Dear CCI Followers,
The U.S.-Russia head-on clash in Ukraine is producing more articles and soundbites than we can send to you. Natylie Baldwin, author of “A View from Moscow,” gives permission for CCI to use her short-hand analysis of the events taking place on ground in the past couple of days.
We will keep you informed as the situation comes to a head … which could be anything from an all-out war between the United States and Russia, or a sensible retreat by the Biden administration, which won’t go down well with his overlords, the U.S. military industrial complex … or some quiet diplomacy about which we may never know the back story. Let’s hope and pray for sensible solutions for all sides.
More to follow later in the day.
Sharon Tennison
Center for Citizen Initiatives
Natylie’s Place: Understanding Russia
DE-ESCALATION BETWEEN RUSSIA AND UKRAINE/NATO?
April 14, 2021
By Natylie Baldwin
There have been a lot of developments in the past couple of days with respect to the high tensions between Ukraine – with its NATO cheerleaders on one side and Russia on the other. Let’s recap what has happened since February.
First, in February, according to respected analyst Dmitri Trenin of the Carnegie Moscow Center: “Zelenskiy ordered troops (as part of the rotation process) and heavy weapons (as a show of force) to go near to the conflict zone in Donbas. He did not venture out as far as Poroshenko, who dispatched small Ukrainian naval vessels through the Russian-controlled waters near the Kerch Strait in late 2018, but it was enough to get him noticed in Moscow.”
At the beginning of March, the Zelensky government banned three opposition media outlets with the justification that they were pro-Russian and therefore essentially a source of enemy disinformation. Then on March 24th, Zelensky signed a decree approving a strategy to reintegrate Crimea and the Russian naval base at Sevastopol into Ukraine. Reporting by Telesur at the time stated:
On March 24, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky signed the Decree 117/2021 approving the “strategy of disoccupation and reintegration of the temporarily occupied territory of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the Sevastopol city.”
In practical terms, Ukraine’s decision could trigger actions leading to an armed conflict with Russia in which the United States or other Western countries could become involved.