If you don't like long posts, skip down to the videos at the end, and take a look.

While Poroshenko and all the Ukrainian ministers — and a certain diaspora faction on Twitter — are going to want to keep calling all manifestations of the Russian-backed insurgency as "terrorism" and continue an "anti-terrorist operation" against the Russian-backed separatists, the rest of us are not going to use this term, even if we oppose Moscow and support Kiev. That's their call, and that's their judgement, using their own law and traditions. But I and a lot of other Westerners who aren't stupid and who totally get it about the Kremlin's malevolence and responsibility for this war are going to continue to save "terrorist" for groups that have a terrorist policy to kill civilians as a method and who repeatedly commit terrorist acts.

In other words, I'm not going to call the fake "prime minister" of the phony "Donetsk People's Republic" Zakharchenko holding a military parade with children present a "terrorist" who is taking children as hostages; I'm going to save that for Basayev and co. in Beslan who actually massacred hundreds of children. I'm going to point out that Zakharchenko uses the despicable Soviet-style tactics of war propaganda and state indoctrination dragging little children into political manifestations.

Why does this terminology war continue?

1. The people demanding politkorrektnost' in these language usages are mainly demanding it because they think that Western journalists saying "rebel" have provided a linguistic marker that shows they are Moscow shills and tools of the Kremlin or stupid and naive. They want to make sure that journalists start grasping the fact that this war is manufactured and Made in Moscow.

But it's unfair to call the same journalists who stood on the border at their own risk and saw Russian convoys going into Ukraine and reported on it accurately as a Russian invasion of Ukraine — but who continue to say at times "rebel" in their reportage — as "tools of the Kremlin". They're not. They just don't agree with you on word usage.

2. The next reason that this determined Twitter faction wants is for everyone to stop using the word "separatists" because if they do that, then they can prove if the Kremlin dropped its support of these Donbass insurgents with tanks and troops of their own, and plenty of weapons and ammunition tomorrow, they'd all disappear, the war would stop, and the ruse would be exposed.

Well, to some extent that's true. If tanks and troops stopped immediately and Russia honoured the Minsk talks in good faith — something they've never exhibited in 100 years — then likely we'd see an end to the main frontline fighting. But we'd still see a lot of sporadic clashes. If the fresh weapons and ammunition part stopped being hauled in past under the noses of the OSCE (they're only at two border posts anyway), we might see a real change for the better, and maybe an end to fighting in some key areas, even such as Debaltsevo. Yet there would still have warlords, battles, and long-term, the establishment of soviets at the point of a gun in the Donbass.

And even if Moscow assassinated some of these people, it wouldn't be over yet because you'd still have a lot of angry and armed young and middle-aged men floating around with nothing to do but fight.

To be sure, the "Lugansk People's Republic" which, shall we say, co-owns the former Ukrainian border area with the Russians, is now engaged in "state-building".  "State-building" consists of executing people they don't like, such as Bednov, who may have used tortured just like they did, but who also evidently got on the wrong side of some drug runners who were making a fortune and leaving the people of Lugansk, including sick and elderly as well as injured fighters, without basic medications including pain-killers. "State-building" consists of allowing Sovietized communist/fascist types of killers take over the prosecutor's office, the border guards, the police, etc. and having them terrorize the population. Terrorizing is using a method of terror, but it doesn't mean you are yet a terrorist group. The LNR might succeed in growing up to be a full-fledged state terrorist some day, although for now, they're more like an armed gang with big state backing determined to be a nuisance to Kiev for the rest of their lives.

When a journalist picked up Strelkov's comment that the execution of Bednov was "like" the gangland 1990s in Ukraine, she was bullied for treating the "Novorossiya" lot as merely a gang or mafia and not "the Russian invasion". When I referred to the "Novorossiya gang" without quotes in a crowded tweet, I got a knock over the head for being a shill for Moscow because I didn't grasp these people are "the Russian invasion."

Again, the Russians could invade this area because they had a receptive population. If the Russians tried any of the stunts they've tried on Slavyansk or Mariupol, taking over government buildings, in Estonia and Finland, they'd find themselves tossed out on their asses in short order — now. They weren't in the 1940s, because the West couldn't back them up. Now it will. I think.

