Ukraine truce fails; violence flares again

An uneasy truce between Ukrainian protesters and President Viktor Yanukovych has failed, bringing about another round of violence between security forces and the protesters. Fox News reports:

An Associated Press reporter saw ten bodies on the edge of the protest encampment in Kiev's Independence Square. A medic for the protesters, Bohdan Soloviy, said eight protesters were killed by gunfire on Thursday as demonstrators tried to take control of a building near the encampment. Reuters photographer Vasily Fedosenko told the news agency said he saw six bodies lying at the northwestern side of the square and then a few moments later saw a further four bodies just over 300 feet away at the other side of the plaza. He also reported seeing five dead bodies in front of the Hotel Ukraina, where many foreign media members are staying. All of the dead were civilians, Fedosenko reported. Sky News later reported that 11 bodies were laid out in the lobby of the hotel, which is up the street from Independence Square. Yanukovych announced the truce late Wednesday after two days of fierce street fighting that had killed at least 28 people and injured 287 more, according to numbers provided by the Ukrainian health ministry. Protesters dispute those numbers, claiming that the true toll is much higher. A makeshift medical facility for injured demonstrators has been set up in a nearby cathedral. Sky News correspondent David Bowden reported Thursday that snipers could be seen on rooftops Thursday morning aiming at protesters in the square below. Bowden reported that one bullet had gone through the window of his hotel room and "took a chunk" out of the ceiling.

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If you haven't been following this story closely, the action that lit the fuse was Yanukovych's cancellation of a trade pact with the European Union in favor of one with Russia. Ukraine is a nation divided between a western half that associates more with Europe and an eastern half that associates more with Russia, and Vladimir Putin has been using a combination of threats and incentives to pull Yanukovych into Russia's orbit rather than see it develop stronger economic ties with the West. The protests are much about the unchecked power of the presidency that allow Yanukovych to unilaterally make such a move, as well as about the policy direction itself. It's pretty clear that Putin's agenda is to reconstitute the old Soviet sphere of influence and function as a counter-force against the economic and strategic influence of the U.S. and its allies, and part of his strategy is to see former Soviet republics like Ukraine remain under Russia's thumb. In Yanukovych, he has a willing stooge. The people of Ukraine understand this and want no part of it. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reports that the Obama Administration is late to the game as usual when it comes to defending America's strategic interests abroad:

With his studied detachment from foreign affairs, Mr. Obama has shown zero interest in this strategic confrontation. He dispatched his Secretary of State to focus on unlikely peace missions to the Middle East when the chances for making a difference in Ukraine were far greater. He deferred to the EU, which is too diffident and divided to do anything without U.S. leadership. And he has refused to admit that Mr. Putin, his supposed partner in Syrian peace, wants mainly to reduce U.S. influence across Europe and the Middle East. The Ukraine uprising is an alarm that the world's trouble spots won't wait for the attention of the next U.S. President. They need active U.S. leadership now to prevent them from blowing up into larger and more violent disputes that become much more costly to settle. Mr. Obama may want to retreat from the world, but the world won't retreat from America.

So far all that's happened is that John Kerry is going around offering the usual strongly worded statements that have nothing to back them up. It's pretty much what we expect of an administration that has little enthusiasm for pursuing America's strategic interests abroad, and especially from a Secretary of State with a history of disdaining America's forceful role in the world. Putin's behavior here is bewildering. Rather than trying to keep its neighbors from establishing closer ties to the West, Putin should be seeking to establish such ties himself on Russia's behalf. Opening up new markets in the West is the only way Russia can really hope to achieve the type of prosperity that would set it up as a serious world power. Right now, it's little more than an autocratic third-world country with nuclear weapons - and oil resources it can't figure out how to convert into economic power. But that's what you usually get when you have a leader more interested in consolidating his own power - through corruption and intimidation if necessary - than in pursuing the economic interests of his people. Come to think of it, America's not making very good use of its economic resources either, huh? Maybe there's a connection. By the way, if you haven't already seen it, you can't tell the story of the Ukrainian people better than this woman does: