Donbass: irreconcilable realities | Telepolis

War harms everyone, but none of the parties to the conflict behave accordingly. Reactions to the current crisis from Russian media

A solution to the conflict in Donbass has been negotiated for years; An agreement was reached in Minsk, a ceasefire was agreed in 2019 and yet the area is again on the brink of war, why?

The composition of the negotiating partners becomes a problem in the Donbass conflict. In principle, the government in Kiev wants to negotiate directly with Russia, which it sees as the aggressor, via the mediation of Western states, in order to avoid any diplomatic contact with the rebels in their own country. They should not be politically upgraded or even recognized as a major party to the conflict. In reality, however, the West is on the side of the government in Kiev and is therefore unsuitable as a neutral mediator.

Russia, on the other hand, officially sees itself as neutral – despite all real support for the rebels – and is pushing for direct negotiations between Kiev and the separatists, preferably with itself as a mediator, for which it is just as unsuitable as current German government politicians.

So both opponents strive for a mode of “mediation”, which means realiter pressure on the opposite side and amounts to their isolation. Real willingness to compromise looks different. Here is the phenomenon of an “existence of two wars in mutually incompatible realities”, says the Russian journalist Vladimir Solovyov for the Carnegie Center in Moscow fundamental contradiction to a formula.

Print on the wrong side only

The case is similar with the powers that are behind the two warring parties. To make real progress, the West would have to put pressure on Kiev and Russia on the rebels. This is the only way for round tables like the Normandy format to lead to real understanding. Both warring parties are highly financially and militarily dependent on their background power.

Instead, however, the rifts between the direct belligerents would be deepened by the powers of influence behind them Negotiations wouldn’t deserve their namedescribes the Russian newspaper Kommersant the location. The public exchange of accusations dominates, the negotiations themselves are not progressing, they are stuck immovably.

Respected experts, such as Andrei Kortunov from the Russian Council for International Relations, naturally speak of the bad relationship between Russia and the West Overall situation significantly destabilized. The current escalation in Donbass can be seen as a scaled-down image of these deeply hypothermic overall relationships on a large scale.

Necessary, says Kortunow in the liberal Russian online newspaper Medusa, would be stability, wisdom and understanding to calm the messed up situation. Otherwise, the fears in Kiev of an overly strong Russia and those in Russia because of an even closer, strong NATO would never be allayed and an escalation would be possible all the time.

For Russia, the confrontation with the entire West would heat up towards geopolitical isolation, the consequences would be further sanctions and the country’s way into the circle of the finally outcasts, according to the Fears of the Russian military expert Mikhail Khodarenok. It would be of no use to Russia itself if such a dispute quickly resulted in a military victory for the rebels, which would be a likely outcome with massive Russian aid.

The main victims would be the government in Kiev and its allies in the west. Zelensky was elected president of Ukraine to end the war, not to escalate it; military defeat would cost him his head. The patient Ukraine would not recover from such an armed conflict anytime soon and the financial drip that keeps him alive would be financed by Western taxpayers. However, these have currently enough to do with the costs of fighting a pandemic.

But the West and Russia behave as if the opposite is the case and a war triggered by the evil enemy is not a problem for you. For years, Russia has been diligently granting citizenships of its own to Donbass residents, deepening the gap between them and the rest of Ukraine. Moscow is pretending to keep the Donbass conflict in a frozen state, but the war in Nagorno-Karabakh recently demonstrated the opposite.

The USA, on the other hand, is subliminally suggesting to the government in Kiev with aggressive rhetoric in the direction of Moscow that they would consistently support any adventurous offensive action – NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg also speaks without reservation of his alliance’s commitment to a close partnership with Ukraine.

Trusting in active Western support, the then Georgian President Saakashvili dared to launch the war in Georgia in 2008 with an attack on South Ossetia and Russian peacekeepers stationed there. He is currently a senior official in Zelensky’s Ukrainian government – in Georgia he is a convicted and currently fugitive offender.

De-escalation is urgently needed

A mediation is urgently needed not only because of such personal details, since the direct conflict partners both withdraw further and further into their trenches. Representatives of the rebellious “People’s Republics” in Donetsk and Lugansk describe an armed conflict in the near future as inevitable and suggest imminent attack operations by the government – in order to get massive Russian aid, for example from volunteer fighters. It is precisely this influx of fighters that heats up the situation.

Should the final escalation come, each side will feel right. Each of the two parties to the dispute would see their own war here, as described by Vladimir Solovyov’s gloomy future scenario. Only those who die in one version are also dead in the other.
(Roland Bathon)

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