http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdffCp-MdgA
Crimea Officially belongs to Russia.
Russia President Putin: West Crossed Line, Crimea's Move similar to Ukraine's Move from Soviet.
(CBC) President Vladimir Putin fiercely defended Russia's move to annex Crimea, saying Tuesday that the rights of ethnic Russians have been abused by the new Ukrainian government.
In a televised address to the nation, he said Crimea's vote Sunday to join Russia was in line with international law, reflecting its right for self-determination.
To back the claim, he pointed to Kosovo's independence bid from Serbia — supported by the West and opposed by Russia — and said that Crimea's secession from Ukraine repeats Ukraine's own secession from the Soviet Union in 1991.
He denied Western accusations that Russia invaded Crimea prior to the referendum, saying Russian troops were sent there in line with a treaty with Ukraine that allows Russia to have up to 25,000 troops at its Black Sea Fleet base in Crimea.
"The (Crimean) issue has a vital importance, a historic importance for all of us," Putin said
Putin also said Russian relations with "brotherly" Ukrainians will always be important to Russia.
Earlier, Putin approved a draft bill for the annexation of Crimea, a key move in a flurry of steps to formally take over the Black Sea peninsula.
Russia's Constitutional Court and the Kremlin-controlled parliament are expected to quickly endorse the move. Some lawmakers said that Crimea could be made part of Russia by the end of the week.
Crimea on Sunday voted overwhelmingly to secede from Ukraine and seek to join Russia. The hastily called vote was held two weeks after Russian troops had overtaken the Black Sea peninsula.
Russia slapped with sanctions
The West and Ukraine described the referendum, which was announced two weeks ago, as illegitimate.
The United States and the European Union on Monday announced asset freezes and other sanctions against Russian and Ukrainian officials involved in the Crimean crisis. President Barack Obama warned that more would come if Russia didn't stop interfering in Ukraine.
France's Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said on Europe-1 radio Tuesday leaders of the Group of Eight world powers "decided to suspend Russia's participation, and it is envisaged that all the other countries, the seven leading countries, will unite without Russia."
The other seven members of the group had already suspended preparations for a G-8 summit that Russia is scheduled to host in June in Sochi.
Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, however, hailed Crimea's vote to join Russia as a "happy event." Gorbachev, in remarks carried Tuesday by online newspaper Slon.ru, said Crimea's vote offered residents the freedom of choice and showed that "people really wanted to return to Russia."
Gorbachev added that the referendum set an example for people in Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine, who also should decide their fate.
The decree signed by Putin and posted on the official government website Tuesday morning is one of the steps to formalize the annexation of Crimea.
Putin has warned that he would be ready to use "all means" to protect Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine, and Russia has built up its forces alongside the border between the two countries, raising fears of an invasion.
New concerns in Ukraine
Ukraine's Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk said in a televised statement that Ukrainian law-enforcement agencies have gathered "convincing evidence of the participation of Russian special services in organizing unrest in the east of our country."
Many in the ethnic Tatar minority in Crimea were wary of the referendum, fearing that Crimea's break-off from Ukraine would set off violence against them.
Crimean Deputy Prime Minister Rustam Temirgaliyev seemed to confirm those fears, saying in remarks carried by the RIA Novosti news agency that the government would ask Tatars to "vacate" some of the lands they "illegally" occupy so authorities can use them for "social needs."
The Russian State Duma, the lower chamber of parliament, on Tuesday unanimously passed a resolution condemning U.S. sanctions targeting Russian officials including members of the chamber. The chamber challenged President Barack Obama to extend the sanctions to all the 353 deputies who voted for Tuesday's resolution, suggesting that being targeted was a badge of honour. Eighty-eight deputies left the house before the vote.
Putin's senior foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov blasted the new sanctions in an interview with Russian news agencies. "We are fed up with these sanctions," Ushakov said.
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Wed Mar 19, 2014 6:37 pm Post subject:
Joseph Miranda is a long-time US wargame designer who, 10-15 years ago, designed a game called 'Ukraine' which reflects in some ways what we are seeing in the news at the moment.
The game features Information Operations targeting TV channels and Joseph explains that he does not have a TV in is own home, preferring to get his news from technical and military specialist websites. He is currently working on 'Kiev' and other 'New World Order' games including China versus Russia scenario.
http://www.radio4all.net/index.php/program/74920
Ukraine & Gaming Modern War - designer Joseph Miranda
'...And then, in 2004, there arrived in Havana a person well known in Venezuela, Kelly Keiderling. Kelly came to Havana to work as Chief of the Office of Press and Culture. They set up a meeting. they arranged a cocktail party, and at that party I met with 12 North American functionaries, North Americans and Europeans. They weren’t only North Americans. All of them people with experience, some also inside the Soviet Union, others who had participated in training and preparation of the people in Yugoslavia, in the Color Revolutions, and they were very interested in meeting me. Kelly became very close to me. She began to prepare me. She began to instruct me. I began to receive, from her, a very solid training: The creation of alternative groups, independent groups, the organization and training of youth leaders, who did not participate in the works of our cultural institutions. And that was in 2004-5. Kelly practically vanished from the scene in 2005-6. And when I started to work, she put me in direct contact with officials of the CIA. Supposedly, I was already committed to them, I was ready for the next mission, and they put me in touch with Renee Greenwald, an official of the CIA, who worked with me directly, and with a man named Mark Waterhein, who was, at the time, the head of Project Cuba, of the Pan-American Foundation for Development.
This man, Mark, as well as directing Project Cuba, had a direct link to Cuba, in terms of financing the anti-revolutionary project, as well as being involved in working against Venezuela. That is, he was a man who, along with much of his team of functionaries of that famous project, also worked against Venezuela at that time. They were closely connected. At times it took a lot of work to tell who was working with Cuba, and who was not, because many times they interlocked. For example, there were Venezuelans who came to work with me, who worked in Washington, who were subordinates of the Pan-American Foundation and the CIA, and they came to Cuba to train me as well, and to bring provisions. From there arose the idea of creating a foundation, a project called Genesis.
Genesis is maybe the template, as an idea, of many of the things going on in the world today, because Genesis is a project aimed at the university youth of Cuba. They were doing something similar in Venezuela. Why? The idea was to convert universities — which have always been revolutionary, which have produced revolutionaries, out of those from which many of the revolutionaries of both countries came — and convert them into factories for reactionaries. So, how do you do that? By making leaders. What have they begun to do in Venezuela? They sent students to Yugoslavia, financed by the International Republican Institute (IRI), which was financed by USAID and by the Albert Einstein Institute, and sent them, in groups of ten, with their professors.
Q. Do you have the names of the Venezuelans?
No, we’re talking of hundreds being sent. I spoke with the professor, and watched one group and followed the other. Because they were working long-term. The same plan was also in place against Cuba. Genesis promoted, with in the university, a plan of training scholarships for Cuban student leaders and professors. The plan was very similar. Also, in 2003, they prepared here, in Havana, a course in the US Interests Section, which was called “Deposing a leader, deposing a dictator”, which was based on the experience of OTPOR in removing Slobodan Milosevic from power. And that was the idea, inside the Cuban university, to work long-term, because these projects always take a long time in order to reap a result. For that reason, they also started early in Venezuela. I believe as well — I don’t have proof, but I believe that in Venezuela it began before the Chávez government, because the plan of converting Latin American universities, which were always sources of revolutionary processes, into reactionary universities, is older than the Venezuelan [Bolivarian] process, to reverse the situation and create a new right-wing.
Q. Did the CIA only work in Caracas?
No, throughout Venezuela. Right now, Genesis has a scholarship plan to create leaders in Cuba. They provide scholarships to students to big North American universities, to train them as leaders, with all expenses paid. They pay their costs, they provide complete scholarships. We’re talking 2004-5 here. It was very obvious. Then, those leaders return to university at some time. They’re students. They go to end their careers. Those leaders, when they end their student careers, go on to various jobs, different possibilities, as engineers, as degree-holders in different sectors of Cuban society, but there are others who go on constantly preparing leaders within the university. One of the most important missions of the university leaders was to occupy the leadership of the principal youth organizations of the university. In the case of Cuba, we’re talking about the Union of Communist Youth, and the University Student Federation. That is, it was not to create parallel groups at that time, but to become the leaders of the organizations already existing in Cuba. Also, to form a group of leaders in the strategies of the “soft” coup. That is, training people for the opportune moment to start the famous “color revolutions” or “non-violent wars”, which, as you well know, have nothing to do with non-violence...' _________________ 'And he (the devil) said to him: To thee will I give all this power, and the glory of them; for to me they are delivered, and to whom I will, I give them'. Luke IV 5-7.
Despite Russia’s veiled threat that any ongoing action against pro-Russian demonstrators had the potential to instigate civil war and bring action by the Russian forces, Ukraine’s interior minister Arsen Avakov has announced, Reuters reports, that Ukraine has launched an “anti-terrorist” operation in the eastern city of Kharkiv and about 70 “separatists” have been arrested for seizing the regional administration building. Is this the red-line that Putin laid down last night?
As Russia made clear last night, as ITAR-TASS reports,
The Russian Foreign Ministry urged Ukraine to halt any interior military preparations, which could instigate a civil war in the country, the ministry was quoted as saying on its Facebook.com account.
“According to our information, units of the Interior troops and Ukraine’s national guards as well as militants from the illegal armed formation ‘The Right Sector’ are being amassed in the southeastern parts of Ukraine and in the city of Donetsk,” the ministry said.
“We are particularly concerned that the operation involves some 150 American mercenaries from a private company Greystone Ltd., dressed in the uniform of the [Ukrainian] special task police unit Sokol,” the ministry said.
But, in the interests of stability, as Ukraine also made clear yesterday, Reuters reports that
Ukraine has launched an “anti-terrorist” operation in the eastern city of Kharkiv and about 70 “separatists” have been arrested for seizing the regional administration building, Ukrainian Interior Minister Arsen Avakov said on Tuesday.
On his Facebook page, Avakov said: “An anti-terrorist operation has been launched. The city center is blocked along with metro stations. Do not worry. Once we finish, we will open them again.”
Ukraine’s Interior Ministry was quoted as saying by Interfax-Ukraine news agency that those detained were suspected of “illegal activity related to separatism, the organization of mass disorder, damage to human health” and breaking other laws.
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Fri Apr 18, 2014 8:47 pm Post subject:
US lies about Brennan's presence in Kiev
Big surprise: CIA Director Brennan's trip to Ukraine initiates use of force
http://www.sott.net/article/277652-Big-surprise-CIA-Director-Brennans- trip-to-Ukraine-initiates-use-of-force
CIA Director John Brennan
The recent visit of CIA Director John Brennan to Ukraine was likely an attempt to initiate the use of force against pro-federalization protests, Brandon Turbeville, an American international affairs expert, told RIA Novosti.
"It's clear that the CIA director's presence in Kiev is much more than mere coincidence," Turbeville said.
