Putin turns up the heat on Ukraine – again
Although seldom noticed by anyone west of Warsaw, there has been a war going on in Europe for almost five years now. It began in early 2014 with a Russian secret operation in mid-February that annexed Crimea and soon spread to overt Kremlin military intervention in eastern Ukraine as well. Serious fighting followed, and that conflict remains unfrozen and deadly. While there has been no sustained combat in eastern Ukraine in years, neither is that front quiet. Kiev has never accepted the Russian theft of Crimea and the ‘people’s republics’ in Donetsk and Luhansk, Kremlin-run pseudo-states that serve as bases for Russian military units on Ukrainian soil. Those units regularly shell Ukrainian positions, because they can.
