The repetition of the news is the main enemy of peace in Ukraine. Every day the OSCE observers report the escalation of the fighting to a highest. It ends not to be a news anymore. Meanwhile, it seems that someone is working against the Minsk agreements. It’s really possible?
Earlier this month a group of OSCE observers in mission in the village of Zaitseve, under the control of Kiev forces, has been targeted by mortar shells and light weapons from the separatist’s side. Within 24 hours, five Ukrainian soldiers were killed and four wounded. It was the worst bulletin of recent months. So much so that the High Representative for EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini, spoke for the first time of an “unprecedented level of violence” and a “significant increase in violations of the ceasefire in the Donetsk region”. In addition, the Ukrainian military spokesman Andriy Lysenko said he had notified Osce the possibility of carrying artillery and mortars on the frontline, inside the demilitarized zone.
But everything was tragically already passed by yesterday’s deaths. At least five, all civilians, including a pregnant woman, were killed in their cars at a separatists checkpoint in Olenivka, a suburb of Donetsk.
Who is firing?
Who fired on civilians, yet again? Is there someone wishing to jeopardize the ceasefire and the Minsk agreements?
As usual, the separatists said the Ukrainians fired artillery on the cars of civilians. Ukrainians say they have been targeted by machine guns but had not returned fire. The voices from the field tell a different story. “We shoot every day, like in real war,” Oleg Kutsyn, commander of the Ukrainian battalion Sich told me not long ago. “The peace agreements, the political will, have nothing to do with what happens on the field. Sometimes soldiers open fire because they’re bored, sometimes because of alcohol or depression. In general, it takes just someone in any position of command that gives the order to fire”.
In a video uploaded on YouTube Massimiliano Cavalleri, an Italian volunteer fighting alongside the separatists with the nom de guerre “Spartacus,” says that the Ukrainians always shoot first (hard to expect to hear something different) and that “we do not want to use artillery but we use it in exceptional cases.”
And who is stuck in the middle has the most disillusioned point of view. “They shoot every day. Here come those OSCE and stops everything, but when they go away they start shelling once again”, said a woman from a village near Horlivka to a local reporter.
The Minsk agreements that everybody (and nobody) want
The Minsk agreements have never been so threatened as today. If, after the entry into force of the second ceasefire on February 2015, the intensity of the conflict significantly lowered, it’ impossible to be sure it will work in future.
It is unlikely, though not impossible, that there is a planned political will by at least one of the parties to raise the level of confrontation to derail the negotiations. The peace protocol seems itself designed not to work for long. From the elections in the breakaway territories, supposed to be governed by the Ukrainian law – an obscenity for separatists –, to the general amnesty for all the insurgents – an obscenity for Ukrainian nationalists –, the obstacles materialized almost immediately. In a way that it’s now months the Contact Group meets only to emphasize that there is no progress.
Paradoxically, in fact, the fragility of what agreed in Minsk lies in the constant reminder that the parties make to the points put on the paper. In other words, keeping on holding no other possible way to settle the conflict and, at the same time, accusing each other to put a spoke in the wheels of the Minsk machine, is the best way to nullify the agreements. And to leave to field commanders the freedom to violate the cease-fire with impunity.
@daniloeliatweet
The repetition of the news is the main enemy of peace in Ukraine. Every day the OSCE observers report the escalation of the fighting to a highest. It ends not to be a news anymore. Meanwhile, it seems that someone is working against the Minsk agreements. It’s really possible?
