How to end the war in Ukraine

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According to BBC World in a broadcast yesterday morning, its considered opinion is that the ceasefire in eastern Ukraine, where Russian-backed rebels are battling US-backed Ukrainian forces, is working. There are still too many skirmishes, too many guns and mortars being fired but the big guns are largely silent. President Vladimir Putin said the other day that both sides have been guilty of transgressing the ceasefire.

Both the Russians on one side and the US and NATO on the other have been playing with fire with their support of the two sides. Who suffers? The ordinary inhabitants of the eastern provinces. However pro-Russian they were before all the fighting began they are now largely convinced the rebels killing in their name no longer represent them. The businesses they work for or own are working at half power or less. Unemployment has soared, homes have been decimated, pensions are unpaid and hospitals are finding it increasingly hard, struggling to deal with extra patients and a curtailed drug supply.

In Moscow, among thinking people, it has become clear that Russia should have no interest in taking over large swathes of Ukrainian territory, which would be just an economic albatross around its neck. Putin is said to think like that, although he might be glad if the rebels, including a good number of Russian soldiers, captured the port city of Mariupol, making it easier for Russia to integrate Crimea.

We now wait anxiously until the end of the year. The agreement made in Minsk in February by German Chancellor Angel Merkel, French President Francois Hollande and President Putin determined that the separatists do not have to hand control of 450 km of the Ukrainian-Russian border back to the central Ukrainian government until the end of the year. That step was made conditional on Ukraine devolving powers to its regions and passing a law granting “special status” to the eastern areas. The regions will be allowed to create their own police forces and appoint prosecutors and judges.

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/opinion/13-May-2015/how-to-end-the-war-in-ukraine

[KoKo]

1. Interesting read...

A bit more of the read:

It was Clinton and Talbott who initiated this policy, despite 95 percent of Russian experts from the US’s top universities telling them that the expansion of NATO was neither needed nor desirable. George Kennan, the US’s revered elder statesman on Russian affairs, warned that it would be the beginning of a new Cold War. “There was no reason for this. Nobody was threatening anybody else. Our differences in the Cold War were with the Soviet communist regime. And now we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history that removed the Soviet regime.”

It is time overdue for Obama to change the government’s counterproductive Ukraine policies. Only that will truly end the war.

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2. It's a pattern.

Nixon's drug war panel said the same about drug prohibition, and was similarly ignored, for the same self-serving political reasons.