News

Phillip Karber: Ukraine faces Russia’s ‘new-generation warfare’

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KYIV – Dr. Phillip Karber never projected that Ukraine would be able to withstand Russian military aggression for as long as it has – three years already. The president of the Potomac Foundation, an independent policy center in Virginia, said Ukraine’s army has “substantially improved” since Moscow engineered an armed uprising in the easternmost regions of Luhansk and Donetsk in April 2014. “It was a miracle,” the expert in defense and national security told The Ukrainian Weekly in a telephone interview, noting that Kyiv was “struggling to get 10 battalions ready to fight.”

Today, three years into the Donbas war, and after 10,000 people killed, Ukraine has 22 brigades and close to 70 battalions, and has the structure to have up to 30 brigades. Although Ukraine in spring 2014 managed to prevent Russia from carrying out the “Novorossiya construct” whereby the Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Kherson, Zaporizhia and Odesa oblasts would slip from Kyiv’s grasp, according to Dr. Karber, it could’ve settled the conflict had it “moved faster and more decisively.”

He credited the “spirit of the Maidan” – the revolution that toppled Viktor Yanukovych’s oppressive and corrupt presidency in February 2014 – in whose aftermath volunteer units were immediately formed and initially resisted the combined Russian-separatist elements in Ukraine’s east. But he was quick to say that, by the end of the summer of 2014, Ukraine’s military had made progress to improve its fighting capability and today is five times stronger.

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Erstwhile Yanukovych ally Firtash closer to extradition to the U.S.

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KYIV – Dmytro Firtash, a Ukrainian mogul whose political tentacles extend to Washington, London, Moscow and the Ukrainian diaspora community, faces extradition to the U.S. on bribery charges following a Vienna court ruling on February 21. Vienna’s Higher Regional Court reversed a lower court’s ruling from April 2015 that said U.S. authorities were partially politically motivated in their pursuit of Mr. Firtash over $18.5 million in kickbacks that he allegedly arranged for Indian officials in order to mine titanium for Boeing, a major aerospace company and mainstay U.S. military government contractor. Worth an estimated $250 million, according to Forbes, Mr. Firtash, 51, has repeatedly denied the allegations. He looked bewildered and shocked upon hearing Judge Leo Levnaic-Iwanski’s ruling. “It wasn’t for us to judge whether Mr. Firtash was guilty, but only whether the extradition is allowed,” the judge said, as cited by Bloomberg.

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Kyiv in “wait and see” mode over Trump policy toward Ukraine

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KYIV – Ukraine is still “watching and waiting” when it comes to U.S. President Donald Trump’s policy towards its strategic partner and his stance towards the Donbas war that Russia has stoked since April 2014. Being gauged in every world capital for his unorthodox policy views and governing style, the 45th American president said he wasn’t taken aback when Kremlin-backed forces escalated fighting in eastern Ukraine within 24 hours of his phone conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin on January 28. Asked by Fox host Bill O’Reilly, “Did you take that as an insult?,” Mr. Trump responded: “No, I didn’t because we don’t really know exactly what that is. They’re pro forces. We don’t know if they’re uncontrollable.

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Ukraine mourns fallen soldiers amid uptick in Kremlin’s Donbas war

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KYIV – Hundreds of mourners came to Independence Square on February 1 to honor seven soldiers from the 72nd Separate Mechanized Brigade who died defending Avdiyivka in Donetsk Oblast from repeated Russian onslaughts this week. A day after U.S. President Donald Trump spoke with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, over the phone, combined Russian-separatist forces on January 29 launched attacks along most of the 450-kilometer front line in eastern Ukraine. Fighting continues as of February 1, marking an escalation in hostilities not seen in months. Heavy artillery barrages and ground assaults were centered mostly on Avdiyivka. A town of about 16,000 people, it’s located some 24 kilometers north of Russia-occupied Donetsk, and is home to Europe’s biggest coking coal production plant.

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Petro Matiaszek: promoting Ukraine via “honest dialogue” with investors

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KYIV – Petro Matiaszek prefers “government relations and communications” to the streetwise adage of “fixer” to describe his 23-year illustrious role in Ukraine. For nearly two decades, the New York Law School graduate has smoothly navigated among the three sectors of society – public, private and civil society – with such fluidity that he could easily build a checklist of accomplishments:

Bring Kentucky Fried Chicken to Ukraine – done. Translate for ex-President Viktor Yushchenko – done. Send parliamentary delegations to Europe – done. Help raise some $25 million to help Ukraine’s war refugees – done.

Analysis

Ukraine upgraded in yearly graft ranking on back of e-declarations

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KYIV – Ukraine slightly improved on the yearly corruption index compiled by Transparency International, placing in the 26th percentile alongside regional peers Russia and Kazakhstan. The Berlin-based corruption watchdog said Ukraine ranked 131st out of 176 countries last year, a minor improvement over the previous year when it ranked 130 out of 167 countries – or in the 23rd percentile. The upgrade, which saw Ukraine garner 29 out of 100 points on perceived corruption that the non-profit gauges via its surveys, was “attributed to the launch of the e-declaration system that allows Ukrainians to see the assets of politicians and senior civil servants, including those of the president,” TI said on January 25. Multiple surveys conducted by Ukrainian polling firms last year found that the mandatory electronic asset declarations were by far the most popular anti-graft measure implemented by the government. More than 50,000 officials filed declarations last year, exposing their extraordinary wealth amid the paltry official salaries they receive.

