Confidence in Ukraine's cease-fire hurt by arms violations

March 21, 2015

NOVOAMVROSIIVSKE, Ukraine (AP) — With cameras and clipboards in hands, teams of blue-jacketed international observers drive around the muddy countryside of eastern Ukraine looking for rocket launchers and artillery.

Their task is to verify whether government troops and Russian-backed rebel forces are removing heavy weapons from the front line in accordance with a February cease-fire deal. The success of the Organization for Security and Europe monitoring mission would lessen the chances that heavy fighting will resume in conflict that has already left more than 6,000 dead in a year.

Evidence is emerging, however, that the warring sides are leading monitors on a time-wasting game of hide-and-seek. Distrust between foes remains intense and anxiety lingers that a new flare-up could be just around the corner.

On Friday, an Associated Press journalist saw two tanks and two 120 mm guns being taken toward the front in rebel territory, near the separatist-held city of Donetsk. Two days earlier, Ukrainian troops were seen transporting a tank and a large-caliber gun in the town of Avdiivka, which also lies right on the front line.

None of the weapons should have been there. Under a peace deal laboriously negotiated between the leaders of Ukraine, Russia, Germany and France, anything with a caliber of 100 mm or above should be pulled back 25 to 70 kilometers (15 to 45 miles) from the front.

The weapons withdrawal began the last week of February and both sides claim to have completed the process. But the OSCE says to make sure the pullbacks happened, it must know how many weapons each side has and where they are being stored.

"Some information has been provided from both sides, but we still need substantial information," said Michael Bociurkiw, the OSCE mission spokesman. On Friday, a group of inspectors in rebel territory traveled from Donetsk to Novoamvrosiivske, a village near the Russian border where AP journalists on Feb. 26 followed four trucks carrying Grad launchers to a cement factory.

In that same cement factory, monitors scrutinized dozens of tanks, rocket launchers and howitzers, eyeing serial plates, taking photos and writing down notes. Where serial numbers were scratched away, a photo was taken of that missing information.

In separatist areas, OSCE teams have to ask in advance for permission to visit sites they wish to see and they travel under the supervision of rebel fighters. "They have complained to us that they can move around freely on Ukrainian territory," one rebel fighter, who gave his name as Major Yegorov, told the AP in Novoamvrosiivske. "That is true, but on that territory there is no fighting. The war is here, in the southeast. So we control them because we want to provide safety for them."

It is unclear to what extent the OSCE teams are able to decide on their own where to inspect. On the road back to Donetsk after the Novoamvrosiivske inspection, fresh tracks on the asphalt in the Donetsk suburb of Makiivka appeared to indicate that a convoy of heavy machinery had passed through since the morning. The OSCE team drove past, but an AP journalist followed the tracks to find two tanks in a multi-vehicle convoy that included truck-pulled cannons and troop carriers full of rebel fighters.

On Wednesday, two days earlier, a Ukrainian soldier told an AP reporter, laughing, that a cease-fire agreement-busting cannon that was being taken toward the front had a "90-something mm caliber." The weapon was clearly more powerful than that.

Ukrainian military officials have at times conceded that they are refraining from a complete withdrawal of heavy weapons, citing what they say is rebel reluctance to do the same. "We will not withdraw all our weapons, as we have no confirmation that the same is being done by the enemy," military spokesman Andriy Lysenko told reporters March 11. "It would be wrong and criminal to leave our troops without any cover."

And Ukrainian authorities say artillery fire continues in sporadic clashes along the front line. Donetsk region police chief Vyacheslav Abroskin said a resident of Avdiivka was killed Friday after a shell struck a home in the town.

In addition, neither side is willing to agree that tanks fall under the weapons to be withdrawn, although the cease-fire clearly envisions their removal. Monitors complain daily that they are not being allowed to travel freely. Sometimes they are made to wait at checkpoints, forcing delays, while in more extreme cases they are blocked entirely from reaching their destination.

