Ukraine’s peace prospects fizzling out as fighting flares up

After a final crackle of gunfire, Avdiivka’s deadly industrial zone fell silent.

Known as the "promzona", this district now makes daily, depressing news in Ukraine, as government troops and Russian-backed militants fight to control an area that adjoins a key regional road and rail junction.

From here, highways head towards Kiev-controlled territory and into the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics (DPR and LNR), which Moscow and the separatists created two years ago in response to Ukraine's pro-western revolution.

Now the tailfins of mortars and tinkling shrapnel cover the pocked tarmac, the motorway barriers are ripped open by shellfire, and most of the cars that race past carry camouflage-clad gunmen.

The sudden lull in fire coincided with the arrival of a fleet of white SUVs, however, which brought civilian monitors from Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) to check reports of deadly overnight fighting.

OSCE team

As dark smoke rose from the promzona, the unarmed OSCE team walked down 600m of deserted road that divides the separatist-held town of Yasynuvata from Ukrainian positions in Avdiivka.

Then Eduard Basurin, a senior rebel military official, arrived to monitor the monitors.

“The fighting goes like a wave, and it’s heading up again,” he said.

“Here, it’s constant now.”

Avdiivka is a focal point for Ukraine’s bloodiest clashes this year, which have seen at least 15 government soldiers killed in the last 10 days.

The militants have also suffered losses, including three fighters reportedly killed in the promzona in the hours before the OSCE arrived.

Such is the "ceasefire" agreed in February 2015, as part a deal aimed at ending the war, devolving some powers to Donetsk and Luhansk, holding local elections there and restoring Ukraine's control over its border with Russia.

But the current surge in bloodshed has only confirmed that the so-called Minsk agreement is unlikely to resolve this conflict, which has killed almost 10,000 people, injured 20,000 and driven two million from their homes.

Border closure

The militants demand a full amnesty and more power than

Kiev

is ready to give, while Ukraine wants local elections to be held in the east only once the Russian border is closed, and an armed OSCE mission is deployed to ensure voters’ safety.

The separatists receive military and other help from Moscow, which resents Kiev’s westward pivot and is intent on eastern Ukraine remaining a pro-Russian region through which it can influence the whole country’s future.

"We are a young entity, an unrecognised country that needs to take advice when making decisions," said Denis Pushilin, a former casino croupier and pyramid-scheme salesman who is now the speaker of the DNR's parliament.

“It’s perfectly normal that we speak to Russia.

“Who should we speak to – the United States? Kiev probably talks to them,” he said in his office in Donetsk.

Pushilin called for Ukraine to become a confederation of regions with broad autonomy – exactly the kind of system that Kiev fears Russia would exploit to destabilise the country and derail its integration with the West.

“Becoming a confederation is the only way Ukraine can remain on the map of the world,” Pushilin said, claiming other regions would in time also break with Kiev.

DNR and LNR now comprise less than half of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, but rebel officials want to control all of them.

“We’d like to solve that question politically,” Basurin said. “The other method would result in many victims and tragedies.”

The militants also retain hopes of expanding into other largely Russian-speaking areas of eastern and southern Ukraine – territory known as Novorossiya (“New Russia”) under the tsars.

Pushilin explained that DNR and LNR were not seeking unification with Russia now "because that would mean renouncing the rest of Donetsk and Luhansk regions . . . and also Kharkiv, Odessa and Kherson, where our people cannot openly express their position and are political hostages."

He rejected the notion of armed OSCE monitors, and DNR leader Alexander Zakharchenko declared: "I will shoot anyone with a weapon, so they don't even think of coming here with a gun."

Such threats are not taken lightly by the OSCE, which now has 701 international monitors in Ukraine, including 12 from Ireland.

Fired upon

During his visit to the Yasynuvata-Avdiivka frontline, deputy chief monitor

Alexander Hug

and his team came under fire from an unknown direction and were forced to take cover for half an hour.

On the same day, an OSCE drone was shot down over separatist-held territory, after spotting an advanced “Strela” surface-to-air missile system below.

Hug said government and separatist forces had failed to remove artillery from frontline areas, and had crept into buffer zones that previously had kept them apart, sparking clashes and raising the risk of a major escalation.

"All the elements are in place. The positions are there, the guns are there and heavy weapons are still in the security zone," Hug told The Irish Times in Donetsk.

“There have been many ceasefire violations. The risks must be reduced.”

It is hard to see any common ground between the sides, however: as the rest of Ukraine demands more democracy and less corruption, and smashes its Soviet monuments and old ties with Russia, DNR and LNR crave only the Kremlin’s embrace.

"Look at this," Basurin said as he looked towards battle-scarred Avdiivka, the profile of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin glinting from a badge on his chest.

“This is what democracy has done.”