Sabbath Message 26/2/37/120

Dear Friends

We have been watching the Ukraine go through this turbulent phase in its development. Its political systems are actually comprised of pro-Russian and Pro EU factions with some of the pro-Russian factions openly infiltrated and working with the Russian political group under Putin.

The coming election on Sunday 25 May 2014 will be split between the pro-EU faction and the so-called independent faction that is trying to marshal the support of the Pro-Russian factions in the East.

The result will leave the nation in more confusion and it will lack more clear direction. The Russian actions are part of a long term plan of reclamation. Europe is threatening sanctions but its actions are being undermined by German industry leaders.

The leaders of Germany and France have warned of further EU sanctions against Russia, if presidential elections fail to take place in Ukraine later this month.

In a joint statement, Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande also said referendums planned for Sunday by pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine would be illegal.

Russian President Vladimir Putin made a calculated retreat over Ukraine's crisis on Wednesday, urging the pro-Russian insurgents who control large areas of Donetsk to postpone a referendum on the status of the region.

The Russian leader also promised to "seek ways out of the crisis" and claimed that some of his country's troops had been withdrawn from Ukraine's eastern border.

Mr Putin's newly conciliatory tone - the first time he has specifically called on the pro-Russians to take a step back from confrontation - came amid mounting evidence that the separatist leaders of the "Donetsk People's Republic" would have been incapable of holding a plausible referendum by the original deadline of Sunday.

His words coincided with another failed operation by Ukraine's security forces. At dawn, police and soldiers tried to clear pro-Russian protesters from city hall in Mariupol, the second biggest urban centre in Donetsk region with a population of 500,000.

Witnesses said the security forces drenched the four-storey building with gas, stormed inside, arrested 16 occupiers and then flew the blue and yellow Ukrainian flag from the roof. Having achieved this, they immediately left.

The Telegraph in London reported that: "Why they did so is unclear, but their departure allowed the activists to re-occupy city hall. A crowd cheered as a man wearing a gas mask appeared on the roof and hoisted the red, blue and black flag of the 'Donetsk People's Republic' once more."

"The Ukrainian military needed a picture for the Ukrainian mass media to show the building was taken back," said Eugene Stashko, 40, who came to city hall in support of the occupiers. "They took the pictures to show the Ukrainian flag. But now you see everything has changed again and the building is back in the hands of the People's Republic."

The use of gas infuriated the crowd. Hours after the assault, one man with red, tearful eyes was still squatting in agony outside the building. "We can't live in our country anymore," said one woman, who declined to be named. "Those fascists in Kiev have come here and poisoned our people with gas."

The Mariupol operation was the latest in a series of failures by Ukraine's security forces as they try to restore control over Donetsk.

Vladimir Putin demanded an end to the Ukrainians' action, but also took a step back from confrontation, saying: "We ask the representatives of the south east to postpone the referendums planned for May 11 in order to create the conditions necessary for dialogue."

Donetsk is the most populous region of Ukraine, with 4.5 million people. Holding a referendum across the area of 10,000 square miles would have required scores - if not hundreds - of polling stations and the cooperation of thousands of officials. Organising it by Sunday was probably beyond the leaders of the "People's Republic".

Four days before the planned plebiscite, basic issues were still unresolved, including the location of polling stations.

It appears that in stepping in, Vladimir Putin might have saved his allies from a fiasco. Denis Pushilin, the self-styled "prime minister" of Donetsk, immediately took the opportunity to effect a dignified retreat. Within an hour of the Russian leader's intervention, Mr Pushilin said: "We have the utmost respect for President Putin. If he considers that [a postponement] is necessary, we will of course discuss it."

When asked to clarify Mr Putin's position, his spokesman outlined two conditions for Russia to consider Ukraine-wide elections planned for May 25 as legitimate: a postponed referendum and an end to military action.

"If supporters of federalisation in east Ukraine listen to Mr Putin's call and postpone the date of the referendum, and Kiev, in turn, stops the military operation and begins steps to launch dialogue, it may allow Ukraine to escape a situation that is currently only deteriorating," Dmitry Peskov told Slon.ru, a Russian news website.

Mr Putin struck his conciliatory tone after a meeting in the Kremlin with Didier Burkhalter, the president of Switzerland, who also serves as chairman of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Putin said "I know that you have your own proposals, your ideas of how to find a way out of the situation that has occurred [in Ukraine]," he continued "Let's try to analyse the situation and seek ways out of this crisis."

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/world/vladimir-putin-retreats-in-battle-for-ukraines-future-20140508-zr6p2.html#ixzz315yaqFLv

It is obvious that with the far reaching economic sanctions Europe is hoping they will be the one card to influence events. The problem is that the Russian energy giant Gazprom is a key gas supplier for Germany and so Germany's business lobby has essentially blocked that. More than 6,000 German companies do business in Russia and have argued fiercely against tougher sanctions. They want the business world to continue unruffled by events in Ukraine. It is reminiscent of pre WWII appeasement.

