Ukraine - guns and fighters

The Guardian is trying to paint a picture so won't mention Polish death squads (along with the Right Sector they couldn't possibly exist! - sic). Even the possibility of Chechens fighting on the side of the People's Republic won't be mentioned.

"Closing the border is becoming the number one issue today,"  - You bet! That includes closing humanitarian corridors for evacuating women and children.

Guns and fighters seep 

through Ukraine's porous 

Russian border

Combatants engaged in last week's fighting say walked into the country 'to visit relatives' at poorly policed 

checkpoints

the Guardian

31 May, 2014

In late April, 65 Russian men in groups of five to 10 crossed the border with Ukraine on foot, telling border guards they were going to visit relatives.

It wasn't a fond babushka who picked them up at the border, however, but rather pro-Russian rebels from the self-declared Donetsk People's Republic in eastern Ukraine. They bussed the Russian fighters to the regional capital, where they took up arms and last week engaged in the fiercest combat yet against forces loyal to Kiev.

"I was watching events in Odessa and was very upset about what was going on," said one of the Russian fighters, who would give only his wartime nickname "Varan" or "Monitor Lizard". Clashes between pro-Ukrainian and pro-Russian protesters in that city last month left more than 40 people dead. "I called up the military enlistment office and asked what I could do. They said people were gathering in Rostov and it may be possible to go to Ukraine. It's not official; they whispered it in my ear, so to speak."

The Russian fighters – including veterans of the military, intelligence services and riot police – formed the core of a new unit called the Vostok Battalion, which took a lead role in the bloody battle for the Donetsk airport last week, in which 33 Russian citizens were killed.

The story of how Varan and his brethren simply walked into the country highlights the problem that Ukraine has had in keeping out the growing number of Russians reinforcing local rebels in the two-month-old uprising in Luhansk and Donetsk regions. Recently, Ukrainian forces have reportedly captured vehicles carrying weapons from Russia, while others have got through, hinting at the porous nature of the 1,400-mile border between the two countries.

Speaking on national television on Friday, Anton Geraschenko, a top aide to Ukrainian interior minister Arsen Avakov, said establishing greater control of the border will be key to Kiev's "anti-terrorist operation" against pro-Russian rebels in the east.

"Closing the border is becoming the number one issue today," Geraschenko said. "All 23 years that Ukraine has been independent, our border with Russia has been fairly porous. We don't have exclusion zones, we don't have sufficient border defences."

On Friday, pro-Russian forces attempted to storm a border post near Dyakovo in Luhansk region from the Ukrainian side, the border service said, marking the latest in a string of similar clashes. Russian Cossacks who entered Ukraine last month reportedly took part in the assault. On Thursday night, there was a rebel attack on another border post further east.

Earlier last week, the border service said a column of 40 trucks and cars attempted to cross the border from Russia in the early hours of the morning, and many of them made it in during the ensuing firefight, in which one Russian was killed. Border guards reportedly captured a car and two minibuses, confiscating machine guns, grenade launchers, sniper rifles and 84 boxes of live ammunition.

"Our border, especially in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, has become a front line that various 'terrorists' are trying to break through," border service head Mykola Lytvyn told journalists in Kiev on Wednesday. "Daily fighting with 'terrorists' and groups of criminals near the Ukrainian and Russian border has become our routine reality."

A weekend visit by the Observer to border crossings near the town of Uspenka in Donetsk region, where military forces reportedly repelled a rebel attack on 20 May, did find that border guards were delaying and checking vehicles coming from Russia. Paratroopers from a brigade based in the nearby Dnepropetrovsk region were opening boots at checkpoints on main roads leading from the border.

The commander of the main checkpoint said the military had been monitoring all traffic for the past three weeks, but added that the interior ministry was not doing its part to control the border region. Many police officers in restive cities in the east have supported the rebels.

"It doesn't do anything. We haven't seen a single police officer. The interior ministry has eliminated itself," he said.

But the regular traffic across the border of Russians and Ukrainians, many of whom have relatives on the other side, presents a trickier problem. Despite reports in April that Ukrainian authorities had barred Russian men aged 16 to 60 from entering the country, border service representatives denied there was such a restriction and said that the border was functioning under the same rules as before. Russian and Ukrainian citizens can cross without a visa.

