In mid-April, Tim Judah, highly regarded historian of the post-Yugoslavia wars of secession, toured Ukraine for the New York Review of Books. His essay 'Ukraine: the Phony War?' just came out in the 22 May NYRB issue. It is hauntingly prophetic. He predicted things were about to go very badly in Ukraine:
This has been a time when normal life continues while men arm themselves and begin to prepare for combat. It is that strange pre-war moment when the possible future overlaps with the present. Rebels make Molotov cocktails a stone's throw from roadside shops selling garden gnomes. A halted Ukrainian army convoy is surrounded by locals who mill around chatting to the soldiers ...
As men in beaten-up cars race up country roads past towering grain silos, as groups gather to demand referendums, as people tell me that they don't believe that war is coming and that Russians and Ukrainians are brothers, I remember the same brave talk, the same euphoria, and the same delusions before the Yugoslavs tipped their country into catastrophe in the 1990s. Ukraine is not like that Yugoslavia, although the atmosphere in the east is a horribly similar combination of resentment and disbelief.
Just two weeks later, Ukraine races towards civil war. In the pro-Russian, Russian-speaking eastern provinces — the famous Donbas heavy industrial region, with its hero cities of the Soviet Union like Donetsk — the irresolute and panicked new government in Kiev has ordered the Ukrainian Army to retake cities from pro-Russian militia demonstrators who had bloodlessly occupied key government buildings to popular acclaim.
After initial reverses, the Ukrainian Army has orders to use lethal force to regain control of those centres. People look on aghast as Ukrainian soldiers shoot local militiamen, and even unarmed demonstrators:
Local people claim the Ukrainian army shot at unarmed citizens who formed a human chain near a road blockade on the edge of the village of Andreevka, only a few miles from Slavyansk. 'They are killing peaceful people,' said Igor, 29, a farmworker from the village ...
'Where is Russia? Putin stays silent. Russia, Russia, there is no Russia here. Why? We beg Putin to come and save us,' said [a local woman], visibly distraught.
At this rate, it may not be long before Moscow's hand is forced, as it was in Georgia, into massive and overwhelming armed intervention.
The Washington Post reported on 4 May that the Kremlin says it is weighing its response to 'thousands' of pleas for help from Ukraine. On 3 May, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov reportedly told US Secretary of State John Kerry that 'the punitive operation in south-eastern Ukraine is putting the country into a fratricidal conflict'.
Moscow news agencies report that Lavrov called on the United States 'to use all its influence to force the Kiev regime protected by it, which has declared a war on its own people, to immediately halt the military action in the south-eastern regions, remove the troops and release protesters'.
I fear Lavrov is right, But it may already be too late to halt the remorseless escalation into bloodshed and dissolution of the fragile Ukrainian state.
The accelerating civil war is not confined to the pro-Russian far eastern parts of Ukraine. In the south, in the historic Black Sea city of Odessa, near Ukraine's Western border, there was murderous civil violence over the weekend. In this highly cultured, ethnically complex city (with 62 per cent Ukrainians, 29 per cent Russians, and various Balkan and Jewish communities), a group of peaceful pro-Russian demonstrators barricaded themselves in a city building. Pro-Kiev contra-demonstrators set the building on fire. Dozens were burnt or suffocated.
And so the madness grows. There cannot be much left now of Ukraine's fragile and uneasily asserted national identity. As happened in Ireland in 1919, as in Spain in 1936, as in former Yugoslavia in the 1990s:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
(W. B. Yeats, 'The second coming', 1919)
Yet I had not expected civil society to deteriorate so quickly in Ukraine, in civilised 21st century Europe. In my essay on the Crimean crisis in Eureka Street on 4 March, I wrote that Putin 'would prefer to try to keep Ukraine united, with whatever government it elects, as long as that government retains good-neighbourly relations and strong economic links with Russia'.
That vision has now been destroyed by the provocative clumsiness of Kiev and its Western cheerleaders. It is hard to see any outcome now other than bloody secession of the east, supported by Russian armed might, and continued bloodshed and unrest in what will be left of Ukraine: a weak and resentful rump state, ripe for the picking by neo-fascist Ukrainian nationalist elements.
It would have been better had the West cooperated in Putin's original vision to keep Ukraine united, geopolitically neutral, and not anti-Russian.
Some will say the East Ukrainian militiamen provoked the crisis, acting as Moscow's pawns. I don't buy this. I believe people in the eastern provinces felt genuinely outraged and threatened by Prime Minister Yanukevich's violent ouster on 22 February in Kiev, and that they were determined to assert new demands for regional autonomy and human rights from the mistrusted new government in Kiev. Kiev in turn behaved provocatively and clumsily e.g. in attempting to pass laws downgrading the official status of the Russian language.
Now, this government has borne out the eastern people's worst fears, by treating them as traitors and turning national troops on them.
I do not think there can be any going back now from this slide into civil war. The news from Ukraine will get worse before it gets better.
Tony Kevin is a former Australian ambassador to Cambodia and Poland and author of several books including Reluctant Rescuers.
Image of protest in Kiev from Shutterstock