Russia Dropping Cluster Bombs over Civilian Areas in Syria

Russian bombers are dropping cluster munitions over Raqqa, Syria, the city known as the de facto capital of the Islamic State terror group, sources inside Syria confirmed to Breitbart News. Sources say Moscow is also indiscriminately targeting civilians neighborhoods populated by Sunni Muslims, killing innocent women and children in the process.

Russia remains loyal to the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, which has also indiscriminately targeted non-Alawite civilians throughout the country and is estimated to have killed far more Syrians than the Islamic State terror group. Forces loyal to Assad have slaughtered over 85 percent of the 250,000-plus Syrians killed during the war, according to estimates.

A source with Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently, a citizen journalism network that was created to document the atrocities of the Islamic State, told Breitbart News that Russia is targeting almost the entirety of Raqqa with cluster bombs, munitions that carry explosives which on impact, disperse hundreds of deadly metal fragments. When these submunitions deploy, they spread out over hundreds of yards of territory, creating a situation where individuals far away from the target site are subject to being killed or seriously injured. A single cluster bomb may hold hundreds of sub-munitions.

The citizen journalist network posted photos of the Russian strikes on its social media pages.

Using Cluster bombs against Civilians in Raqqa is A WAR CRIME, international community should take responsibility

RUSSIAN INVASION FORCE ENTERING UKRAINE 1800 CET - 26.08.14

How Putin Lost Ukraine

Half a year ago, in the fall of 2013, Ukraine was well on the way to becoming an authoritarian vassal state of Russia. Now, thanks to Russia’s neo-fascist dictator, Vladimir Putin, Ukraine is well on the way to becoming a democracy and a full-fledged member of the international community.

 

How did Putin snatch a humiliating defeat from the jaws of surefire victory? How could he have walked into a strategic trap of his own making? In a word, how did he lose Ukraine?

 

And make no mistake about it: it was Putin, and no one else, who lost Ukraine. He had it. He could easily have kept it. But now he’ll never have it again. And he has no one to blame but himself.

 

Putin has never understood Ukraine. For him, as for all too many Russians, it’s a historical mistake: a part of Russia that’s been swayed from the path of righteousness by a few dastardly fascist imperialist cigar-chomping bourgeois nationalists in cahoots with the CIA. If you treat a bona fide country with a bona fide people with a bona fide identity as your dirty backyard, don’t be surprised if you slip in the mud and fall on your face.

 

Putin’s first major slip was during the 2004 Orange Revolution, when, stupidly, he backed Viktor Yanukovych. That disaster taught Putin nothing, and, nine years later, he made the same mistake during the Euro Revolution. How could a supposedly smart leader back the same loser—not once, but twice? How could that same supposedly smart leader still insist that the loser remains Ukraine’s legitimate president—even after a fair and free election gave a huge mandate to Petro Poroshenko? The sad thing is that, after 15 years in power, Putin still doesn’t “get” Ukraine.

 

Putin’s most egregious blunder was to coerce Yanukovych into rejecting the Association Agreement with the European Union last fall. That strategic error led to the demonstrations in Kyiv, Yanukovych’s downfall, the emergence of a pro-Western, democratic Ukraine, and Russia’s transformation into a rogue state and sponsor of terrorism. That’s bad enough. Worse, Putin’s move was premised on his belief that the agreement would remove Ukraine from Russia’s sphere of influence. Sure, it would have provided Ukraine with a foothold in Europe, and, yes, it would have diminished Ukraine’s international isolation in the long run, but a Yanukovych-misruled Ukraine would have remained firmly ensconced in Russia’s backyard for a long time to come.

 

After all, with the Association Agreement as his main claim to fame, Yanukovych would have probably been reelected in 2015; the penetration of Kyiv’s government by agents of the Kremlin would have remained high or gotten higher; and the presence of Russian propaganda, business, and other forms of “soft power” would have only grown. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s military would have continued to decay, Ukraine’s foreign policy would have remained unremittingly pro-Russian, and a large segment of the Ukrainian population would have stayed ambivalent about Ukraine’s independence. The Europeans, meanwhile, and Germany in particular, would have remained indifferent to Ukraine. What’s not to like from the Kremlin’s point of view? A smart Russian president would have encouraged Yanukovych to sign the agreement with Brussels.

 

Alas, when it comes to Ukraine, Putin’s IQ takes a nosedive. Having sparked the Euro Revolution, having destroyed his pal Yanukovych, having embarked on the idiotic Crimean adventure, and having supported terrorism in the Donbas, Putin has forced Ukraine to become independent, democratic, and pro-Western. He’s forced it to develop an army and security apparatus. He’s forced the population to take sides and discover its Ukrainian identity—and pride. He’s forced the government to streamline the state apparatus. He’s forced elites to embrace democracy. And he’s forcing them to embark on radical economic reform and administrative decentralization. Faced with Putin’s aggression, Ukraine has no choice but to embody all the qualities—democracy, rule of law, tolerance, a functioning market economy—that Putin systematically destroys.