The border runs directly between rustic one-storey homes in the tiny village of Stepne in the Donetsk region, where surveys show a majority of locals support more independence from Kiev.

Several locals told the Observer they would like to join Russia. At a tiny border service booth, Vladimir Uvorvikhvost, a pensioner from the nearby town of Amrosivka who was originally born in Russia, was waiting for his daughter and son-in-law to return from visiting relatives in the Russian city of Taganrog.

"Russia is our saviour. We won't go anywhere without Russia," Uvorvikhvost said.

Sergei, a taxi driver in Amrosivka who declined to provide his last name, said the border was well-patrolled now, but said not all roads into Russia had border posts. "You could bring in one machine gun, but no more than that. One you could take apart and hide in your underwear, as we say," he said.

The flow of Russian fighters is not likely to decrease any time soon, if Varan's 

experience is any indication. Many others in his homeland feel the same "outburst of patriotism" that he did, Varan said.

"Friends call me and ask me how it is here," he said. "They want to come too."

Polish Death Squads Fighting 

in Ukraine. CIA Covert 

Operation?

Global Research,

28 May, 2014

On May 11 a plane arrived at Kiev’s airport in strict secrecy; it was met by the airport’s military personnel rather than the civilian staff. NATO military uniforms, 500 packages of amphetamines, and containers marked as poisonous substances were unloaded from the plane. By order of the Kiev directorate of the SBU, the fighters, the cargo and the containers of poison were not inspected and left the airport in cars with tinted windows. The cargo was accompanied by CIA agent Richard Michael. Aboard the plane were also fighters from the Right Sector and the Polish private military company ASBS (Analizy Systemowe Bartlomiej Sienkiewicz) Othago, created several years ago by Poland’s current Minister of the Interior, B. Sienkiewicz.

According to available data (5), this Polish PMC lost 6 men during a punitive operation in Eastern Ukraine (the remaining casualties among foreign mercenaries working for the junta came from the American PMC Academi and its subsidiary PMC Greystone Limited, which lost 50 and 14 fighters, respectively, as well as the CIA and the FBI, with 25 casualties, 13 of whom were killed).

The Poles have been participating actively in the formation of death squads in Ukraine since September 2013, when Foreign Minister R. Sikorski invited 86 members of the Right Sector to train at the police training center in Legionowo, 23 km from Warsaw. The fighters, who came on the pretext of a university exchange program, were mostly men of around 40; they received a month-long training course in organizing mass protests, erecting barricades, seizing government buildings, street fighting tactics, shooting techniques, including from sniper rifles, etc. The Polish weekly Nie published a photo from Legionowo showing Ukrainian fascists dressed in Nazi uniforms alongside their Polish instructors in civilian clothing.

While the Polish special services were training the future participants of punitive operations, the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs made this official statement (02-02-2014):

«We support the hard line taken by the Right Sector… The radical actions of the Right Sector and other militant groups of demonstrators and the use of force by protestors are justified… The Right Sector has taken full responsibility for all the acts of violence during the recent protests. This is an honest position, and we respect it. The politicians have failed at their peacekeeping function. This means that the only acceptable option is the radical actions of the Right Sector. There is no other alternative». 

At the same time, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk cautioned President Yanukovich against«disproportionate use of force» against the Maidan. Donald Tusk  demands that the Kiev junta deal with the «eastern rebels» harshly, «as with terrorists».

In mid-May Tusk demanded that Hungarian Prime Minister Orban, who considers fascist Ukraine a «challenge to the European Union» refrain from making such statements so as not to divert attention from the fight against the main adversary – Russia. But several weeks earlier (04-24-2014), the Polish prime minister stated that Europe must prepare for the disintegration of Ukraine.

«The problem is that Warsaw’s eastern policy is to a great degree directed by Polish intelligence, which collaborates closely with American and British intelligence agencies», asserts Leszek Sykulski, head of the Czestochowa Institute of Geopolitics.

In early April, CIA director John Brennan visited Kiev. The very next day after his visit, the head of the Kiev regime, Turchynov, announced the beginning of «large-scale antiterrorist operations in connection with events in the Southeast». Not only American, but Polish mercenaries showed up for this operation.