Bociurkiw said even a short wait violates the verification process. "Any delays are unacceptable in our books," he said.

Leonard reported from Kiev, Ukraine.

Crimea exiles fight to keep Ukraine unity message alive

March 18, 2015

SHCHASLYVE, Ukraine (AP) — The tormentors stuck scotch tape to his eyes and locked him in a dank room. For 11 days, Andrei Schekun said, they beat him, shocked him with electrodes and scalded him with burning metallic plates.

He said the torture took place as Crimea voted in a referendum to secede from Ukraine a year ago Wednesday. Schekun's crime: campaigning to persuade his fellow Crimeans to reject absorption by Russia.

Schekun's crusade for Ukrainian unity, which he continues today in exile, began as pro-Moscow sentiment among the majority ethnic Russian population reached fever pitch on the peninsula. Demands for a split from Ukraine spiked within days of the February ouster of Moscow-friendly Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. Although most Ukrainians resented the president with feverish intensity for his predatory rule, people in regions such as Crimea and eastern Ukraine, with dominant ethnic Russian populations, viewed him with more sympathy.

Russian state television stations already fed them a steady diet of stories about unrest being led by rabid Ukrainian nationalists bent on oppression of the Russian population. Ill-intentioned Ukrainians, the Russian networks warned, were poised to descend upon Crimea.

Schekun's activism in drumming up support in Crimea for the anti-government protests that toppled Yanukovych was enough to make him suspect. Soon flyers appeared in the courtyard outside Schekun's home in the Crimean town of Bakhchysarai describing him as a traitor.

"Everywhere in the district where we lived, they stuck up leaflets with his face, calling him a bloodthirsty traitor and a fascist, and all kinds of other things," said Schekun's wife, Lyudmila, speaking from their new home outside Kiev. Schekun, along with his wife and three sons, are among the roughly 20,000 people who Ukrainian officials say have left Crimea for the mainland since the region was annexed by Russia.

On March 9, one week before the referendum, plain-clothed policemen detained Schekun at a train station in the Crimean capital of Simferopol, as he awaited the delivery of Ukrainian flags and symbols. The group was from a self-described militia charged with ensuring the referendum on joining Russia proceeded smoothly.

"They thought we wanted to derail their referendum," he said. "They thought we were some kind of terrorist group or something." Pro-Ukrainian activism inside Crimea has become an even more dangerous proposition since then.

Last week, a small group of Crimea residents marked the day of Ukraine's national poet Taras Shevchenko by gathering outside his statue in Simferopol with Ukrainian flags. That minor act of defiance earned them 40 hours hard labor.

The peninsula's Tatar minority, whose leadership resisted Russian annexation, says it too has been subjected to intimidation that has ranged from petty official harassment to beatings, kidnappings and murder.

Speaking at a United Nations conference in Geneva on Monday, the human rights envoy for Ukraine's parliament, Valeriya Lutkovskaya, described Crimea as a "peninsula of terror." "People are afraid to express their opinion," Lutkovskaya said. "They feel fear for their life and future, fear to espouse their faith and speak in their native language."

According to the most recent census, carried out in 2001, ethnic Ukrainians make up one-quarter of Crimea's population. From a distance, exiles feel at a loss to help and say they are disappointed with the Ukrainian government's failure to keep Crimea near the top of its agenda.

"Unfortunately, there is at the moment no single government executive body that deals with Crimean matters," said Eskender Bariyev, a member of the Mejlis, a self-governing body of Crimean Tatars. With government initiative lacking, Schekun says it is up to activists like him to shore up the morale of Ukrainians still in Crimea: "They need our moral support," he said. "They need to hear us say 'We haven't betrayed you, we haven't abandoned you.'"

It's hard to keep up the fight in a rented apartment outside the capital. But Schekun remains upbeat about his mission. "We will not let the government forget," Schekun said, joined by his wife in emphatically finishing the thought, "that Crimea is Ukraine."