 

Worse still for Putin, his imperialism is driving Ukrainian elites to seek refuge in Western security institutions. Half a year ago, the elite and popular consensus in Ukraine was distinctly anti-NATO.

 

The West, meanwhile, was suffering from “Ukraine fatigue” and had little interest in Ukraine as a strategic partner. Now, everything’s changed. Ukraine is the darling of the West, and Ukrainian public opinion on NATO is shifting.

 

Amazingly, Putin appears to think that, by supporting terrorism in eastern Ukraine, he can compel Ukraine to back away from the West. The effect, as any schoolboy confronted by a bully could have told him, is just the opposite. Faced with a hostile Russia, Ukraine has no choice but to turn westward. And, thanks to Putin’s treachery and mendacity, a democratic Ukraine will never again be the close, and fawning, partner of Russia that it was until a few months ago. Since Putin cannot be trusted, whatever deal Kyiv eventually signs with Moscow will at best establish a condition of formally peaceful relations between hostile neighbors (“cold peace”) or informally belligerent relations between hostile neighbors (“cold war”). Warily peaceful relations following a “de-annexation” of Crimea and recognition of Kyiv (“hot peace”) will be impossible as long as Putin remains in power.

 

For the time being, most Russians are still too bedazzled by Putin’s Tarzan yells to realize that he’s lost Ukraine irrevocably—and may be in the process of losing Russia. When they wake up to the reality of his “harebrained” blunders, Putin will discover that his sky-high ratings are as ephemeral as his swings on the vine are a pathetic pose.

Recriminations and Denials After Putin

One of these days Russians will wake up from what they now think is a dream and realize that it was a terrible nightmare. They’ll realize that Vladimir Putin—their current hero and demigod—is really a loser and a thug who’s brought ruin to their country, ruin to their people, ruin to their ethnic brethren in Ukraine and other non-Russian states, and ruin to the world. They’ll realize that Putin is a criminal, that the regime he created is fascist, and that his policies are paranoid, delusional, destructive, and self-destructive to the point of being suicidal.

 

And that’s when the recriminations and denials will begin. There’ll be lots of finger pointing. “Blame it all on my neighbor,” many Russians will say, “He’s the collaborator. He’s the flag-waver. He’s the one who voted for Putin and attended all those mass rallies. And he did it voluntarily too.” 

 

Most will insist they “knew nothing.” The war against Ukraine? “Gosh, there were rumors to that effect.” The destruction of Russians and Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the Donbas? “Lord, had we only known!” The billions that Putin and his pals purloined from the Russian Treasury? “More rumors!” The tens of thousands of Chechen deaths? The thousands of Ukrainian deaths? The hundreds of Russian deaths? “Rumors, rumors, rumors.”

 

Some Russians will realize that such denial is uncomfortably reminiscent of postwar German reactions to Hitler and his crimes. Death camps? The gassing of Jews? The destruction of Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine? The starvation of Leningrad? “Never heard of it! And believe me, had I only known, had I only known—I would’ve fought that criminal Hitler regime for sure! By the way, wasn’t Hitler really Austrian?”

 

A few brave Russian intellectuals will feel shame, guilt, and responsibility and call for lustration and trials. Most Russians will prefer to put the past behind them: “let bygones be bygones, let’s all be pals again.” What to do with Putin and his closest entourage will be a bit of a problem. Naturally, people will blame everything on him—their former hero and demigod. “He’s the criminal, he built the system, he started the wars, he bamboozled us: we’re innocent.” But putting him on trial could be inconvenient: Putin might spill the beans and reveal just how deeply popular he, his system, and his policies were.

 

Not putting a world-class war criminal on trial could be equally inconvenient. After all, Moscow is the Third Rome. Oh, if only Putin would make a run for Belarus, Kazakhstan, or China! Alas, that’s not likely: it would be too humiliating for him to seek refuge in a vassal state or among the overbearing Chinese. South America? Too far; besides, isn’t that where Nazis go to hide? Perhaps Germany or France? That just might work. Putin’s got some mighty powerful friends in the former and he received the Legion of Honor decoration from the latter. A Putin-Schröder Peace Institute funded by all those purloined billions in Berlin? Warum nicht? Residence in Baby Doc Duvalier’s former villa in France? Pourquois pas?

 

Germany and France will be as eager to forget Putin’s crimes as most Russians. Ukrainians and other non-Russians will be less quick to do so. Victims of aggression, war, and genocide tend to remember the pain. Whom will they blame? Putin and his system, definitely. But millions of fingers will also be pointed at Russians. “Why did our self-styled brothers enthusiastically support Crimea’s annexation and the war in eastern Ukraine? Why did they look the other way as Russian forces and Russian proxies killed thousands and destroyed the Donbas? Why did no one protest? How could they believe that our efforts to establish a democracy were anti-Russian? How could they possibly believe that we were ever anti-Russian?” Expect Ukrainians to insist on reparations. Expect Russians to shrug in response.