I once asked a Hungarian sociologist and peace activist why the Soviets were able to invade in 1956. The West didn't help enough, and some people even claimed Radio Liberty incited false expectations of hope for Western help that never came, a debate that has raged for 50 years but generally concluded that Radio Liberty didn't incite unrest so much as cover it. The Hungarians are capable of rebelling on their own, you know.

But this sociologist said a surprising thing. He didn't blame the West and he didn't even fully blame the Soviets for the invasion. He said:

"Because civil society was weak."

When civil society is strong — as it is in the Western part of Ukraine, Russians can't invade so easily. People resist them at every level with every fiber of their being. But where people are poor, uneducated, lacking in non-government institutions, lacking in independent media, then civil society is weak, and it's easy to invade them.

3. The third reason people are trying to insist on this usage is because they are starting to realize that the West is losing interest, they are seeing deal-making going on between Obama and Putin, they see that the Ukrainian leadership may make some compromises, and they are furious. And I don't blame them, because I am, too. We are going to get a lot of sabotage from Obama before all this is over.

So they vent their spleens on those among their ranks who are visible who aren't  politically correct, because they're not ready to blast Poroshenko himself, or become anti-American by bashing Obama as well. So they hit out at people they think they can control better by Twitter-bullying.

4. There's another phenomenon going on that I've seen played out a hundred times over in my lifetime in different parts of the world, whether Ireland, Korea, Nigeria, Russia or Ukraine. A country that is at war or suppressed by an occupier or suffering state oppression makes a transition. Up to that point, the diaspora and the emigres were hugely important. The jar of coins to support the IRA in an Irish pub on Lexington Avenue — which I would never put a dime in — was an example of that. The Russian exile book publishers trying to get Russian-language books or Ukrainian-language into the Soviet Union was an example of that, including Prolog, which played an important part of undermining Soviet oppression in Ukraine in the 1970s-1990s.  The Korean deli grocers or Nigerian technicians at the UN who don't return home are part of this.

But at some point, when these countries change, the action shifts from the diaspora, and perhaps an insurgent army or an underground samizdat movement and moves to the open parliament. Elections become more important than book-smuggling or in our day, Twittering. Peace is made and the jars in the bars are not needed. And so all these people who helped are than left out. They actually are still very much needed in a 100 ways, but it's hard sometimes to deploy them usefully and some of them are now rejected by their homelands as out of touch. The Ukrainian Orange Revolution and then Maidan and now the war in Crimea and Donbass are a very high-speed version of this phenomenon I've seen stretch out 20 or 30 years with a place like Ireland or Korea — in part because events move fasters and because of social media amplifying and accelerating the events.

Most of the people in a small group on Twitter heckling me or others are in the diaspora, some away for many years or even generations. Or they are foreigners in Ukraine that are "more Maidan than thou." They play an important role serving as interpreters of the events in Ukraine to clueless Americans and journalists who are maybe more savvy but also tend to reflect the successes of Kremlin prop
aganda. But they are one faction. And one that tends to be more vocal and virulent and exaggerate things more and hate the Russians more at a time when others may be forced to make peace because they don't have the luxury of hate from 4,000 miles away, with US or Canadian passports. They have to live in Ukraine.

Every day, the NSDC reports on their anti-terror operation, and every day, we use their words to describe what they are doing and describe them as the ATO conducting what they see as rooting out terrorists. But we ourselves don't use the term. Yet never once have these officials — who coined and made the term "terrorist" what it is — cross the street and punch us in the fact on social media because we failed to join them in using their term. They know we oppose the invasion by Russia as much as they do.

Every day, Maidan activists and other human rights NGos and the fighting battalions report on events in Ukraine but I've never seen a single one of these people cross the street on Twitter to punch me or some other blogger or journalist in the nose because we failed to use the term "terrorist". So I take all of this with a grain of salt.

5. There's a fifth reason that I think is the most dangerous, however. By trying to get reality to change with language, those insisting on these terms are imagining that there is no resistance to Kiev or reason to resist Kiev once you get rid of the Russians  — "who make up 90% of the rebels" or the "terro-Russians" who are really trained and supplied from Russia. And that's I think a dangerous miscalculation of the enemy that is going to lead to harm. That's why I continue to insist on reporting the truth about this, as I see it.

