Australian deployment to Ukraine imminent
Source: Skynews
The federal government is close to finalising an agreement with the Ukrainian government to deploy federal police officers to the MH17 crash site.
Prime Minister Tony Abbott said the deployment would include Australian Defence Force personnel alongside AFP officers.
Some of the police officers may be armed and a further 100 are set to travel to Europe to join 90 who have already arrived.
The prime minister made the announcement during a press conference at the AFP's national headquarters in Canberra.
Read more: http://www.skynews.com.au/news/top-stories/2014/07/25/australian-deployment-to-ukraine-imminent.html
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It'll be a problem to maintain order. Esp. if the ceasefire doesn't hold.
In the center of the brown-striped area is a little icon of a crashed plane. If you go 40 km from that, where there's supposedly a ceasefire, you'll notice that it covers the area from the large dot in the SW (Donets'k) to the front lines in the NE (just southwest of a major area of fighting, Luhans'k). To the south it gets to the Russian border, where the Ukrainians are in an untenable position to the NW where the active front line for the fight is.
There's a tongue of rebel-held territory just north of the crash site. In the next few days expect that to vanish--the rebels have fallen back from most of that territory already, but it's still rebel-occupied because the Ukr forces haven't gone in--so that a bit over half of all rebel territory would be in that ceasefire zone.
It's a safe enough area for a week or two, the main Ukr push being to surround the cities to the SW and NE. The problem will be if the Ukr forces decide to try to cut the two "republics" apart and get rid of the bottleneck in the S. near the Russian border. Then the area of the crash is right in the middle of where they'd most likely go. (They might try to go south along the eastern border with Russia and reinforce their positions that way--they'd get control of that border but push the rebel forces to fight even harder in the south. With Russian artillery fire helping weaken the Ukr forces in the south, that might not be a wise move.)
Map:
