[LINK] "A Cease-fire Takes Hold in Ukraine as Territorial Questions Linger"

[rfmcdonald]

While there are flamewars in the comments, Eve Conant's National Geographic article takes a good look at the consequences of the ceasefire. With maps and historical references aplenty, she considers whether or not the east might split.

I would note that the territory controlled by the Novorossiyan separatists in eastern Ukraine is not even most of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts. Rather, the territory controlled only encompasses the major urban areas, places with dense Russian populations close to the border. Her prediction that southern Ukraine--specifically, the coastline on the northern shore of the Sea of Azov, including the city of Mariupol'--might come under threat as Russia seeks a land connection to Crimea is one that is frighteningly plausible to me.

A cease-fire has been called in embattled Ukraine, one that many world leaders are skeptical will last. Yet even as the fighting that had flared along Ukraine's strategic southeastern coast Thursday fell silent in the hours after the cease-fire was announced, larger questions about the territory of Ukraine remain, as does a vow from separatists to split from Ukraine entirely.

The details of the cease-fire, signed in Minsk by negotiators representing the Ukrainian government, the separatists, Russia, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, include amnesty for fighters who disarm and have not committed serious crimes, the disbanding of militias, the release of hostages, and a ten-kilometer buffer zone to be created along the Russian-Ukrainian border, according to news reports. The deal states that power would be decentralized—with an appointed governor to be granted control of provinces—and also includes provisions regarding the protection of the Russian language and early elections.

But realities on the ground may be different, Russian news agencies report. Igor Plotnitsky, one of the rebel leaders of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People's Republic, says, "The cease-fire does not mean a shift from our course of breaking away from Ukraine. This is a compulsory measure."

The agreement, says experts, already signals Ukraine's weakness and potential loss of territory.

"This is definitely a loss for Ukraine," says Faith Hillis, assistant professor of Russian history at the University of Chicago and author of Children of Rus': Right-Bank Ukraine and the Invention of a Russian Nation. She says the first question is whether the cease-fire will hold, but "this looks as if Ukraine will lose parts of the east, whether through a federalization scheme or some sort of autonomy reached for the region. Parts of Ukraine could end up as a 'frozen conflict.' " If so, they would join several other post-Soviet regions with unresolved political status, like South Ossetia, Abkhazia, or Transdniestria, the breakaway state located between the Dniester River and Moldova's eastern border with Ukraine.

Recent pro-Russian territorial gains included strategic territory that could hasten the forging of a land bridge to the geographically isolated Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula that Russia annexed in the hastily called referendum last March, all the while occupying prized coastline along the way. The most recent fighting was centered around the southeastern port city of Mariupol on the Sea of Azov, with its potential oil and gas reserves. In nearby Novoazovsk, flags of the so-called Novorossiya (New Russia) Army were already flying.