The "Divided" Ukraine

There's a strange thing that goes on with Ukraine, for historical reasons. The Western journalists and governments refer to Ukraine as "divided" between "East and West" and some know-it-alls will always tell you about the history of the region, relations with Poland and the Soviet Union, Galicia, etc. to prove that there is this division. And there is. But it's not 50-50. It's more like 80-20 at best. I mean, look at the map. Look at which areas are still at war. Look at the areas the war has even come to, at all, in any form. It's not 50-50. It's 80-20.

Curiously, the people in the West, and in Kiev in particular, don't ever explain in really forceful and visible terms that the people who are "the problem" make up only 11% of the electorate. Perhaps you could tease this out to 20% of the population or 15% of the GDP — and that's important, but not 50-50. I don't know why they never use these talking points — why should a parliament and a state be overthrown by 11% of the electorate?! Why should a liberal, democratic movement building a state be sabotaged by hardline communists and criminalized socialists? Anywhere. Even in the concentrated areas of that population.

And I think there are two reasons for this: a) they don't want to appear to be dimissing or diminishing a very loud and very over-sensitive minority that lies — and lies in particular about suppression of its native language which is the biggest whopper of this war told; b) they may not want to admit that the problem of resistance is actually small, and defined in very specific territories. And yet, when Poroshenko is willing to cut a deal with a thug like Plotnitsky, it's precisely because what Plot might get out of this is only parts of Lugansk and Donetsk territory — not "50%" of Ukraine. I wish some Ukrainian analyststs would be more vocal about this. 11% of the population. Not 50%.

Every minority deserves rights and attention and access to the economy. But *this* "minority within a minority" has a big, powerful, aggressive, vicious friend next door with tanks and troops. So let's not weep big tears.

When polls are done in the Donbass as to whether they want to join Russia, most people say "no." The standard of living was better in Ukraine before the war than in Russia.

Armed Separatists Do Exist and Won't Go Away

But here's what we have to realize — a lot of people were left behind from the Soviet Union in this region, mentally and physically. And a lot of people grew up watching only Putin's state TV in the 1990s. And you have to have a plan for dealing with them, and the plan can't be merely hoping they die by attrition in battle or from starvation, which is immoral and a mass crime against humanity. And the first part of having a plan for them is admitting that armed, local insurgents who are separatists and are rebels do exist.

How have I come to this perspective, that you will not be getting me to change? By watching hundreds of hours of videos, reading thousands of pages of news accounts, looking at zillions of pictures and places on Google maps. That's not like being there, naturally, but people on Twitter for the main part aren't there, either.

So let me convey just a fraction of this material from my recent YouTube queue.

Let's start with today's "conflict report" from @Conflict_Report. It's just plain wrong. He has posted this video below with the comment that the guy is supposedly a fighter captured by the DNR who is Ukrainian, and is now being forced to fight in the DNR. In fact it's the opposite. The reading on it comes because the @Conflict_Report doesn't know Russian, and may have been told it means something and urged to distribute it in a certain way.

He's corrected, but still doesn't get it, so I'll show a screen-shot as it may get deleted again:

 

 

 

So, what's going on here? Clearly a man has been beaten bloody and black and blue — tortured. But he's not sitting and speaking robotically in front of the camera with a pre-set text, the way the Russian POWs taken by Kiev this summer spoke in videos, or the way Streamer Vlad speaks. The demeanor of someone tortured and told to give a set piece in order to gain their freedom is very different than this video.

This man has indeed been tortured — evidently by a Ukrainian volunteer battalion — but he isn't recanting. He refuses to cooperate. He's rebellious. He keeps speaking out against Kiev. He keeps saying "fuck Poroshenko". But the Ukrainian forces who are interrogating him in this video are actually bewildered and frustrated. They keep asking him questions, trying to get to the bottom of why he a soldier in the Ukrainian army, yet doesn't like Ukraine and feels more sympathy for the DNR. They clearly have a "hearts and minds" problem – and they themselves are trying to get to the bottom of it. Obviously, torture is not helping this process. And obviously, the guy himself can't explain some of the obviously deep-felt feelings and ideas he has.

Basically, he is a Russian and Russian-speaking recruit (he can also speak Ukrainian or Surzhyk) who was drafted into the Ukrainian Armed Forces (VSU) because there's compulsory draft now. He was completely disenchanted with the process that involved poor treatment by commanders, mismanagement, chaos, bad food, lack of protection etc. You get the feeling that the captive is just bewildered himself at how awful things are managed — and wonders why his captors can't understand why he's gravitating toward the DNR that might promise him a better life.

