Perhaps surprisingly, Minsk II has been... well, somewhat successful. It was understood when the agreement was signed that one of the particular problem areas was not going to go away without an incredible amount of work and diplomatic effort - that of the critical transportation depot of Debaltseve.
For the most part, the rest of the front lines have been quiet, but that particular town was always going to be an issue.
What's interesting to me is how 'close,' relatively speaking, it is now possible to be to these wars. Not in the physical, proximate sense, but in the information sense. For instance, during WWII, much news was conveyed to the public through newsreels - before films, on the radio, etc. They were often not immediate releases, they had to be scripted, produced.
Nowadays, however - and this was no more clear than on saturday as I followed the truce and details on twitter - updates are instantaneous. Anyone with a cell phone connection, with the application, can put out a message that says x is happening, or y is happening.
That is not to say that these messages are any more accurate then anything else was back in the day, but it lends a tension to it that would not, I think, have been possible in the past. Everything is immediate - instantaneous. Which lets it hit closer to home - and unsurprisingly, creates opportunities for increased distortion.
Russia, has, I believe, used this to great effect. The entirety of Russian media has been devoted to creating, and maintaining, the idea that Russia is fundamentally threatened by the west. In the ceasefire, the very first reports of it being broken came in from separatist news organizations and mouthpieces, picked up by Russian journalists and spread to the wider world. Their claim was that Ukrainian forces had fired on them, and they would begin returning fire immediately. Yet, western journalists on the ground in Debaltseve, reported no such firing on twitter - and heard no outgoing fire.
Ultimately what we have here is a narrative that Russia has scripted - Ukrainians bad, separatists good, they fired on us first, yada yada. It has become a relatively common metaphor in the west to claim that Putin's playing chess, the west is playing checkers; but this is not the case. A more apt comparison might be to films - Russia's writing and directing, and the west can't find the plot. Despite the death and destruction, the Ukraine conflict isn't a war, its a production. Once the EU and US realize that, they might be able to come up with a better way of dealing with it.
I'd recommend talking to Hollywood, they've plenty of experience with the stories Russia's spinning.
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