"Despite the denials by the White House, it seems that Brennan's visit was an attempt to, at the very least, express support for a violent crackdown on pro-Russian protesters and militants in Eastern Ukraine. It is more likely, however, that Brennan's trip was an attempt to formulate, encourage and initiate that use of force," he added.
CIA Director John Brennan visited Ukraine over the weekend, information that was confirmed by White House Press Secretary Jay Carney on Monday, after being reported by media on Sunday.
Over the same weekend, Kiev authorities cracked down on pro-federalization protests in eastern Ukraine. Regime troops advanced toward a number of cities in eastern Ukraine Tuesday to attack the protesters.
"Brennan's appearance in Kiev just before the announcement of a violent crackdown in eastern Ukraine is just too timely to assume that it is a coincidence," Turbeville said.
"Brennan, who has been actively involved in arming insurgents in Libya, Syria and Venezuela, has a reputation for using thuggish tactics in pursuit of CIA goals," Wayne Madsen, an American investigative journalist told RIA Novosti.
"The reported presence of Greystone mercenaries in Ukraine is typical of the CIA using shadowy front companies with murky interconnecting relationships to carry out agency operations," Madsen said.
Sreeram Chaulia, Professor and Dean at the Jindal School of International Affairs, believes the CIA director traveled to Kiev with promises of large sums of money "to create new special units and squads that can help in crushing the people's uprisings in eastern Ukraine."
"He must have gone in person rather than leave it to the local CIA station chief so as to give hope to the Ukrainian security agencies that a new Western-dominated reordering of the state is underway, and that they should hence stop being ambivalent about Russia," Chaulia told RIA Novosti.
Chaulia said the visit was a US attempt to make Ukraine "more confrontational and aggressive toward Russia by showing a high level of Western commitment for counter-intelligence and sabotage."
Several American organizations are known to be involved in meddling in domestic affairs of other countries, including staging revolutions. In Ukraine, the US held a series of so-called TechCamps over the past two years to train social activists. Similar workshops are regularly held in other states and often coincide with epicenters of revolutions and unrest.
"The involvement of organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy and the International Republican Institute should not be overlooked either, since John McCain, who is heavily involved with the IRI even went so far as to travel to Ukraine to express support for the neo-Nazis and fascists who were in the process of seizing power," Turbeville said.
Joined: 30 Jul 2006 Posts: 6060 Location: East London
Posted: Fri Apr 18, 2014 11:40 pm Post subject:
About time Moscow deployed it's 'Not so secret' 'Weapon of Mass Awakening': no, not an almighty 'Kerr-BOOOM', but the dissemination of their knowledge of the totally crooked, perverted, fraudster leaders of the USA, which the MSM knows about but won't touch with a barge-pole.
Stuff like George Bush Sr., Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, Brian Mulroney and other previous heads of State's PAEDOPHILIA (of course the Russians and Chinese have the evidence), and the frauds committed by ALL the Bushes, many Senators and Congressmen, CIA, DIA, DEA, Military, ONI. And the massive importation of Cocaine and Heroin, destroying countless US lives.
Kind of a 'Damocletian Sword', eh, Obomba?
I sure as heck hope they do use that angle; it will at least give a chance to those fighting the apathy and ignorance of the general public, and MAY (though I doubt it) stall the NWO Juggernaut in it's tracks, at least for a while. _________________ 'And he (the devil) said to him: To thee will I give all this power, and the glory of them; for to me they are delivered, and to whom I will, I give them'. Luke IV 5-7.
Shorter time-scale than Roland Dumas' and Wesley Clark's evidence re Syria plans, but similar scenario. Also, of course, there was the 'CANVAS' training (they were probably combined).
It's the same ploy CANVAS used in Cuba and Venezuela, giving 'students' 'University courses'.
'..The Polish left-wing weekly Nie (No) published a startling witness account of the training given to the most violent of the EuroMaidan [1] activists.
According to this source, in September 2013, Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski invited 86 members of the Right Sector (Sector Pravy), allegedly in the context of a university exchange program. In reality, the guests were not students, and many were over 40. Contrary to their official schedule, they did not go to the Warsaw University of Technology, but headed instead for the police training center in Legionowo, an hour’s drive from the capital. There, they received four weeks of intensive training in crowd management, person recognition, combat tactics, command skills, behavior in crisis situations, protection against gases used by police, erecting barricades, and especially shooting, including the handling of sniper rifles.
Such training took place in September 2013, while the Maidan Square protests were allegedly triggered by a decree suspending preparations for the signing of the Ukraine-European Union Association Agreement, which was issued by Prime Minister Mykola Azarov on November 21, i.e. two months later.
The Polish weekly refers to photographs attesting to the training, which show the Ukrainians in Nazi uniforms alongside their Polish instructors in civilian clothing...' _________________ 'And he (the devil) said to him: To thee will I give all this power, and the glory of them; for to me they are delivered, and to whom I will, I give them'. Luke IV 5-7.
On Thursday [April 17th] Democracy Now! welcomed back Stephen Cohen, Professor Emeritus of Russian Studies and Politics at New York University and Princeton University, to discuss the deepening crisis in Ukraine. Cohen, a specialist on Russia and the Soviet Union, is the author of numerous books on the subject including his latest Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War. He was asked “Are we seeing the beginning of a new Cold War?” and “what exactly is happening right now in Ukraine?” Cohen’s response began as follows:
Those are big questions. We are not at the beginning of the Cold War, a new one; we are well into it—which alerts us to the fact, just watching what you showed up there, that hot war is imaginable now, for the first time in my lifetime, my adult lifetime, since the Cuban missile crisis, hot war with Russia. It’s unlikely, but it’s conceivable. And if it’s conceivable, something has to be done about it.
You did two things on your introduction which were very important. Almost alone among American media, you actually allowed Putin to speak for himself. He’s being filtered through the interpretation of the mass media here, allegedly, what he said, and it’s not representative. The second thing is, let us look just what’s happening at this moment, or at least yesterday. The political head of NATO just announced a major escalation of NATO forces in Europe. He did a Churchillian riff: “We will increase our power in the air, in the sea, on the land.” Meanwhile, as negotiations today begin in Geneva, we’re demanding that Russians de-escalate. And yet, we, NATO, are escalating as these negotiations begin.
So, if you were to say what is going on in Ukraine today—and, unfortunately, the focus is entirely on eastern Ukraine. We don’t have any Western media—in eastern Ukraine. We don’t have any Western—any Western media in western Ukraine, the other half of the country. We’re not clear what’s going on there. But clearly, things are getting worse and worse. Each side has a story that totally conflicts with the other side’s story. There seems to be no middle ground. And if there’s no middle ground in the public discourse, in the Russian media or the American media, it’s not clear what middle ground they can find in these negotiations, though personally, I think—and people will say, “Oh, Cohen’s a Putin apologist”—but it seemed to me that the proposals the Russians made a month ago for resolving the conflict are at least a good starting point. But it’s not clear the United States is going to accept them.
I will come back to some of Cohen’s further points in a moment, but first I’d like to just try to understand why, as Cohen points out, there is such a lack of media coverage across Ukraine and in particular in the western half of the country.
Below is a video (I can’t find a still frame) recorded in mid-March featuring a statement by Vitali Klitschko as he warned of an impending catastrophe in Crimea should it vote to join Russia in the recent referendum. Klitschko has since been sidelined, of course, but what strikes me as odd is that he was standing in front of a board much like the kind of sponsorship boards we see behind interviews of Premier League footballers. Similar except that the ex-sportsman here was backed by just one logo. You can see that it reads “Ukraine Crisis Media Center”:
Now if you type “Ukraine Crisis Media Center” into the Google image search you will find many other Ukrainian political figures giving statements in front of that same logo board. So just who are the “Ukraine Crisis Media Center”?
Well, they have a website and you can search for details there, but in fact you will find very few and none at all about their own sponsors. Instead, what you will read is this:
Ukrainian Crisis Media Center is launched to provide the international community with objective information about events in Ukraine and threats to national security, particularly in the military, political, economic, energy and humanitarian spheres. During this crisis period, the Center on a 24/7 basis will provide support to all the media who cover events in Ukraine.
Having failed to find further information on their website, I decided to email the organisation [on Thursday April 3rd] and asked the following:
I cannot find any information on your site about where financial support for the media center comes from. Without information on who is backing the venture how can we be sure that your coverage is wholly impartial?
I have not received a reply.
In the meantime, I also searched the web for insight from other places – and came across a glowing report published in Kyiv Post which began as follows:
Much like the EuroMaidan Revolution itself, the Ukraine Crisis Media Center sprang to life with speed, spontaneity, creativity, competence – and a strong sense of mission.
Although the center has been open only since March 4, its third floor headquarters in the Hotel Ukraine on 4 Institutska St. is already a required daily stop for dozens of Ukrainian and foreign journalists.
Continuing:
The group came together at Razumkov Center in Kyiv on March 2.
Nataliya Popovych, the president of Kyiv’s PRP Group, an affiliate of the global Webber Shandwick company, is among the founders.
Popovych said that the Kremlin is fast on its feet in spreading lies about Ukraine, whose government is often slow to respond to allegations and counter untruths.
Well, here’s one of the details I was searching for – so who is Nataliya Popovych?
Nataliya started career in Leo Burnett, one of the leading advertising agencies in the world, and continued in Romyr & Associates, Canadian government and public relations firm. After getting Master degree and probation in USA, Nataliya has become a head of PRP Ukraine, a Weber Shandwick Affiliate Company in Ukraine, and in a year became the President of PRP Group, Weber Shandwick partner on CIS markets.
And PRP? You probably won’t be surprised to learn that they are a PR company:
PRP is more than an integrated solutions agency. It is a creative concept. It is a strategy. It is the management of reputations in a new era. It is the ability to communicate and create goodwill. It is integrated solutions which engage audiences into the lives of companies and brands.
That’s taken from their current LinkedIn profile and the profile of Nataliya Popovych is from PR Congress.
