U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden visited Ukraine and contributed to encouragement of negotiations in the country. Ukrainian Speaker of Parliament Oleksandr Turchynov called for renewal of the operation in the Donetsk Oblast. Pavel Gubarev, a self-proclaimed governor in Donbass, proposed a referendum on May 11 to transform the Lugansk Oblast into the independent state of Novorossiya.
Yevgeny Minchenko, director of the International Institute for Political Expertise, emphasized that Kiev had no resources for the special operation. He clarified that the Berkut special units had been disbanded, the Army was inefficient, special forces were small and consisted of less than a thousand troops.
The expert sees three solutions for Kiev: hiring mercenaries, which is a very risky step for oligarchs; organization of private armies of oligarchs consisting of security officers and groups raiding enterprises; mobilization of veterans of special forces, of which there are about the same number in both the west and the east. He noted that veterans of special forces were the core of resistance in Donbass.
Minchenko predicts that instability in Ukraine will stay for long. The analyst predicts a slow civil and low-scale civil war that would not grow because Russian President Vladimir Putin had permission of the Federation Council to deploy forces in Ukraine.
Moreover, the expert pointed out that the Geneva agreements were losing value because all sides of the conflict considered it a symbolic act rather than an obligation.
