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Brian Bonner: Fight this war or surrender

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Feb. 16, 2015, 11:13 p.m. | Op-ed — by Brian Bonner

A Ukrainian serviceman guards a checkpoint near the town of Svitlodarsk in Donetsk Oblast on Feb. 16. A two-day-old truce in Ukraine is under threat with fighting raging around a strategic railway hub, putting in peril an agreement to start withdrawing heavy weapons from the front line.
© AFP

Brian Bonner

Brian Bonner has served as the chief editor of the Kyiv Post since 2008. He also held the job in 1999, three years after first arriving in Ukraine to teach journalism. Bonner is a veteran American journalist who spent most of his professional life with the St. Paul Pioneer Press in Minnesota, where he covered international, national and local news during a nearly 24-year career in which he was a staff writer and an assigning editor. For American newspapers, he has reported from abroad in Russia, Ukraine, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Laos. Bonner left the St. Paul newspaper in 2007 to become the associate director of international communications at the Campaign For Tobacco-Free Kids in Washington, D.C. He also worked as a member of the core teams with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe during six election observation missions in Ukraine, Belarus, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan. To contact: email bribonner@gmail.com, Facebook at www.facebook.com/brianbonner, Twitter @BSBonner, Skype at brian.bonner1959.

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The Feb. 15 cease-fire called for by the Minsk II agreement only three days earlier should be a contender for the shortest one in the history of war.

It never existed. And that should have been expected when, instead of agreeing to an immediate cease-fire, Russian President Vladimir Putin pushed for extra time on Feb. 12.

From Day 1, Kremlin-backed separatists shelled Ukrainian forces in the embattled railway junction city of Debaltseve in Donetsk Oblast. Several thousand Ukrainian troops are still trying to keep hold of the city that had 30,000 residents before the war.

On the same day, journalists working with the Kyiv Post witnessed the shelling in Debaltseve from both sides and also heard explosions that sounded like shelling coming from inside separatist-controlled Donetsk.

Today, on Feb. 16, our Kyiv Post correspondent is reporting from Myronivsky, some 20 kilometers northwest of Debaltseve on the same road. She says the remaining residents -- less than half of the pre-war population of 8,000 people -- report being under constant bombardment since Feb. 15. Since the Ukrainian government and forces control the town, the shelling can only be blamed on one side: Putin's proxies. Ukraine's government says at least five soldiers have been killed in the last 24 hours.

To compound the absurdity, the Kremlin-backed separatists are laying claim to Debaltseve as their territory and refusing to allow monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe into the city.

Memo to separatists: You have no claim on any territory of Ukraine, including the Crimean peninsula.

Memo to the West: Please don't issue any more hollow statements of "deep concern" or pointlessly beg the Kremlin to "de-escalate." You've been doing it, collectively, for a year and it's gotten you nowhere with Putin. And please drop phrases like the cease-fire is "largely holding" when the shooting and killing is still going on.

For there to be peace, both sides have to want it.

Putin's side wants war and conquest.

So there are only two alternatives: wage war or surrender to Putin's terms.

It is not clear which course that the West, or even many in Ukraine, want to take.

During a telephone interview I gave to CNBC in London this morning, the journalist supposedly asking questions flat-out told me that economic sanctions don't work.

My response: The limited economic sanctions put in place by the West have inflicted economic damage on Russia, but have not been strong enough to persuade Putin to end the war against Ukraine.

But to work, sanctions need time and significantly more bite than the West has applied.

The West can toughen sanctions in many ways. The "killer" variety of economic sanctions includes a "war tax" on all Russian energy imports, banning Russian banking transactions from the financial SWIFT system and an embargo on all non-essential imports from Russia. (Most are non-essential, except energy.) And, of course, no arms deals to Russia -- ever.

With regard to Ukraine, the nation's leaders are paying a heavy price not only for the sins of the distant past, when many in Ukraine's elite simply plundered their own nation, but also of the present. They are moving too slowly in fighting corruption, slowly enough to raise questions about whether that is even their aim.

They are also moving confusingly in terms of war strategy. I think they made a big mistake in not leveling with the West and Ukrainians that this is a real war from the beginning. Instead, their designation of the enemy as "terrorists" and the government response as an "anti-terrorist operation" are misnomers.