 

Ukrainians will look back at the 2014 Russo-Ukrainian War as their third bloody encounter with Russia in the last 100 years. Russian Reds and Whites crushed Ukrainian independence in 1917–1921. Soviet Russians then crushed the Ukrainian liberation movement in Western Ukraine in 1945–1954. Then, in 2014, Putin’s Russians and their proxies tried to crush independent Ukraine.

And failed.

 

Putin’s failure is as evident now as are his crimes. He’s lost Ukraine. He’s destroyed the Donbas. In a word, he’s lost. The most he can do now is kill more Ukrainians and destroy more cities.

 

One day, when they finally wake up and realize their hero was a ruthless dictator, Russians will understand just how enthusiastically complicit they were in his evil—up to the very end.

‘Criminal in the Kremlin’: An Interview with Professor Walter Clemens

 

Below is an interview conducted recently with Walter Clemens, a professor emeritus of political science at Boston University and an associate of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University.

 

MOTYL: Walter, you’re well known for tackling complex moral and legal issues of international relations in your work. One of your books was Can Russia Change?

 

CLEMENS: I’m still doubtful.

 

MOTYL: Your current project is titled “Can—Should—Must We Negotiate with Evil? The World and North Korea.”

 

CLEMENS: The subtitle could also read “The World and Vladimir Putin.”

MOTYL: What should the international community do about Mr. Putin?

 

CLEMENS: He should be indicted and brought before the International Criminal Court. Putin is probably guilty of all types of transgressions the court is authorized to prosecute—genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and aggression. As Russia’s president or prime minister, Putin dispatched Russian armed forces against the peoples of Chechnya, Georgia, and Ukraine while keeping them in a province of Moldova. His troops killed between 100,000 and 200,000 Chechens, split off South Ossetia and Abkhazia from Georgia, and watched as South Ossetians carried out ethnic cleansing of Georgian villages. Putin’s forces have seized Crimea, putting Tatars as well as Ukrainians at risk. Putin has fomented separatism in eastern Ukraine and sent several thousand Russians to fight alongside the separatists. He may not have intended for his proxies to shoot down a Malaysian airliner, but he provided the equipment and training that permitted them to do so and kill nearly 300 civilians. When weapons based in Russia strike targets inside Ukraine, however, there is no doubt about Putin’s intentions.

 

MOTYL: Do his actions actually meet the definitional requirements of the crimes you outline?

 

CLEMENS: The Rome Statute setting up the International Criminal Court in 2002 gave precise definitions of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes—all of which fit Putin’s policies. But the member states’ lawyers did not define “aggression” until 2010. According to this definition , aggression includes “the invasion … by the armed forces of a state of the territory of another state”; “annexation by the use of force of the territory of another state”; “bombardment by the armed forces of a state against the territory of another state”; and “the sending by or on behalf of a state of armed bands, groups, irregulars or mercenaries … against another state.” Putin’s forces have clearly committed all these forms of “aggression,” but the ICC cannot exercise its jurisdiction over such crimes before 2017 and until the requisite number of member states have given their approval.

 

Meanwhile, it is clear that Putin’s Kremlin has violated the 1929 “Litvinov Protocol,” which put into force for Russia, Poland, Romania, Estonia, and Latvia the Pact of Paris outlawing war. That pact is still in force.

 

MOTYL: Very well, let’s agree that Putin’s armed forces are guilty on each of these counts as well as of committing crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. Is the man Vladimir Putin guilty of these crimes as well? Couldn’t he argue that he knew nothing about them?

 

CLEMENS: Putin might counter that he bears no personal responsibility for what Russian forces have done. On the other hand, he has reigned as a virtual dictator over Russia since 1999 and cannot evade responsibility for the crimes his troops commit. Putin could deny that the ICC has jurisdiction, because Russia is one of 31 states that have signed but not ratified the Rome Statute. Pending ratification, however, Russia is obliged under international law not to violate its ICC obligations.

 

MOTYL: So who would bring charges against Putin?

 

CLEMENS: That’s where the complexities get deeper. The Rome Statute gives first jurisdiction to courts in the home country of the accused. Since Russian courts are puppets of the president, they cannot be expected to try and convict their boss. The United Nations Security Council could refer the Putin case to the ICC, but Russia would surely veto such a move.

 

Some 122 states have signed and ratified the Rome Statute. The statute provides that a party to the treaty “may refer to the prosecutor a situation in which one or more crimes within the jurisdiction of the court appear to have been committed” and request “the prosecutor to investigate the situation for the purpose of determining whether one or more specific persons should be charged with the commission of such crimes.” Three states party to the statute have cause to bring charges against Putin: Moldova, Georgia, and the Netherlands. Given that the Netherlands lost nearly 200 citizens on MH17, it probably has the strongest grounds for bringing charges against Putin. Georgia and Moldova, for their own reasons, have solid reasons to join the suit. Nongovernmental actors such as Human Rights Watch and Chechen organizations could also file charges. The Rome Statue permits the prosecutor to initiate investigations motu proprio, or on his/her own initiative, on the basis of information received from individuals or organizations.

