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Deal To Ease Ukraine Tension Threatened By New Violence

Deal To Ease Ukraine Tension Threatened By New Violence

By Neela Banerjee, Tribune Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — The fragile diplomatic accord to resolve the Ukraine crisis frayed Sunday as an armed clash erupted in eastern Ukraine and top Russian and Ukrainian officials, appearing on television talk shows, each demanded the other side lay down its weapons.

Russia’s ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak, said a gunfight early Easter morning that left at least three people dead at a checkpoint outside the eastern Ukrainian city of Slovyansk showed the need for all sides to disarm.

On “Fox News Sunday,” Kislyak declined to say whether Russian President Vladimir Putin would tell the pro-Russian separatists to end their armed occupation of government buildings in eastern Ukraine. Militants have seized government and communications facilities in more than a dozen cities.

Kislyak said Russia was committed to using its influence “to try to de-escalate and defuse the situation.”

Kislyak did not appear optimistic that the diplomatic agreement signed Thursday in Geneva by the U.S., Russia, Ukraine and the European Union would solve the standoff between the new government in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, and Russia, which already has annexed the Ukrainian region of Crimea.

“Ukrainian colleagues have suggested that (the agreement is) not applicable to what is happening in Kiev, that the far-right groupings are not going to be disarmed,” he said. “Under such circumstances, you shouldn’t expect that the other part of the political spectrum will be willing to rush in implementing the agreement.”

On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseny Yatsenyuk placed the blame for Sunday’s clash in Slovyansk on Russia.

“Russia triggered this violence and Russia supported these terrorists and Russia was obliged to … condemn terrorists and to condemn those so-called peaceful protesters with AK-47s in their hands, shooting into civilians and shooting into Ukrainian riot police,” Yatsenyuk said.

“And if Russia pulls back its security forces and former KGB agents, this would definitely calm down the situation and stabilize the situation in southern and eastern Ukraine.”

Yatsenyuk accused Putin of seeking to restore the Soviet Union. Kislyak dismissed that idea “as a false notion.”

“We just want the Ukrainians to find a way of a dialogue, a new constitution, that would help them to live in a country that is democratic, that supports the rights of all the ethnic groups, including certainly Russians,” Kislyak said. “We want to have a friendly neighbor, because for us all, irrespective of what is happening, Ukrainians are just our brothers.”

Two members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN), and Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that the standoff in Ukraine proved the need for the Obama administration and European allies to increase pressure on Russia through harsher economic sanctions.

“I think the time is now to rapidly ratchet up our sanctions, whether it’s on Russian petrochemical companies or on Russian banks,” Murphy said.

The White House has prepared another list of Russian individuals and institutions to sanction if Moscow does not meet its commitments under the Geneva accord. But the administration is not expected to slap sanctions on whole sectors of the Russian economy unless tensions escalate sharply.

©afp.com / Anatoliy Stepanov

When Does An Occupation Become A Movement?

On Sept. 22, I was on my way to moderate a panel discussion in lower Manhattan, when I walked past a crowd of several hundred people gathered in Zuccotti Park.

It looked more like a sit-in than a protest, but it had the feel of something bigger waiting to be born.

Nobody was shouting or making much effort to talk to passers-by. A number of people were taking pictures, but most of them looked more like tourists than journalists or bloggers. One young woman wearing a Gucci bag draped over her shoulder held a film school’s microphone, nodding intently as a young man talked into the video camera looming behind her. A number of other cameras snapped her picture as she continued to nod.

I talked to a few of the protesters that day. I found them intriguing, as I do most groups of anonymous Americans who stand shoulder to shoulder to make a public statement. What that statement was exactly was a little murky. They were mostly young and always earnest and loosely connected to one another. Beyond their outrage over corporate wealth, it was difficult to discern their call to action.

A blanket of posters on the ground, however, quilted together their list of grievances. All of the signs were homemade, most of them written on plain slabs of brown cardboard. There seemed to be hundreds of them.

REPLACE WALL $T NOW
FOX NEWS LIES
WILL YOU CAMP OUT FOR YOUR COUNTRY’S FUTURE?
WE ARE ALL IN THIS 2GETHER
MY DAUGHTER AND I LIVE IN POVERTY THANKS TO WALL ST POLICY MAKERS $ CORPORATE GREED

I took a few more pictures and went on my way. That evening, I posted a few of the photos on Facebook, under the title “Just another day in New York.” A few days later, we all were calling the protest “Occupy Wall Street.”

Did I, as a member of the mainstream media, fail to register the movement unfolding in front of me? I’ve thought about that a lot after such criticism from the left reached a crescendo in the past week or so.

It had been a beautiful fall day, and they seemed so leisurely, so unengaged. I can’t work up a lot of guilt for how I responded to them that day.

A lot has changed since. They have not only refused to leave Zuccotti Park but also turned it into a functioning community. There are group-imposed rules about cleanliness and order. Donations have rolled in to staff a first-aid station and clothing booth and provide regular meals. Dozens of volunteers, including several experienced journalists, have started publishing a four-page newspaper, called the Occupied Wall Street Journal. The protesters have their own website, too, at http://www.occupywallst.org, where you can catch up on their latest developments and watch live streaming video, too.

Similar public protests — Occupy Boston, for example, and Occupy Cleveland — have sprung up in cities across the country. Even the most resistant of news organizations are covering the phenomenon now, and the word “movement” is bubbling up. Hundreds of stories now echo a variation on the persistent theme of economic disparity between the 1 percent of America’s wealthiest citizens and everybody else.

Some pundits are wondering aloud how long the protesters will hold up after the splendor of early autumn gives way to a punishing winter. We’re a little too gleeful in the speculation, which is often the case when we run up against people who are far more willing than we are to be uncomfortable for a cause.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently told The Wall Street Journal he has “no idea” when the occupation will end, but he added, “I think part of it has probably to do with the weather.”

What if the weather has nothing to do with it?

There was a time when women who dared to picket Woodrow Wilson’s White House for the right to vote were thrown into prison and dismissed as crazy.

There was a time when too many scoffed at the notion that a bunch of maids boycotting buses in Birmingham, Ala., could change the way blacks were treated across the country.

There was a time when students marching against the war in Vietnam were denounced as spoiled brats with too much time on their hands.

I’m not saying the protesters of Occupy Wall Street are in the same company as these brave activists who changed America.

I’m not sure they aren’t, either.

Hard to be smug about that.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and an essayist for Parade magazine. She is the author of two books, including “…and His Lovely Wife,” which chronicled the successful race of her husband, Sherrod Brown, for the U.S. Senate. To find out more about Connie Schultz (con.schultz@yahoo.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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