It's a Russian war being waged within the territory of Ukraine, using the Donbas and potentially the annexed Crimean peninsula as staging grounds. This allows Putin to perpetuate the fiction of a Ukrainian "civil war" to Russians who, despite his propaganda, should know better. It also allows him to contain the bloodletting to Ukraine, even as Russian soldiers are killed in the battles.

The CNBC interviewer also asked if the U.S. should supply Ukraine with weapons. My answer is also simple: Yes, but if they do, the military aid should still be combined with heavier economic sanctions. My rationale is that it does no good for the West to be supplying Ukraine with weapons while also trading or doing business as usual with Russia. It's absurd to be strengthening Ukraine and Russia at the same time.

Many are categorically against arming Ukraine, citing the lack of military skills and the endemic Ukraine corruption that could lead the weapons to go to enemy hands. Fair enough.

But if Ukraine is to be treated as an independent, sovereign nation, it needs the tools to defend itself against the Russian invasion -- now and in the future. If Ukrainians want to wage the war for their own land, the West should help them with training and military hardware.

If Ukrainians don't want to fight for their land, then it's time to give Putin what he wants at the negotiating table. It is counter-productive for Ukraine to be at war with Russia and buying coal, natural gas and other items at the same time. If Ukraine is simply too dependent economically on Russia to fight back, now is the time to lay down arms, not after more thousands of people are killed.

I am far from being a military expert, but it seems to me there are weapons that would actually improve Ukraine's chances of prevailing: anti-tank weapons, better communications equipment, better air defense systems, more precise weapons. I am sure military analysts could supply a longer and better list. These advancements may actually even reduce casualties, especially of civilians. Right now, the world is watching the carnage that happens to civilians when both sides fire on each other with very imprecise and antiquated weapons.

Ukraine's leaders have lulled the population for too long. The West, in turn, is lulling its citizens into thinking that this is a localized conflict that doesn't concern them.

For Ukraine to prevail, everybody -- in the West and inside Ukraine -- will have to sacrifice far more than they have done.

So far, the biggest sacrifices are coming from Ukraine's over-matched and under-equipped soldiers who, nonetheless, display remarkable resilience and will to fight.

The least sacrifices are coming from Ukraine's oligarchs, who seem to be doing their usual dance of protecting their money, privileges and assets until they see which side wins the war. The world should never forget that most of these billionaires supported ousted President Viktor Yanukovych.

A war tax should be applied to the wealthiest. I am not the only one who thinks so. Timothy Ash, the head of emerging markets research for Standard Bank in London, wrote: "When the international community is being asked to dig deep to support Ukraine, and the Ukrainian population are being asked to tighten their belts and likely accept real cuts in wages and pensions, and higher utility charges, should those who benefited most from Ukraine's transition over the past two decades also be asked to share more of the burden?" He called for a 20 percent one-off tax. Good idea.

The rest of society should also be called upon to sacrifice more. I don't know if declaring martial law officially is the answer, but too many are still not taking the war seriously.

The West, also, is giving very little in comparison to the scale of the threat that Putin poses to European security. Putin is undermining the Western alliance through bribery, threats, cyber-warfare and economic blackmail. If the United States cannot see that a destabilized European Union is a threat to all democracies, including America's, then heaven help us all. If the U.S. and Great Britain will not stand by their 1994 Budapest Memorandum guarantees (of protecting Ukrainian sovereign in exchange for the surrender of its nuclear weapons), then they will have lost their moral authority. For it is morality that is at stake in Ukraine's struggle -- the right of a nation to live in peace, within internationally recognized boundaries, with its sovereignty guaranteed and its right to choose its own economic, political and foreign policy course.

Ukraine is bleeding, slowly, with each day that the war continues. This suits Putin just fine because Russia can withstand an economic downturn longer than Ukraine can.

I am not an American hawk and I understand those who say that it is easy to call on others to fight in a war while sitting on the sidelines. But this is my point exactly: If everyone gets off the sidelines -- from business people to millionaires and soldiers and common shopkeepers, in whatever country they are from -- and into the fight, Putin doesn't stand a chance

Kyiv Post chief editor Brian Bonner can be reached at bribonner@gmail.com

Minsk agreement Russia's war against Ukraine Brian Bonner

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