It is reported that the chief executive of Siemens visited President Putin and spoke of "temporary turbulence". The former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder - and currently on the Gazprom board - saw no reason to forego a public embrace with Putin on his 70th birthday.

Other countries like Spain and Italy, struggling to escape the legacy of the eurozone crisis, show no appetite for meaningful sanctions.

History shows us that events develop their own momentum and do not necessarily reward sitting on the sidelines. Events escalate through revenge and inaction. In Syria the protests against the Assad regime very rapidly were taken over by more extreme groups, after regime forces opened fire at pro-democracy demonstrators.

The Balkans demonstrated the results of inaction which led to the conflict spreading and massacres followed.

The Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has warned that, in the worst case, Ukraine will descend into civil war with refugees fleeing into neighbouring countries. The history of other conflicts suggests that outside countries would be drawn into the conflict and Europe could hardly sit on its hands in the face of a refugee crisis. The Poles have historical experience of Catherine the Great of Russia using the Ukraine and associated areas which comprised Eastern Poland, splitting Poland in two and annexing the entire area and it appears Putin is drawing lessons from her rule in this process. We will look at that later.

Germany remains the key. While it is putting all its diplomatic muscle into arranging another international conference to try and negotiate a breakthrough, the crisis is increasingly being driven by events on the ground. German business continues to argue for its interests which are counter to the overall interests of the EU and NATO. However, Ulrich Speck, writing in Die Zeit, said "the attack on Ukraine is an attack on the very order that underpins Germany's freedom, security.

Putin holds that the Bolsheviks were wrong, seemingly because they gave Finland its independence in 1918. He also wants to take over the Baltic states and Belorussia and who knows what else. He seems intent on taking over the Eastern Ukraine and driving a corridor south through Georgia and Ossetia to Iran. This will be the decisive factor that links to Iran and Syria in the conflicts of the Middle East. This will be the news spoken of by the prophet Daniel where news from the East and the North will alarm the king of the North and force him to go forth and utterly exterminate many (Dan. 11:44f)

NATO has 6000 troops including those from UK, France and US, on exercise in Estonia caused by concerns of this crisis and there are 1200 on exercise in Norway also to reassure the Baltic states and Scandinavia. Matthew Dal Santo has drawn attention to the fact that Putin is imitating Catherine the Great's use of her foreign allies to support her in the partition of Poland. He is thus in constant contact with the German Chancellor Angela Merkel in this matter.

The end of the crisis will not be found in Washington, so it is imagined, but in the recent negotiations between Putin and Merkel on Thursday of the previous week.

For Mrs Merkel, the immediate issue was the release of a group of Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe observers held by pro-Russian forces in Slovyansk. For Mr Putin, it was something more. According to the Kremlin, the Russian president urged Mrs Merkel to use her influence over Ukraine's interim government to prevail on Kiev to withdraw its forces from southern and eastern Ukraine.

Precisely how the German chancellor reacted was not reported. However, Mr Putin was, in effect, asking her to consent to a partitioning of Ukraine between the pro-Western, and Western-backed, government in Kiev that is in favour of closer ties with NATO and the EU, and pro-federalist or separatist militias backed by Russia in the east and south.

Whilst she is opposed to the Kremlin's dealings in Crimea and she seems personally disposed to take a harder line with the Kremlin, the pressure on her from German businesses and a surprisingly pro-Russian political establishment - on both the left and right - has been enormous. This may well be the cause of the division of the EU and the collapse of NATO. They will realise too late that appeasement does not work.

Whilst it has been estimated that 300,000 German jobs depend on exports to Russia. More than that number of lives might well be lost in the following hostilities.

It is assumed that while she is the EU's unofficial gatekeeper, it is thought that Mrs Merkel is among the few Western leaders who could persuade Kiev to agree to the federalisation plan Moscow insists is essential to quelling the violence.

By far the European leader with the most influence in eastern Europe, she finds herself in an awkward position in that Germany is the only European country Putin - himself fluent in German - takes seriously. It's also one of Russia's biggest trading partners and German corporate weakness and cunning will draw this matter out and embolden Putin.

In 2013, Russia exported some €40 billion in trade with Germany, mostly oil and gas, the bread and butter of the Russian economy. It is argued that though Germany would inflict real harm on itself, a tough sanctions regime would apply real pressure on Russia.

It is important to remember that the two countries have a long history of dividing up their neighbourhood in Europe. In 1918, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk divided all the lands of modern Poland and Ukraine between the Kaiser and the Bolsheviks - generously in Germany's favour. In 1939, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Hitler's Germany and Stalin's USSR put an end to an independent Poland. Even though, in the end, Russia had to go to war due to Germany's invasion in 1941.

However, as we should all realise, the most instructive division of Europe from today's perspective took place when Russia's Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia from 1762 to 1796, partitioned the sprawling Polish Commonwealth between herself and Europe's two leading Germanic powers: Frederick the Great's Prussia and Maria-Theresa's Austria.

