08/27/14 – Jason Ditz – The Scott Horton Show

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Next up is the great Jason Ditz from news.antiwar.com.
He writes up everything important that happens and what you really need to know about it all day, every damn day, at news.antiwar.com.
You got to read each and every last bit of it.
That's what I say.
Hey, welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm doing good, Scott.
How are you?
Good, good.
Happy to have you back here.
Now, so let's talk about what we know and what we don't know about what is going on in Ukraine right now, according to Vox.
And they only do facts, no context.
They say, let's be clear, Russia is invading Ukraine right now.
They're just not calling it that.
So is that right?
Well, it seems to be right that 10 Russian troops strayed across the border yesterday.
But I don't know that 10 constitutes an invasion.
It sounds like they were only a few yards across the unmarked border in one of the areas in between the cities, and they got picked up by Ukrainian border patrol.
I mean, certainly Ukrainian officials are trying to make this out as an invasion and some sort of special operations mission that the Russians are trying to carry out behind their back.
But to me, 10 people does not an invasion make.
Well, you know, I saw them joking yesterday on Twitter saying, oh, yeah, well, I guess.
Would you believe my GPS broke or whatever?
How could they possibly accidentally cross the border?
They must have been up to something no good.
Well, I mean, a lot of borders in the world are like this.
They're just not marked.
I mean, some borders are very, very obvious.
I mean, the U.S.-Mexico border, it would be awful difficult to stray across that border in most parts without knowing it.
But the Ukraine-Russian border, which wasn't even a border during the Soviet era, I mean, there are checkpoints along the roads, but if you're in between those roads and not within visual sight of any roads, you're not going to see any identifying marks saying that you're at the border.
So it really would be pretty easy if you're patrolling that border to accidentally stray across one side or the other without even knowing it.
Yeah, it's a real strange situation there.
So I guess what can you tell us about the fighting recently in the breakaway provinces there?
I mean, even tell us what you don't know, what the sides claim and what turns out to not be provable or any kind of context you can give us to what's really going on.
What we don't know is a lot more than what we do know about the fighting, because so many of these claims, particularly from the Ukrainian government, turn out to just be nonsense.
I mean, they appear to have taken part of Luhansk, they continue to shell Donetsk, although there's been some counter-offenses and some reports by the rebels that they've made some gains fighting back against the military.
Exactly where it stands, I don't think anybody really knows.
And the official statements from both sides are always pretty dubious.
Right.
Yeah, you know, I'm watching this thing at the New York Times right now out of the corner of my eye where this guy supposedly is, you know, this is supposedly a Russian admitting that, well, he said he didn't know when he crossed the border, but he knew that was the plan.
But for all the nonsense that's come out of Kiev, I don't even know if this is really a Russian soldier or what, you know?
I don't know, they have a dog tag, but I wouldn't know how to compare a Russian versus Ukrainian dog tag.
Right, and who's to say it's his dog tag when he's making statements?
I mean, we saw not that long ago Ukraine claiming to have destroyed an entire column of armored Russian vehicles inside the Ukraine that had invaded.
It was sort of a curious story at the time because they were touting this, but they didn't say exactly where it was and they provided no pictures or anything.
And after a few days of bragging about this destruction of this phantom column, which Russia said never happened, Ukraine finally dropped the story too and even claimed that they never said that.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's the thing about, you know, Eric was telling me that really everything we hear from Rasmussen, Anders Fogg, Rasmussen, they're the head of NATO, that really all he does is just repeat whatever the Kiev government says.
So the New York Times headline might read, NATO says Russia invades Ukraine, but then it turns out that NATO is just, you know, parroting a proven obvious liar.
I mean, for example, like you're saying about the attacks on the Russian columns that never happened, that they claimed over and over again.
They said, yeah, we obliterated them with artillery overnight.
I mean, you knew they were lying right there.
How'd you hit them at night with artillery and you got every last vehicle, huh?