 

Malaysia and Ukraine also have grounds to bring charges against Putin, because Flight MH17 belonged to Malaysia and was shot down in Ukrainian airspace. But their failure to ratify the statute disqualifies them from taking their complaints to the court. The United States has also disqualified itself by the George W. Bush administration’s decision to “un-sign” the Rome Statute negotiated and signed by the Clinton White House.

 

MOTYL: Do you seriously expect charges against Putin to be brought?

 

CLEMENS: Putin’s crimes rank with those committed by leaders in the former Yugoslavia who were charged and convicted of war crimes. But there are obstacles. Whereas complaints from ultranationalist Croats and Serbs about persecution of their heroes did not rattle the international community, many governments and businesses in Europe do not wish to offend the Kremlin. Even the United States prefers to retain Russian cooperation in many spheres, from outer space to North Korea.

 

Still, the climate is changing. Putin’s actions in late July–early August led the European Union and the United States to intensify their sanctions against Russia. To try and put the leader of a regional superpower in the dock would be a further step up the ladder. Significantly, Navi Pillay, the UN high commissioner for human rights, said the downing of the Malaysia Airlines jet may be a “war crime.” In July, the Court of Arbitration in The Hague ordered Russia to pay $50 billion in damages to shareholders in the defunct Russian oil company Yukos. That same month, Washington announced that Russia has been testing ground-based cruise missiles in violation of the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty. These accusations come on top of other suspicions aroused by a string of unexplained murders of Russian journalists and others who challenged Putin over the years. And did not the recent cyber attacks against Ukrainian government offices in Kyiv and abroad originate in Putin’s Kremlin? A milieu of crime appears also to have spawned the theft by Russian gangsters of 1.2 billion usernames and passwords belonging to more than 500 million e-mail addresses around the globe.

 

The bottom line is obvious. If the world does not stand up to Putin today, as the Economist warned on July 26th, “worse will follow.”

Hitler and Putin: A Tale of Two Authoritarians

Will Russia’s unconstitutionally elected president, Vladimir Putin, unleash a full-scale land war against Ukraine.

 

I can give you ten reasons for every possible answer to this question. Which is to say that, like everyone else trying to divine Putin’s “mind,” I don’t know.

 

But there is one thing that I definitely do know. Suddenly, we are all talking about war in Europe. The one thing that was supposed to have become “unthinkable” and “unimaginable” after the end of the Cold War and the rise of the European Union has become perfectly thinkable and quite imaginable.

 

And all thanks to Putin. If tomorrow’s headlines scream “RUSSIA INVADES ESTONIA,” we’d be shocked, but would we be surprised?

 

Don’t blame the thinkability and imaginability of war on the Ukrainians. All they did was remove a corrupt dictator and embark on building a democracy. The Ukrainians didn’t invade Crimea. Nor did they arm separatist republics with Russian soldiers and weapons. That was Putin’s doing and only Putin’s doing.

 

There’s a lesson here, and it’s not either of the ones that are usually drawn: that Putin is a power-hungry madman, if you’re his critic, or that Putin is a shrewd statesman motivated by raison d’état and Realpolitik, if you’re his backer. The real lesson is that dictatorships, especially fascist dictatorships built on the ruins of collapsed empires, are prone to do bad things, such as engage in imperialist wars.

 

I’ve made the comparison many times before (starting in the late 1990s, by the way), but it’s worth reminding ourselves just how similar Russia’s and Putin’s trajectories are to those of post–World War I Germany and Adolf Hitler. The point is not to score easy debating points or to shake Germans’ assumptions about the uniqueness of Nazi evil, but to demonstrate that there are deeper structural reasons for Putin’s aggressiveness and indifference to international norms.

 

Both Germany and Russia lost empires and desired to rebuild them. Both Germany and Russia suffered economic collapse. Both Germany and Russia experienced national humiliation and retained imperial political cultures. Both Germany and Russia blamed their ills on the democrats. Both Germany and Russia elected strong men who promised to make them grand and glorious again. Both strong men employed imperialist arguments about “abandoned brethren” in neighboring states, remilitarized their countries, developed cults of the personality, centralized power, gave pride of place in the power structure to the forces of coercion, constructed regimes that may justifiably be called fascist, and proceeded to engage in re-annexing bits and pieces of lost territory before embarking on major landgrabs. Both strong men demonized friendly nations. Germany’s strongman ended up starting a world war. Russia’s strongman—well, we don’t know what he’ll do, but please do notice that a rigorous pursuit of the comparison does not bode well for peace in Europe or the world.

 

Democracy matters. Dictators are more prone to war precisely because they can manipulate public opinion and ruthlessly pursue whatever warped visions they have without much resistance from institutions and elites. Democratic presidents don’t have that luxury—as a rule of course. That’s why democracies plod along. That’s why they muddle through. That’s why they’re the worst form of government, as Winston Churchill observed, except for all the others.

