While the situation seems to be getting worse by the hour in the Donbass and Russia is still massing troops on the border with Ukraine, Kiev is trying last-ditch diplomatic approaches. But it may already be too late, say the country’s media.
Over the past few days, shooting has increased on the line of contact between the Ukrainian army and the pro-Russian forces. On the single day of February 19, the latter, reports Oukraïnska Pravdawould have “opened fire 136 times, including 116 with weapons prohibited by the Minsk agreements. Two Ukrainian soldiers were killed, and 4 wounded.” On the morning of February 20, a huge explosion was reported in the city of Donetsk, without knowing the reason, and since then the shooting has continued.
To what is this worsening of the situation, which is very real, due? According to the governments of the self-proclaimed separatist people’s republics of Luhansk and Donetsk, the fault lies with the Ukrainian army, which is preparing to launch a major offensive to reconquer the region, which the Kiev authorities vehemently deny, accusing on the contrary the “hybrid Russian units” to be the cause of the crisis.
“The biggest war in Europe since 1945”
In the West, some leaders are once once more asserting that a Russian invasion would be imminent, such as Boris Johnson who, during a interview with the BBC also Quoted by Thestated that, in his opinion, “everything proved that the plan [de la Russie] had in a sense already begun” and that this might lead to “the biggest war in Europe since 1945”. “According to intelligence information, Russia intends to launch an invasion that will encircle the Ukrainian capital,” he added.
In the East too, this worsening of the situation is invoked to justify the fact that “Russia and Belarus have not ended their joint exercises”, highlighted Oukraïnska Pravda. As for Ukrainian General Staffhe warns that “information began to arrive from various sources regarding the preparation of a series of provocations carried out by the occupying forces […].”
So, according to intelligence, to carry out these provocations, units of Wagner arrived in Donetsk to carry out a series of terrorist acts together with the Russian special services, namely the demolition of residential buildings. The purpose of these provocations will, of course, be to accuse Ukraine of further escalation.”
And the army of Kiev takes the opportunity to remind that “Ukrainian military units do not plan any offensive or other action in the temporarily occupied territories”.
Zelensky à Munich
Meanwhile, President Volodymyr Zelensky traveled to Munich on February 19 to attend the security conference. On the spot, he gave a long speech to explain Ukraine’s position in the current conflict. He referred to the Budapest memorandum of 1994, by which, details Oukraïnska Truth, “Ukraine, which then had the world’s third largest nuclear arsenal since its independence in 1991, had agreed to give up its status as a nuclear power in exchange for guarantees for its sovereignty and territorial integrity”. The United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, China and France were signatories to this memorandum, now considered obsolete in Kiev.
What Zelensky summed up simply by saying that Ukraine today does not have “no nuclear weapons, no security”.
Other international agreements that Kiev is very close to considering invalid, the Minsk agreements, signed in February 2015, supposed to preside over the ceasefire in the Donbass, and never really respected since.
Ukraine, in particular, is reluctant to grant any form of autonomy to the separatist republics until it regains control of its border with Russia, which Moscow refuses.
Faced with such an impasse, comments a columnist from The, there will be “only by force will we force the Ukrainians to accept the Minsk agreements”, because these would be “incompatible with real democracy, and it is no coincidence that Putin insists that the West oblige Kiev to implement its clauses”.
And if the Westerners finally give in, they will reveal themselves “worse than Chamberlain and Daladier. Because the current Western leaders know very well that shortly following the Munich agreements (in 1938), shortly following the dismantling of Czechoslovakia which was to ‘bring peace for future generations’, the Second World War began”.
