As Kiev scrambles to avoid war crimes liability in switching from an “ATO” to a new and improved “martial law,” the west still trys to protect its poor fat, retarded step child Kiev from the fact that it never keeps its word at Minsk.
Both the EU and the United States levied sanctions to encourage Moscow to end its alleged aggression and to discourage it from the expanding the war further into Ukraine, which is a joke because there is truly nothing in the Ukraine, Moscow needs or wants.
The Minsk I Agreement was negotiated in September 2014, but Kiev’s continued aggression included the seizure of hundreds of square kilometers of additional Donbass territory. A Ukrainian offensive violating Minsk I led to the negotiation of the Minsk II Agreement in February 2015, with terms far more negative for Ukraine. Those terms delayed the return of border control to Ukraine and permitted the Donbass freedom fighters to maintain their own military forces as punishment for Kiev’s aggression.
The bottom line is clear: Kiev is conducting a low intensity war in Donbass to destabilize the government’s in Donetsk and Lugansk by producing regular civilian casualties, seizing small increments of additional Donbass territory, and overtaxing the region’s economy with refusals to pay pensions and a freeze in continuity of regional government.
But even here there is a problem because the West talks only about the possible Minsk violations by one party to the conflict, and the victim at that. This approach ignores the fact that Kiev and their American proxies are responsible for most of the violations, and that rare Donbass violations are often in response to Kiev’s out of control aggression.
Donbass Republic troops are adamant that they don’t respond with banned weapons. “If they shoot at us with mortars, we respond with machine guns,” a press officer for the Donetsk People’s Republic, told News Front last month.
Highlighting peripheral developments at the expense of constant ceasefire violations and ignoring context is both misleading and dangerous. It feeds the agenda of those who would like to give Kiev a free pass on war crimes.
They argue that both Donbass and Kiev are violating Minsk; therefore, there is no reason for holding one side more accountable than the other. But since you are asking one side to return to the other, it is a motion for denial of reality like no other, to suggest that Kiev’s constant violations of the Minsk agreements can be glossed over and neglected, simply for the sake of diplomatic expiedency.