 

Ukraine’s democracy has at best been crummy and creaky for the last two and a half decades. It’s done far too little about reform and it’s been much too enamored of corruption. As a result, Ukraine has muddled along, sometimes muddling up, sometimes muddling down. Change is imperative, and, thanks to the Maidan Revolution, everyone in Ukraine finally knows it. Stasis is bad, possibly unsustainable, probably destructive. And yet, and yet: Ukraine remains a democracy, far more so now than just a few months ago. It’s searching for answers to complex questions, balancing far too many interests and sensitivities, moving much too slowly to satisfy proponents of breakthroughs (and that includes me).

 

But do take note of one very important fact. Amid all this democratic sludge, independent Ukraine has been pacific for the entire time of its existence. At the same time, when provoked, as in the past few months, democratic Ukraine has also demonstrated that it can fight to defend itself and its values.

 

Which goes to show two things: that, except for the likes of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, Stephen F. Cohen, Marine Le Pen, and Aleksandr Dugin, even a crummy Ukrainian democracy is preferable to an efficient Russian dictatorship and that a war initiated by democratic Ukraine really is unthinkable and unimaginable.

Russians Open Fire In Ukraine, NATO Reports

Russia on Friday escalated tensions with Ukraine to the highest level since its stealthy invasion of Crimea in the spring, sending more than 200 trucks from a long-stalled aid convoy into rebel-held eastern Ukraine over the objections of Kiev and, NATO said, conducting military operations on Ukrainian territory.

 

NATO officials said that the Russian military had moved artillery units inside Ukrainian territory in recent days and was using them to fire at Ukrainian forces.

Russia has repeatedly denied sending troops or military hardware into Ukraine, just as it denied any link to the unidentified gunmen who paved the way for Moscow’s annexation of Crimea — until President Vladimir V. Putin stated in April that Russian troops were “of course” involved.

There has been “a major escalation in Russian military involvement in eastern Ukraine since mid-August, including the use of Russian forces,” Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen of NATO said in a statement.

“Russian artillery support — both cross-border and from within Ukraine — is being employed against the Ukrainian armed forces,” Mr. Rasmussen added.

Russia’s Permanent Mission to NATO, in a statement, accused the alliance of indifference to humanitarian suffering in eastern Ukraine and described its protests over the entry of a Russian aid convoy into Ukraine without Red Cross escorts as “another cynical attempt to cover the crimes of Ukrainian authorities.”

Mr. Rasmussen did not say how many Russian artillery pieces had moved into Ukraine or where they were located, but one Western official said the number of Russian-operated artillery units was “substantial.”

The NATO allegations are based on intelligence reports from several alliance members, Western officials said, and the allegation generally echoed Ukrainian claims in recent days of an expanding Russian military involvement in support of pro-Russian rebels who are battling to hold off a Ukrainian offensive.

A NATO spokeswoman, Oana Lungescu, also said that the alliance had receive multiple reports of the direct involvement of Russian airborne, air defense and special operations forces in Eastern Ukraine.

The NATO statements added new pressure on Moscow before a flurry of diplomacy in coming days, including a visit to Kiev on Saturday by the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, and a scheduled meeting next week between President Petro O. Poroshenko of Ukraine and his Russian counterpart,  Putin, in Minsk, Belarus.

Ms. Merkel spoke by telephone with the Russian and Ukrainian presidents on Friday and “expressed her great concern” over Russia’s unilateral decision to move its aid trucks into Ukraine, her spokesman said.

She also spoke with President Obama and, according to the White House, both leaders agreed that the arrival of the convoy represented “a violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

In a news briefing, the Pentagon spokesman, Rear Adm. John Kirby, condemned the convoy as an “unauthorized entry into Ukraine” and called for the vehicles’ immediate withdrawal.

The move into Ukraine, without the Red Cross escorts that had been agreed upon, drew angry accusations from Ukraine that Moscow had broken its word and mounted what Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, the head of Ukraine’s Security Service, called a “direct invasion.”

But Ukraine stepped back from earlier threats to use “all forces available” to halt any Russian vehicles that crossed the frontier without its full accord, and Mr. Poroshenko told the visiting foreign minister of Lithuania, “We will do our best to ensure that this does not lead to more serious consequences.”

The comments by Mr. Poroshenko suggested that Ukraine would limit its response to verbal protests and not use force against the Russian vehicles, although it was unclear whether volunteer Ukrainian battalions of sometimes shaky discipline would respect calls for restraint.

The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a long statement saying in essence that it had authorized the crossing because it was fed up with stalling by the government in Kiev.

Russian news agencies quoted a spokesman for Putin as saying that he had been informed of the convoy’s movements.

“All the excuses to delay the delivery of aid to people in the area of a humanitarian catastrophe are exhausted,” the ministry said.

“The Russian side has made a decision to act. Our column with humanitarian cargo starts moving toward Luhansk.”

That brought a curt response from a spokeswoman from the Obama administration. 

