From "Putin's Big Mistake" by Marc Champion on BloombergView:
Is Russian President Vladimir Putin losing Ukraine by stoking a war to keep it?
As a new military campaign appears to be getting under way in eastern Ukraine, that’s an important question. To answer it, Putin could do worse than to stop by for tea at the Makarov household in Mariupol, the region’s main port and industrial center -- now threatened with attack.
Alexander Makarov is an ethnic Russian, proud that he can trace his family’s roots to 16th century Russian chronicles. At the start of the crisis in Ukraine, he, like many people in this city, was hostile to the revolution in Kiev. He argued repeatedly about it with his daughter, Katerina, with whom he shares an apartment. He hung a Russian flag on his bedroom wall and she put a Ukrainian one on hers. (Katrina's confused seven-year old daughter asked what kind should go on her wall.)
It used to irritate Makarov, a 62-year-old radio engineer, that whenever he needed to write officially to his boss in Donetsk -- also a native Russian speaker -- he had to do so in Ukrainian. And even though 80 percent of the team he worked with at Mariupol Airport’s control tower were Russian speakers, all technical documents, including those with safety implications, had to be written in Ukrainian, too.
It angered Makarov still more when the so-called Maidan protesters in Kiev seemed willing to risk Ukraine’s ties with Russia over a trade deal with the European Union. Most of his friends and family live across the Russian border, just 30 miles away. He even accepted Russia’s decision to take Crimea, because “it was never truly Ukrainian.”
But Makarov's view changed when Putin started sending troops into eastern Ukraine. The death toll quickly doubled and today stands above 4,000. In August, Russian units crossed the border to march on Mariupol, stopping only when Putin and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko signed a cease-fire agreement. The city staged its first pro-Ukraine rallies. Most of Makarov’s team at work changed their minds too, he says.
Makarov trusts Ukrainian TV news reports no more than Russia’s, but he can see that Mariupol faces no risk of being ethnically cleansed by fascists, as Putin claimed this week. What's threatening are the Russian-provided artillery and tanks that last summer shredded the air-traffic control tower at Donetsk’s new airport. Just a year ago Makarov proudly helped install state-of-the-art equipment in that tower, part of a multi-million-dollar effort to bring Ukraine’s air-traffic system into the 21st century.
Read the full story here.
From RFE/RL's News Desk:
Ukraine's prime minister has rejected a Russian call for direct talks between Kyiv and pro-Russian separatists, saying his government would not to talk to Moscow's "mercenaries."
Arseniy Yatsenyuk spoke at a government meeting after Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Moscow was calling for "establishing stable contacts between Kyiv and Donbas aimed at reaching mutually acceptable agreements."
Donbas is a term for an industrial section of eastern Ukraine where pro-Russian rebels hold large parts of two provinces.
Yatsenyuk said in Russian, "We will not hold direct talks with your mercenaries."
He called on Moscow to "stop playing games aimed at legitimizing bandits and terrorists."
"If you want peace, fulfill the Minsk agreement," Yatsenyuk said, referring to a September 5 agreement, which Russia signed off on, that imposed a cease-fire and set out steps toward peace.
From our News Desk:
U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden is due to arrive in Ukraine on November 20 for a two-day visit.
The U.S. ambassador to Kyiv, Geoffrey Pyatt, announced the dates for the "working visit" in a tweet.
The visit comes amid persistent tension over the conflict between Ukrainian government forces and pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.
A statement on the U.S. Embassy website said Biden and his wife will leave Morocco for Kyiv in the afternoon on November 20.
It said Biden will meet with Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk on the morning of November 21 and attend a working lunch with President Petro Poroshenko that afternoon.
Biden will attend a round-table discussion on anticorruption before departing for Istanbul.
He's kidding, right? Right?!
Irena Chalupa for Atlantic Council (Chalupa is a former Ukrainian Service director of RFE/RL):
[Colonel Igor] Girkin conceded in an interview with Svobodnaya Pressa (“Free Press”), an internet news site, that in April he expected a Russian takeover of the Donbas region to go as smoothly and bloodlessly as Russia’s just-completed seizure of Crimea, in which Girkin had taken part. “I planned to do everything like in Crimea, I hoped that everything would go according to the Crimean scenario. We planned to help local leaders establish popular rule, conduct a referendum and unite with Russia.” In June, Girkin complained in Donbas that he was unable to persuade significant numbers of Donbas men, especially the young, to join the war against Ukraine. Asked now why the Donbas conflict has not resulted in a popular, pro-Russian uprising, he doesn’t quite manage an explanation. Of one thing he is sure: that Russia has failed to give it enough support.
Here's our own recent story on the organization, "Under Fire In Ukraine, OSCE Questions Its Worth."