Igor Strelkov’s Appeal, June 16, 2014

Marked Urgent

Translated from Russian by Gleb Bazov / Edited by S. Naylor & @GBabeuf
Original: http://summer56.livejournal.com/155186.html

The enemy is engaged in massive bombardment of Kramatorsk, using howitzers at Mount Karachun and in the vicinity of the water purification facilities between Slavyansk and Kramatorsk (they have a stronghold there).

There are numerous casualties and fires in the city. They are bombarding both the industrial sector and the residential neighbourhoods. The population is in a state of panic—[to date] Kramatorsk has not experienced such massive artillery shelling.

What is more, Militia targets have been spared—the strikes are not directed against them. Why, you ask? The answer is simple: in order to force tens of thousands of refugees to flood into Russia; genocide and ethnic cleansing in their purest form.

I have decided to offer up for universal review a text from my personal correspondence (appropriately amended). I ask that you distribute it. It is no longer possible to keep silent, hoping that someone “on the mainland” “comes to his senses.”

As I have become accustomed to anticipate events several steps ahead, I am in a state of utter “prostration.” The observable destruction of the economy and the population I anticipated even a month and a half ago, and, in order to avoid it, called then for a peacekeeping intervention.

It is now too late—peacekeepers will not be able to intervene without a battle. Now I am calling for the provision of immediate and wide-scale military assistance. But no assistance has come.

In a week or two (or possibly earlier) a substantial part of the military detachments of the DPR and the LPR might be completely routed. The reason is the insurmountable ratio of heavy weaponry…

And when Donetsk and Lugansk are completely blockaded and surrounded, like Slavyansk, the following question will rear its head—either Russia will:

1) commit to intervention with full force (an intervention the Ukies are openly provoking); or,

2) completely abandon Novorossiya (a possibility [the Ukies] are dearly hoping for).

And I am not at all sure that this dilemma will be resolved via the first option. More likely than not, it will be the opposite.

We can burn down even a hundred APCs and kill even five thousand troops, but the overall balance of forces will hardly change. Well, for example, the [manpower] ratio will become 14:1 instead of 15:1

Every day we are forced to relinquish another large settlement—we have neither the men nor the guns to defend them. At the same time, we have no ability to retake any of them—because we have nothing to match the Ukies’ heavy weaponry. All we can do is engage them defensively, with more or less success.

So, what reason is there for optimism? From our own minor successes? They are purely tactical. And in the meantime we long ago started losing the strategic engagement.

I see open sabotage in the approach taken by Russian officials at the highest level in relation to Novorossiya. It shows in everything. I dare say that [this sabotage] is fully conscious. Otherwise, there is no explanation for the fact that the DPR and the LPR have yet to be recognized even de facto and that they receive no supplies of such sorely needed weapons and equipment.

Yes, Putin has effectively disavowed (and I wonder—at whose suggestion?) his pledges of standing ready to protect the Russian civilian population of Donbass. No alternative whatsoever has been proposed. If there is no military aid—a military defeat of the DPR and the LPR is inevitable.

Whether [this defeat] comes a week earlier or a month later does not matter. The enemy will cut us off from the border and will methodically suffocate us, “cleansing” the territory in the process and, in one go, forcing out into Russia a million or two utterly deprived and embittered refugees (I trust the consequences for the economy and the social sphere are obvious).

And then, groups of “grateful oligarchs” will come to Putin with sorrowful faces and offer as their spokesperson the “Great Schemer”, Surkov, who will explain in a quiet and insinuating voice that: “We did everything that we could, but these—these good-for-nothing Donetsk bandits failed it all themselves, and we can give them no help without risking nuclear war…They punished themselves…It is not worth the risk…We need to persevere…We will make everything right in time…It is possible to negotiate with Poroshenko…This is a tactical retreat…We are not ready to go to war…Anyway, we took Crimea, didn’t we…?” And so on and suchlike.

What this will mean for our company—I already know. Most of us will perish, but that is not the issue—this uprising and all the victims will be in vain, and the “Russian Spring” will be eliminated at the root by the “Ukrainian Winter.”

And the next war, the war that we will not witness, will be on Russia’s territory—right after the “Moscow Maidan,” of course…