Amsterdam: There are two ways to look at the loss of Debaltseve in Ukraine – a final combat convulsion before both sides honour last week's Minsk ceasefire agreement; or just another humiliation of Ukrainian forces by Russian-backed separatists, of which there have been many.
The trajectory of this conflict suggests the latter. But the timing of the rout at a strategic transport hub in the country's east risks elevating it to what historians might record as a tipping point, at which Washington succumbed to pressure to supply lethal weapons to the Kiev government.
A recent marked change in US President Barack Obama's rhetoric – from "we will not" to "I've asked my team to look at all options" – coincides with a ramping-up of pressure from think tanks and others for Washington to arm Kiev to the tune of billions of dollars.
But the battle for Debaltseve has already been quite instructive – about what Russian President Vladimir Putin likes to describe as an army of former miners and tractor-drivers can do, if given access to the weapons warehouses of a superpower; and about the awful training, morale and discipline of what pass for the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
Should Washington start shipping weapons, it is likely that Russian-armed separatists will always best Ukrainian national forces, with or without weapons supplied by the US. These ideas, along with Ukraine's muddied history in the Moscow sphere, seemed to make sense of Obama's initial resort to an asymmetric response to the conflict: if Moscow's regional military superiority gave the separatists the upper hand, didn't it make sense for the West to ignore the separatists and to go after Putin with escalating economic sanctions? Why not let Putin go bang-bang for as long as he liked in the bomb craters of eastern Ukraine, while Washington and other capitals co-opted the corporate boardrooms of the world, to fix a gradually tightening sanctions tourniquet on the Russian economy?
Playing catch-up with Moscow as arms supplier to the other side would in all likelihood prove a costly zero-sum game – by one count, the separatists already have more than 500 Russian tanks, more than the German, British or French armies.
Apart from the fact that it was a rout, it remains unclear precisely what happened in Debaltseve, which until this week was part of a lick of land controlled by Kiev that protruded into rebel turf, in the region of the self-proclaimed separatist "republics" of Donetsk and Luhansk. Hundreds of Kiev's forces are dead or wounded, missing or captured. Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko tries to hail the evacuation of about 2500 of his troops and 200 vehicles as a victory of sorts.
But his men were in retreat, and their reported behaviour in the towns to which they were evacuated falls short of that of a properly trained army. Drunken and shell-shocked, they have been wandering the streets, commandeering taxis for which they refuse to pay and opening fire in restaurants to back demands for hard liquor – for which they also refuse to pay. Just as their government fails to adequately train and arm them, it seems it does little for them as they retreat.
Barely heard amid the din is the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe's litany of complaints of ceasefire violations – mostly about artillery fire – and its critique that the ceasefire was not a shopping list from which the combatants might choose how or where to observe this or that clause.
But a pattern is emerging. It was only in September 2014 that the leaders solemnly inked the last, stillborn ceasefire agreement in Minsk. This go-round, none of the terms of the ceasefire hammered out last week, in the presence of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande, have been implemented. In hindsight, this latest agreement has many flaws – least of which is its silence on the very pertinent question of what was to be done about a hapless civilian population and thousands of national forces virtually encircled in Debaltseve.
Kiev is elated by the new ceasefire agreement's unambiguous declaration that the separatist enclaves are part of the sovereign territory of Ukraine. But by some analyses, this and a series of other clauses in the deal work to a perceived long-term push by Putin to disown the rebels as it suits him, foisting the burgeoning cost of keeping the eastern communities and repairing their infrastructure on Kiev and by extension the West. This shift in liability, the analyses go, would emerge in tandem with a soft-power strategy by Moscow to take the border provinces - and ultimately even the entire country - back into Moscow's orbit.
Remarkably, none of the second Minsk ceasefire's architects wants to declare it dead on arrival. At the Kremlin, officials talk of a new round of meetings between Russian, German, French and Ukrainian officials on implementation; in Paris, the spin is that by comparing the lie of the land before and after Minsk "there has been progress"; and in Berlin, the ceasefire is deemed to be damaged – but not dead.
Could it be that like Moscow, the European Union doesn't want to be saddled with the cost of propping up Ukraine, and is there an unstated belief in some capitals that - to use a Keatingism - letting Russia do Ukraine slowly is preferable to full-blown war?
Harvard professor of international relations Stephen Walt certainly thinks that we have seen this playbook before. Sketching the bones of the Putin-Ukraine story in Foreign Policy magazine without naming names, he says: "Sounds familiar? Of course it does, but the great power in this story isn't Russia, the tough-minded leader isn't Putin, and the troubled weak neighbour isn't Ukraine.
"The great power in this story was the United States, the leader was Ronald Reagan, and the unfortunate neighbour was Nicaragua."
On the overthrow of pro-US dictator Anastasio Somoza by the Sandinistas, the Reagan administration organised, armed and backed the anti-Sandinista Contras in a bid to stop Soviet encroachment in the Western Hemisphere – the result was a civil war in which 35,000 Nicaraguans died.
And Walt's point is? "Reagan and the US acted wrongly then, and Putin and Russia are acting wrongly today. But the parallels . . . tell you something often forgotten when high-minded moralists start complaining about 'foreign aggression'."
That something is that however unseemly, great powers are always sensitive to encroachment on their borders – and will usually play hardball to protect vital interests. In Nicaragua the West – that is, Washington – got it, because it perceived itself as the victim. But with Ukraine, a collective Western failure to understand "this basic fact of life" was a key reason why the crisis erupted and why it has been so hard to resolve.
To date, the toll in Ukraine is 5600 dead, about 1.6 million people displaced and the Crimea gone – formally annexed by Moscow. The country's eastern industrial belt has ground to a halt. There is still some way to go to catch up with Nicaragua.