During the interrogation, the man behaves defiantly, but with a kind of recklessness — there's no way you can claim his statements are forced, although in the larger sense they are indeed forced because he's in captivity. But you sense from this video that the captors are actually filming all this so that others — commanders? politicians? — can see their problem — they have people in their army who feel no affinity for them and are a liability who will defect to the other side.

When confronted as to why he wasn't for Ukraine, the man says "What has Ukraine done for me?" And asked if he is therefore for Putin, he says "Putler? Fuck Putler and Pedeshenko and all the rest (making a slur out of the words "pederast" and "Poroshenko" along with "Hitler" and "Putler". This is a grunt who feels "a plague on all your houses."

He is very much in the weeds complaining about the bad behaviour of a commander, and his captor asks increduously why he'd be willing to defect to the enemy just because he happened to have a few bad experiences.

And the answer is, well, because he's Russian, and doesn't feel affinity with Ukraine. And that will be impossible to beat out of him. Asked if he wants to fight, he says "No." He's from Dnepropetrovsk — not a DNR stronghold by any stretch — but he sympathizes with the DNR. Not that much, but still. "But you're for the DNR," says the captor mockingly when he says he doesn't want to fight. Then he explains: he has a brother in the DNR, he loves his brother, and that's how it is.

His captors keep questioning and mocking him, pointing out also that he's drunk and confusing things (that's probably how he ended up getting arrested). They ask if he has any children. He says he has a 17-year-old daughter, in a technical high school. "Is it a Ukrainian high school or a DNR high school?" taunts the captor, making sure the grunt should learn what side of the bread his butter is on. "Ukrainian,"  he answers. "Do you realize the DNR schools aren't even working?" They're closed in DNR territory due to shelling.

At the end of this video, the Ukrainian captor softens his tone and tries to convince his captive that he shouldn't think of defecting. That it's light and war here. That the utilities work. That there is no shelling (are they in Dnepropetrovsk? It's not clear). (It's that part of the video especially that you realize that what's happening here isn't the interrogation of a guilty DNR defector in the Ukrainian army, but a Russian recruit into the Ukrainian army who isn't thrilled with it so far and gravitates toward the DNR.)

The captor gets a grudging admission from the captive that yes, it's true. Is the captor succeeding now in "winning a heart and mind?" The captor continues. "There's shooting there" (in DNR territory). "They're a bunch of bands shooting each other."

But his captive re-gathers his fighting spirit. He lifts himself up on his elbow and says, "Hey, you want to see infighting? Get a look at Right Sector!" Then the tape cuts off.

And there you  have it.

So, does the Ukrainian Armed Forces have another happy recruit who will exit this "interview" with a song in his heart? No, not with that bloody black eye, and not with that beating, and not with those attempts to indoctrinate him.  This isn't "We have met the enemy, and he is us;" this is "We have never met the people who live in our own country."

This reminds me of a legend repeatedly told in my own family about my grandfather's ancestors in the Civil War: "Five rode away and five came back." This was considered a miracle, that five brothers survived the war. But here's the other odd part of it: for various reasons, they fought on opposite sides of the Civil War. The reasons low-level soldiers fight on different sides of a war can be simple — they worked in one territory for a boss and had to fight on the side that boss took; they fell in with one group of conscripts where there were three squares a day and some money, and they fought on that side; they had trouble with their own people, a fight, a robbery, and had to go to the other side. Sometimes ideology and patriotic affiliation is very far away in a situation like this.

And Russia clearly exploits it. When the Russian-backed fighters took Checkpoints 31 and 32 and beyond, they targeted their disinformation wars and charm offensives and efforts to provide "exits" and "humanitarian aid" to the rank-and-file Russian recruits in Ukraine whom they knew they could win over culturally; then they massacred in cold blood the nationalist volunteers whom they couldn't win over — splitting up battalions and people on the same side in the war. The Russians are prepared to go to each corner and each little Ukrainian cottage. We aren't. Our hair stands on end when we see Motorola and his men casually grinding through a neighbourhood of Ilovaisk and firing Shmels at residences and crashing through the roads on a BTR. How could civilians possibly put up with this?! Wouldn't they flee? Yet a babushka appears, who casually offers them water and bread. Until you grasp that these very babushkas are the problem — and a problem not fixed by shelling — you will keep losing the war.