But back to the article in the Kyiv Post:
She [Nataliya Popovych] considers Ukrainians to be loving, peaceful and tolerant people and, while she didn’t consider herself a follower of iconic and controversial nationalist hero Stepan Bandera (1909-1959), she is now “proud to be called a Banderite.”1
And for those who don’t know who Stepan Bandera was, then here are a few extracts taken from a detailed and rather generous biography written by Professor of History at Yale University, Timothy Snyder, and published by The New York Review of Books around the time Viktor Yushchenko (President after the “Orange Revolution”) was voted out of office in 2010:
The incoming Ukrainian president will have to turn some attention to history, because the outgoing one has just made a hero of a long-dead Ukrainian fascist. By conferring the highest state honor of “Hero of Ukraine” upon Stepan Bandera (1909-1959) on January 22, Viktor Yushchenko provoked protests from the chief rabbi of Ukraine, the president of Poland, and many of his own citizens. It is no wonder. Bandera aimed to make of Ukraine a one-party fascist dictatorship without national minorities. During World War II, his followers killed many Poles and Jews. Why would President Yushchenko, the leader of the democratic Orange Revolution, wish to rehabilitate such a figure? Bandera, who spent years in Polish and Nazi confinement, and died at the hands of the Soviet KGB, is for some Ukrainians a symbol of the struggle for independence during the twentieth century. […]
Consistent as the rehabilitation of Bandera might be with the ideological competition of the mid-twentieth century, it makes little ethical sense today. Yushchenko, who praised the recent Kiev court verdict condemning Stalin for genocide, regards as a hero a man whose political program called for ethnic purity and whose followers took part in the ethnic cleansing of Poles and, in some cases, in the Holocaust. Bandera opposed Stalin, but that does not mean that the two men were entirely different. In their struggle for Ukraine, we see the triumph of the principle, common to fascists and communists, that political transformation sanctifies violence. It was precisely this legacy that east European revolutionaries seemed to have overcome in the past thirty years, from the Solidarity movement in Poland of 1980 through the Ukrainian presidential elections of 2005. It was then, during the Orange Revolution, that peaceful demonstrations for free and fair elections brought Yushchenko the presidency. In embracing Bandera as he leaves office, Yushchenko has cast a shadow over his own political legacy.2
All of which helps to explain something else that has been puzzling me… why every other story about what’s happening in Ukraine is entitled “Ukraine Crisis: something or other” – the reason being that “Ukraine Crisis” is more or less the brand name that Nataliya Popovych and other “Ukrainian nationalists” have adopted — a list of the founders of the “Ukraine Crisis Media Center” is available at the end of the same Kyiv Post article.3
So what is this new political brand promoting?
*
The “war on terror” is dead, long live the new cold war!
Returning to Stephen Cohen, here is what he had to say about the rise of this new cold war:
As a historian, I would say that this conflict began 300 years ago, but we can’t do that. As a contemporary observer, it certainly began in November 2013 when the European Union issued an ultimatum, really, to the then-president, elected president, of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, that “Sign an agreement with us, but you can’t have one with Russia, too.” In my mind, that precipitated this crisis, because why give a country that has been profoundly divided for centuries, and certainly in recent decades, an ultimatum—an elected president: “Choose, and divide your country further”? So when we say today Putin initiated this chaos, this danger of war, this confrontation, the answer is, no, that narrative is wrong from the beginning. It was triggered by the European Union’s unwise ultimatum.
Now flash forward to just one month ago, about the time I was with you before. Remember that the European foreign ministers—three of them, I think—went to Kiev and negotiated with Yanukovych, who was still the president, an agreement. Now, the Russians were present at the negotiation, but they didn’t sign it. But they signed off on it. They said, “OK.” What did that agreement call for? Yanukovych would remain president until December—not May, when elections are now scheduled, but December of this year. Then there would be a presidential election. He could run in them, or not. Meanwhile, there would be a kind of government of national accord trying to pull the government together. And, importantly, Russia would chip in, in trying to save the Ukrainian economy. But there would also be parliamentary elections. That made a lot of sense. And it lasted six hours.
The next day, the street, which was now a mob—let’s—it was no longer peaceful protesters as it had been in November. It now becomes something else, controlled by very ultra-nationalist forces; overthrew Yanukovych, who fled to Russia; burned up the agreement. So who initiated the next stage of the crisis? It wasn’t Russia. They wanted that agreement of February, a month ago, to hold. And they’re still saying, “Why don’t we go back to it?” You can’t go back to it, though there is a report this morning that Yanukovych, who is in exile in Russia, may fly to eastern Ukraine today or tomorrow, which will be a whole new dimension.
But the point of it is, is that Putin didn’t want—and this is reality, this is not pro-Putin or pro-Washington, this is just a fact—Putin did not want this crisis. He didn’t initiate it. But with Putin, once you get something like that, you get Mr. Pushback. And that’s what you’re now seeing. And the reality is, as even the Americans admit, he holds all the good options. We have none. That’s not good policymaking, is it?
Click here to read a full transcript or watch the latest interview with Stephen Cohen on the Democracy Now! website.
*
The United States spent over a decade hunting down Osama Bin Laden at financial a cost running into multiple trillions and a human cost of more than a million lives, yet since his demise the jihadist cause that Bin Laden once spearheaded is stronger than ever. Forces of al-Qaeda and other near identical jihadist factions now hold control of a large region of Iraq and Syria that exceeds the area of Britain, whilst other Islamist gangs run amok throughout Libya. Thus, after a decade of dirty wars executed by means of “shock and awe” air strikes, the perpetual overhead threat of drones and the knock at the door that ends with secret rendition to faraway torture sites, the “war on terror” has been lost. “Terror” reigns supreme as the victor: terror from all sides that is.
But then, it is hard to imagine any foreign policy that could have manufactured and spread terrorism more effectively than the policies enacted during this decade-long “war on terror”. Blowback? Up to a point. But, we must not forget that all of the many al-Qaeda factions that have gained so much territory could never have done so without our help. Whether indirectly, with the establishment of the power vacuum in Iraq, or more purposefully, with Nato bombers opening the way for the Islamist insurgency in Libya. But mostly, the gains of al-Qaeda are thanks to the very generous funding of one of America and Britain’s closest allies, that bastion of freedom and democracy, Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Bin Laden, and the nation known to have the closest ties to those accused of the 9/11 attacks. Attacks that provided the very springboard from which the “war on terror” was launched all those years ago. These are the facts and none can be refuted, so make of them what you will – if it was a plot for a film it would seem ludicrously far-fetched.
Of course, the “war on terror” lost a great deal of its public appeal with the bludgeoning of Iraq, and so under Obama we’ve had “humanitarian interventions”. But this new gloss has also flaked away, with the majority of people in the West absolutely sick of war. That said, the wars go on regardless – wreaking havoc but still satisfying the insatiable thirst for blood demanded by our military-industrial-financial complex.
None of these wars have had anything to do with stamping out terrorism or, surely more laughably, the West’s desire to bring “freedom and democracy”. The United States’ covert backing of al-Qaeda is nothing new and neither is the West’s more brazen support of al-Qaeda’s primary sponsor Saudi Arabia? If the wars were about either terrorism or “freedom and democracy”, then the Saudi regime would surely have topped the charts of “the axis of evil”.
In truth, the game never changed. And sadly it is a game (at least to those currently holding power) – as Zbigniew Brzezinski, one of America’s leading geopolitical strategists, makes clear not least with the title of his notorious book on Eurasian geostrategy, “The Grand Chessboard”. In it he wrote:
In brief, for the United States, Eurasian geostrategy involves the purposeful management of geostrategically dynamic states and the careful handling of geopolitically catalytic states, in keeping with the twin interests of America in the short-term: preservation of its unique global power and in the long-run transformation of it into increasingly institutionalized global cooperation. To put it in a terminology that hearkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together.4
This neo-imperialist game is much the same as the older imperialist game, in which only the strategies have been updated. It is about control of territory, of energy resources, of financial systems, and it has (and always did) amount to a series of proxy wars against the competing interests of competing powers. Traditionally Russia have been the great adversary, but now there is China too. So the Cold War that officially concluded with the fall of the Berlin Wall in October 1989… ended only in name. With the Ukrainian crisis (or should that be “Ukraine Crisis”) the chill that remained has become considerably icier. Treacherously so. But our military-industrial-financial complex needs perpetual war just to keep the racket going, or, when that ceases to be an option (as it now has), to maintain the illusion of an imminent threat against us. Bin Laden is dead, so a new Cold War is just the ticket. On top of which, as Brzezinski also explained in his book:
“Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire.”
Here’s Stephen Cohen again:
The real debate going on in NATO—the real debate, because this is a distraction—is what Rasmussen said in your earlier clip—he’s the political head of NATO—that we’re building up, as we talk, our forces in eastern Europe. Now, understand what’s going on here. When we took in—”we” meaning the United States and NATO—all these countries in eastern Europe into NATO, we did not—we agreed with the Russians we would not put forward military installations there. We built some infrastructure—air strips, there’s some barracks, stuff like that. But we didn’t station troops that could march toward Russia there. Now what NATO is saying, it is time to do that. Now, Russia already felt encircled by NATO member states on its borders. The Baltics are on its borders. If we move the forces, NATO forces, including American troops, to—toward Russia’s borders, where will we be then? I mean, it’s obviously going to militarize the situation, and therefore raise the danger of war.
And I think it’s important to emphasize, though I regret saying this, Russia will not back off. This is existential. Too much has happened. Putin—and it’s not just Putin. We seem to think Putin runs the whole of the universe. He has a political class. That political class has opinions. Public support is running overwhelmingly in favor of Russian policy. Putin will compromise at these negotiations, but he will not back off if confronted militarily. He will not.
*
A trade war opens the way for new trade deals
The new cold war isn’t only a military escalation, it also potentially marks the beginning of a new trade war. But due to reliance on Russia imports (especially when it comes to energy) EU sanctions on Russia will be difficult, and so one way forward could involve loosening trade restrictions between the EU and the US.
The following passages are taken from a press release by the European Council following the recent EU-US Summit in Brussels. It begins:
Recent events in Ukraine have confirmed that strong cooperation between the European Union and the United States on peace and security is of critical importance.
Continuing under the next heading “Economy and global challenges” as follows:
Reinforcing economic growth and job creation remains central on both sides of the Atlantic. The EU and the United States have taken important steps to stabilise financial conditions and overcome the crisis. The EU remains committed to building a deep and genuine economic and monetary union, including a banking union. […]
The EU and US leaders renewed their commitment to a strong Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). this should go beyond a free trade agreement and reaffirm Europe and the United States’ shared values of democracy, individual freedom, the rule of law and human rights, and a common commitment to open societies and economies. [bold highlights maintained from original source]
And what is TTIP? Here are additional notes at the end of the same press release:
The EU and US have decided to take their economic relationship to a higher level by agreeing to launch negotiations on a comprehensive trade and investment agreement. It aims to remove trade barriers in a wide range of economic sectors to make it easier to buy and sell goods and services between the EU and the US.
In fact, I have already touched on the subject of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) as well as its sister treaty the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) . Both of these “free-trade agreements” appear to have alternative and conflicting names and acronyms and in the case of TTIP it is also known as the Transatlantic Free Trade Area, abbreviated as TAFTA, which is how it appeared in that earlier post. Why trade agreements need to have multiple names becomes more apparent when you realise what this commitment to “freeing up regulations” will mean. Here are a few extracts from a detailed analysis published by Der Spiegel International and entitled “Corporation Carte Blanche: Will US-EU Trade Become Too Free?”:
Lori Wallach had but 10 minutes to speak when she stepped up to podium inside Room 405 at George Washington University, located not too far away from the White House. Her audience was made up of delegates currently negotiating the trans-Atlantic free trade agreement between the United States and the European Union.
They had already spent hours listening to presentations by every possible lobbying group — duty bound to hear myriad opinions. But when Wallach, a trade expert for the consumer protection group Public Citizen, took the stage, people suddenly started paying attention. The 49-year-old Harvard lawyer, after all, is a key figure in international trade debates.
