'Russian Soldier Kills Ukrainian Officer'

Ukraine Unrest Could Spark Russian Invasion

Updated: 4:43pm UK, Monday 07 April 2014

By Sam Kiley, Foreign Affairs Editor

A few dozen men in balaclavas declare themselves in the vanguard of an independent republic, demand a referendum on unification with Russia, and throw up the colours of Moscow over municipal buildings.

This was the declaration of a Potemkin state, a pretend entity.

But it is just the sort of incident that could set off an uncontrollable chain reaction.

And it is no coincidence that the stunt in Donetsk was repeated in the other Russian-language dominated Ukrainian Oblasts (provinces) of Kharkiv and Luhansk.

These were the regions toured by Catherine the Great in 1787 on her way to inspect the New Russia which extended into the Crimea which her armies captured from the Ottoman Empire.

Grigory Potemkin, the empress's governor of the new region, is said to have built fake villages, like film sets, and peopled them with soldiers in peasant garb, to demonstrate the rapid reconstruction of the war ravaged landscape as Catherine passed by.

Now hardliners, inspired and cajoled by the Kremlin's own propaganda machine, appear bent on apparently falsifying claims of ethnic suffering and reinforcing them with provocative claims of nationhood for the oblasts of Ukraine's east.             

"An anti-Ukrainian plan is being put into operation ... under which foreign troops will cross the border and seize the territory of the country," Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseny Yatseniuk told a cabinet meeting in Kiev.

"We will not allow this."

In Donetsk, home base of deposed pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych, about 120 pro-Moscow activists calling themselves the "Republican People's Soviet of Donetsk" seized the chamber of the regional parliament.

Similar moves have happened before.

They are often driven by Cossacks, members of a militaristic ethnic group which straddles the borders between the two countries and whose Russian leaders have already told Sky News they would intervene in Ukraine to "protect our brothers".

An unidentified bearded man read out "the act of the proclamation of an independent state, Donetsk People's Republic" in front of a Russian flag.

"In the event of aggressive action from the illegitimate Kiev authorities, we will appeal to the Russian Federation to bring in a peacekeeping contingent," said the proclamation.

In early March, Vladimir Putin, the Russian President, re-affirmed a standing obligation set by the Duma, that Russia should intervene to protect ethnic Russians allegedly facing persecution in other nations.

The "obligation" was exercised in South Ossetia and Abkhazia - breakaway Georgian republics - six years ago.

The Kremlin has been bombarding Russian media with allegations of widespread attacks against Russian speaking Ukrainians and even, erroneously, adding that hundreds of thousands have been fleeing ethnic pogroms into Moscow's territory.

This is nonsense of course.

But as Potemkin demonstrated, a lie can be credible if told with enough conviction.

The danger in Ukraine's east is that the central government may eventually tire of the hooded bands of armed men claiming government buildings for Mother Russia and send in its own forces to take them back.

Russian tanks and artillery are poised close to Ukraine's borders.

Moscow's Black Sea Fleet, based in Sevastopol in the newly annexed Crimea, has unlimited reign over the Ukrainian coastline.

There is now a very tense standoff in Luhansk, where police have sealed off roads and where separatists are reported to have seized weapons from a government armoury.

A sudden bout of violence, especially one that claims Russian-speaking lives, could be the trigger for a wider invasion ordered by the Kremlin.

More likely, though, is that the continuous destabilisation of Ukraine fits more neatly into Russia's plans for a federalised neighbour from which the industrialised east will continue to lean heavily towards Moscow and emerge as a counter balance to western Ukraine's increasingly pro-European tilt.

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