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54 Opinion
bne June 2018
Forces of Ukraine. This body will coordinate different armed forces, national police, national guard, state emergency services, and other institutions that will perform their duties in the conflict zone. The Head of the United Operations Staff general lieutenant Sergiy Nayev will answer directly to the Head of the General Staff of Ukraine.
The control of the United Operations Staff will extend to the entire oblasts of Donetsk and Luhansk, not only to the conflict zone and the contact line zone as it was before.
It is also worth noting that the Staff, in coordination with SBU, will control the movement of goods on the occupied territory as well as a movement of people through the contact line.
The Donetsk and Luhansk regions will be divided into three security zones. The green, the yellow and the red ones. The green regime will be established on the territories with no restrictions on the freedom of the movement of people. Those in the yellow regime should always have documents with them and be ready to display them on request, as well as present their personal belongings and vehicles for inspection. The red regime is a restricted territory entrance to which requires a special permit.
MOSCOW BLOG:
Russio delenda est
Ben Aris in Berlin
When King Pyrrhus of Epirus stood on the Italian coast surveying the battlefield of Asculum where he had just defeated the Roman army in 279BC he famously said: “If I have another victory like that I will return to Epirus alone.”
Epirus is in the modern day Balkans and Pyrrhus was the first serious challenger faced by the growing Roman Empire, which very nearly lost to the Illyrian fighting forces.
The Romans won in the end thanks to their ability to simply out-resource all their opponents: if an army lost they simply drew on their massive and growing hinterland to raise another one. They wore their opponents down into eventual defeat – even if that took years to accomplish. The Romans were later challenged by Hannibal in the second Punic war and unable to defeat the wily general, but again they out-resourced him and Carthage was eventually razed
to the ground.
The US is in a similar position today and that is what worries the emerging markets that are rapidly catching up with the western world.
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Obviously, it would be naive to think that change of the name of the operation will bring some significant changes to Eastern Ukraine. I believe it wasn’t even an intention of the authors of the law. The territories of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions are still controlled by the Russian occupation forces that continue shelling Ukrainian positions and hardly any changes from the Ukrainian side can stop them. However, there is a very positive change in the organization and control of the operations
in Eastern Ukraine. Clarity and coordination of the efforts between different actors involved will have a positive influence on any operations held in the Donbas. It is also expected that United Operations Staff will be able to have a better control over the region. This is a good sign showing that Ukraine is ready to learn from its own mistakes and make the necessary changes to ensure better coordination of the security efforts.
An activist, journalist and co-founder of Global Ukrainians, an international network of Ukrainians worldwide, Kateryna Kruk was awarded the Atlantic Council Freedom Award for her work communicating the Euromaidan revolution to the world. She predicted a frozen conflict in July 2014, which has largely come to pass, and now comments on the progress of crucial reforms in Ukraine.
Like the Romans, the US has built a military-industrial econo- my that can massively out-resource all its opponents’ and so is impossible to defeat – a legacy of the rapid militarisation dur- ing WWII when it simply out produced first the Nazis and then the Soviet Union, the only other country on the planet at the time with any chance of matching the US’s industrial might.
Like the Romans, the US will have its share of vain and incom- petent leaders and US President Donald Trump has become an international laughing stock, with other politicians openly mocking his stupidity.
Rome screwed up regularly in its fights with Hannibal. The most famous was the battle by lake Trasimene, where Hanni- bal lured the Roman general Gaius Flaminius into a trap by playing on his arrogance and drove the Roman forces into the water where most of them drowned. Hannibal lost a handful of soldiers. The battle is still taught at West Point and acknowl- edged as one of the most stunning military victories of all time. But Hannibal lost in the end, defeated at the battle of Zama outside the Carthaginian gates.
The US imposed new sanctions on Russia on April 6 that have