-Russian father. I am not alone in this opinion. The invading Nazis regarded this region to be one the worst places to be deployed to because of unending partisan activity, and even when this region was under Communist rule in the old Soviet Union .... strikes, protests, riots .... this always happened, and when the KGB was sent in, it got even worse. In fact .... the first strikes and protests that led to the fall of the Soviet Union started in the coal mines of eastern Ukraine .... so the history is already there of the Donbass region not seeing eye to eye on what Moscow wanted or wants. As for today .... these differences in opinions are still continuing .... and for peace to succeed my advice is the following .... the people in the Donbass region are the ones who will need to eventually sort it all amongst themselves on what they want ... and while I do not know how long that is going to take .... my advice to Kiev and Moscow is to be patient, swallow your pride, and accept what they want because the alternative will be unending civil strife and conflict that will last for generations.