Vol. 78/No. 28 August 4, 2014
The incident has accelerated the separatists’ growing unpopularity among working people in Ukraine, Russia and beyond. And it has widened fissures among separatists themselves.
Before the shootdown made international headlines, Igor Strelkov, Russian operative and self-proclaimed military commander of the Donetsk People’s Republic, posted a message on Vkontakte, a popular Russian Internet site, bragging that separatists had shot down a Ukrainian government plane. “We warned them not to fly in our skies.”
Surveillance photos released by the Ukrainian government show paramilitary forces driving a Russian BUK surface-to-air missile launcher July 17 into the area where the plane was shot down. Similar photos show it being driven back to Russia the next day, with one less missile.
For the next four days, separatists occupied the crash site, restricting the movements of Ukrainian emergency workers and seizing everything they could, from victims’ bodies to the plane’s black box.
Denis Pushilin, “chairman” of the Donetsk People’s Republic, announced July 18 in Moscow that he was resigning.
The same day Sara Firth, a reporter for the Moscow-controlled Russia Today TV network, quit in protest over the station’s efforts to blame the Ukrainian government for the shootdown. “I couldn’t do it anymore,” she said. “Every day we’re lying.”
Ilya Bogdanov, a senior lieutenant in the Federal Security Service of Russia, announced his defection to Ukraine July 18. “I couldn’t take it anymore, because a decent person’s conscience can’t be silent when lies are being spewed 24/7 from TV, radio, the papers and Internet,” he said in a statement reported by Ukrainian TV’s Channel 5. “I’m ready to fight in the Ukrainian army as a common volunteer because I want this war to end, for our fraternal peoples to stop fighting.”
Putin government backpedals
Russia’s capitalist rulers, concerned about political stability and profits, are pressing for a change of direction. “I think there is a growing feeling that it has gone too far,” Olga Kryshtanovskaya, a Russian sociologist, told the New York Times July 22.President Barack Obama levied a new round of financial sanctions after the plane was shot down, restricting access to U.S. capital markets of Rosneft oil company and Gazprombank, the international banking company associated with Gazprom, the state-controlled natural gas monopoly, and others.
Meanwhile, President Vladimir Putin is moving to rein in the uncontrollable forces his government set in motion. “We are being urged to use our influence with the militias in southeastern Ukraine,” he told Russia’s Security Council July 22, in a speech broadcast repeatedly on state-run television. “We of course will do everything in our power.”
Armed separatists have recently left Metalist, Oleksandrivsk, Bile and Rozkishne, the Interfax-Ukraine news agency reported July 15. But paramilitaries still control government buildings in Donetsk, Luhansk and some nearby towns.
Paramilitary gangs still make attempts to attack workers and shut down production. They fired missiles July 12 at a working mine near Kurakhovo.
“The council meeting of the Independent Trade Union of Miners of Ukraine decided July 3 to organize workers in the Donbass region into labor guards,” Mikhailo Volynets, chair of the union, told the Militant July 22. “The purpose is to protect miners and their families as well as workplaces from pro-Russian separatists’ attacks and aggression.
“In mining areas where the separatists are being driven out, plants are reopening,” Volynets said. “Miners are receiving their wages, pensions and other payments, which were broken off under the control of the paramilitaries. They have resumed trade union activities, organizing themselves to defend the sovereignty and unity of Ukraine.”
Workers are returning to Slovyansk, which was the separatists’ military center until two weeks ago.
Maryna, a 52-year-old mother of two, told the Financial Times July 13 that she had initially supported the separatist forces, but has since changed her mind. “Looking back, it seems Strelkov and the others used us and our city, doing everything possible to ensure maximum destruction, so that Putin would send the Russian army in,” she said.
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Defend sovereignty of Ukraine!
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