Re: A Remarkable Interview: Ukraine General Regarding the East Ukraine Separatists, “I don’t consider them enemies”

Subject: A Remarkable Interview: Ukraine General Regarding the East Ukraine Separatists, “I don’t consider them enemies”
Date: Sun, 31 Aug 2014
From: Paul Grenier <psgrenier@gmail.com>

A Remarkable Interview: Ukraine General Regarding the East Ukraine Separatists, “I don’t consider them enemies”
Paul Grenier

The war in Ukraine, like virtually every war, depends for its continuation on demonization of the enemy. A sympathetic effort at seeing things from the viewpoint of the enemy, acknowledging that the enemy’s motives are perhaps no worse than one’s own — this is not what one expects to hear from the senior leader of a military organization struggling to crush that same enemy. And yet that is exactly what occurred on Wednesday, Aug. 20, when Ukrainskaya Pravda published a remarkable piece titled: “An interview with General Ruban on the fighters in East Ukraine: ‘There are people there who stood with us on Maidan.'”

I don’t wish to distract too much from the article itself — the reader can make his or her own judgments after reading the excerpts that follow (here is the full text in Russian).[http://www.pravda.com.ua/rus/articles/2014/08/20/7035274/] Ukraine politics these days are convoluted and confused, to put it mildly, and I make no claims of being a specialist on the subject — my background is more in Russian and European political thought. All the same, whatever the ‘deep background’ might be here, at the very minimum General Ruban’s words provide an opening for what would seem to be an obviously much-needed dialogue – in the first instance between the two halves of Ukraine, but also between Russia and the U.S. The tone of Ruban’s words create precisely what is most difficult to achieve, and also what is most urgently needed: they provide an emotional opening. If built upon by all sides, such a change in tone could create the kind of virtuous dynamic where each side begins to take more fully into account the perspective of its opponent. Which is the only path to peace.

A few words about Ukrainskaya Pravda, the newspaper that printed the interview with General Ruban, might be helpful. Ukrainskaya Pravda was founded in the year 2000 by Georgii Gongadze, the investigative journalist who was murdered, also in the year 2000, apparently for his reporting on government corruption during the Kuchma presidency.

According to Prof. Nicolai Petro, a University of R.I. political scientist who just spent a year in Ukraine and has a rather good feel for recent Ukrainian politics and media, there is good reason to take the article seriously. To begin with, the newspaper in which it was published is itself a serious one, and has a solid relationship with the current government in Kiev. And Petro also pointed out, in a private correspondence, that what the general is saying in this interview jives well with what other observers have been saying, including the Sunday Times’ Mark Franchetti (see also this related piece). Somewhat less emphatically, the same idea comes through in this CNN interview with Kommersant’s Ilya Barabanov, as Petro also kindly pointed out. To be sure, things on the ground are changing fast, and the Ruban comments preceded what, according to Western sources, has been a sudden ratcheting up of Russian direct assistance to the East Ukraine separatists. But the main take-aways from the interview in any case lie elsewhere.

Who is Colonel General Vladimir Ruban? In the interview, he states that he has been tasked by the Ukraine ministry of defense and the office of the president with leading all negotiations on prisoner exchanges with rebel forces in the East. Ekaterina Sergatskova, the journalist who conducted the interview, describes General Ruban in a brief introduction as something of a legendary figure in Ukraine, admired for his intelligence and great courage — and for his success at getting prisoners home.

Here are some excerpts (my translation).

“An interview with General Ruban on the fighters in East Ukraine: ‘There are people there who stood with us on Maidan'”
….

Q: How many people have you managed to free?

– More than a hundred. We stopped counting after one hundred.

Q: How many calls do you receive each day from people looking for someone who has gone missing?

– About three hundred
…..

Q: What about the other people working with you in the Center — are they trusted by the guys in the East? Do they work independently?

No. I personally do all the negotiations. There is a key word, a password, which is accepted the same as a handshake, after which work can begin. The password is ‘officer.’ If I give my word as an officer, that means we’ve reached agreement. The other side knows that I and the other officers will do everything possible to keep our word. Which is precisely what we do, regardless of circumstances. There is no way we can break our word.

Q: But the work load is enormous. And lately the number of prisoners has gotten bigger…

Yes. A lot bigger. But now the administrative office of the President [of the Ukraine] has gotten involved, and the president himself understands the vital importance of this work, as does the Security Service and the Ministry of Defense. They can see for themselves that it works. They can see the usefulness of our approach.
….

[The following section makes clear that there are various groups holding prisoners. Some are doing so just to get ransom money. But, the general says, if such prisoners are in any way connected to the leadership of the Donetsk or Lugansk People’s Republics, the DNR and LPR, the question of money never comes up. Prisoners are simply exchanged. The general adds: “We agreed with them from the beginning that we don’t pay money for people and don’t get involved in those kinds of deals.” The interviewer is surprised at the good faith of the rebels in this respect. — PRG ]

Q: But how is that to the advantage of the DPR and the LPR?

– It is a way for them to prove that they are concerned for the welfare of their own people who have been taken prisoner or are in prison — just as it is to the advantage of (the Ukraine’s) president. He also shows concern for his own fellow citizens. This is the way it should be. That’s what he was elected to do. People have been taken prisoner, it’s his job to get them out of there.

