Brilliant Overview of Putin's Ukraine Role. And This is a Must Read for Everyone.
While I haven't regularly read SLATE in years, after experiencing Anne Applebaum's - brilliant - and there is no other word to describe it - summary of what is really happening over there (which is a reprint of her Washington Post column), I will make certain not to miss another article by her. Hopefully someone in the White House will make certain President Obama reads this article. Here are the opening paragraphs:
The downing of the Malaysia Airlines passenger plane has exposed the chaos in Ukraine as a real war.
Before there is any further
discussion of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, it’s important that one point
be made absolutely clear: This plane crash is a result of the Russian
invasion of eastern Ukraine, an operation deliberately designed to
create legal, political, and military chaos. Without this chaos, a
surface-to-air missile would not have been fired at a passenger plane.
With the help of local thugs, these Russian security men besieged
police stations, government offices, and other symbols of political
authority, in order to delegitimize the Ukrainian state. In this task, they were assisted by the Russian government and by Russia’s state-controlled mass media, both of which still constantly denigrate Ukraine and its “Nazi” government.
Just in the past week, Russian reporting on Ukraine reached a new pitch
of hysteria, with fake stories about the supposed crucifixion of a
child and an extraordinary documentary comparing the Ukrainian army’s defense of its own country with the Rwandan genocide.
Into this ambiguous and unstable situation, the Russians cynically
funneled a stream of heavy weapons: machine guns and artillery, and
eventually tanks, armed personnel carriers, and anti-aircraft missiles.
In recent days, the separatist forces were openly using MANPADS, and
were also boasting of having taken down large Ukrainian transport
planes, clearly with Russian specialist assistance. Indeed, Strelkov on
Thursday afternoon boasted online of having taken down another military plane,
before realizing that the plane in question was MH17. He removed the
post. In late June, several different Russian media sources published
photographs of BUK anti-aircraft missiles, which they said had been
captured by the separatists—though they were probably outright gifts
from Russia. These posts have also been removed.
This is the context within which a surface-to-air missile was aimed
at a passenger plane: A lawless environment; irregular soldiers who
might not be so good at reading radar; a nihilistic disregard for human
life; scorn for international norms, rules, or standards. Just for the
record: There weren’t any Ukrainian government-controlled anti-aircraft missiles in eastern Ukraine, because the separatists were not flying airplanes.
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