Urgent Appeal from Igor Strelkov
Summer56, Jun 16 2014 (Russian)
Gleb Bazov, Jun 16 2014 (English)
The enemy is engaged in a massive bombardment of Kramatorsk, using howitzers positioned on Mount Karachun and in the vicinity of the water purification plant between Slavyansk and Kramatorsk, where they have a strongpoint. There are numerous casualties and fires in the city. They are bombarding both the industrial sector and the residential neighbourhoods. The population is in a state of panic. Kramatorsk has never experienced such massive artillery shelling before. What is more, militia targets have been spared: the strikes are not against them. Why, you ask? The answer is elementary: in order to force tens of thousands of refugees to flood into Russia. Genocide and ethnic cleansing in their purest form. I have decided to offer up to universal review a text from my personal correspondence (as appropriately amended). I ask that you distribute it. It is no longer possible to keep silent, hoping that someone on the mainland comes to his senses.
As I have become accustomed to anticipate events several steps ahead, I am in a state of utter prostration. I anticipated the observable destruction of the economy and the population as long as a month and a half ago, and in order to avoid it, I called then for a peacekeeping intervention. It is now too late: peacekeepers will not be able to intervene without a battle. Now I am calling for the provision of immediate and large-scale military assistance. But no assistance has come. In a week or two, and possibly earlier, a substantial part of the military detachments of DPR and LPR may be completely routed. The reason is the insurmountable ratio in heavy weaponry. And when Donetsk and Lugansk are completely blockaded and surrounded, like Slavyansk, the following question will rear its head: either Russia will commit to intervention with full force (an intervention the Ukies are openly provoking), or Russia will completely abandon Novorossiya (a possibility they are dearly hoping for). And I am not at all sure that this dilemma will be resolved via the first option. More likely than not, it will be the second.
We can burn a hundred APCs and kill five thousand troops, but the overall balance of forces will hardly change. Well, for example, the ratio will become 1 to 14 instead of 1 to 15. Every day we are forced to relinquish another large settlement, because we have neither the men nor the guns to defend them. At the same time, we have no ability to retake any of them, because we have nothing to match the Ukies’ heavy weaponry. All we can do is engage them in defence more or less successfully. So what reason is there for optimism? From our own minor successes? They are purely tactical. And meanwhile, we have long ago started to lose the strategic engagement. I see open sabotage in the approach taken by Russian officials at the highest level in relation to Novorossiya. It shows in everything. I believe that it is fully conscious. Otherwise, there can be no explanation for the fact that DPR and LPR have yet to be recognized even de facto, and that they receive no supplies of the weapons and equipment they so badly need. Yes, Putin has effectively disavowed (and I wonder, at whose suggestion?) his pledges of standing ready to protect the Russian civilian population of Donbass. No alternative whatsoever has been proposed.
If there is no military aid, the military defeat of DPR and LPR is inevitable. Whether it comes a week earlier or a month later does not matter. The enemy will cut us off from the border and will methodically suffocate us, “cleansing” the territory in the process, and in one go forcing out into Russia one or two million utterly deprived and embittered refugees. I trust the consequences for the economy and the social sphere are obvious. And then, groups of grateful oligarchs will come to Putin with sorrowful faces and offer as their spokesperson the great schemer Surkov, who will explain in a quiet and insinuating voice:
We did everything that we could, but these … these good-for-nothing Donetsk bandits themselves failed it all themselves, and we can give them no help without risking nuclear war … They punished themselves … It is not worth it to take a risk … We need to persevere … We will make everything right in time … It is possible to negotiate with Poroshenko … This is a tactical retreat … We are not ready to go to war … After all, we took Crimea, didn’t we?
And so on and suchlike. What this will mean for our company, I know already. Most of us will perish, but that is not the issue. This uprising and all the victims will have been in vain, and the “Russian Spring” will be eliminated at the root by the “Ukrainian Freeze.” And the next war, the war that we will not witness, will be on Russia’s territory. Right after the “Moscow Maidan”, of course.