| Submit your comments on this article |
| Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia |
| Secret dead of Russia's undeclared war |
| 2014-12-29 |
| You may be wondering why the Russians don't want to admit why Russians troops were sent in to southeastern Ukraine in August, and for a time I wondered that myself. Why, if the sanctions have come down hard, don't you just admit it and get it out of the way? The Russians had no problem with admitting their role in South Ossetia, or in Chechnya. The law that forbids Russian foreign intervention with approval from the Duma on pain of prosecution is a major factor as to why they won't admit it. I think -- and this is just a personal theory -- the Russian general staff in Moscow were told to look the other way as the Russian FSB operatives, for all intents and purposes, took command of the Russian Southern Military Districts and began to tell commanders there what was needed in Donetsk and Lugansk. A modern version of the dreaded WWII Soviet admonition, "Prikaz Stalina": "Stalin's order." "Go ahead. Run your normal training operations, but when we need something in Donetsk or Lugansk, we need it, no questions asked," could have been how what senior staff for the military district were told. Understand that until sometime in early August the whole operation for the Russian militia was run by reserve FSB Colonel Igor Girkin, who had been running the hot phase of this operation since June, and who had in the past run a number of other operations for the Russians including the one in South Ossetia. He was one of many mid level "fixers" for the FSB since 1991. These are vexing questions that remain unanswered. As for the fighting itself, I started writing about the fighting on August 15th, without a full understanding of everything that was going on. I knew at the time, that the Ukrainians were trying to encircle Donetsk city with a double pincher movement, one coming from the west supported by units near Mariupol, and the other coming from the north, to converge on the area near Miusynsk and Krasnii Luch, and that at least two maneuver battalions comprised the western arm of the pincher. I knew that Ukrainian forces had been surrounded just prior to these battles against the Russian border in what Donbas rebels now call Cauldron 1.0, and I knew that the costliest battle for the Ukrainians took place in Ilovaisk after August 15th. Beyond that, at the time, I could not tell you if any Russian military formations were involved in the fighting at the time. As I have said informally and privately from the very start, I suspected that individual Russian troops were being used to train local Russian speaking residents, and that Russian president Vladimir Putin probably has his thumb on the scale, but I can't tell you if combat formations were being used at the time. I just don't know for sure. What I do know is that after Ilovaisk, whatever happened in that battle between the Ukrainian Army and whoever was there -- however much damage the Ukrainians inflicted on the rebels or on Russian troops -- took a bloody chunk out of the Ukrainian Army and utterly destroyed their offensive capacity, perhaps for a year, if not more. You can read what little I have written for Rantburg.com to date by clicking here. Anton Tumanov gave up his life for his country - but his country won’t say where, and it won’t say how. His mother knows. She knows that Mr Tumanov, a 20 year-old junior sergeant in the Russian army, was killed in eastern Ukraine, torn apart in a rocket attack on August 13. Yelena Tumanova, 41, learned these bare facts about her son’s death from one of his comrades, who saw him get hit and scooped up his body. “What I don’t understand is what he died for,” she says. “Why couldn’t we let people in Ukraine sort things out for themselves? And seeing as our powers sent Anton there, why can’t they admit it and tell us exactly what happened to him.” As the year draws to a close, the Kremlin continues to insist that not a single Russian soldier has entered Ukraine to join pro-Moscow separatist militia who have been fighting government forces there since April. During his annual press conference earlier this month, Vladimir Putin, the president, said that all Russian combatants in Ukraine’s Donbas region were volunteers answering “a call of the heart”. The story of Mr Tumanov and the shadowy deaths of scores of other Russian servicemen since this summer belie that claim. Rights activists have recorded cases of at least 40 serving soldiers suspected of dying in the conflict – many believe the figure is in the hundreds - but prosecutors refuse to open criminal investigations into their deaths, a requirement by law. Denied of status by the lies and obfuscation that muffle their stories, these men and their families are casualties of an undeclared war. More at the link |
| Posted by:badanov |