The Ukrainians are reporting 20 occurrences of firing at their soldiers and 30 drone fly overs in the past 24 hours alone. The cease fire has never really taken hold, it slowed the fighting but there have only been 3 or 4 days without some kind of shooting.
http://www.kyivpost.com/content/ukraine/ukraines-truce-still-not-holding-as-kyiv-sees-30-probe-drones-in-last-24-hours-385966.htmlIt has come out that the "separatists" seem to have executed captured Ukrainian soldiers. A war crime.
http://uatoday.tv/politics/amnesty-international-demands-investigation-of-war-crimes-in-east-ukraine-420850.htmlThe OSCE who is supposed to be helping, really isn't....
http://www.rferl.org/content/ukraine-crisis-russia-osce-monitoring-mission/26690263.htmlAnd again Russia is committing a sort of genocide against the Crimean Tatars.
http://www.interpretermag.com/putin-conducting-hybrid-genocide-against-crimean-tatars-muzhdabayev-says/We had 4000 Russian troops in exercises in Transnistria today, 20 minutes up the road from Moldova's capital. Something's coming.
The fact is, a war is coming. Not this "little" war, something bigger and uglier. The current situation is unworkable in the long term for Russia. The parts of Donbas they have taken already are not capable of self sufficiency, in anything such as agriculture, industry or economics, so Putin must either subsidize it, a long term near impossibility, or conquer more territory to affix to it so that it may have some economic viability on its own. The only other option is to retreat and abandon his puppets, this will never happen. So more war is coming to Ukraine, possibly here in Moldova, and some slim chance Estonia and Latvia, depending on how several things shake out...
I think Putin's ultimate goal here is not Ukraine at all, but to fracture NATO and rupture the US-EU relationship, leaving him a freer hand in all of Europe. This week we saw Greek President and Putin boot licker and fascist apologist Tsipiras come to Moscow to hang out with Putin. Last week hackers released communications between the Kremlin and France's Marine Le Pen......Hungary's Orban is constantly on Putin's jock, Britain's UKIP is full of Putin apologists.....and 3 weeks ago they held a conference in Moscow for all these different groups across Europe that espouse a right wing populism. Fascists the lot.
So we have Putin courting the EU's far left and far right......Why would he do this if not simply to destabilize Europe however he can.
Today Germany brought 100 tanks out of mothball, and into service. Merkel is beginning to understand what Poland and the Baltics have been saying, trouble is coming from the East, and talking shows no signs of being able to stem the tide. Almost not a day goes by the past few weeks without Putin threatening to use his nuclear weapons, a tactic to bully and intimidate his neighbors.
I also think we may be seeing the end of MAD (mutually assured destruction) that kept the west and Soviets from nuking each other during the cold war. Look at it this way, Putin launches a full scale invasion of, say the Baltics, NATO responds with conventional forces, Putin nukes Warsaw, daring the West to retaliate with its own nuclear arsenal, if it doesn’t the alliance is finished and falls apart. The main power centers of Europe (Berlin, London, Paris) are still intact to do business with and are far more compliant now. If the west does respond we have nuclear war. I think this could be Putin’s ultimate gambit. He essentially does the craziest thing possible daring the west to be as crazy as he is, with the idea that they won’t.
Here comes the war.