“It is important to remember that Russia is purporting to alleviate a humanitarian situation which Russia itself created,” Caitlin Hayden, the spokeswoman for the National Security Council, said in a statement.

“If Russia really wants to ease the humanitarian situation in eastern Ukraine, it could do so today by halting its supply of weapons, equipment, and fighters to its proxies,” she added.

In a telephone interview after a meeting with Mr. Poroshenko, the Lithuanian foreign minister, Linas A. Linkevicius, described the Russian move as “a serious escalation” but said Ukraine’s president had made clear there would be “no attack” on the trucks by Ukrainian forces.

“They will not add anything to this escalation,” he said, adding that Russia’s decision to move in its aid trucks, many of which appeared half empty to Western journalists allowed to see them earlier this week, only strengthened suspicions that the Kremlin’s humanitarian effort “is a smoke screen for something else.”

Rather than an invasion, however, the arrival of Russian trucks — only 34 of which Ukrainian officials inspected Thursday evening on the Russian side of the border, and found to contain buckwheat, rice, sugar and water — appeared to be a Russian effort to stall an accelerating offensive by Ukrainian forces against beleaguered pro-Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine.

The Ukrainian government has suggested it would be reluctant to attack with a convoy interposed. 

The trucks are traveling toward Luhansk, a war-ravaged rebel-held city where the bullet-riddled body of the acting honorary consul for Lithuania, a 39-year-old Ukrainian national named Mykola Zelenets, was found on Thursday.

He was kidnapped earlier this month by armed separatists, the Lithuanian ambassador to Ukraine, Petras Vaitiekunas, said.

Luhansk has come under heavy military pressure in recent days from Ukrainian forces.

The rebel city’s recapture by Ukraine would deliver a humiliating blow to Putin, who has faced mounting calls from hard-line nationalists in Russia to intervene decisively to stave off defeat for the Russian-speaking and often ethnically Russian separatists. 

While denying that it supports the rebels, despite a steady flow of arms and fighters into eastern Ukraine from Russia, the Kremlin has tied itself to their fate by whipping up a nationalist fervor with vows to protect Russians beyond Russia’s borders.

The decision to send in the aid trucks in defiance of Kiev suggested an attempt by Putin to calm nationalist complaints that he has not done enough to prevent a rebel defeat and marked the latest in a long series of surprise moves by the Russian president, a judo practitioner, to put Ukraine and the West off balance.

Spreading the conspicuously large white aid trucks through Luhansk could effectively impose a cease-fire, essentially daring the Ukrainians to fire at vehicles that have been sent to provide desperately needed humanitarian assistance.

Any respite in Ukraine’s military offensive could allow rebels to dig in further, and indefinitely postpone any attempt to oust them.

Ukraine has from the start viewed Russia’s aid convoy, which left Moscow on Aug. 12, with deep suspicion, worrying that the vehicles could be carrying weapons or be part of a ruse by Moscow to support the pro-Russian separatists, or possibly an attempt to provoke Ukraine into an ill-advised attack.

“This is a provocation,” said Colonel Andriy Lysenko, Ukraine’s military spokesman.

“They expect us to attack the convoy.”

He added that Ukrainian forces would allow the convoy to reach Luhansk, because “it is easy to shoot but the consequences would be very destructive.”

He said Ukraine would adopt a different approach if it turned out that, after reaching Luhansk, the convoy “has other equipment, not just humanitarian aid.”

Under the arrangements agreed to by the two countries, officials from the International Committee of the Red Cross were to escort the trucks to Luhansk.

They decided not to proceed after heavy shelling around the city during the night, Ewan Watson, a spokesman for the Red Cross, said in Geneva.

The main highway from the border crossing at Izvaryne to Luhansk has seen heavy fighting over the past week, as Ukrainian forces pressed their military campaign against the separatists.

The rebel forces have been driven out of a string of towns and villages but are still holding out in Luhansk and Donetsk.

There were no signs of Russian military vehicles or any other indications of an armed escort by Russian troops.

The United States and its European allies have warned that any crossing of the border by Russian military vehicles, even under the pretext of protecting the aid convoy, would be regarded as an invasion.

Several dozen trucks, from a convoy of about 270, crossed the border around noon.

Soldiers carrying automatic rifles and wearing camouflage, some bearing the markings of the rebels in eastern Ukraine, cleared the road to let the convoy move past.

Truck Convoy Returns To Russia From Ukraine

The huge convoy of Russian trucks that entered war-torn eastern Ukraine on Friday, sharply escalating tensions, returned to Russia on Saturday after unloading food and medicine in the city of Luhansk, and the Russian government quickly declared its satisfaction with the operation.

Russia’s decision to send the convoy across the border without an escort by the International Red Cross or final clearance from the Ukrainian government in Kiev had drawn harsh criticism.

President Petro O. Poroshenko of Ukraine called it a “flagrant violation of international law.”

Another senior Ukrainian official denounced it as a “direct invasion.”

And Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen of NATO, in a statement condemning the convoy’s entry, said it coincided with a “major escalation in Russian military involvement in eastern Ukraine.”

