The Middle East

Last week, information about the breakthrough into the territory of the Donbass of new columns of trucks from Russia transporting militants and weapons was received daily. This was reported to the Ukrainian authorities, not able to stop large groups of Russian militants to stop weak border detachments. The militants themselves, who boasted with new supplies of the “needles” and “sewing machines” - that is, the Khlag missile systems, and, apparently, anti -aircraft machine guns, reported on the same thing in their blogs. The apotheosis was the presentation of a group of militants from Chechnya and Ossetia, called the reincarnation of the GRU battalion "Vostok".

As for the efforts of the Russian side to prevent such export of people and weapons across the border, as far as can be judged by fragmentary messages, individual enthusiasts who want to fight in Ukraine are caught, interrogated and released at the nearest railway station. Organized columns and groups have no problems with the passage . The direct requirements of the Ukrainian side are ignored by Russia.

Numerous reports of journalists, local residents and militants themselves record the folding in the Donbass of the alliance of various groups, the backbone of which is Russian citizens, who have never been to the region until March 2014. Two Russian citizens, convinced Russian nationalists, Alexander Borodai and Igor Girkin (Strelkov), are actually rulers, respectively, Donetsk and Slavyansk. Over the past week, Girkin, with the help of the detachments of the militants controlled by him - primarily the Cossacks of the Wolch Hundred association from the Belorechensk of the Krasnodar Territory - established control of the Slavic "self -defense" under the command of the People's Mayor Vyacheslav Ponomarev, who once called the chieftain with the squad to his territory. A few days later, the subordinating beard “Vostok”, despite heavy losses with the unsuccessful assault on the Donetsk airport, was occupied by the Main Center of the Anti -Ukrainian rebels - the building of the Donetsk Regional State Administration. The local "self -defense", branded as the "fifth column", was partly dispersed for looting, partly re -sedded the beard, which was thereby finally established in the role of the main separatist of Donbass. Its main local competitor, "Chairman of the Presidium of the DPR" Denis Pushilin, as well as the first "People's Governor" of the region Pavel Gubarev is removed from real affairs and are engaged in inflating cheeks in Megaloman "New Russia" projects. The alleged chief organizer of the DPR, oligarch Rinat Akhmetov, even earlier, was disappointed in his brainchild and escaped to Kyiv, and Borokin and Girkin were concerned about cleaning the DPR from his personnel, seeing the main reason for their own forces.

In the city of Anthracite, the second most important center of resistance to the Ukrainian authorities in the Luhansk region, power belongs to the Don Cossacks who came from Russia. Only in the first -generation of the separatists, a local resident Valery Bolotov, who has already experienced one attempt from unknown persons who was seriously in power, who has already experienced one attempt on the part of unknown persons (SBU in such methods of influencing separatists has not yet been noticed) and has not yet been guaranteed from the following.

Thus, the Donbass separatists themselves, with all their numerical superiority over the "aliens", play an auxiliary role in armed conflict (I do not want to use the wiped term "cannon meat"), much smaller than Russian citizens organized in paramilitarian formations, which, in determining the Ukrainian side, are terrorist.

It can be stated that the armed conflict in the territory of Donbass is no longer a clash between the central authorities of Ukraine and regional separatists. The degree of participation in it of the Russian side is so great that many analysts say that Russia wages a new type of war. At the end of last week, the US authorities decided, under the pressure of the republican opposition, to sharply increase the supply of military equipment to Ukraine, which is so lacking in the Ukrainian army.

How to accurately qualify the existing conflict is the task of experts in international law. I am interested in something else. What is the point of maintaining the Russian authorities, and so openly, in a deliberately losing situation, small groups of Russian citizens who have already parted with the hope of "clearing the Nazis of Kyiv", but so far, who remain under their control, part of the Donbass - and at the same time having various motives for hatred for Ukrainians and in tense relations? After all, sooner or later, with large or less losses, the Ukrainian army will reach them?

Here I recall another place on the globe, where now they also shoot a lot. Where a weak central government also fights with groups of differently motivated militants, which are united by only one desire-to shift the unholerty, in their opinion, the head of the country and its environment. This country is Syria.