That problem starts ending when you stop trying to wave jazz hands and bully people on Twitter to use different terminology, and admit what you have here, and stop pretending it's not what you have here.

I don't believe this is the official ATO showing this video; it's an ATO support group. They are showing it because they think it will instantly show everyone what idiots they are dealing with who are so stupid they're ready to defect to the hugely dubious "Donetsk People's Republic" or DNR. They think it's all self-evident.

But they don't seem to be able to step out of their context. Anyone else with a grain of humanity even supporting Kiev and opposing Moscow will have to say: you guys are not winning this war because you don't know how to be attractive to people like this drunken recruit with a brother, who he loves, in the DNR and a daughter in a Ukrainian high school.

I don't know if that's fixable. Maybe when the Ukrainian army comes into Slavyansk, gets the food distributed and the electricity on and starts unearthing mass graves and explaining who put people in them — not the Ukrainian army, but Col. Strelk0v — it will get better. But I think it will be a long haul fought out literally on every single street corner next to ever single little Ukrainian cottage.

So let me keep going. Here's a tweet of a scene in Kramatorsk:

#КрасныйЛуч #всёплохо pic.twitter.com/uuNZZ9kOhv

— Nowhere Man (@falconua) January 6, 2015

 

Would a Russian soldier or volunteer stay in the Donbass and get married there? Most of the volunteers I've seen on VKontakte have their girlfriends, often pregnant, back home. They return home to marry, or marry before they go into battle. These people are very likely locals who want to stand on a tank with a DNR flag on their wedding day

 Then there's this man, getting up early on a winter holiday and packing his gear and chatting cheerfully about the enemy Ukrainians firing at him as he trudges through the snow. He is a local.

 

 

So is the man filming him, @Borisich_glass on Twitter. He has gotten to be something of a famous war photographer, and follows something of the tradition of Babel's Red Army. He is Jewish, and calls the Ukrainians the "UkroWehrmacht" which is ridiculous, because the Ukrainians aren't fascists and there are plenty of Heil Hitler saluters in the ranks of the Russian volunteers.

His photography is haunting — even if biased. He's covered hundreds of bombed-out homes in places like Nikushino. As I've pointed out, he also shows that the reasons Ukrainians are even shelling these locations is because — hello! — the rebels — and they are rebels — are going into them, even being fed by the townspeople who know them — and then drawing fire on them. Sometimes, the villagers flee, as they have in Nikushino. But the man filming this — and his subjects — do not appear to be a Russian plant.

Here's some of his many tweets of bombed out homes:

а вторая уже влетела в дом… четко видно, что били со стороны Каменки, там стоят части укровермахта. pic.twitter.com/kVZ4C72y1F

— Борисыч (@Borisich_glass) January 3, 2015

pic.twitter.com/rlC6GaQyNN

— Борисыч (@Borisich_glass) January 3, 2015

и так, Никишино, улица Петровского… одно могу сказать точно, на данный момент, эта улица пострадала меньше всего… pic.twitter.com/qRwhcsOhOK

— Борисыч (@Borisich_glass) January 3, 2015

Here's Streamer Vlad. At the age of 16, he started live-streaming combat scenes in Slavyansk and other towns. He sided with the rebels because he's Russian but a local. His mother was unable to keep him at home. this is yet another family where you have to ask "Where's Dad?". He began getting footage for the Russian sabotage TV station ANNA — which covers wars in Abkhazia, Southern Ossetia, even Syria and Kosovo — hence my title for them — although in their propaganda, you can look to the sides and see what's real.Perhaps they paid him. More likely they just kept him around as a mascot. Yes, they are a Kremlin tool. But unless you think we can believe that a local teenager is only created by GRU squads, you have to concede he's authentic even if his context isn't:

The Ukrainian Right Sector kidnapped and held and tortured him, forced him to make a confession while they roughed him up on TV:

Do you think after that Vlad started chanting "Geroyam Slava!" and adding "We Can Never Be Brothers" to his YouTube favourite lists after that? No. Today, Vlad is in camo, with the badge of one of the Russian-supplied battalions on his arm, faking his death so he can get in and remove his family from Mariupol, then appearing to say he's alive. The Vlad problem is not going to be easy to undo. Not surprisingly, when you pull people's hair and punch them and humiliate them on TV, this is how they get.