The convoy’s swift return suggested that, at least for a moment, the government of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had scored a public relations victory.

Russian television stations, largely controlled by the government, had carried constant coverage of the convoy crossing the border on Friday, after the Russian Foreign Ministry declared the humanitarian crisis in eastern Ukraine so grave that it could no longer tolerate what it described as stalling by the Ukrainian government and the International Committee of the Red Cross, which had agreed to oversee the convoy.

For weeks, Kiev and its allies, including the United States and major European countries, had raised suspicions about Russia’s plans to deliver humanitarian aid, fearing that the trucks could be used to carry weapons and other supplies to pro-Russian militants who seem to be on the verge of defeat in their fight against the Ukrainian government.

There were also concerns that Russia would use the trucks to slow the Ukrainian government’s military operations in Luhansk, essentially to shield rebels as they regrouped and rearmed.

In Ukraine’s capital, Kiev, a military spokesman, Col. Andriy Lysenko, said the Ukrainian government was also hoping to defuse the situation, but he accused Russia of using some of the aid trucks to take military equipment from Ukrainian factories back to Russia.

However, he offered no evidence to support his assertion.

“The leadership of Ukraine is using all diplomatic and political means to resolve this crisis and will not allow it to develop further,” Colonel Lysenko said at a briefing for reporters.

While witnesses reported seeing more than 260 trucks in the convoy, Colonel Lysenko said that Ukrainian officials had counted 184 crossing the border on Friday and that some of them, having dropped off their cargo, were being used “to take away equipment from Ukrainian enterprises.”

He said, without offering any proof, that the equipment was taken from the Topaz plant, which makes Kolchuga, a type of radar system, and from a factory in Luhansk that produces firearms magazines.

At the briefing in Kiev, the capital, Colonel Lysenko said Russia was continuing to fire artillery and missiles at Ukrainian military positions from the Russian side of the border, repeating an accusation that Ukraine has made consistently in recent weeks.

Russia has denied direct military involvement in the conflict.

By swiftly returning the trucks to Russia, the Kremlin seemed to seize an opportunity to make its detractors in Kiev and the West appear alarmist, and the Foreign Ministry issued a statement saying the goals all along had been strictly humanitarian.

“We are satisfied that the Russian humanitarian aid for southeast Ukraine was delivered to the destination,” the Foreign Ministry said.

“We were guided in this exclusively by the goal of helping needy civilians.”

The statement added that Russia intended to work with the Red Cross to deliver the assistance.

The hasty unloading of the trucks also seemed to confirm that many of them had been nearly empty.

Journalists who were allowed to look inside some trucks had seen that many were only partly filled.

The State Border Guard Service of Ukraine’s inspections of an initial group of trucks found that most of them carried foodstuffs, including buckwheat, rice, sugar and water, and that some bore medical supplies.

The Red Cross said on Friday that fighting in eastern Ukraine made it too dangerous for the convoy to cross the border and deliver the aid.

The Russian Foreign Ministry issued a statement saying that the humanitarian crisis was worsening and that it could no longer wait.

Military experts say that there is no doubt that Russia could invade Ukraine — with tanks not cargo trucks — on extremely short notice and that the West could do little about it.

The loud criticism from Kiev and the West, however, seemed to provide the Kremlin with an easy opportunity to portray its critics as shrill and unreliable, while pushing back on hard-line Russian nationalists who have criticized Putin and his government for not doing more to help pro-Russian militants.

The Obama administration on Friday had also sharply criticized Russia’s unilateral decision to send the convoy across the border, which it said was “in violation of its previous commitments and international law.”

“Russian military vehicles painted to look like civilian trucks forced their way into Ukraine,” said a spokeswoman for the National Security Council, Caitlin Hayden.

In her statement, Ms. Hayden said that only a small number of vehicles were inspected by Ukrainian customs officials and that there was no way to know the contents of the entire convoy.

The Ukrainian government complained that its customs agents sent to a border crossing to inspect the trucks had been blocked as Russia sent the convoy through. 

The return of the trucks to Russia came as Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany arrived in Kiev to visit Ukrainian leaders.

Merkel Says Tightening Ukraine-Russian Border Is Key To Peace Deal

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Saturday the standoff over Ukraine could be solved but only if control was tightened over the Ukraine-Russia border across which, the West alleges, Russia has been funnelling arms to help a separatist rebellion.

Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel looks on as Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko gestures in Kiev August 23, 2014

 

Merkel was visiting Kiev as a prelude to a meeting next week between the Russian and Ukrainian leaders that diplomats say is the best chance in months of a peace deal in eastern Ukraine, where government forces are fighting pro-Moscow rebels.

But she arrived as tensions flared up again.

NATO has alleged Russia's military is active inside Ukraine helping the rebels, and Moscow angered Kiev and its Western allies by sending an aid convoy into Ukraine against Kiev's wishes.

