126 - How to Stop Wars Without End: Ukraine, Tigray, and Central Africa
Ukraine
Ukraine repairs its electricity transformers and sub-stations. Putin’s Russia bombs them anew, plunging the same cities and the same suffering peoples into darkness amid the creeping cold of early winter. If only we could stop the missile bombardments and the kamikaze drone attacks, Ukrainians say, we could (with recent Western assistance) restore much of the lost power. (Russia is cleverly hitting decentralized nodes essential to the overall system, not the much harder to disable generating plants themselves.) The West needs to ready a powerful response.
The problem therefore is how to unleash Ukraine – how to provide and then enable the kinds of armaments that could take out sea-borne missile launching sites in the Black Sea and the on-land pads in Russia itself, and how to destroy drone assembly areas in the Crimea. Washington and NATO together could, of course, demand that Russia cease committing such war criminalized acts against innocent civilians, and against the civilian-focused infrastructure of Ukraine. Obtaining no satisfaction from their imperative demarche, the West could then legitimately attack.
Presumably those obvious options are being stayed by fears of provoking a wider and a potentially nuclear conflagration. But the longer we permit Putin to assault Ukrainian civilians with impunity (as we have written here several times already), the more he and his generals redouble their pulverizing of inner Ukraine. Russia is not winning on the ground and on the several battlefields, but it is gaining negotiating leverage by being allowed at will to cripple Ukraine’s electrical, heating, and water supplies. Supplying much needed air defense batteries is certainly necessary and will help, but Ukraine desperately needs credible offensive capability as well.
It is long past time for the West to act. Temporizing and hoping that Russia will run out of Iranian drones (and maybe missiles) and Russian and North Korean missiles is unlikely to keep Ukraine whole and its people warm. Moreover, leaving Putin unchallenged and unchecked only encourages more Russian intransigence. Shall the West collectively craft a suitable and effective response, daring Putin to go nuclear by sharpening our retaliatory armaments?
Morale in Ukraine, aroused and sustained by brave combat deeds and the amazingly gifted leadership of President Volodymyr Zelensky, will be elevated in the face of even more suffering if Ukrainians know that Putin is finally being held accountable. Can there be a better moral case for outright intervention on the part of Europe and the United States?
Ethiopia
Civilian and military deaths and casualties have been even greater, proportionally, in Tigray, Ethiopia’s northernmost province. Since a cease fire was brokered by the African Union in a meeting last month in South Africa, aid convoys have been able for the first time in two years to travel from Addis Ababa, the national capital, to Mekele and other mostly destroyed towns in Tigray. But the supposed truce is badly being breached by rogue state Eritrea. Stopping Eritrea is imperative.
The World Food Program reported last week that it had managed to deliver 2,400 metric tons of food and 100,000 liters of fuel into Tigray since Nov. 15. But Some United Nations vehicles have encountered difficulties in accessing more remote areas due to the security situation and roadblocks managed by Ethiopian troops.
Ethiopian army forces have stopped attacking Tigray, where local combatants have pledged to disarm. But Eritrea, earlier allied with Ethiopia to battle Tigray, and with many long-harbored anti-Tigrayan resentments of its own, has resumed its own assault over the international border into Tigray. In recent weeks, Eritrean forces killed 111 people, according to an internal report compiled between Nov. 17 and Nov. 23 by the Tigray regional government’s Emergency Coordination Center. The regional authority also reported that 103 people had been severely injured in areas of Tigray still illegally controlled by Eritrea, while 241 houses were destroyed. More than 100 camps for people displaced by the ongoing fighting were operating in the vicinity of the historical city of Adigrat, well within Tigray and north of Mekele.
Farther west, hundreds of civilians in late October were taken from their homes and killed by Eritrean troops in the countryside surrounding Adwa, another renowned heritage site about 40 kilometers (25 miles) from the border with Eritrea.
“There are reports of extra-judicial killing of civilians, injuries, kidnapping, disappearances, destruction of houses and widespread looting by the occupying forces,” a Tigrayan source reported.
According to Tigray, its forces “are doing everything to honor their part” of the peace deal but “Eritrean forces are still on a rampage, killing children and women at will, ransacking, destroying and looting property.”
Just as the war in Ukraine is making life miserable for the civilians who certainly never reckoned on such unnecessary devastation once their sisters and brothers had repulsed the first forays of Russian might, so signing a truce favorable to Ethiopia should have protected Tigrayans from renewed and totally unprovoked Eritrean attempts to reduce Tigrayan freedom and hegemony. The African Union now needs to compel Eritrea to respect the Tigrayan peace deal even though Eritrea, the ultimate pariah, is a renegade state ruled by a bitter despot.
The Central African Republic
Russian mercenaries who were invited to the Central African Republic are the cause and focus of conflict there, just as they are in and around beleaguered Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine.
The Wagner Group, owned and led by one of Putin’s closest and most dangerous allies, has supplied mostly Russian soldiers of fortune to Central Africa ostensibly to protect its president from harm and to separate warring Muslim (the Séléka) and Christian (anti-Balaka) fighting forces. But its members have specialized in looting gold, diamonds, ivory, and other resources from the lamentably poor nation, and harming civilians who object to being bullied and harassed.
In the Central African Republic, Wagner fighters ride around Bangui, the capital, in unmarked military vehicles and guard the country’s mines. They have helped to hold off armed rebel groups and to keep President Faustin-Archange Touadéra in power. But their presence hardly contributes to local stability and peace. Indeed, last week the Wagnerites were targets of air attacks. Their encampment near Bossangoa was bombed from the air. Chad, which backs the Séléka, is suspected of being behind the assault, but no one really knows. And security in one more Russian-affected corner of the globe is compromised.
Everything Putin’s Russia touches is afflicted with corruption and deceit.
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