Debaltseve: You run away today to...

It reminds me of the immortal lines of James Garner in Maverick, when explaining his action:" you run away today to run away another day." No doubt Pres Poroshenko considers the Ukrainian army's exit  from Debaltseve as a brilliant military move and it was in a strangely logical way. One can certainly admire a group of men put into an impossible and dangerous situation escape. Which begs the question as to why they were there in the first place.

Poroshenko is trying to make the best of it on TV, claiming that he gave the order to retreat according to a carefully worked out plan. This is while his soldiers tell a different story: that THEY decided it was time to leave and they set out across the fields while being shot at and even shelled.

In the end, I suspect that the Rebs and their Russian comrades let the govt troops escape. Parading around 1500 POWs, or worse, letting people tweet pictures of that many corpses, would have been bad optics especially during a Cease Fire.

The Ukrainian leadership has talked itself into a very bad position by referring to the Rebs as "terrorists." It is nearly impossible to deal with terrorists, while it is possible to deal with Rebs. In the meantime the infrastructure and economy of the Donbass is destroyed or severely injured.