Regardless of one's position on the current military situation, it seems more likely that the Ukraine situation will create another
Frozen Conflict zone along with what seems to be a fait accompli in Crimea. Such a zone would have the same kinds of regional and international problems experienced by Transnistria, Nagorno-Karabakh, Abkhazia and South Ossetia with their varied histories of recognition and sovereignty. The
present Russian-backed offensive against Mariupol as an attempt to join Crimea to Novorossiya (sic) will be yet another chapter in creating new proxy wars and client states based on divisions in ethnicity and language. Like Kosovo,
Balkanization has never had it so good.
Grad rockets rained down on residential areas of the Ukrainian city of Mariupol on Saturday, killing at least 30 and wounding more than 90, according to local authorities. The rockets, apparently fired by pro-Russia rebels, came on the day their leader announced an assault on the city, despite earlier denials from rebel authorities that they were responsible. “Today an offensive was launched on Mariupol. This will be the best possible monument to all our dead,” said Alexander Zakharchenko, speaking at a memorial event for those killed in a mortar attack on a trolleybus stop in the rebels’ capital Donetsk on Thursday.
In diplomatic parlance, the term "frozen conflict" generally refers to unresolved disputes affecting countries of the Black Sea region. But in the post-ideological, non-interventionist age that dawned with the fall of George Bush and Tony Blair and the rise of new, ruthlessly pragmatic, self-interested great powers such as China and India, a widening range of intractable conflicts, from Somalia, Kashmir and Kurdistan to Kyrgyzstan, Burma and Tibet might fairly be described as frozen, too.