New Meaning for an old Term
Just the next day after signing of a treaty, Kiev's authorities announced the second part of ATO - counter terrorist operation. As well as most people, I thought that "ATO" means that a group of terrorists are attacking peaceful citizens and Special Forces should protect their lives. Certainly, that's very bad when someone well-armed is launching threats against unarmed people, it's bad when he takes away their rights and freedom. But in the Ukrainian situation it seems somebody swapped their places. And now Ukrainian "ATO" is the battle between regular citizens and "military protectors of their lives". And some people, whose lives should be defended by this operation, were already killed by their “defenders”. It sounds like a bad joke and so it is. However, the issue is much deeper. This ATO is being carried out by the newly formed dubious "National guard" and the illegally armed gang called "Right Sector" with the Army’s support. One of authorities - Mr. Kolomoysky - sets the bounty for our heads. Government executive of Dnepropetrovsk is going to pay money for captured or killed "terrorists"! This guy is an oligarch, not minister or colonel. But he has a "small army" - squadron Dnipro - which is taking place in this ATO. There are a lot of rumors about this army (paramilitary group). Some say that it consists of a fringe group of people, another ones decide that hired guns are soldiers of fortune. Who knows? The only thing I can say for sure is that people don't trust them. And the commander of all these "counter terror forces" is Mr. Turchinov, the man who came to power in a very questionable way. Do you really think this weird company is going to bring peace to us?
Okay, let's try to imagine, they want to keep peace and they are ready for dialog. But something went wrong and they didn't hear our demands. Terrible misunderstanding? I don't think so. They had a chance to maintain a conversation, but they prefer to imprison Pavel Gubarev - one of South-East leaders, instead of keeping open communication. They prefer to allow the Right Sector's thugs to attack and beat up Oleg Tsarev, one of the candidates to President, in Kiev just because he spoke in behalf of South-East. How can we keep the dialog when they come to force their rules? They said: "we're open for discussing and solving the problems". Discussing with whom? These days there are no men who can present our point of view in the government or parliament. Additionally we cannot see anyone in that government who is open to real dialog.
So we have a strange situation: we saw the "anti-terror" force which cannot be trusted by the population, then we saw their commanders which people call junta and it is popularly believed that they pay no heed to the opinions of the general populace. Then we can see their actions... As a result we have some innocent unarmed civilian deaths, broken buildings and roads, protester's roadblocks robbed by soldiers and a lot of people arrested only for their political views. And after all they call us "terrorists" and they call people shooting us "our saviors". O tempora, o mores!
J.V.