US air defense troops train fast deployment in Poland

March 21, 2015

SOCHACZEW, Poland (AP) — U.S. air defense troops are training rapid deployment of Patriot missile launchers in Poland amid concerns that the conflict between Russia-backed rebels and government forces in Ukraine is threatening the security in the region.

On Saturday, at a test range in Sochaczew near Warsaw, two U.S. soldiers demonstrated for reporters the procedure of emplacement of a Patriot launching station of 16 missiles, as part of their week-long exercise.

Some 100 U.S. troops and 30 vehicles from the 5th Battalion of the 7th Air Defense Regiment arrived in Sochaczew this week from Germany, where they are stationed, to train with Polish troops. The exercise is aimed at showing the U.S. Army's capacity to deploy Patriot air and missile defense systems rapidly within NATO territory.

The Patriot missiles are superior to Poland's air defense weapons. Poland's Defense Minister Tomasz Siemoniak and U.S. Ambassador Stephen Mull visited the troops on Saturday. Speaking in fluent Polish, Mull said that the U.S. is always ready to "defend and stand by Poland's side in times of need."

Siemoniak said that the exercise in quick deployment of Patriot missiles is a response to the "events in the East of Europe." In 2018, Poland is to be covered by a permanent U.S. air defense system to be built in Eastern Europe.

Meanwhile in Szczecin, on the Baltic coast, the NATO Multinational Corps Northeast held a ceremony to open the procedure of raising its status from low to high reaction readiness as it is preparing to command NATO's new rapid reaction force, the so-called spearhead.

Poland seeking submarine-launch cruise missiles

Warsaw (AFP)
March 12, 2015

Poland is seeking advanced cruise missiles to equip three new submarines it wants to acquire by 2030, the NATO member's minister of defense said Thursday.

Tomasz Siemoniak confirmed on Polish public radio that Poland had asked the United States about the availability of Raytheon's Tomahawk cruise missiles.

"Last year, I decided that Polish vessels should be able (to launch cruise missiles) and we are speaking to all those able to deliver this kind of weapon, including the Americans," he said.

Procedures to begin the submarine tender could be launched this year, the minister added.

If Washington greenlights the sale of Tomahawks to Warsaw, they could compete in the Polish tender against France's MdCN missile systems exclusively used to equip submarines made by the country's DCNS group.

Looking east to the bloody conflict gripping Ukraine, Poland has kicked off an unprecedented military spending spree worth some 33.6 billion euros ($42 billion) to overhaul its forces over a decade.

Its long shopping list includes an anti-missile shield and anti-aircraft systems, armored personnel carriers and submarines as well as combat drones.

The plans bring Warsaw in line with NATO's recommended defense spending level of 2.0 percent of gross domestic product.

Seventy multi-role helicopters top the list, a contract worth 2.5 billion euros.

To counter an upped Russian military presence in the Baltic and Black Sea region, NATO is boosting defenses on its eastern flank with a spearhead force of 5,000 troops and command centers in the Baltic states, Bulgaria, Poland and Romania.

Source: Space War.
Link: http://www.spacewar.com/reports/Poland_seeking_submarine-launch_cruise_missiles_999.html.

Macedonia premier denounces opposition leader over tapes

March 15, 2015

SKOPJE, Macedonia (AP) — Macedonia's conservative prime minister has denounced the opposition leader for attempting to "destabilize the country" and working for "foreign service interests" after the latter released taped conversations of what he says is new evidence of the premier's involvement in a real-estate lucrative business.

Hours after Zoran Zaev, leader of the main opposition Social Democratic Union, released the conversations, Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski held a rally attended by thousands of supporters of the ruling center-right VMRO-DPMNE party Sunday to deny wrongdoing and proclaim he won't resign.

