As exercises in cognitive dissonance go, it’s hard to beat the first sentence of this Washington Post report on events in Ukraine:
Fighting intensified in eastern Ukraine on Wednesday despite a fragile cease-fire, as pro-Russian rebels appeared to be close to capturing the strategically important Donetsk airport.
This ceasefire appears to be fragile in the sense that a piece of china you have just shattered is fragile.
In the Post’s defense, at least some of the parties to the truce still speak as though it is still in effect. The Ukrainian government, perhaps fearing the military consequences of a complete breakdown and hoping to buy some time, is "reluctant" to declare the agreement over, according to the Post. The U.S. ambassador to Kiev, for his part, tweeted:
Russian forces/mil equipment still in Ukraine, border remains unsecured. Now time for Russia and separatists they back to implement Minsk.
— Geoffrey Pyatt (@GeoffPyatt) October 1, 2014
The Russians and their proxies no doubt enjoy the ambiguity the ceasefire brings to the situation, allowing them both to consolidate their gains and, in the case of key strategic terrain like the airport in Donetsk, to expand their control:
Ukraine’s military and rebel forces said the fighting had gotten worse Wednesday, as rebels vowed to retake a strategically important landmark that has remained in government hands for almost all of the six-month-long conflict.
If rebels succeed in taking over the airport, they will have gained an important new facility to bring in supplies to their war-torn territory as they seek to build a new state in Ukraine’s southeast. The cease-fire hands over effective control of the territory to the rebels without granting them independence. For the government in Kiev, losing the airport would be a major symbolic defeat after they sustained heavy losses in a battle in late May to keep it under their control
Donetsk city government officials said Wednesday that residents are contending with an "extremely difficult situation" and that the part of the city closest to the airport had undergone a "massive bombardment." At least six civilians were killed when a shell hit a minibus, and a shell also hit the grounds of a school that was in session, shattering windows and injuring six adults, the city authorities said. A reporter for the Associated Press who visited the school said he saw three dead people there.
The Ukrainian military denied that it had fired at the school or the bus. It said that its forces had come under fire at the airport Wednesday from tanks and Grad multiple-rocket launchers.
Moscow has not relaxed in its efforts to paint the Kiev regime as predatory and cruel, waging an information campaign that is both for domestic political purposes and to maintain a fig leaf casus belli for continuing action in the country, some of which is conducted directly by Russian troops—who are not deployed to fight with the separatists, Moscow claims, but merely using their own vacation time. And occasionally the Russian tanks they took on vacation with them.
Whether or not Moscow’s claims of Ukrainian war crimes in the eastern part of the country are accurate is another story, according to the BBC:
The website of Russian TV channel REN TV has been using images of victims of the MH17 Malaysian airline disaster to illustrate reports about the alleged discovery of "mass graves" in east Ukraine.
Over the past week, pro-Kremlin media have been full of stories of "mass graves" said to contain victims, including civilians, "tortured", "executed" and "raped" by retreating Ukrainian troops in and around the village of Nizhnya Krynka, 60 km from the insurgent stronghold of Donetsk.
The graves are clear evidence of "war crimes", the Russian media have been saying.
On 25 September, REN TV's website ran a story quoting Russian-backed insurgents as saying that "dozens" of bodies had been discovered in three graves, some with organs removed. It illustrated the story with an image of men carrying what appears to be a body bag.
Four days later, REN TV's website - from which a screen grab was taken, above - reported that "bodies continue to be discovered" in areas that it said had been recently vacated by Ukraine's National Guard. The report contained an image of numerous body bags placed on the ground near to what appears to be a piece of white wreckage.
But both of these images were details from photographs that had appeared over a month earlier on the website of the Ukrainian version of the newspaper Argumenty i Fakty in a report referring to MH17, which was downed over insurgent-controlled east Ukraine on 17 July.
The full version of the photographs clearly shows fragments of the airliner's wreckage.
To summarize: the conflict in the Ukraine is not over, and Russia and its proxies continue to make gains. The United States is doing effectively nothing to stop this. What conclusions must Chinese President Xi Jinping—currently considering his next move in response to pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong—be drawing in response?