 

Like Right Sector got when they were forced to crawl through a gauntlet and get beaten blo0dy by separatists who yes, had a lot of bussed-in ultranationalists from Russia to help.

 

 

How do you think you would turn out after this happened to you?

Which is why we have this scene, where Russians are beaten bloddy by Right Sector in Kharkiv, because they remember who forced them to kneel on the street months ago. Interestingly, the police intervened, although people say they "never" do. Maybe by now they are on the side of the separatists. Maybe they are paid by Regionaire or Communist oligarchs and their cronies.

 

Here's the infamous Givi, who is an ethnic Georgian but who is native to the Donbass. Yes, he has lots of fresh ammunition in shiny boxes from Russia with crisp packing straw — not to mention huge tanks that are only available in Russia and were never stolen from Ukrainians. Look over his shoulder, as he may have been in Berkut or intelligence and recruited by the GRU, to the other people in the video. Some are Russian volunteers. Some are locals. If you go through the masses of "Novorossiya" propaganda TV — and it is propaganda — you can find many intervies of people explaining why they joined the fight — they often describe their belief that the Ukrainians were going to take over their towns. Of course, if any Ukrainian army came near their towns, it's because Russian-backed commandos or Russians themselves took over the OGAs in every town in the Donbass FIRST. But they tune in later, often starting by just guarding checkpoints or warehouses or serving as drivers, then graduating to becoming hardened combat specialists.

Take a look at the people in one of the best-known "Novorossiya" propaganda videos showing how Motorola and his Sparta battalion make a run on the Donetsk Airport. Motorola himself is from Ukhta in Komi — a Russian, not from the Donbass. But not all these people are. Do you really think the women here came all the way from Russia? And if you sift through these propaganda films, you'll see a lot of them are locals. Go to the end. These people literally bleed into the ground for their turf. If they're outsiders from Russia, they also literally bleed into ground that they think is "theirs." This is not something you "turn off" by shutting down the supply line on orders from Moscow. The men in this video probably lost their legs or died. Do you think they or their families are going to be cheerful patriots of Kiev?

 

 

Here's the deputy commander of the LNR "people's militia" — which is not "the people's" or "militia" — two lies in two words — but what you can't dispute is that the man is local. Here he is giving awards to Southern Ossetians who are clearly NOT local. But this scene shows you it is BOTH — locals and outsiders.

 

 

 Here's a tank crew, filmed by icorpus.ru, Strelkov's TV crew which is basically a Moscow-funded and operated outfit which used to have some Crimean Russians, but they were killed in crossfire with Andrei Stenin. The crisp Moscow accent of the interview aside, the people he's interviewing are locals as you can hear from their accents. They are defending their homeland. Then there's the hardened old guy who has come from Altai — he's Russian — after he watched the Odessa fire on TV. He's retrained from what he knew in other wars, evidently.

This gang has a Russian tank for sure, a T-72 with special reactive armor. So — Russian helpers, a Russian tank, but locals to drive it and die in it.

 

 

Let's look at these two fighters, pale and shaken after Aleksandr Bednov and their comrades were executed in Lugotino on the way to Krasny Luch. They are locals. Listen to their accents. They make the distinction about how one of the men in their battalion, yes, was Russian-from-Russia. But they aren't. These people aren't the crack GRU-trained fighters from Moscow, these are people who were drivers or tool-makers in civilian life and are now drivers or gun-toters in the war. Maybe some of them have learned out to be snipers. But they're locals, and they won't be going away:

 

Here are the sad-sacks of the Cossacks in the "Stakhanov People's Republic" which has broken away even from the DNR and LNR. There's Pavel Dremov:

 

 

If you can't or won't hear it from me and I don't tell the story very well, hear it from Ollie Carrol who is a talented journalist who moved from Moscow to Kiev and covers the war. Listen to what he says:

There are few absolutes in eastern Ukraine today, and it would be wrong to suggest other separatist leaders do not share a desire to expand territories beyond current borders. But the deal on a “ceasefire”—which in reality exists only in areas sufficiently removed from strategic front lines—does seem to have divided the separatists.