Zaev called for the government to step down, claiming corruption at the highest levels, including mismanagement of funds, control of the judiciary and media, spurious criminal prosecutions of opponents and illegal wiretapping of more than 20,000 people, including public officials, religious leaders and foreign ambassadors.

Greece fights German bailout demands with Nazi-era claims

March 22, 2015

BERLIN (AP) — It was 1943 and the Nazis were deporting Greece's Jews to death camps in Poland. Hitler's genocidal accountants reserved a chilling twist: The Jews had to pay their train fare.

The bill for 58,585 Jews sent to Auschwitz and other camps exceeded 2 million Reichsmark — more than 25 million euros ($27 million) in today's money. For decades, this was a forgotten footnote among all of the greater horrors of the Holocaust. Today it is returning to the fore amid the increasingly bitter row between Athens and Berlin over the Greek financial bailout.

Jewish leaders in Thessaloniki, home to Greece's largest Jewish community, say they are considering how to reclaim the rail fares from Germany — with seven decades of interest. "We will study the law and do our best to claim," the community's president, David Saltiel, told The Associated Press.

Such a move would suit the new government in Athens, which is trying to shift the public focus from Greece's current debt crisis to Germany's World War II debts ahead of Monday's first visit to Berlin by Greece's new Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras.

While war reparations have been a staple demand of previous Greek governments, Tsipras' radical left government has made the issue a central part of the bailout negotiations with Germany. The Germans have dismissed such demands, saying compensation issues were settled decades ago in post-war accords.

Billions of euros in rescue loans from other European countries and the International Monetary Fund have saved Greece from bankruptcy since 2010. Germany, the largest contributor to the bailout, has been vocal in pressing Greece to cut back on government spending to bring its finances under control.

But the Greeks point out that, following its wartime defeat, Germany received one of the biggest bailouts in modern history within a decade of laying waste to much of Europe. Greece was among 22 countries that agreed to halve Germany's foreign debt at a 1953 conference in London.

Even some German politicians have called for a change of heart on the reparations issue. They argue that if Germany doesn't confront its World War II guilt, it cannot expect other countries to repay their more recent debts. The point has particular resonance in Germany because, in German, guilt and debt are the same word: Schuld.

Among the claims that Greece, or individual Greeks, might bring against Germany: — Tens, possibly hundreds, of billions of euros (dollars) in present-day money as compensation for destroyed infrastructure and goods, including archaeological treasures, looted by the Nazis from 1941 to 1944.

— Compensation for the estimated 300,000 people who died from famine during the winter of 1941-1942. — Compensation for the slaughter of civilians as reprisals for partisan attacks. One of the most infamous massacres took place in the Greek village of Distomo on June 10, 1944, when Waffen-SS soldiers killed more than 200 women, children and elderly residents. Another in Kalavryta in December 1943 involved German troops killing more than 500 civilians, including virtually all of the town's males aged 14 or over.

— Repayment of some 1.9 billion drachmas, around 50 million euros ($55 million) today, that the Jewish community paid as ransom to occupying authorities in 1942 in return for 10,000 Jewish men being held as slave laborers. The men were released only to be sent to concentration camps the following year.

— Repayment of an interest-free loan of 568 million Reichsmark (7.1 billion euros or $7.7 billion) that the Nazis forced Greece to make to Germany in 1942. — Returning the train fares that the Reichsbahn received for transporting Jews to their deaths. Historians disagree on whether the tickets were bought directly by Jews or paid by a special Nazi fund established with money stolen from Jews. They broadly agree that the money came from Holocaust victims.

Previous efforts to bring claims against Germany have ended in legal quagmires. In 2011 the European Court of Human Rights dismissed a lawsuit brought by four survivors of the Distomo massacre. The judges in Strasbourg, France, concluded that a German court hadn't discriminated against the plaintiffs when it rejected their claim on the basis that states can't be sued by individuals.