After the head of the CIA, on April 21-22 U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden visited Kiev. Speaking in the Verkhovna Rada, Biden stated that Washington supports the Ukrainian government in the face of «humiliating threats», obviously with Russia in mind. The answer to the question of what the United States needs in eastern Ukraine is simple: The cities which the junta is desperately trying to subjugate are located in the Dniepr-Donets Basin, which has enormous deposits of shale gas. Royal Dutch Shell has already staked a claim on these tracts.

«I would say that the economic interest in this case is what’s driving the coup regime in Kiev to launch military actions against its own citizens, because they stand to make a profit from these contracts signed by the previous government», asserts American foreign affairs expert Nebojsa Malic.

Robert Hunter Biden, the son of the U.S. vice president, who has become a frequent visitor to Kiev, was recently appointed to the Board of Directors of the largest private gas producer in Ukraine, Burisma Holdings, which is registered in Cyprus and holds licenses for developing the gas fields of the Dniepr-Donetsk Basin. In April, Devon Archer, a family friend of the U.S. Secretary of State who was the college roommate of Kerry’s stepson and a senior advisor during John Kerry’s 2004 presidential election campaign, also received a post in the company.

U.S. top officials and their close relatives have a great personal interest in all the countries invaded by American occupation forces, starting back in the days of the wars against Yugoslavia and Iraq. For example Kerry’s predecessor as Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, has business in «independent Kosovo», and Biden’s predecessor as vice president, Richard Cheney, and his family, as well as yet another U.S. secretary of state, Condoleeza Rice, latched onto Iraq’s energy resources through Halliburton and Chevron. The same kinds of interests are appearing in those who serve the interests of Americans in Eastern Europe, as well. For example, Ukraine’s ex-Minister of Ecology Mykola Zlochevsky and former president of Poland Aleksander Kwasniewski are on the Board of Directors of Burisma Holdings.

One of the potential shale gas fields for which development rights were given to Burisma Holdings is the Yuzivska shale field. Besides Slavyansk and part of neighboring Kramatorsk, with a population of 160,000 people, the tract given to Shell includes the cities of Krasny Luch and Svyatogorsk in the Donetsk region, as well as Balakeya and Izyum in the neighboring Kharkov region. And the shale gas extraction contract is written such that the Ukrainian government is obligated to forcibly take property away from its lawful owners if Shell states that it plans to drill on those lands. The vicinity of Slavyansk has been selected as the location for the drilling of the first gas wells…

The place where the Ukrainian army is concentrated, supported by the Right Sector, the private punitive battalions of fascist oligarch Igor Kolomoisky and mercenaries from American and Polish PMCs, points directly to one of the main reasons for the punitive operation: that the Kiev regime is serving the business interests of the commanding elite of the U.S. and Poland. It is around Slavyansk and Kramatorsk that the most violent clashes between the punitive forces and the people of the Donets Basin have taken place, while Izyum is the main base for Ukrainian forces participating in the punitive operation.

The following speak of what methods are being used in the punitive operation:

-the attackers’ losses, which include attack and transport helicopters, armored vehicles, 122-mm howitzers, and «Grad» rocket launcher systems, a salvo from which is capable of destroying all life in an area of 14.5 hectares,

-bombardment of cities from mortars, as a result of which more civilians are killed than self-defense fighters,

-sniper activities, killing even children,

-the use of helicopters with UN symbols on them for air attacks on Kramatorsk. These helicopters were piloted by Polish mercenaries, as even their Ukrainian colleagues refused to violate international norms of using military equipment bearing United Nations symbols.

All of this can be considered an answer to the question of just what kind of cargo is being hurriedly transported to Ukraine by Polish mercenaries under the supervision of U.S. intelligence, and why the Pole Kwasniewski is on the board of directors of a company for whose activities the way is now being cleared by armed groups of Ukrainian fascists (the «national guard») and American and Polish mercenaries, killing militants and civilians. It seems that the Kiev junta and its Western masters are prepared to resort to any provocations, up to and including using chemical warfare agents on the local population, as happened recently in Syria, and earlier in Iraq, where it was the Poles who specialized in such matters.