In mid-April, Tim Judah, highly regarded historian of the post-Yugoslavia wars of secession, toured Ukraine for the New York Review of Books. His essay 'Ukraine: the Phony War?' just came out in the 22 May NYRB issue. It is hauntingly prophetic. He predicted things were about to go very badly in Ukraine:
This has been a time when normal life continues while men arm themselves and begin to prepare for combat. It is that strange pre-war moment when the possible future overlaps with the present. Rebels make Molotov cocktails a stone's throw from roadside shops selling garden gnomes. A halted Ukrainian army convoy is surrounded by locals who mill around chatting to the soldiers ...
As men in beaten-up cars race up country roads past towering grain silos, as groups gather to demand referendums, as people tell me that they don't believe that war is coming and that Russians and Ukrainians are brothers, I remember the same brave talk, the same euphoria, and the same delusions before the Yugoslavs tipped their country into catastrophe in the 1990s. Ukraine is not like that Yugoslavia, although the atmosphere in the east is a horribly similar combination of resentment and disbelief.
Just two weeks later, Ukraine races towards civil war. In the pro-Russian, Russian-speaking eastern provinces — the famous Donbas heavy industrial region, with its hero cities of the Soviet Union like Donetsk — the irresolute and panicked new government in Kiev has ordered the Ukrainian Army to retake cities from pro-Russian militia demonstrators who had bloodlessly occupied key government buildings to popular acclaim.
After initial reverses, the Ukrainian Army has orders to use lethal force to regain control of those centres. People look on aghast as Ukrainian soldiers shoot local militiamen, and even unarmed demonstrators:
Local people claim the Ukrainian army shot at unarmed citizens who formed a human chain near a road blockade on the edge of the village of Andreevka, only a few miles from Slavyansk. 'They are killing peaceful people,' said Igor, 29, a farmworker from the village ...
'Where is Russia? Putin stays silent. Russia, Russia, there is no Russia here. Why? We beg Putin to come and save us,' said [a local woman], visibly distraught.
At this rate, it may not be long before Moscow's hand is forced, as it was in Georgia, into massive and overwhelming armed intervention.
The Washington Post reported on 4 May that the Kremlin says it is weighing its response