Germany insists that the 1942 loan should be considered part of the overall reparations issue. German Chancellor Angela Merkel's spokesman, Steffen Seibert, says that liability has been "comprehensively and conclusively resolved."

But a confidential legal assessment provided to the German parliament concluded that Berlin's liability wasn't so clear-cut. A Munich historian, Hans Guenter Hockerts, says the Greeks shouldn't be confident of winning any of their claims, but are on firmest ground in demanding repayment of the 1942 loan.

Even the Nazis felt bound by terms of that loan and paid back two installments before their occupation of Greece ended. The unpaid 476 million Reichsmark would be equivalent to at least 6 billion euros ($6.5 billion) today.

That figure dwarfs the war reparations actually paid by Germany since 1945, which include: — $25 million in goods shortly after the war; Greece says the proper sum should have been nearer $14 billion.

— 115 million Deutschmarks — equivalent to about $330 million today — as part of a 1960 treaty with Greece meant to compensate victims of Nazi atrocities, including Greek Jews. — 13.5 million euros (about $15 million) paid to former slave laborers from a fund established in 2000 by German companies and the government.

— 1 million euros ($1.1 million) paid annually for a "German-Greek future foundation" meant to fund remembrance and historical research projects. Gesine Schwan, who twice ran for president as the candidate of Germany's center-left Social Democrats, says the government's stance on new reparations payments is damaging Germany's image in Europe.

"It's embarrassing if rich Germany demands that poor Greece ... pay back debt," Schwan wrote in a newspaper column, "but isn't prepared even to discuss repayment of a forced loan that Nazi Germany took from Greece during the war."

Associated Press reporter Costas Kantouris in Thessaloniki, Greece, contributed to this report.

Vote blunts rise of France's far-right National Front

March 23, 2015

PARIS (AP) — France's governing Socialists never expected to do well in Sunday's first-round local elections, and their strategy worked just as planned: Their conservative rivals took first place.

Before the elections for 2,000 local councils, the Socialists urged people to vote, hoping that turnout would blunt the rise of Marine Le Pen's far right National Front, even if it meant Nicolas Sarkozy's conservative UMP would be the victor.

Initial projections from polling agencies gave the UMP party 31 percent of the vote compared with 24.5 percent for the National Front and 19.7 percent for the Socialists and their allies. Turnout was 51 percent, compared with about 45 percent in similar elections in 2011.

With little air of a man in third place, Prime Minister Manuel Valls was the first to praise the far right party's defeat. "This evening, the extreme right, even it is too high, is not at the forefront of French politics," Valls said. "When we mobilize the French, it works."

Le Pen was nowhere on the ballots themselves, but her National Front is trying to build a grassroots army of local officials to buttress her presidential ambitions in 2017. France's council elections are in two rounds, so victory Sunday determines which candidates can contest a second vote March 29.

The Socialists, which currently control the majority of the councils, are deeply unpopular after the government's failure to turn around France's economy. Both they and the UMP are torn by infighting, leaving the National Front something of an open field for the first round.

But both the Socialists and UMP, normally rivals, have issued dire warnings about France's future under a resurgent National Front, which is opposed to immigration, the perceived "Islamization" of France, and the European Union. Le Pen has tapped disillusionment with a stagnant economy and transformed the party from a pariah under her father, party co-founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, into one of France's most popular political forces.

Jockeying ahead of the second round started moments after the first-round results came in. Valls essentially called for voters to choose anyone running against a National Front candidate. Sarkozy, who like Marine Le Pen is eyeing the 2017 presidential race for a comeback, told supporters to abstain in the second round if a UMP candidate wasn't running.

And Le Pen demanded Valls' resignation for "trying to lead a campaign against the people, a filthy and violent campaign that stigmatized millions of French voters." One outcome is certain: Half of those elected will be women.

Instead of voting for individual candidates, the ballots contain tickets — one man, one woman — in order to overcome years of failed efforts to get more women into government. Currently, only 16 percent of council members are women.