And the Donetsk and Lugansk leadership act the same way with their own fellow warriors. Their basic mission is to get all of their people freed. It’s perfectly normal. That’s the humane way to do things.

Q: And is it possible?

– Yes, it’s possible.

Q: In other words, the ultimate goal is to exchange all prisoners?

– That’s the ultimate goal. My job is to get everyone freed on all sides.
……

[Again skipping over a long section, in which the general discusses the varied responses used in cases where prisoners are civilians or military, and how the mass media should behave to maximize safety of prisoners, etc. The following sections are the most surprising and important. — PRG]

Q: What kind of people are they, the ones you are negotiating with? What’s their character like? Why do they do this? You have probably managed to form a portrait of them by now.

– And what motivates the Ukrainian army to take prisoners? What kinds of people are these in the Ukrainian army and its battalions?

Q: In other words, for you it’s all the same?

– And for you it isn’t? For you all of a sudden the six million people living in Lugansk and Donetsk have suddenly all become enemies?

Q: No, peaceful civilians aren’t enemies.

— But the ones who are carrying arms — and there are fifteen thousand of them — they are all enemies?

Q: To be honest, well, yes. We are talking about people who are threatening the lives and well-being of ordinary people.

— The army is threatening the lives and well-being of ordinary people. That’s what it was created to do. Officers who come out of military training academies are professional killers, or is that news to you? You didn’t know? We’re not talking about people who walk around carrying flags at a parade, we’re talking about people who get in trenches and kill other people.

That’s what their training is all about. Just like me. I’m a fighter pilot [Note: the Russian word for a fighter airplane — istrebitel’ — means annihilator — PRG]. It’s a pretty word. We don’t think about what it means in everyday usage. Take away the word ‘pilot’ and, think about it — I am an annihilator. What is my job? To annihilate.

I don’t have the same attitude as you do to these people. I don’t consider them enemies. It’s easy for you, from your perspective. I have known these people for a long time. Over there what you have are officers, guys who fought in Afghanistan, and men who stood with us while we were protesting against Yanukovich. There are people over there who stood next to us on Maidan. On the Euromaidan. But that isn’t what we called it.

Q: When you say “over there” you mean where?

– I mean on the other sidе. In the Lugansk and Donetsk Republics.

Q: You mean to say these people stood with you on Maidan?

– Yes. Now they are fighting the Ukrainian army. They can be found on both sides.

Q: But why are they doing this?

— Why did people from ‘Right Sector’ stand on Maidan? Or why did people in general stand on Maidan?

Q: If they were part of Maidan, why are they now acting against the people with whom they were standing shoulder to shoulder?

— Because the people who came out to Maidan were satisfied with nothing more than the removal of Yanukovich. Not a single one of the other demands has been fulfilled. Whereas these guys are determined to stick it out. It’s not enough for them that Yanukovich was removed, they want real changes. And the majority of the points on their agenda coincide with the ones that were announced at Maidan.

Q: But it doesn’t look that way at all.

— For which you can thank all the journalists, and everyone else who called them terrorists. As well as those who came up with the term ATO [Anti-Terrorist Operations — PRG] instead of the word ‘war.’

Q: But Russia doesn’t acknowledge that it is a war.

— What does Russia have to do with anything?

Q: In your opinion Russia is not participating in this conflict?

— Have you seen Russian troops there?

Q: I have seen soldiers from Russia.

— Have you seen Russian troops participating in the conflict?

Q: Not in an official capacity.

— And you won’t see them unofficially either, because they aren’t there. If you saw someone who was Russian or a fighter, it doesn’t mean that Russia is participating.

Q: So what should it be called then?

— Call it anything you like. You know that there are mercenaries on both sides?

Q: Yes.

— On both. On the Ukrainian, and also on the Lugansk and Donetsk sides. So how do we describe it, then? Should we say that Poland and Sweden are fighting on our side?

There’s a bit of black humor that goes like this: “Russia is fighting with America down to the very last Ukrainian.” That gets closer to the truth …
….

[The discussion turns to which countries the mercenaries and volunteers are coming from and then continues as follows — PRG]

Q: But the people giving instructions on what to do and how to do it are all from Russia. How can you say that the process is a wholly internal, domestic Ukrainian one if what is happening is being managed from the outside?

– You go ahead and say anything you like.

Q: No, but I am trying to figure this out.

– Figure it out then. I told you what I think. All the key questions are decided inside Ukraine. The war could have been won already, by one side or the other, a good eight times.

Q: If not for …

– If not for the fact that someone prefers to drag things out, instead of winning. A ceasefire and an agreement could have been reached in three months. It’s always possible in any situation to cease fire and come to an agreement.

Q; Why, in your opinion, is that not happening?

– Someone is not interested in stopping the war. I could reach an agreement.

Q; You’re ready to do that?

– I am.

[The interview goes on for quite a while. In the next section the general argues that, in order to decisively conclude the war, martial law needs to be declared, censorship of the press instituted, and a more decisive approach to taxation adopted. But the civilian leadership in Kiev, he says, is unwilling to risk such a situation under which power might slip out of their hands. And so drift continues to be preferable and “the country’s whole infrastructure is damaged, and the people suffer.” -PRG]