“The planned deal will transfer power from elected governments and civil society to private corporations,” she said, warning that the project presents a threat of entirely new dimensions. [bold emphasis added]
How will TTIP help to transfer even more power out of democratic control and into the hands of the major corporations? Well, let us count the ways:
After the third round of negotiations, an unusually broad alliance of anti-globalization groups, NGOs, environmental and consumer protection groups, civil rights groups and organized labor is joining forces to campaign against TTIP.
These critics have numerous concerns about the treaty – including their collective fear that the convergence of standards will destroy important gains made over the years in health and nutrition policy, environmental protection and employee rights. They argue the treaty will make it easier for corporations to turn profits at the public’s expense in areas like water supply, health or education. It would also clear the path for controversial technologies like fracking or for undesired food products like growth hormone-treated meat to make their way to Europe. Broadly worded copyrights would also restrict access to culture, education and science. They also believe it could open the door to comprehensive surveillance.5
Click here to read the full article in Der Spiegel.
*
Fracking for freedom (and digging for victory)
I have already highlighted at the end of an earlier and rather more extended post how energy giants Chevron and Exxon Mobil have been getting ready to move their operations to Ukraine with the intention of exploring both conventional and “unconventional” resources (otherwise known as “fracking”). On Saturday’s Keiser Report, Max Keiser spoke to freelance journalist JP Sottile of Newsvandal.com, who also occasionally writes for the Guardian, about not only how Big Oil, but also Big Agra, have their eyes fixed on Ukraine. Sottile names the people and corporations hoping to take advantage of Ukraine’s exceptional fertile lands. Here are some excerpts of what he had to say [from about 13 mins in]:
“One of the bones of contention with Russia, Europe, and its transit point Ukraine, is Russia’s domination of the natural gas market in Europe. So I thought it was very interesting when the deal was announced that Chevron was involved in developing shale gas in Ukraine. Now that would have been with the previous government of Yanukovych – and I believe that that led to a lot of the pressure coming out of Moscow for Yanukovych to reject the economic deal between Ukraine and Europe, and that then of course led to a cascading number of events, which led to the deposing of Yanukovych and the ‘crisis in Ukraine’ as it is now called.”
Beyond the oil and gas, Sottile has also looked closely into the interests of agricultural giants Cargill and Monsanto, who are keen to exploit Ukraine’s riches closer to the surface:
US-Ukraine Business Council is an investor in the US-Ukraine Foundation where Ms [Victoria] Nuland was speaking on December 13th [about how the US had already spent $5 billion helping Ukraine realise its “European aspirations”] and also on December 13th, that was the day that Cargill invested in a Black Sea port to help open the Russian market to its agriculture. Well, Cargill is also heavily invested in Ukraine in a company called Ukrlandfarming. The just bought a two hundred thousand dollar stake in Ukrlandfarming. In fact they bought that stake – or it was announced – on the very day, January 12th of this year, that fifty thousand Ukrainians flooded Kiev to protest the government of Yanukovych.
They are all connected through Freedom House – a guy there who worked with Ms Nuland, who is Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, she had a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, a guy named David Kramer. David Kramer serves on – he’s actually head of Freedom House – Freedom House is one of the organisations that the United States uses to stoke democracy movements around the world. It is actually responsible, along with the National Endowment for Democracy, for funding many of the opposition forces there in Ukraine. And David Kramer also serves on the US-Ukraine Business Council. If you go the US-Ukraine Business Council – which is a very interesting organisation – on the executive board of the US-Ukraine Business Council you’ll find Cargill, Monsanto, John Deere, CNH International (which is a farming equipment and tractor-making company), Eli Lilly and DuPont Pioneer – DuPont Pioneer being the genetically modified organisms and agricultural wing of DuPont. And they all serve together under the guidance of a guy named Morgan Williams. Morgan Williams is CEO and President of US-Ukraine Business Council, and he has been a fixer for Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, [and] other big agricultural companies in Ukraine for the last fifteen to twenty years.
There is an expression from my part of the world that goes: “where there’s muck, there’s brass”. Well, as Sottile’s investigations reveal, there’s loads of muck in Ukraine and not just in oil and gas deposits. Perhaps, as he suspects, the bigger prize is the land itself. Either way, the vultures are already circling. Except that they are more predatory than the much maligned vulture. Rather than waiting for a crisis to happen they have been directly involved in fomenting one, and now, as their “Ukraine Crisis” escalates, they won’t be planning to let it to go to waste.
Click here to read more about this in JP Sottile’s article entitled “Ukraine, Chevron, Condi Rice and Shale Gas… join the dots” published by The Ecologist magazine on March 18th.
Valeriy Chaly, Razumkov Centre, deputy foreign minister of Ukraine (2009-2010)
Ivanna Klympush-Tsyntsadze, Yalta European Strategy, director
Nataliya Popovych, PRP, president
Natalia Olbert-Sinko, PRP in Ukraine, executive director
Yaryna Klyuchkovska, independent communications consultant
Gennadiy Kurochka, CFC, founder and managing partner
Vasyl Myroshnychenko, CFC, partner
Alina Frolova, R.A.M. 360, CEO
Volodymyr Degtyaryov, NewsFront PR agency, director
Ivetta Delikatnaya, AGL, director of development
Maxim Savanevskyi, PlusOne DA, managing partner
Andriy Zagorodskiy, Newsplot, director
4 Extract from The Grand Chessboard, Chapter 2 “The Eurasian Chessboard”, p. 40, written by Zbigniew Brzezinski, published in 1997. It is available at http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Zbigniew_Brzezinski
Joined: 30 Jul 2006 Posts: 6060 Location: East London
Posted: Sun Apr 27, 2014 11:59 pm Post subject:
RT video of Scott Rickard, ex-US Intel whistleblower:
Former U.S. Intelligence Officer Says U.S. Orchestrated Coup:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=de9DcWM2X74 _________________ 'And he (the devil) said to him: To thee will I give all this power, and the glory of them; for to me they are delivered, and to whom I will, I give them'. Luke IV 5-7.
Joined: 30 Jul 2006 Posts: 6060 Location: East London
Posted: Mon Apr 28, 2014 8:04 pm Post subject:
Alleged OSCE Observers Held in Slavyansk by Pro-Russian Forces Are Active Duty NATO Military Officers Out of Uniform, Many from Geilenkirchen Intelligence Base Where Awacs Are Flown; Visit Was Sponsored by German Defense Ministry, Which Is Pressuring Osce To Keep Up Attempted Camouflage of Possible Spy Mission-or Worse:
'..Tarpley: I would have to say first of all, we should stop calling them OSCE observers because all indications are that they are not. That is what the OSCE has been saying continuously since this started and you can see it on their website. There are basically two versions. The Western media say OSCE observers, but the mayor Mr. [Vyacheslav] Ponomaryov, the pro-Russian mayor of Slavyansk, knows them as spies. I’m afraid reality seems to be going in the direction of Mr. Ponomareyov.
These are active-duty NATO military officers. They are four from Germany, one from Sweden, the Czech Republic, Denmark, and Poland. All NATO or European Union (EU).
The German officers come from a place called Geilenkirchen, which is a very important NATO base. This is where the AWACS planes are flown from. It’s one of the big NATO reconnaissance centers and they particularly belong to a unit of the German army, the Bundeswehr, which is called the center for enforcement or verification tasks. In other words, it’s military intelligence. What seems also to be the case, is that they were accompanied by five active-duty Ukrainian officers of the pro-Kiev forces, the ones that are controlled by the regime.
The complicating factor is they were riding around in OSCE vehicles. They were in a bus that seems to have been displaying OSCE markings. Now, when they were captured, there was obviously tremendous pressure exercised by the German Defense Ministry and the whole NATO apparatus on the OSCE to play along with this charade, pretending that they were sent by the OSCE, but it hasn’t worked...'
'..On Friday evening in Vienna, on the first program of the Austrian television, Claus Neukirch, a high-ranking official of the OSCE, said this was not our group, not our visit, we were not the ones who did it. This is also admitted on the Deutsche Welle. Deutsche Welle is the international TV and radio of the German Foreign Ministry.
All of this exists really only in German, so today, the Ukrainian foreign minister struggling to keep up this fakery to maintain the camouflage, the Ukrainian foreign minister said, “oh, the Secretary General of the OSCE will be arriving here in order to begin negotiations or to take them over.” Very wisely the secretary general of the OSCE, an Italian diplomat named Lamberto Zannier, said “no, I’m not going.” He was very well advised not to go. Who knows what would happen to him if he got there?..' _________________ 'And he (the devil) said to him: To thee will I give all this power, and the glory of them; for to me they are delivered, and to whom I will, I give them'. Luke IV 5-7.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9674pRBm6g _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
'The IMF has confirmed a conditional loan of $17bn to Ukraine in what it touts as a rescue package aimed at stabilizing Ukraine as it seeks to maintain independence from a belligerent Russia. Instead, we are witnessing the final stages of the US-EU coup of Ukraine, and by implementing the conditions of the loan, the nation will be left destitute and dependent..'
'..In recent days, an attempt was made to assassinate Gennady Kernes, the Jewish and pro-Russian Mayor of Eastern Ukrainian city Kharkiv. Kernes was shot in the back as he was jogging in the street, in broad daylight. He is fighting for his life and has been airlifted to Israel for treatment.
Prior to this incident Jewish sites (including a Holocaust memorial) have been vandalized, synagogues firebombed and various other acts of violence and intimidation by the empowered fascist element of Ukraine. Ver little of which has made it into the media of the EU or US.
However, when an alleged pro-Russian group issued leaflets in Donetsk instructing all Jewish people aged 16 and above to register with local authorities and pay a $50 fee or face imprisonment or deportation, the Western media went into over drive. These leaflets, invoking the pogroms of the Nazi holocaust were no doubt utterly terrifying for local residents. The story went around the world. Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk (he who nazi-saluted for fasist crowds just weeks ago) vowed to find the “b******” who issued the leaflets. But these ‘b******’ turned out to be none other than pro-Ukrainian tricksters. As Sarah Kaufman writes for Policy Mic:
This is actually just a provocation most likely planted by pro-Ukrainian groups.
Rain, an independent TV station in Russia, quoted Pushilin as saying the documents did not come from him. Some people from the local Jewish community agreed documents were an attempt to provoke a conflict and blame it on Pushilin and his separatists, according to the Ukrainian news publication the News of Donbass.
To set the record straight: Jews in Ukraine are not being asked to register with pro-Russian separatists at risk of losing citizenship. This war of information, however, might not be ending anytime soon...' _________________ 'And he (the devil) said to him: To thee will I give all this power, and the glory of them; for to me they are delivered, and to whom I will, I give them'. Luke IV 5-7.