Eighteenth-century Poland - then Europe's largest country save Russia itself - included much of the lands that now lie in today's Ukraine. It is obvious to the casual observer that Putin is today pursuing more or less the same strategic aims as Catherine the Great, when she first brought Russian rule to Europe's southern steppes in the 1760s, and doing so in much the same way and on much the same pretext. It was the inherent weakness of the Polish constitution which provided for a king elected by Sejm or parliament and every single nobleman had the power of veto over the Royal legislative edicts rendering it anarchic with private armies and forced extraction of revenues. Catherine used this weakness to her advantage and in 1764 placed on the throne and then destroyed the power of her former lover King Stanislaw.

As king, however, Stanislaw turned out to be made of stronger stuff than expected. Rather than merely toeing Catherine's line, he set out to reform the Polish state, curtailing the nobles' veto rights - rights, as Catherine well knew, that had made Poland ungovernable and so easily amenable to foreign (i.e. Russian) influence.

Styling herself the defender of Poland's "ancient freedoms", in 1768 Catherine used the threat of invasion to force Poland's King Stanislaw to sign a treaty not only to protect Poland's Orthodox minority - whose religious freedoms she claimed Stanislaw's new constitution threatened to undermine, much as Putin has lately been doing on behalf of Ukraine's sizeable Russian-speaking minority - but also to restore the unwieldy constitution Stanislaw had sought to modernise.

Agreeing to this treaty was a trap that allowed a faction of nobles to cast Stanislaw as a Russian puppet. And when they revolted - as fed up Ukrainians did last year when another ruler gave up a potentially transformative trade agreement with the EU - Catherine pounced. In 1771, under the guise of protecting law and order, a Russian army entered Poland.

The country collapsed. The Ottoman Turks declared war, but the Russians defeated them and made them hand over Crimea. Unwilling to fight or go to war, Prussia and Austria instead decided to join Catherine in dividing Poland up.

The result, in 1772, is what has since become known as the First Partition of Poland, which awarded thousands of square miles of Polish territory to Russia, Austria and Prussia.

In 1783 Catherine annexed Crimea and pushed the Ottomans south towards the Danube. Into this so-called New Russia, Russian settlers followed, whose "rights" Putin has lately deployed the Russian army to defend. It took two further partitions to erase Poland from the map. Putin is following this almost as a textbook example and his aim is to move south and destroy all of NATO influence and reform the Northern alliances. His aim is to use German weakness to reform Europe and remove the power of the UK and US.

Putin needs Merkel to achieve what Catherine had by using Merkel to legitimise his actions supported by German economic quislings in imitation of 19th century double dealings.

It is argued that behind the recent crisis lies a combination of elite infighting, constitutional wrangling and Russian opportunism at Europe's eastern crossroads that's almost a set-piece replay of the situation Catherine exploited.

Like Catherine, Putin took advantage of squabbling between Ukraine's modern-day elites for a division of the country's spoils.

It is argued that in much the same way as Catherine's treaty trapped Stanislaw, so too the Kremlin's deal-making with then Ukraine president Viktor Yanukovych delivered him into Putin's pocket, including the $15 billion loan for walking away from the EU's trade deal that ended up making him look like a Russian stooge.

Dal Santo and journalists following his line correctly point out that ever since, Putin has been playing the same legitimist card as Catherine, presenting Russia as the defender not only of the lawful Ukrainian president and legitimate Ukrainian constitution, but also of the "rights" of Ukraine's Russian speakers, first in Crimea, now in Donbas and Odessa.

What Catherine had was the international partners to legitimise the sphere of influence. Putin lacks those to support the position he has asserted and, to all intents and purposes, carved out.

The situation is similar to that under Catherine where, led by the United States, the West won't talk, but like Prussia and Austria in the 1770s, however, it has ruled out war to make him give them up.

Thus Germany's Angela Merkel, like Frederick the Great and Maria-Theresa in the 1770s and 1790s, was last Thursday being asked to partition Eastern Europe with Russia. We thought this was ended with the fall of the Berlin wall but prophecy and Scripture cannot be broken.

Germany is faced with a reality that it is the only big European country Russia will deal with and it is at present the only one that thinks it really has to.

Putin's view of Russian interests is straight from the days of Catherine the Great. Russian meddling has again plunged a fatefully divided neighbour into a constitutional crisis that has allowed the Kremlin to intervene as the defender of law, order, and minority rights. This meddling with its neighbours will plunge Europe into world war but Putin will follow this set piece action to its bitter end and is set to harness Germany to achieve his ends. Germany does not end up with the western end of Ukraine but Europe will and they will view that as the same thing. Germany will support the Russianisation of the east Ukraine in return for the EU absorption of Kiev and the west.

They think they can avoid war by this appeasement but Putin's move against the other NATO allies including the Baltic States will force WWIII and Europe will be in a weaker position through German self-interest. Merkel will weep just as did Maria-Therese of Austria. However, it will be for the dead men she will lose at the end of it. This crisis will test her to the limits and German people will pay for their spineless business leaders.

The real danger is that Russia and Germany become the new NATO and it is paid for in the blood of the UK and the US and other nations that will become subservient to them in the short term.

Ukraine will either fight or die.

Wade Cox

Coordinator General