The situation in Ukraine continues to deteriorate heading
into what looks like a crucial week for the country.
The political unrest took an ugly turn over the weekend when
more than 30 protesters were
killed in a fire in Odessa after storming the city's trade union
building. As with many of the recent
events in Ukraine, the exact details of what occurred are murky, though this series of
first-person accounts from the BBC offers perhaps the best picture of
events. Competing pro-Kiev and
pro-Russian rallies turned into a string of running street fights between the
two groups that culminated in the pro-Russian side storming the trade union
building. Accounts on what happened next
differ. The building was set on fire by
molotov cocktails, though it is unclear whether the petrol bombs were being
thrown at the building or by those inside as well. The pro-Russian group claims that the
pro-Kiev protesters prevented the pro-Russians from fleeing the building, while
the pro-Kiev demonstrators say that they tried to help rescue people from the
fire. Some 30 people are said to have
died in the fire with several others dying as they jumped from the building to
escape the burning building. All sides
though seem to agree that Odessa's police were ineffective, doing little to
either stop the fighting or to control the scene around the burning trade union
building and facilitate a rescue of those inside.
The situation in Odessa is shocking because the city is far
removed from the Ukraine/Russia border region that has previously been the site
of the pro-Russian unrest. According to
the BBC report, Odessa had been quiet up until this weekend's violence, with
tourists – even Russian tourists – enjoying springtime on the streets of this
city by the Black Sea. Ukraine's government
is once again blaming Russia for fomenting unrest in Odessa, claiming that
Russian agitators snuck into the region from Moldova's pro-Russian breakaway
region of Trans-Dniester,
which is near to Odessa, to cause trouble in the city. Both sides are seizing on the death toll from
Odessa as proof of the brutality of the other, further ratcheting up tensions
in the country and making the successful staging of the May 25th
presidential election seem even more unlikely.
In addition to Odessa, there are two other factors that
could make this the decisive week in whether or not there will be a full-scale
war in Ukraine.
This Friday, May 9, is Victory Day in
Russia, a national holiday to commemorate Germany's surrender in what most of
the world calls World War II, but what Russia still refers to as the “Great
Patriotic War”. While Victory Day serves
the same purpose as Memorial Day does in the United States, it also
traditionally is the most patriotic day on the Russian calendar, a time to
celebrate Russia's armed forces and the date of a massive military parade in
Moscow. The key symbol of Victory Day –
the black-and-gold St. George's ribbon (analogous to the Memorial Day poppy in
the US and Great Britain) – has already been appropriated by Ukraine's pro-Russian
separatists as a sign of their solidarity with Russia. It is possible then that Russia could use
this very patriotic holiday to launch their long-threatened military action to
rescue the supposedly threatened Russian minority in Ukraine.
The second reason has to do with the make-up of the Russian
military itself. Russia still relies on
conscription for the bulk of their armed forces, with men over the age of 18
(supposedly) required to serve at least one year in the military. As Pavel Felgenhauer explains here
in Foreign Policy, conscripts are
typically taken into service in two cohorts per year and the hitch for one of
those cohorts is reaching its end, meaning that these troops are,
theoretically, at the peak of their military training. Once their conscription period ends though,
they will be replaced by a new batch of raw recruits who will have to go
through the process of learning to be a soldier from scratch, greatly
diminishing the effectiveness of the 40,000 or so Russian troops stationed
along Ukraine's eastern border. From a
Russian military point of view, the time to strike is now.
Whether Russia will remains an open question. By Pres. Vladimir Putin's benchmarks, with
the deaths in Odessa and ongoing Ukrainian “anti-terrorist” operations being conducted
in the pro-Russian separatist cities in eastern Ukraine, the causes belli
exist. Putin may also be emboldened by
another round of relatively weak sanctions laid down by the United States and
the European Union. Plus, as discussed
earlier, Putin's larger goal of destabilizing Ukraine would be set back if the
country can stage a successful presidential election at the end of the
month. It is more likely than not then
that Russia will conduct some type of direct military action against Ukraine in
the coming days, though with Putin, nothing is ever quite what it seems.