'..Ukraine has Europe’s third-largest shale gas reserves at 42 trillion cubic feet, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. While for years U.S. oil companies have been pressing for shale gas development in countries such as Britain, Poland, France and Bulgaria only to be rebuffed by significant opposition from citizens and local legislators concerned about the environmental impacts of shale gas extraction – including earthquakes and groundwater contamination caused by hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” – there has been considerably less opposition in Ukraine, a country that has been embroiled in numerous gas disputes with the Russian Federation in recent years.
Russia’s state-owned Gazprom, controlling nearly one-fifth of the world’s gas reserves, supplies more than half of Ukraine’s gas annually, and about 30 percent of Europe’s. It has often used this as political and economic leverage over Kiev and Brussels, cutting gas supplies repeatedly over the past decade (in the winters of 2005-2006, 2007-2008, and again in 2008-2009), leading to energy shortages not only in Ukraine, but Western European countries as well. This leverage, however, came under challenge in 2013 as Ukraine took steps towards breaking its dependence on Russian gas.
On Nov. 5, 2013 (just a few weeks before the Maidan demonstrations began in Kiev), Chevron signed a 50-year agreement with the Ukrainian government to develop oil and gas in western Ukraine. According to the New York Times, “The government said that Chevron would spend $350 million on the exploratory phase of the project and that the total investment could reach $10 billion...” _________________ 'And he (the devil) said to him: To thee will I give all this power, and the glory of them; for to me they are delivered, and to whom I will, I give them'. Luke IV 5-7.
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Fri May 02, 2014 10:10 pm Post subject:
The Strangelove effect - or how we are hoodwinked into accepting a new world war
18 April 2014
http://johnpilger.com/articles/the-strangelove-effect-or-how-we-are-ho odwinked-into-accepting-a-new-world-war
I watched Dr. Strangelove the other day. I have seen it perhaps a dozen times; it makes sense of senseless news. When Major T.J. 'King' Kong goes "toe to toe with the Rooskies" and flies his rogue B52 nuclear bomber to a target in Russia, it's left to General 'Buck' Turgidson to reassure the President. Strike first, says the general, and "you got no more than 10 to 20 million killed, tops."
President Merkin Muffley: "I will not go down in history as the greatest mass-murderer since Adolf Hitler."
General Turgidson: "Perhaps it might be better, Mr. President, if you were more concerned with the American people than with your image in the history books."
The genius of Stanley Kubrick's film is that it accurately represents the cold war's lunacy and dangers. Most of the characters are based on real people and real maniacs. There is no equivalent to Strangelove today, because popular culture is directed almost entirely at our interior lives, as if identity is the moral zeitgeist and true satire is redundant; yet the dangers are the same. The nuclear clock has remained at five minutes to midnight; the same false flags are hoisted above the same targets by the same "invisible government", as Edward Bernays, the inventor of public relations, described modern propaganda.
In 1964, the year Strangelove was made, "the missile gap" was the false flag. In order to build more and bigger nuclear weapons and pursue an undeclared policy of domination, President John Kennedy approved the CIA's propaganda that the Soviet Union was well ahead of the US in the production of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles. This filled front pages as the "Russian threat". In fact, the Americans were so far ahead in the production of ICBMs, the Russians never approached them. The cold war was based largely on this lie.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US has ringed Russia with military bases, nuclear warplanes and missiles as part of its "Nato Enlargement Project". Reneging a US promise to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 that Nato would not expand "one inch to the east", Nato has all but taken over eastern Europe. In the former Soviet Caucuses, Nato's military build-up is the most extensive since the second world war.
In February, the United States mounted one of its proxy "colour" coups against the elected government of Ukraine; the shock troops were fascists. For the first time since 1945, a pro-Nazi, openly anti-Semitic party controls key areas of state power in a European capital. No Western European leader has condemned this revival of fascism on the border of Russia. Some 30 million Russians died in the invasion of their country by Hitler's Nazis, who were supported by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, the UPA, responsible for numerous Jewish and Polish massacres. The UPA was the military wing, inspiring today's Svoboda party.
Since Washington's putsch in Kiev - and Moscow's inevitable response in Russian Crimea, to protect its Black Sea Fleet - the provocation and isolation of Russia have been inverted in the news to the "Russian threat". This is fossilised propaganda. The US Air Force general who runs Nato forces in Europe - General Breedlove, no less - claimed more than two weeks ago to have pictures showing 40,000 Russian troops "massing" on the border with Ukraine. So did Colin Powell claim to have pictures of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. What is certain is that Obama's rapacious, reckless coup in Ukraine has ignited a civil war and Vladimir Putin is being lured into a trap.
Following a 13-year rampage that began in stricken Afghanistan well after Osama bin Laden had fled, then destroyed Iraq beneath a false flag, then invented a "nuclear rogue" in Iran, dispatched Libya to a Hobbesian anarchy and backed jihadists in Syria, the US finally has a new cold war to supplement its worldwide campaign of murder and terror by drone.
A Nato Membership Action Plan or MAP - straight from the war room of Strangelove - is General Breedlove's gift to the new dictatorship in Ukraine. "Rapid Trident" will put US troops on Ukraine's Russian border and "Sea Breeze" will put US warships within sight of Russian ports. At the same time, Nato war games throughout eastern Europe are designed to intimidate Russia. Imagine the response if this madness was reversed and happened on America's borders. Cue General 'Buck' Turgidson.
And there is China. On 24 April, President Obama will begin a tour of Asia to promote his "Pivot to China". The aim is to convince his "allies" in the region, principally Japan, to re-arm and prepare for the eventual possibility of war with China. By 2020, almost two-thirds of all US naval forces in the world will be transferred to the Asia-Pacific area. This is the greatest military concentration in that vast region since the second world war.
In an arc extending from Australia to Japan, China will face US missiles and nuclear-armed bombers. A strategic naval base is being built on the Korean island of Jeju less than 400 miles from the Chinese metropolis of Shanghai and the industrial heartland of the only country whose economic power is likely to surpass that of the US. Obama's "pivot" is designed to undermine China's influence in its region. It is as if world war has begun by other means.
This is not a Strangelove fantasy. Obama's defence secretary, Charles "Chuck" Hagel, was in Beijing last week to deliver a menacing warning that China, like Russia, could face isolation and war if it did not bow to US demands. He compared the annexation of Crimea with China's complex territorial dispute with Japan over uninhabited islands in the East China Sea. "You cannot go around the world," said Hagel with a straight face, "and violate the sovereignty of nations by force, coercion or intimidation". As for America's massive movement of naval forces and nuclear weapons to Asia, that is "a sign of the humanitarian assistance the US military can provide".
Obama is currently seeking a greater budget for nuclear weapons than the historical peak during the cold war, the era of Strangelove. The United States is pursuing its longstanding ambition to dominate the Eurasian landmass, stretching from China to Europe: a "manifest destiny" made right by might.
'..WASHINGTON -- The commander of U.S. air forces in the Pacific has reported a significant increase in activities by Russian planes and ships in the region.
Gen. Herbert Carlisle linked the uptick in Russian traffic to the situation in Ukraine. He said Russia was demonstrating its capabilities and gathering intelligence on U.S. military exercises.
Carlisle said there had been long-range Russian air patrols to the coast of California and a circumnavigation of the U.S. Pacific territory of Guam. He said a U.S. F-15 fighter jet intercepted a Russian strategic bomber that had flown to Guam.
"It's a combination of things that's to demonstrate their capability to do it," Carlisle said Monday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank in Washington, according to a Reuters transcript of his remarks.
Overall, Carlisle deemed it a significant "increase in the activity from Russia in the Asia-Pacific, and we relate a lot of that to what's going on in the Ukraine."
He also reported a sharp increase in Russian air patrols around Japanese islands and Korea...'
And, purely coincidentally, of course, comes another relic of the 'Cold War' story:
Remember, if the balloon goes up, 'Duck & Cover' (in Russian, 'Caviar & Vodka'). _________________ 'And he (the devil) said to him: To thee will I give all this power, and the glory of them; for to me they are delivered, and to whom I will, I give them'. Luke IV 5-7.
What took place in Odessa on May 2 is "typical fascism" and "we will pursue the truth", Russian FM Sergey Lavrov said at a ceremony commemorating the fallen heroes of WWII at the Ministry on Wednesday.
Russia will not permit last Friday's events to be "swept under the rug", the foreign minister continued. In his view, all witness accounts point to how the scale of the tragedy has been greatly under-reported.
Lavrov went on to say that the upcoming Victory Day is a good occasion for Russians not only to remember their past, but to not forget that the country has a "duty not to allow fascism to spread throughout Europe and the world at large".
The Russian FM spoke about how, for some time now, Europe has been very selective in its judgment of such ideologies, sometimes simply "ignoring" telltale signs, some of which have included all-out marches commemorating the fighters of the SS.
After violent clashes between radical pro-Kiev activists and people wearing St. George ribbons commonly used by Ukrainian anti-government protesters, the radicals raided a nearby protester tent camp.
The camp was then allegedly torched and people residing there sought protection from their opponents in the local House of Trade Unions.
The radicals pelted the building with Molotov cocktails, starting a massive fire.
At least 46 people died inside as they suffocated from smoke or fell to their deaths trying to escape the blaze. Some of the survivors were beaten by the crowd of radicals surrounding the building.
Despite evidence of the apparent massacre, Western mainstream media coverage was ambiguous and often failed to mention facts incriminating the pro-Kiev forces.
Last Friday's events could be classed as "an act of terrorism", Ukraine's presidential candidate, MP Petr Poroshenko believes, after hearing evidence at a closed meeting of the Rada, which seems to suggest that some sort of poisonous substance was being used against the people barricaded inside the House of Trade Unions.
Another opinion regarding how the situation transpired was voiced by Ukraine's general prosecutor, Oleg Mahnitsky. He believes that the blaze could have been caused by either side; either Molotov cocktails thrown by the anti-Maidan group, or the pro-Kiev supporters setting the building on fire.
Joined: 30 Jul 2006 Posts: 6060 Location: East London
Posted: Wed May 07, 2014 11:48 pm Post subject:
Cem sent this out to the group, but I don't think he put it on the Forum.
'Western cover-up of Odessa massacre'
by Finian Cunningham, Press TV, 7 May 2014
'We know that a massacre happened in the Ukrainian city of Odessa last week in which more than 40 pro-Russian civilian protesters were killed when a public building they were seeking refuge in was deliberately set ablaze by neo-Nazi supporters of the Western-backed Kiev junta.
Apparently, the victims died from the blaze or from smoke inhalation, or when they jumped from windows to the pavement below.
But in the aftermath, new shocking images have been published in various reputable Russian media sources that tell a far more harrowing story.
Photos show victims lying on the floor of the Trade Union building who were only partially burned, with their heads and upper limbs incinerated, the rest of their bodies strangely unscarred.
Suspiciously, in many of the images the surrounding space where the bodies lay bears no evidence of fire damage.
Other victims also appeared to have gunshot wounds to their charred heads. And in one particularly disturbing image, the body of a pregnant woman is photographed bent over backwards on an office desk. The victim appears to have been garrotted; neither her body nor theoffice where her remains were found shows any signs of fire damage.