One camp, supporting the deal, consists of relatively more disciplined and Moscow-dependent forces, and prioritizes rebuilding before any further military moves. The second camp, relatively more belligerent and independent, advocates immediate military advance, complains about the other side being money-obsessed, and freely talks about the Ukrainian conflict being a prelude to World War III. Without mass Russian military backing—which does not appear to be part of the current script, though that may change—breakaway forces like Dremov’s Cossacks are unlikely to make significant inroads. Ukrainian forces have regrouped and dug in two strong lines of defenses to the North and West.

But the resolution of the standoff between the various camps is of vital importance to the broader viability of the new de facto separatist statelets. Economies are already dysfunctional, with significant pressures on cash flow amid few concrete promises from Russia; war damage is serious and debilitating; and winter and the first snows have made their introductions. If the authorities are unable to protect the population from major humanitarian disaster—or at the very least, if they are unable to blame the Ukrainians for it—a currently supportive public may well move against them, and quickly.

 

Here's the deputy mayor of Stakhanov trying to explain why there are no pensions, even though people tried to transfer them to Severodonsk, outside of the LNR in Ukrainian territory, to try to get them there as Kiev shut off pensions. This didn't work for 90% of them. But there's no pensions in the LNR or Stakhanov People's Republic either…

 

Here's an ordinary man with a GoPro giving new meaning to the word "post-modern" by hunting for a loaf of bread in Stakhanov, where there are buildings, an urban setting, buses running — but the stores are closed:

 

These people live there. They are not Russians. Quite a few of them took up arms. What's the plan for them?

My father who fought in the Korean war and went up in planes to spy on the Soviet pilots' conversations to try to defeat the Soviets said we should respect our enemy, and learn their language and culture. That didn't mean that we ceased characterizing them as our enemy — they were and are. But we wouldn't needlessly kill them or torture them — we would have a healthy respect for their capacity and also a humane attitude toward them and even respect for some aspects of their cultural achievements.

The people in these videos are our enemies. They're our enemies because they've chosen the side of the Kremlin, which is our enemy, and because the Kremlin is waging war on Ukraine which is wrong and a mass crime against humanity, in my view. These people become our enemies because they threaten Europe with the return of a Soviet oppressive system, and that threatens all of Western civilization.

It's precisely because they are our enemy that we have to admit they exist and not pretend they're going away or use inhumane methods on them.

I've seen with Chechnya and Dagestan that if you call fighters terrorists long enough, even when they weren't, even when originally they might have only been farmers with shot-guns protecting their villages, or indigenous rebels fighting Russians who used outrageous and barbaric tactics on them, eventually they do become terrorists.

Once again: when you call people "terrorists" who aren't, eventually they become them.

Terrorists are not people who take over police stations or city administration buildings, even if along the way, take hostages and even kill them.  They're urban guerillas. Those awful things they are doing are guerilla or insurgent tactics but not necessarily terrorism or the policy of a terrorist group. Terrorist groups bomb cafes, bus stops, discos, marketplaces, employment lines, mosques, churches, homes to deliberately kill civilians in large numbers.

Taking a human shield like Givi does on an apartment building where most people left is not like blowing up the apartment buildings in Moscow (which may have been state terrorism or state negligence or complicity in letting a Chechen terrorist group do the job.)

So the discussion has to be: what is the right policy for dealing with people who are insurgents, were exploited and brought into being by Moscow, and who have arms and hatreds still? One way Poroshenko has dealt with this is by offering an amnesty to all but the most heinous who have committed mass crimes, let's say if there is a unit that has killed dozens of people, for example, or shelled a town and killed civilians.

By and large, the plan is to give amnesty to most of these characters. Is that a good idea? I'm not sure it is, but it's a political exigency. I'd like to see at least "truth and reconciliation" commissions in every town so we can at least state the truth about who the people are who came and took over buildings and killed some of their neighbours. If you don't find those facts, declare them, explain right from wrong yet reconcile, you get endlessly scenes like those beat-downs in Kharkiv.

I think it's really important to investigate and fact-find and publish the account of the Odessa Trade Union fire. There are constantly propagandistic lies and disinformation hoaxes going on still around this tragedy and they fuel more hatred and craziness. If the authorities won't take this on politically, human rights groups should, and I don't mean Human Rights Watch, in which I've lost total faith regarding their treatment of this war.