Stefan van Nielen loved everything about Asia—the people, the cultures, the weather—and Bali in particular had captured his heart. He’d visited the island a number of times. By telling enticing stories and showing off countless snapshots of enchanting Bali, Stefan had convinced his younger brother, Martijn, to go on a holiday there with him. The two brothers had not been on a trip together since they were kids and so, excited about the prospect of travelling to his beloved Bali with his brother, Stefan had searched the internet for flights.
It appeared that he could not get tickets. It was the height of summer and flights were booked to the max; they certainly wouldn’t be able to book a flight together. He finally found one seat on MH17 for 17 July, and another for his brother on the same day but on a different flight.
Martijn could only get a ticket from Brussels to Paris to Kuala Lumpur, but he decided to take that route and meet up with Stefan in the Malaysian capital, from where they would travel on to Bali. They would have liked to have flown together, but this was a good alternative. Martijn’s flight would arrive in Kuala Lumpur just a tad later than his older brother’s.
Stefan and Martijn, although thirty and twenty-seven years old, still lived at home with their parents, but Stefan had been applying for a job on Bali. He desperately wanted to live there, and he had written letters to a number of businesses. An advertising company to which he had applied for a job looked promising, but he had not heard back from them yet. He was hoping to get a message from them in the next couple of days. His dad promised to phone him if a letter arrived while he was in Bali.
Chapter 12
Ukraine, June–July 2014
The downing of the transport plane led to a violent attack on the Russian embassy in Kiev. Positive that Moscow was largely responsible for what was happening in the eastern regions of their country, pro-Ukraine protesters tore down the Russian flag and threw Molotov cocktails and stones, smashing the windows of the embassy building. The furious horde overturned diplomats’ cars, hacking into them with an axe while nearby police looked on and did little to stop them.
Moscow was outraged, and the US also strongly condemned the violent attack, calling on Ukraine to meet their obligations and provide adequate security. In retaliation for this attack, Russia turned off the gas supply. The message from Moscow was that poverty-stricken Ukraine would only receive gas if it paid for it in advance, which effectively meant the country would have to rely on their own supplies for the time being. It was June, summertime, but many Ukrainians knew their own Naftogaz reserves would not stretch very far as soon as winter set in.
In an attempt to create an opening for peace talks, the newly installed president of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko, on 18 June proposed a ceasefire in eastern Ukraine. He warned beforehand that he expected the proposed ceasefire to be very short-lived. The president promised that all rebels who surrendered peacefully, giving up their arms during the ceasefire, would receive amnesty, unless of course they had been accused of committing grave crimes during the hostilities. Government forces were ordered to withdraw from their positions to allow the rebels a chance to lay down their weapons. In the meantime, Russia resumed its build-up of forces along Ukraine’s eastern borders.
It soon became evident that the pro-Russian separatists were ignoring the call for a ceasefire from the Ukrainian government. The violent clashes between government forces and separatists, which were now concentrated in the city of Krasny Liman, a town to the north of Donetsk and Luhansk, did not abate. Separatists reported that a hospital in the town had come under attack from Ukrainian forces, killing twenty-five people. Igor Girkin, commanding the pro-Russian troops in the town, said the Ukrainian military advance would completely cut rebel supplies to Sloviansk and he issued a desperate plea to Russia for military assistance. The separatists had suffered heavy losses and Girkin admitted that his troops were outgunned.
On 20 June Poroshenko officially announced a one-week ceasefire. He also proposed a peace plan that would increase autonomy to the regions as well as protecting the Russian language. The battle’s pause gave the Ukrainian president the opportunity to visit his troops fighting in the east. During his visit he warned the separatists that the ceasefire did not mean that there would not be retaliation if the rebels showed any aggression against Ukrainian troops. Poroshenko stressed that the truce was meant only to give the rebels time to disarm. However, the pro-Russian insurgents showed no sign that they were willing to lay down their arms. The Kremlin initially dismissed the truce in a press release, saying it was ‘not an invitation to peace and negotiations but an ultimatum’.
After talks with American president Barrack Obama, President Putin however later cautiously welcomed the Kiev ceasefire and on 23 June the pro-Russian separatists followed suit, agreeing to the truce. Alexander Borodai, the leader of the People’s Republic of Donetsk, agreed to a four-day break in the hostilities, promising to start negotiations with the government.
But it soon became evident that the separatists were not united in their fight for independence. Many of them appeared to possess their own separate agendas and it became increasingly unclear who actually had the final say in the Dontesk and Luhansk regions. As the doubt about who was in charge in eastern Ukraine mounted, it slowly became obvious to the outside world that this depended on what area one was dealing with. Even the self-proclaimed leaders operating in the region appeared to only be in control of specific areas, villages, towns and cities in the eastern part of Ukraine. Several leaders had by now claimed their own autonomous states.
The truce was literally blown out of the skies just a few days after it had begun when a Ukrainian military helicopter was shot down near Sloviansk in the Donetsk region by separatists. The helicopter had arrived at Karachun (near Sloviansk) to unload and pick up a group of soldiers who were finishing their tour and going on leave. It was hit by a rocket just after take-off and nine servicemen and three crew members were killed as it crashed to the ground.
Donetsk leader Borodai claimed responsibility for the attack but blamed the Ukrainian military for inciting it, because of earlier provocations and violations of the ceasefire from their side. In response Poroshenko called the separatists ‘terrorists’ who were intent on maintaining a ‘bandit state’. The helicopter incident was the most severe breach in the continuing violence, with both rebels and government forces accusing each other of breaking the ceasefire.
The EU, eager to pull Ukraine out of Moscow’s clutches, offered Poroshenko a deal. So on 27 June, almost eight months after Viktor Yanukovych’s refusal to sign an agreement with the EU, President Poroshenko signed an Association Agreement with the European Union. Using the same pen that the now overthrown President Yanukovych would have used many months ago if he had not backed out at the last moment, Poroshenko initialled the deal with the European countries.
Although the trade pact did not provide Ukraine with membership of the EU, it did mean that if the country was to successfully implement the Association Agreement, the EU would view favourably at a later stage their ambition to become full members of the union. For the pro-EU citizens in Ukraine it meant a renewed chance to become a modern European country after the missed opportunities of the past years. For Russia, the signing of the Association Agreement meant a grave setback, as it set Ukraine on a course towards Europe once again.
By the end of June, Poroshenko let the press know that he was considering an extension to the shaky ceasefire between Ukrainian and pro-Russian forces. But the next day he retreated from this and suddenly terminated the truce immediately. In explaining his about-face, he said that the talks with the rebels had not in any way been productive and they had failed to reach any permanent peace agreement. In light of this, further negotiations were considered useless. The Ukrainian Anti-Terrorist Operation (ATO) resumed their operations in eastern Ukraine with air strikes, artillery bombardment and infantry assaults.