Russian media report survivor accounts saying that the rooms they were hiding in to escape from the effects of the blaze were broken into by assailants who pretended to be pro-Russian protesters. On entering the offices, those inside were attacked by the intruders.
This suggests that persons associated with the neo-Nazi crowd outside the building somehow gained entry to the Trade Union building and then systematically set about murdering those inside.
When news of the deadly blaze emerged last Friday, it struck some observers as strange that so many people could have perished from a fire that was mainly located at the front of the building on the ground floor. The giant multi-storey solid stone structure surely would have given those trapped inside more escape routes or spaces to avoid the effects of deadly fumes.
And how do we explain the macabre images of partially incinerated bodies surrounded by seemingly undamaged wooden floors and railings? Or the victims with apparent gunshot wounds to the head and the pregnant woman slumped on the office table?
Another vile image shows a woman's body near an elevator door in which her naked lower body is charred, but her upper body is clothed, indicating that she may have been raped by her attackers before they killed her.
The harrowing images suggest that something much more sinister happened than what initial reports conveyed. The initial reports are disturbing enough.
In broad daylight, a peaceful protest encampment of pro-Russian citizens calling for a referendum for federalization, in opposition to the Western-backed unelected junta that seized power in Kiev on February 22, was attacked by neo-Nazi supporters of the junta. The Kiev supporters were bussed into the southern port city of Odessa from the capital and another city, Kharkov, under the guise of attending a football match.
Like many towns and cities elsewhere in the east of Ukraine, the pro-Russian protesters in Odessa are opposed to the junta in Kiev, which illegally seized power against the elected president Victor Yanukovych.
The melee turned apparently into a riot between clashing sides in Odessa. There are reports that the neo-Nazi crowd deployed agent provocateurs who used firearms while mingling among the riot police. The police reportedly did little to restrain the violence. All those arrested at the scene later were pro-Russian citizens.
Crowds from the pro-Russian side took shelter in the nearby Trade Union building. Then the neo-Nazis set the building alight with petrol bombs. As the flames flared there were shouts of "burn them" from the baying mob outside, referring to the people trapped inside.
But could such a blaze located on the ground floor entrance of the building result in such a large number of deaths, where bodies were later recovered scattered in various parts of the building?
The macabre fatal wounds of the victims point to elements that took advantage of the cover of fire to go inside and murder at will. The victims could have had their necks broken by professional killers, who then set about torching the bodies to give the impression of death
from the fire.
Why the killers would do this is not clear. Pure hatred? We know that the fascist supporters of the Kiev junta are motivated by a deep hatred of the ethnic Russian population - a hatred that goes back to their forbears and ideological "heroes" of the Second World War who collaborated with the Nazi SS in extermination of fellow Ukrainians simply because they were viewed as "Untermenschen slavs".
The same hatred is expressed openly by today's political leaders in Kiev. Only a few weeks ago, demagogue Yulia Tymoshenko was caught joking in a private phone call about "whacking" ethnic Russians in the head and
"nuking" pro-Russian eastern Ukraine.
But one thing seems clear. The marauding neo-Nazis who carried out the massacre in Odessa last Friday must have been given orders from certain people in power. The subsequent lack of serious criminal investigation and the dissembling media spin point to a cover-up.
Another thing that is clear is that the Western media are assisting in the cover-up of the massacre. Never mind the full horror of what may have really happened, the Western media have not even reported the apparent blaze killings with any of the seriousness that they deserve.
Incredibly, the incident was only given brief coverage, quickly dropped from the news cycle, and most reports tended to obscure the circumstances, blaming "clashes on both sides that resulted in a deadly fire" without apportioning blame on the obvious neo-Nazi perpetrators.
Tellingly, the Western media have sought to downplay the role of the neo-Nazi paramilitaries and the Western-backed junta in Kiev. One can imagine how the Western media would have given days of saturation coverage to the killings if they had been carried out by pro-Russian
protesters against supporters of the Kiev regime that the media has lionized as the "government of Ukraine".
Indeed, in the aftermath of the Odessa massacre the Western media instead amplified the claims by the Kiev junta that it was the fault of "pro-Russian agents" trying to "destroy Ukraine".
This is reminiscent of the way the Western media distorted the sniper killings of up to 100 protesters in Kiev's Maidan Square on February 20 by blaming that incident on the then government security forces, when in reality the fatal shootings were carried out by the Western-backed coup plotters and their CIA-backed neo-Nazi paramilitaries.
Western regime change in Ukraine has led to a junta that is ruling by a reign of terror against its own citizens, where the vilest crimes are being committed to crush any political opposition. And the Western media are assiduously covering up for this criminality.
Washington has emerged as the main sponsor of the Kiev regime. Sickeningly, within hours of the Odessa massacre, US President Barack Obama was entertaining more than 2,000 sycophantic journalists at the annual White House Press Corps dinner, at which he cracked flippant jokes about Russian President Vladimir Putin being a despot.
Ironically, in this week that commemorates the defeat of murderous fascism in Europe at the end of the Second World War, the Western governments and their media are doing their best to rekindle the horror of this very same fascism in Ukraine - while blaming it on Russia, the country that really won that war.' _________________ 'And he (the devil) said to him: To thee will I give all this power, and the glory of them; for to me they are delivered, and to whom I will, I give them'. Luke IV 5-7.
'..However, the crowd of pro-government supporters who were trying to enter the building was quickly becoming bigger.
“They were coming from everywhere,” she added.
According to Tatyana, the radicals started hurling Molotov cocktails, after which the first and the third floors of the House of Trade Unions burst into flames.
Tatyana also recalled that the outraged crowd outside was shouting that they wouldn't let anybody out.
“They were also throwing firecrackers, so people in the halls were sitting on the floor, blinded.” She added, “At that moment you realize there is no way to help these people so you'd better rescue yourself.”
Public services such as police and fire brigade were not rushing to rescue the injured people.
“The police were idle not doing anything,” she recalls. “When firefighters arrived it was too late – too many people had already died, even though the closest fire station is 700 meters away from the site.”
According to the numerous videos released in the Internet, many victims of the Odessa massacre received bullet wounds. On some of the videos a man in a bulletproof vest who introduces himself as sotnik Mykola (“sotnik” is what Maidan group leaders in Kiev call themselves) is shooting several times in the direction of the burning House of Trade Unions.
“Have a look at the video,” says Tatyana, pointing to the footage where Micola is pictured. “This armed man in a vest is carrying a gun...”
'...According to her, the shooting started in Grecheskaya Street, in the north of the city.
Tatyana said that after the pro-government activists managed to enter the burning building, “many people were strangled. I didn’t know how they [pro-government activists] were able to get through the fire but they did,” she added.
She recalled that the radicals “finished off some of the people who managed to escape, and threw from the windows those who didn’t, to kill them on the ground.”
“17-year-old hooligans were finishing people with bats,” she added.
Meanwhile, the next day after the clashes, Ukraine’s Vice President, Vitaly Yarema, said that some of those who were killed in the Trade Union building were foreign nationals.
However, Tatyana denied this information saying that all the people who were killed on May 2 came from Odessa.
“They all loved their city deeply. We stood shoulder to shoulder from the very first day,” she said. “A regional council deputy, Vyacheslav Markin, is also known to have been killed in the flames.”
She also commented on the reports from mostly western outlets, which claim that some of those killed were “mercenaries from Russia.”
“If we had indeed been mercenaries, there would have been fewer victims, and not on our side,” adding that the only thing they received from Russia was “moral support...” _________________ 'And he (the devil) said to him: To thee will I give all this power, and the glory of them; for to me they are delivered, and to whom I will, I give them'. Luke IV 5-7.
Introduction: Not since the US and EU took over Eastern Europe, including the Baltic countries, East Germany, Poland and the Balkans and converted them into military outposts of NATO and economic vassals, have the Western powers moved so aggressively to seize a strategic country, such as the Ukraine, posing an existential threat to Russia.
Up until 2013 the Ukraine was a ‘buffer state’, basically a non-aligned country, with economic ties to both the EU and Russia. Ruled by a regime closely tied to local, European, Israeli and Russian based oligarchs, the political elite was a product of a political upheaval in 2004, (the so-called “Orange Revolution”) funded by the US. Subsequently, for the better part of a decade the Ukraine underwent a failed experiment in Western backed ‘neo-liberal’ economic policies. After nearly two decades of political penetration, the US and EU were deeply entrenched in the political system via long-standing funding of so-called non-governmental organizations (NGO’s), political parties and paramilitary groups.
The strategy of the US and EU was to install a pliant regime which would bring Ukraine into the European Common Market and NATO as a subordinate client state. Negotiations between the EU and the Ukraine government proceeded slowly. They eventually faltered because of the onerous conditions demanded by the EU and the more favorable economic concessions and subsidies offered by Russia. Having failed to negotiate the annexation of the Ukraine to the EU, and not willing to await scheduled constitutional elections, the NATO powers activated their well-financed and organized NGOs, client political leaders and armed paramilitary groups to violently overthrow the elected government. The violent putsch succeeded and a US-appointed civilian-military junta took power.
The junta was composed of pliant neo-liberal and chauvinist neo-fascist ‘ministers’. The former were hand-picked by the US, to administer and enforce a new political and economic order, including privatization of public firms and resources, breaking trade and investment ties with Russia, eliminating a treaty allowing the Russian naval base in Crimea and ending military-industrial exports to Russia. The neo-fascists and sectors of the military and police were appointed to ministerial positions in order to violently repress any pro-democracy opposition in the West and East. They oversaw the repression of bilingual speakers (Russian-Ukrainian), institutions and practices – turning the opposition to the US-NATO imposed coup regime into an ethnic opposition. They purged all elected opposition office holders in the West and East and appointed local governors by fiat – essentially creating a martial law regime.
The Strategic Targets of the NATO-Junta
NATOs violent, high-risk seizure of the Ukraine was driven by several strategic military objectives. These included:
1.) The ousting of Russia from its military bases in Crimea – turning them into NATO bases facing Russia.
2.) The conversion of the Ukraine into a springboard for penetrating Southern Russia and the Caucasus; a forward position to politically manage and support liberal pro-NATO parties and NGOs within Russia.
3.) The disruption of key sectors of the Russian military defense industry, linked to the Ukrainian factories, by ending the export of critical engines and parts to Russia.
The Ukraine had long been an important part of the Soviet Union’s military industrial complex. NATO planners behind the putsch were keenly aware that one-third of the Soviet defense industry had remained in the Ukraine after the break-up of the USSR and that forty percent of the Ukraine’s exports to Russia, until recently, consisted of armaments and related machinery. More specifically, the Motor-Sikh plant in Eastern Ukraine manufactured most of the engines for Russian military helicopters including a current contract to supply engines for one thousand attack helicopters. NATO strategists immediately directed their political stooges in Kiev to suspend all military deliveries to Russia, including medium-range air-to air-missiles, inter-continental ballistic missiles, transport planes and space rockets (Financial Times, 4/21/14, p3). US and EU military strategists viewed the Kiev putsch as a way to undermine Russian air, sea and border defenses. President Putin has acknowledged the blow but insists that Russia will be able to substitute domestic production for the critical parts within two years. This means the loss of thousands of skilled factory jobs in Eastern Ukraine.