The Syrian case is close to the Donbass in that in the internal conflict in the country's difficult population, various external forces were largely involved. Russia and Iran act on the side of Assad, supplying him with military equipment and ammunition, supplying it with advisers, loans and volunteers; On the side of the Syrian opposition - "friends of Syria", openly helping it with weapons, money and volunteers through the land boundaries that are not controlled by central authority. Foreign subjects, including al-Qaida activists and groups close to it, form the basis of radical Sunnis detachments, which are now the most serious force that confronts Assad. And they, too, are not averse to putting the "local" oppositionists.

In the modern Russian political vocabulary, the term "response" taken from criminal jargon is popular - a power response to some actions or call of an opponent. Crimea, for example, is a “answer” for Kosovo. And other Russian actions that violate international legislation are “answer” for Kosovo, and for Gaddafi, and for the “NATO bombing” of Serbia, and even for the collapse of the USSR. Putin, Lavrov and many other high -ranking Russian officials have repeatedly said that they use exactly the same funds as the West, and if they violate international law, then no more often than “Western partners”.

What is happening in Syria, like any attempt to overthrow the dictator from the pro -Western opposition, the Russian authorities are extremely unhappy. Perhaps they hope to use the Donbass as a bargaining coin during their global conflict with the West. While the duties of the head of the Ukrainian state were performed by Turchinov, the Russian authorities communicated regarding the Ukrainian situation only with Western leaders, without perceiving the Ukrainian government as a subject of negotiations. Putin's silence about the election of Preshenko implies that such a method can be applied further, and the elected Ukrainian president in the eyes of the Russian authorities will be no more legitimate than Assad in the eyes of the West.

Orthodox terrorists and Chechen volunteers, at their own peril and risk of those who have gathered in the Donbass, are partly the same people who have already fought in Syria. The same Igor Girkin, according to his published correspondence, advised Russian volunteers in Syria about new people who wanted to go there, and then admitted that in his detachment there are people with experience in this country. The Abkhazian agency "Anna-Nuus", for the past few years specializing in the production and publication of videos about how a successfully Syrian army has been fighting with the rebels, reoriented to support the Donbass rebels and denouncing the Ukrainian authorities, becoming one of the main rubies of the militants. Dmitry Steshin and Alexander Kotz, cheerfully illuminating the cruelty of Islamic militants in Syria, a year later in the same expressions describe the actions of the Ukrainian authorities in the Donbass. The Vostok battalion, and previously fulfilled foreign missions at the direction of the Russian authorities - in South Ossetia and Lebanon (one Prochrevsky geopolitics of the Duginsky circle in August last year dreamed of its use in Syria) - was revived in Donetsk. The new deliveries of MANPADS to the Donbass (and most importantly, the news of the news about this) was amazingly followed by the transfer of similar systems of the Syrian opposition to the US government.

The direct invasion of the Russian troops into the region looks unlikely, although such a threat (again by analogy with the actions of Western countries in Syria) is continuously hanging in the air, sometimes materializing in the form of Russian drones . At the same time, the needs and desires of the population of the region neither the chief player in Moscow, nor fanatics of the Russian-Orthodox idea on the spot are taken into account. Opponents of Novorossiya and joining Russia can, in their opinion, go to hell, supporters must accept the war as a necessity, and neutrals are still allowed to scatter in all directions. And to rake the ruins of Donetsk and Slavyansk following the “geopolitical” war, the authorities of Ukraine will still have to, and not the remnants of the “volunteers” leaning back to Russia.

What price will Putin will appoint the West for the peace of eastern Ukraine? What can we talk about at a meeting of world leaders in Normandy? I think that a package agreement will be proposed from the Russian side, according to which the West will have to recognize the seizure of Crimea and the non -block status of Ukraine, as well as announce the end of the military support of the anti -Asadian opposition in Syria. Will the "seven" agree to this? It is unlikely. Moreover, the Ukrainian government began to show some successes in the military field. And this means that the news about the world from Donbass in the near future will not have to wait.