Right.
And you're talking 50 plus year old Soviet artillery, which isn't known for its incredible accuracy.
The idea that they could wipe out an entire armored column with no resistance was laughable in the first place.
And the fact that they never showed pictures and eventually dropped the story entirely reflects how crazy a lot of the stories coming out of Ukraine right now are.
I mean, even the U.S. State Department, which for a long time has taken whatever Ukraine says at face value and reported it as unquestionable fact, including while Russia was complaining about the 1 million people displaced in the East, repeating the Ukrainian government's claim that they think a lot of those people are just visiting family.
Even the State Department is now, you know, when that column story came out, the U.S. first reported it, but then the State Department, when they were asked about it, said they couldn't really confirm that it happened.
So I think there's an increasing understanding that a lot of what Ukraine says is just nonsense and that echoing it is going to be embarrassing a few days down the road when it turns out not to be true.
Well, and you know, it's really a horrible thing that NATO is not just a treaty, a system.
It's its own centralized bureaucracy with its own institutional reasons for trying to expand all the time.
And I mean, this is almost unbelievable to me that in the middle of this crisis, the Guardian headline reads, NATO plans East European bases to counter Russia.
And and they're talking about putting them in the Baltic states.
And I don't know, I guess eventually Belarus, they think they can get away with it.
Maybe that's, you know, in another couple of years.
Well, and Poland has been pushing pretty heavily for this, not so much because there's a serious military threat to Poland because there's not, but rather because Poland assumed there would be a substantial foreign military presence there when they joined NATO.
They figured it would get them a lot of foreign aid.
And it really hasn't panned out that way.
So they're really pushing hard on this, this Ukraine crisis as an excuse, trying to come up with the idea that all of a sudden Russian tanks are going to start pouring into Central Europe and that they want, they want to have military bases in Poland to prevent that.
All right.
I'm sorry.
Hold it right there, Jason.
We've got to take this break.
We'll be right back.
Jason Ditz, news.antiwar.com.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with Jason Ditz from news.antiwar.com, news.antiwar.com about the situation in Ukraine.
And well, one of these headlines here from the bottom of the page, Jason, is about the talks going on that Poroshenko and Putin are talking personally, apparently directly with each other.
Can you fill us in on that, how long this has been going on and whether there's any reason to be optimistic that they can have some kind of ceasefire in the near term?
Well, it started yesterday and they're meeting in Belarus.
Certainly the goal for the talks was to negotiate some sort of ceasefire.
But right now, it's not really clear if Poroshenko even wants a ceasefire.
Ukraine's kind of made a lot of the idea that they're winning this war, and they don't seem to want any ceasefire that doesn't include unilateral surrender by the other side.
So, I'm not all that optimistic that they're going to come up with a deal, especially now that the 10 Russian troops that they captured is the big headline in Ukraine.
I think that'll probably be the main focus of the talks is trying to secure their release.
Well, and again, assuming that that's even true, but I guess, are the Russians disputing it?
No, no, and the Russian defense ministry issued a statement confirming that some of their troops strayed across the border by mistake.
Well, that one guy's going to be in trouble, because whatever happened to name, rank, and serial number?
He's going on and on about it.
I'm assuming he's one of the 10 again, but it would be the first time the Kiev government told the truth about something, but there's a first for everything.
Well, so now, if that is putting the kibosh on the peace efforts, then what about the opposite of that?
Has Putin, I guess he's too smart to have really drawn a red line out loud and dared the Kiev government to cross it, but I mean, is the Western side confident that he's just going to sit there and let Donetsk and Luhansk eventually be crushed?
Well, the Western side has been confident for months that he wasn't going to do that and has been predicting an imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine pretty much on a weekly basis since June, but it really hasn't happened.
And even though there's constant talk of buildups along the border, there really isn't any sign that Russia is going to be able to do that.
There really isn't any sign that Russia is going to go in there.