4.) The military encirclement of Russia with forward NATO bases in the Ukraine matching those from the Baltic to the Balkans, from Turkey to the Caucasus and then onward from Georgia into the autonomous Russian Federation.
The US-EU encirclement of Russia is designed to end Russian access to the North Sea, the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. By encircling and confining Russia to an isolated landmass without ‘outlets to the sea’, US-EU empire builders seek to limit Russia’s role as a rival power center and possible counter-weight to its imperial ambitions in the Middle East, North Africa, Southwest Asia and the North Atlantic.
Ukraine Putsch: Integral to Imperial Expansion
The US and EU are intent on destroying independent, nationalist and non-aligned governments throughout the world and converting them into imperial satellites by whatever means are effective. For example, the current NATO-armed mercenary invasion of Syria is directed at overthrowing the nationalist, secular Assad government and establishing a pro-NATO vassal state, regardless of the bloody consequences to the diverse Syrian people. The attack on Syria serves multiple purposes: Eliminating a Russian ally and its Mediterranean naval base; undermining a supporter of Palestine and adversary of Israel; encircling the Islamic Republic of Iran and the powerful militant Hezbollah Party in Lebanon and establishing new military bases on Syrian soil.
The NATO seizure of the Ukraine has a multiplier effect that reaches ‘upward’ toward Russia and ‘downward’ toward the Middle East and consolidates control over its vast oil wealth.
The recent NATO wars against Russian allies or trading partners confirm this prognosis. In Libya, the independent, non-aligned policies of the Gadhafi regime stood out in stark contrast to the servile Western satellites like Morocco, Egypt and Tunisia. Gadhafi was overthrown and Libya destroyed via a massive NATO air assault. Egypt’s mass popular anti-Mubarak rebellion and emerging democracy were subverted by a military coup and eventually returned the country to the US-Israeli-NATO orbit – under a brutal dictator. Armed incursions by NATO proxy, Israel, against Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon as well as the US-EU sanctions against Iran are all directed against potential allies or trading partners of Russia.
The US has moved forcefully from encircling Russia via ‘elections and free markets’ in Eastern Europe to relying on military force, death squads, terror and economic sanctions in the Ukraine, the Caucasus, the Middle East and Asia.
Regime Change in Russia: from Global Power to Vassal State
Washington’s strategic objective is to isolate Russia from without, undermine its military capability and erode its economy, in order to strengthen NATO’s political and economic collaborators inside Russia – leading to its further fragmentation and return to the semi-vassal status.
The imperial strategic goal is to place neo-liberal political proxies in power in Moscow, just like the ones who oversaw the pillage and destruction of Russia during the infamous Yeltsin decade. The US-EU power grab in the Ukraine is a big step in that direction.
Evaluating the Encirclement and Conquest Strategy
So far NATO’s seizure of the Ukraine has not moved forward as planned. First of all, the violent seizure of power by overtly pro-NATO elites openly reneging on military treaty agreements with Russia over bases in Crimea, had forced Russia to intervene in support of the local, overwhelmingly ethnic Russian population. Following a free and open referendum, Russia annexed the region and secured its strategic military presence.
While Russia retained its naval presence on the Black Sea … the NATO junta in Kiev unleashed a large-scale military offensive against the pro-democracy, anti-coup Russian-speaking majority in the eastern half of the Ukraine who have been demanding a federal form of government reflecting Ukraine’s cultural diversity. The US-EU promoted a “military response” to mass popular dissent and encouraged the coup-regime to eliminate the civil rights of the Russian speaking majority through neo-Nazi terror and to force the population to accept junta-appointed regional rulers in place of their elected leaders. In response to this repression, popular self-defense committees and local militias quickly sprang up and the Ukrainian army was initially forced back with thousands of soldiers refusing to shoot their own compatriots on behalf of the Western –installed regime in Kiev. For a while, the NATO-backed neo-liberal-neo-fascist coalition junta had to contend with the disintegration of its ‘power base’. At the same time, ‘aid’ from the EU, IMF and the US failed to compensate for the cut-off of Russian trade and energy subsidies. Under the advise of visiting US CIA Director, Brenner, the Kiev Junta then dispatched its elite “special forces” trained by the CIA and FBI to carry out massacres against pro-democracy civilians and popular militias. They bussed in armed thugs to the diverse city of Odessa who staged an ‘exemplary’ massacre: Burning the city’s major trade union headquarters and slaughtering 41, mostly unarmed civilians who were trapped in the building with its exits blocked by neo-Nazis. The dead included many women and teenagers who had sought shelter from the rampaging neo-Nazis. The survivors were brutally beaten and imprisoned by the ‘police’ who had passively watched while the building burned.
The Coming Collapse of the Putsch-Junta
Obama’s Ukraine power grab and his efforts to isolate Russia have provoked some opposition in the EU. Clearly US sanctions prejudice major European multi-nationals with deep ties in Russia. The US military build-up in Eastern Europe, the Balkans and the Black Sea raises tensions and threatens a large-scale military conflagration, disrupting major economic contracts. US-EU threats on Russia’s border have increased popular support for President Putin and strengthened the Russian leadership. The strategic power grab in the Ukraine has radicalized and deepened the polarization of Ukrainian politics-between neo-fascist and pro-democracy forces.
While the imperial strategists are extending and escalating their military build-up in Estonia and Poland and pouring arms into the Ukraine, the entire power grab rests on very precarious political and economic foundations- which could collapse within the year – amidst a bloody civil war/ inter-ethnic slaughter.
The Ukraine junta has already lost political control of over a third of the country to pro-democracy, anti-coup movements and self-defense militias. By cutting off strategic exports to Russia to serve US military interests, the Ukraine lost one of its most important markets, which cannot be replaced. Under NATO control, Ukraine will have to buy NATO-specified military hardware leading to the closure of its factories geared to the Russian market. The loss of Russian trade is already leading to mass unemployment, especially among skilled industrial workers in the East who may be forced to immigrate to Russia. Ballooning trade deficits and the erosion of state revenues will bring a total economic collapse. Thirdly, as a result of the Kiev junta’s submission to NATO, the Ukraine has lost billions of dollars in subsidized energy from Russia. High energy costs make Ukrainian industries non-competitive in global markets. Fourthly, in order to secure loans from the IMF and the EU, the junta has agreed to eliminate food and energy price subsidies, severely depressing household incomes and plunging pensioners into destitution. Bankruptcies are on the rise, as imports from the EU and elsewhere displace formerly protected local industries.
No new investments are flowing in because of the violence, instability and conflicts between neo-fascists and neo-liberals within he junta. Just to stabilize the day-to-day operations of government, the junta needs a no-interest $30 billion dollar handout – from its NATO patrons, an amount, which is not forthcoming now or in the immediate future.
It is clear that NATO ‘strategists’ who planned the putsch were only thinking about weakening Russia militarily and gave no thought to the political, economic and social costs of sustaining a puppet regime in Kiev when Ukraine had been so dependent on Russian markets, loans and subsidized energy. Moreover, they appear to have overlooked the political, industrial and agricultural dynamics of the predictably hostile Eastern regions of the country. Alternately, Washington strategists may have based their calculations on instigating a Yugoslavia-style break-up accompanied by massive ethnic cleansing amidst population transfers and slaughter. Undeterred by the millions of civilian casualties, Washington considers its policy of dismantling Yugoslavia, Iraq and Libya to have been great political-military successes.
Ukraine most certainly will enter a prolonged and deep depression, including a precipitous decline in its exports, employment and output. Possibly, economic collapse will lead to nationwide protests and social unrest: spreading from East to West, from South to North. Social upheavals and mass misery may further undermine the morale of the Ukrainian armed forces. Even now, Kiev can barely afford to feed its soldiers and has to rely on neo-Fascist volunteer militias who may be hard to control. The US-EU are not likely to intervene directly with an Libya-style bombing campaign since they would face a prolonged war on Russia’s border at a time when public opinion in the US is suffering from imperial war exhaustion, and European business interests with links to Russian resource companies are resisting consequential sanctions.
The US-EU putsch has produced a failing regime and a society riven by violent conflicts – spinning into open ethnic violence. What, in fact, has ensued is a system of dual power with contenders cutting across regional boundaries. The Kiev junta lacks the coherence and stability to serve as a reliable NATO military link in the encirclement of Russia. On the contrary, US-EU sanctions, military threats and bellicose rhetoric are forcing Russians to quickly rethink their ‘openness’ to the West. The strategic threats to its national security are leading Russia to review its ties to Western banks and corporations. Russia may have to resort to a policy of expanded industrialization via public investments and import substitution. Russian oligarchs, having lost their overseas holdings, may become less central to Russian economic policy.
What is clear is that the power grab in Kiev will not result in a ‘knife pointed at the heartland of Russia’. The ultimate defeat and overthrow of the Kiev junta can lead to a radicalized self-governing Ukraine, based on the burgeoning democratic movements and rising working class consciousness. This will have to emerge from their struggle against IMF austerity programs and Western asset stripping of Ukraine’s resources and enterprises. The industrial workers of Ukraine who succeed in throwing off the yoke of the western vassals in Kiev have no intention of submitting themselves to the yoke of the Russian oligarchs. Their struggle is for a democratic state, capable of developing an independent economic policy, free of imperial military alliances.
Epilogue:
May Day 2014: Dual Popular Power in the East, Fascism Rising in the West
The predictable falling out between the neo-fascists and neo-liberal partners in the Kiev junta was evidenced by large-scale riots, between rival street gangs and police on May Day. The US-EU strategy envisioned using the neo-fascists as ‘shock troops’ and street fighters in overthrowing the elected regime of Yankovich and later discarding them. As exemplified by the notorious taped conversation between Assistant Secretary of State, Victoria Nuland and the US Ambassador to Kiev, the EU-US strategists promote their own handpicked neoliberal proxies to represent foreign capital, impose austerity policies and sign treaties for foreign military bases. In contrast, the neo-fascist militias and parties would favor nationalist economic policies, retaining state enterprises and are likely to be hostile to oligarchs, especially those with ‘dual Israeli-Ukraine’ citizenship.
The Kiev junta’s inability to develop an economic strategy, its violent seizure of power and repression of pro-democracy dissidents in the East has led to a situation of ‘dual power’. In many cases, troops sent to repress the pro-democracy movements have abandoned their weapons, abandoned the Kiev junta and joined the self-governing movements in the East.