"There must be two sides to be successful. You cannot achieve peace on your own. I hope the talks with Russia will lead to success," said Merkel, looking ahead to a meeting on Tuesday involving Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Ukrainian counterpart Petro Poroshenko.

"The plans are on the table...now actions must follow," the German leader told a news conference after talks with Poroshenko in the Ukrainian capital.

She said a ceasefire was needed, but the main obstacle was the lack of controls along the nearly 2,000 km (1,300 mile) border.

She proposed an agreement between Kiev and Moscow on monitoring of the frontier by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Poroshenko suggested he saw scope for accord.

“The Ukrainian side and our European partners will do everything possible to bring about peace - but not at the price of sovereignty, territorial integrity and the independence of Ukraine," he said.

Hours before her plane landed in Kiev, there was heavy artillery bombardment in Donetsk, the main separatist stronghold on the east of Ukraine, near the border with Russia.

Reporters saw apartments destroyed and puddles of blood, where, according to residents, two civilians were killed.

The unusually intense shelling may be part of a drive by government forces to achieve a breakthrough against the rebels in time for Ukrainian Independence Day, which falls on Sunday.

Diplomats say Merkel has two aims for the visit: primarily to show support for Kiev in its stand-off with Russia, but also to urge Poroshenko to be open to peace proposals when he meets Putin next week.

TRUCK CONVOY 

The conflict in Ukraine has dragged Russian-Western relations to their lowest ebb since the Cold War and sparked a round of trade sanctions that are hurting already-fragile economies in European and Russia.

A convoy of about 220 white-painted trucks rolled into Ukraine on Friday through a border crossing controlled by the rebels after days waiting for clearance.

Moscow said the trucks moved in without Kiev's consent because civilians in areas under siege from Ukrainian government troops were in urgent need of food, water and other supplies.

Kiev called the convoy a direct invasion, a stance echoed by NATO, the United States, and European leaders.

A journalist at the Donetsk-Izvaryne border crossing, where the convoy rolled into Ukraine on Friday, said trucks on Saturday had started pouring back onto the Russian side of the border.

The foreign ministry in Moscow said the convoy had now left Ukraine, though a Ukrainian military spokesman disputed this, saying only 184 of the 220 vehicles had re-entered Russia.

In Brussels, NATO said it had reports of Russian troops engaging Kiev's forces inside Ukraine - fuelling Western allegations that the Kremlin is behind the conflict in an effort undermine the Western-leaning leadership in Kiev.

"Russian artillery support – both cross border and from within Ukraine – is being employed against the Ukrainian armed forces," said NATO spokeswoman Oana Lungescu.

A Ukrainian military spokesman in Kiev, Colonel Andriy Lysenko, said Ukrainian government forces were now coming under cross-border fire from Russia, using Grad and Uragan missiles, over a 400 kms (250 mile) length of the border.

The Russian foreign ministry, in a statement, called those allegations "groundless."

Russia accuses Kiev, with the backing of the West, of waging a war against innocent civilians in eastern Ukraine, a mainly Russian-speaking region.

HOMES DESTROYED 

The crisis over Ukraine started when mass protests in Kiev ousted a president who was close to Moscow, and installed leaders viewed with suspicion by the Kremlin. 

Soon after that, Russia annexed the Ukrainian region of Crimea, and a separatist rebellion broke out in eastern Ukraine.

In the past weeks, the momentum has shifted towards Ukraine's forces, who have been pushing back the rebels.

The separatists are now encircled in their two strongholds, Luhansk and Donetsk. 

Reporters in Donetsk said that most of the shelling was taking place in the outskirts, but explosions were also audible in the centre of the city.

In Donetsk's Leninsky district, a man who gave his name as Grigory, said he was in the toilet on Saturday morning when he heard the whistling sound of incoming artillery.

"Then it hit. I came out and half the building was gone."

The roof of the building had collapsed into a heap of debris. Grigory said his 27-year-old daughter was taken to hospital with injuries to her head.

He picked up a picture of a baby from the rubble.

"This is my grandson," he said.

In another residential area, about 5 km north of the city centre, a shop and several houses had been hit.

Residents said two men, civilians, were killed.

Praskoviya Grigoreva, 84, pointed to two puddles of blood on the pavement near a bus stop that was destroyed in the same attack.

"He's dead. Death took him on this spot," she said.

Ukraine - Saturday August 23rd 2014

Summary

 

-- German Chancellor Angela Merkel called for all parties involved in the hostilities in eastern Ukraine to agree to a cease-fire during a visit to Kyiv on August 23. Speaking after talks with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, Merkel said peace was possible if "both sides" engage.

 

-- Hundreds of trucks from a Russian aid convoy that unilaterally entered eastern Ukraine on August 22 have crossed the border back into Russia.

 

-- U.S. President Barack Obama and Merkel have expressed alarm at Russian moves inside Ukraine. According to the White House, Obama and Merkel said the presence of Russian soldiers in Ukraine, the buildup of Russian troops along the Ukrainian border, and Russian shelling into Ukraine represent dangerous escalations of tensions by Moscow.