I don't think Russia wants that because Donetsk and Luhansk are fairly unappealing cities.
I mean, they're sort of the equivalent of the US Rust Belt.
There's a lot of steel manufacturing and things like that that really haven't been very profitable for Ukraine and would be even less profitable in Russia, as a substantial steel industry.
Going in there to try to stop this would probably mean eventually annexing that region, and I don't think Russia wants it.
It's too poor and it's not of any real value to them.
Yeah.
Well, and as far as the refugees go, they've been flowing by the hundreds of thousands all this time, so I guess that's...
They haven't announced it, but it looks like that's really the policy is.
Russia can easily absorb a million refugees.
I mean, I guess not easily, but there's a shortage of room in Russia to do that, and most of these people are ethnic Russians, so...
Well, and that's the message that the people of the East are getting from Russia, right?
Is that we're not coming to help you.
If you want to run, you can run, but we're not coming.
Is that right?
Well, they've been sort of getting a mixed message.
Early on, Russia was very much public about, we stand with the people of eastern Ukraine.
We're not going to allow violence against ethnic Russians anywhere in the world, and as time's gone on and Ukraine has been so reluctant to accept any sort of ceasefire deal, they've sort of backed off on that, and now they're kind of mum on what their intentions are, but I think their lack of action speaks a lot louder than anything else, and it's pretty clear that they're not going to intervene militarily.
Well, now, so I think I knew this about a week ago, that, correct me if I'm wrong, Jason, is this right, that basically the town in Donetsk, the government buildings and that kind of thing, have been taken by the Kiev government, but now they're working on Luhansk?
Is that right, with the siege there?
Well, I'm not really sure about that.
Certainly, the Kiev government had taken parts of Donetsk, they've taken, they've held the airport, they've taken some of the government buildings.
I'm not sure if they hold that entire district or not.
They've been pretty heavily shelling the residential areas around that district.
Luhansk does seem to be the focus, though, because that's closer to the Russian border, that's when Russia sent humanitarian aid in last week, that was the route through which it came in was by way of Luhansk.
Right.
And then, so what do we know about casualties?
Is anybody keeping count, the Organization for Cooperation and Security in Europe?
Not reliable counts.
We've had figures in the few thousands, but because of the sort of fog of war that's descended over Eastern Ukraine, which, I mean, we're all familiar with how hard it is to get reliable casualties out of places like Iraq and Syria, but that coupled with Ukraine's sometimes crazy proclamations that turn out to not be true, we really don't have any good casualty figures.
There have been times where Ukraine's claimed to have killed five or 600 rebels in an afternoon, and in places that it doesn't seem plausible they would have even had that many rebels.
So, we really don't have good figures at all.
And then, it was a pretty big deal, I thought, that the Pentagon announced that, you know, criticism that the Kiev government was attacking the Eastern, you know, separatist regions, I guess you could call them, with ballistic missiles with, I forget, was it 500, 1,000 pound, obviously conventional warheads, but that these are, you know, basically pretty indiscriminate, like sodomitous scuds kind of thing.
Right.
And it was sort of weird because the Pentagon made that statement, but a lot of the private comments out of defense officials were that they weren't going to offer any particular details on what those ballistic missiles were targeting, exactly where they were hitting, what they were doing, because Ukraine is the good guys.
And that's, I mean, it's a paraphrase, but that was basically the quote they were giving to places like the Washington Post, that they didn't want to make Ukraine's military out to be portrayed in negative light.
Yeah.
I wonder why they even said anything publicly about it at all.
Yeah.
So, sometimes when they talk about things, it's kind of puzzling why it gets released in the first place when they don't expect to provide any details at all.
Yeah.
And it's completely contrary to the rest of what they're up to.
But, anyway.
All right.
Well, thanks so much for your time on the show again, Jason, filling us in on this mess.
Sure.
Thanks for having me.
Sure.
Appreciate it.
That's Jason Ditz, everybody.
News.antiwar.com.
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