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Biden’s last visit to Kyiv as vice-president is viewed as symbolic and cautionary

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KYIV – Joe Biden’s sixth and last visit to Ukraine as America’s vice-president on January 16 was more symbolic and consultative in nature, Ukrainian experts said just five days before a new president is inaugurated in Washington. In his fifth visit since the Euro-Maidan Revolution, Mr. Biden, 74, came to show that America isn’t forgetting about Kyiv and was a swan song gesture of support, commented political analyst Volodymyr Fesenko of the Penta Center. “It is a signal that we are remembered. He didn’t have to come to Kyiv. It’s a sign of respect and attention toward us,” Mr. Fesenko said.

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Pinchuk’s tone of appeasement toward Russia rattles Kyiv

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KYIV – Victor Pinchuk, the billionaire tycoon known for staging Ukraine’s premiere gathering of leaders and thinkers on Ukraine’s European future, drew criticism for suggesting that his country shelve integration with the continent and temporarily sacrifice Crimea in exchange for peace with Russia. He did so in an opinion piece published in the Wall Street Journal on December 29. On the commentary titled “Ukraine must make painful compromises for peace with Russia,” Mr. Pinchuk, 56, said that “Ukraine should give up the idea of European Union membership,” including NATO, and that “Crimea is Ukraine, but this position should not be an obstacle on the way of returning Donbas.”

He furthermore advocated for holding local elections in the Russia-occupied Donbas even though there won’t be “conditions for fair elections until Ukraine has full control over its territory.”

For years an advocate for closer ties with the 28-nation European Union, Mr. Pinchuk’s article came exactly three weeks before he holds the Davos Ukrainian Breakfast at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland on January 19. CNN journalist Fareed Zakaria is scheduled to moderate a discussion on Ukraine’s future in a “changing world” between former British Prime Minister David Cameron and Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze, Ukraine’s vice prime minister for European and Euro-Atlantic integration. President Petro Poroshenko won’t attend the yearly meal that Mr. Pinchuk hosts in Davos, online news publication Leviy Bereg reported, citing anonymous sources in the Foreign Affairs Ministry.

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New OSCE chief visits war-torn Donbas; Kyiv cites massive Russian cyber attacks

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KYIV – The new chairperson-in-office of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe chose war-torn Ukraine for his first foreign visit as the leader of the 57-state organization. Having announced that part of his mission would be to “defuse conflicts” during his year-long chairmanship, Austria’s Foreign Affairs Minister Sebastian Kurz visited the frontline village of Shyrokyne in Donetsk Oblast along the Azov Sea coast on January 4. Mr. Kurz noted that the OSCE, whose 693 monitors have a mandate to monitor ceasefire efforts in the Donbas war, isn’t satisfied with the current “status quo” in eastern Ukraine. “This visit is supposed to signify in the first place that we aren’t happy with the status quo and we want to put forth effort so that changes lead to improvement,” he said at a news conference in Mariupol, some 30 kilometers west of Shyrokyne. Despite never taking hold since the truce was brokered in Minsk in February 2015, Mr. Kurz reiterated that the agreement is the only option for implementing peace and the measures that Ukraine and Russia agreed to fulfill.

News

Report calls Russian artillery attacks against Ukraine in 2014 ‘acts of war,’ as fighting in Donbas escalates

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KYIV – Russia extensively used cross-border artillery fire against Ukrainian military targets in July-September 2014 in what are considered “acts of war,” according to a new report by Bellingcat, a group of citizen journalists who use open-source investigation tools and techniques, that was released on December 21. Numbering in the “thousands,” the report says, the cross-border projectiles were the “first and strongest evidence of a direct Russian participation in the fighting.” Although they were already proven to have occurred by Ukrainian officials and the U.S. government, the new report analyzed the extent to which they were used in the summer of 2014, when they largely contributed to stemming a Ukrainian counterattack to retake the border areas near Russia, and cut off and surround the occupied Donbas capitals of Donetsk and Luhansk. In total, at least 279 separate artillery attacks likely were fired inside Russia, targeting 408 Ukrainian military sites in the “entire border area of the conflict zone.”

Using recent additions of satellite imagery to Google Earth, Yandex and Bing map services, Bellingcat said it found evidence of Russian artillery fire in 2014 “to a much fuller extent.” It found that weapons such as howitzers and multiple rocket-launcher systems were used and, based on other open-source evidence, said that “allows for direct attribution of responsibility to the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation.”

Despite mounting evidence, Moscow authorities have consistently denied direct involvement in the Donbas war that has killed nearly 10,000 people and uprooted more than 1.7 million from their homes since April 2014. Instead, the Kremlin has attempted to portray the war as a civil conflict between Ukrainian government forces and indigenous pro-Russian separatists. The open-source investigative group found that Russia’s artillery barrages “escalated” in “magnitude” the more Ukraine’s offensive in summer 2014 succeeded to liberate occupied territory.