Apart from its outside backers-the White House, Brussels and IMF – the Kiev junta has been abandoned by its rightwing allies in Kiev for being too subservient to NATO and resisted by the pro-democracy movement in the East for being authoritarian and centralist. The Kiev junta has fallen between two chairs: it lacks legitimacy among most Ukrainians and has lost control of all but a small patch of land occupied by government offices in Kiev and even those are under siege by the neo-fascist right and increasingly from its own disenchanted former supporters.
The first part of Odessa 5/02 documentary film, compiled of the extensive amount of video footage done on that day by various witnesses and investigated throughout an independent view point. Soon we'll post the second part that will include further footage, few interviews of survived witnesses as well as the Right sector searches inside of the building later that night. Thank you all, friends, for a positive feedback! We encourage you to rip this video using http://www.clipconverter.cc and re-upload it to your channel in order to spread this material and protect it from being deleted by Youtube.
Music used:
Hildur Guðnadóttir: Ascent (Lulu Rouge ambient jazz remix)
LDRTFS Alone With God extract _________________ 'And he (the devil) said to him: To thee will I give all this power, and the glory of them; for to me they are delivered, and to whom I will, I give them'. Luke IV 5-7.
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Mon May 12, 2014 11:17 am Post subject:
400 US mercenaries 'deployed on ground' in Ukraine military op
Published time: May 11, 2014 15:04 Get short URL
Ukrainian troops outside the town of Andreyevskoe near Slaviyansk, Donetsk Region, where local residents blocked a column of Ukrainian Army armored personnel carriers. (RIA Novosti / Mikhail Voskresenskiy)Ukrainian troops outside the town of Andreyevskoe near Slaviyansk, Donetsk Region, where local residents blocked a column of Ukrainian Army armored personnel carriers. (RIA Novosti / Mikhail Voskresenskiy)
http://rt.com/news/158212-academi-blackwater-ukraine-military/
About 400 elite mercenaries from the notorious US private security firm Academi (formerly Blackwater) are taking part in the Ukrainian military operation against anti-government protesters in southeastern regions of the country, German media reports.
The Bild am Sonntag newspaper, citing a source in intelligence circles, wrote Sunday that Academi employees are involved in the Kiev military crackdown on pro-autonomy activists in near the town of Slavyansk, in the Donetsk region.
On April 29, German Intelligence Service (BND) informed Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government about the mercenaries’ participation in the operation, the paper said, RIA Novosti reported. It is not clear who commands the private military contractors and pays for their services, however.
In March, media reports appeared suggesting that the coup-imposed government in Kiev could have employed up to 300 mercenaries.That was before the new government launched a military operation against anti-Maidan activists, or “terrorists” as Kiev put it, in southeast Ukraine.
At the time, the Russian Foreign Ministry said then that reports claiming Kiev was planning to involve “involve staff from foreign military companies to ‘ensure the rule of law,’” could suggest that it wanted “to suppress civil protests and dissatisfaction.”
In particular, Greystone Limited, which is currently registered in Barbados and is a part of Academi Corporation, is a candidate for such a gendarme role. It is a similar and probably an affiliated structure of the Blackwater private army, whose staff have been accused of cruel and systematic violations of human rights in various trouble spots on many occasions.
“Among the candidates for the role of gendarme is the Barbados-registered company Greystone Limited, which is integrated with the Academi corporation,” the Foreign Ministry said in a statement. “It is an analogue, and, probably and affiliated body of the Blackwater private army, whose employees have repeatedly been accused of committing grievous and systematic human rights abuses in different troubled regions.”
Allegations increased further after unverified videos appeared on YouTube of unidentified armed men in the streets of Donetsk, the capital of the country’s industrial and coalmining region. In those videos, onlookers can be heard shouting “Mercenaries!”“Blackwater!,” and “Who are you going to shoot at?”
(FILES) A picture taken on July 5, 2005 shows contractors of the US private security firm Blackwater securing the site of a roadside bomb attack near the Iranian embassy in central Baghdad. (AFP Photo / Ahmad Al-Rubaye)(FILES) A picture taken on July 5, 2005 shows contractors of the US private security firm Blackwater securing the site of a roadside bomb attack near the Iranian embassy in central Baghdad. (AFP Photo / Ahmad Al-Rubaye)
Academi denied its involvement in Ukraine, claiming on its website that “rumors” were posted by “some irresponsible bloggers and online reporters.”
“Such unfounded statements combined with the lack of factual reporting to support them and the lack of context about the company, are nothing more than sensationalistic efforts to create hysteria and headlines in times of genuine crisis,” the US firm stated.
The American security company Blackwater gained worldwide notoriety for the substantial role it played in the Iraq war as a contractor for the US government. In recent years it has changed its name twice – in 2009 it was renamed Xe Services and in 2011 it got its current name, Academi.
What happened on May 2nd of this year in Odessa, Ukraine, was a complex event that has been glossed over by most news sources. The US corporate coverage has been criminal in its demonization of anti-Maidan/anti-coup activists. The propaganda narrative has even attempted to blame the victims for starting the fires that allegedly killed them. This is two levels removed from reality, and perhaps even three.
Much more information is available than has been reported in America’s criminally-complicit mainstream news. But even alternative journals have failed to pursue the most damning, morally repugnant aspect to this story: who started the violence, and why?
When a massacre happens the horrors of the atrocities tend to distract the public’s attention from the details of how it came to be in the first place. This is known to provocateurs, be they in Kiev, Moscow or in Langley Virginia. Langley is the home base of the Central Intelligence Agency, of course. The CIA director visited Kiev, confirmed by the White House on April 15th, and “dozens” of CIA agents are reported to be in Ukraine “advising” the unelected coup regime as I type this.
On May 2nd a series of events occurred that can be pieced together from the numerous videos and photographs. These show undercover police provocateurs dressed up as anti-Maidan/pro-Russian activists, but these are coordinated by a uniformed officer. The officer is identified, at Oriental Review, as “Odessa Interior ministry branch Colonel Dmitry Fucheji.”
Confirmation and analysis is provided by Russian news anchor Pavel Pchelkin at Channel One Russia. The gunmen, allegedly from the “pro-Russian” side were undercover agents coordinated by the Ukrainian interior ministry. A platoon of approximately 30 armed undercover agents fired numerous rounds at the football crowds, who were known to be “pro unity” or “pro Ukraine” and aligned with the Maidan coup government. The undercover/gunmen started a street battle from behind police lines, hiding behind a wall of officers and instigating the football crowd to attack them.
The neo-Nazi Right Sector joined the enraged football crowd, and together they pursued these provocateurs – who were dressed similarly to “pro-Russian” protesters – pursuing them all the way back to the Union hall, where the actual non-violent anti-Maidan activists had set up camp. Once this violence had begun it was easily turned against the real anti-Maidan activists, and the police provocateurs disappeared back into the police brigades.
Further confirmation comes from a Ukrainian official, acting Prosecutor General Oleh Makhnitsky:
“This action [in Odessa] was not prepared at some internal level, it was a well-planned and coordinated action in which some authorities’ representatives have taken part.”
This is a false flag event.
Undercover provocateurs shot at the football crowds to initiate the violence.
The violence was led and drawn back toward the political targets: the anti-Maidan activists.
Mass murder followed.
The next level of reality that intrudes upon and discredits Western media reporting is the idea that the fires did the killing. This is also false. The victims inside the union hall were mostly murdered with gunshots, as well as strangled to death by the neo-Nazi Right Sector storm troopers, who also were seen inside the building waving flags and cheering.
Most of the bodies seen in photographs were burned in order to hide evidence of gunshot wounds (warning: graphic photographs). This is also not reported across the media spectrum, as if it were of no importance. If the fire is to blame, this is akin to an act of nature, rather than a series of cold-blooded murders by rampaging neo-Nazi thugs allied with our supposed good buddies in Kiev.
Western media, therefore, has become a complicit propaganda organ in spinning narratives for the US State Department and its Nazi partners in the Ukraine. It truly sickens me the depravity and gall of these psychopaths (in both nations) who, in broad daylight, support the worst of the worst, war criminals, mass murderers, racist violent lunatics. This has been true of Syria and Libya prior, and now it is true in the Ukraine.
These imperial games do not amuse the Russians, of course. Russia has an intimate history with Naziism in World War Two. More Russians died in that war than did Americans, Brits, Japanese or Germans. The US/EU empowerment of the most violent, sadistic and murderous forces in Ukraine has driven the world to a true crisis point.
Already $3.2Bn has been dumped on the neo-Nazi unelected coup government, and Obama has knowingly and deceitfully called them “duly elected.”
Since when is gaining power through Molotov cocktails, snipers and bludgeoning the police considered “duly elected?”
This neo-Nazi power seizure has been a US project for quite a while now. Obama’s neo-con strategist, Victoria Nuland, has bragged that $5Bn of US tax money has been poured into Ukraine since the fall of the Soviet Union in order to influence the political system there. Nuland was caught on tape choosing “Yats” to be the frontman for US/NATO interests.
Arseniy Yatsenuk’s own foundation website prominently lists, as William Blum noted:
NATO, the National Endowment for Democracy, the US State Department, Chatham House (Royal Institute of International Affairs in the UK), the German Marshall Fund (a think tank founded by the German government in honor of the US Marshall Plan), as well as a couple of international banks. Is any comment needed?
US meddling in the 2004 Ukrainian elections was already exposed. The US corporate usual suspects are salivating on setting up shop in their new Nazi utopia.
This latest manifestation of covert US foreign policy should shock the entire world to its core and cause them to question just about every assumption they may have had about the US. Actual voting – democracy – is demonized in Crimea and in the other eastern provinces of Ukraine, while firebomb tossing Nazi psychopaths, who gleefully rape and strangle to death pregnant women, are promised $27Bn in IMF graft and loan guarantees to help cement their power over Kiev.
Washington's role in Ukraine, and its backing for the regime's neo-Nazis, has huge implications for the rest of the world
John Pilger - The Guardian, Tuesday 13 May 2014 20.30 BST
A pro-Russian activist with a shell casing and a US-made meal pack that fell from a Ukrainian army APC in an attack on a roadblock on 3 May in Andreevka, Ukraine. Photograph: Scott Olson/Getty
Why do we tolerate the threat of another world war in our name? Why do we allow lies that justify this risk? The scale of our indoctrination, wrote Harold Pinter, is a "brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis", as if the truth "never happened even while it was happening".
Every year the American historian William Blum publishes his "updated summary of the record of US foreign policy" which shows that, since 1945, the US has tried to overthrow more than 50 governments, many of them democratically elected; grossly interfered in elections in 30 countries; bombed the civilian populations of 30 countries; used chemical and biological weapons; and attempted to assassinate foreign leaders.
In many cases Britain has been a collaborator. The degree of human suffering, let alone criminality, is little acknowledged in the west, despite the presence of the world's most advanced communications and nominally most free journalism. That the most numerous victims of terrorism – "our" terrorism – are Muslims, is unsayable. That extreme jihadism, which led to 9/11, was nurtured as a weapon of Anglo-American policy (Operation Cyclone in Afghanistan) is suppressed. In April the US state department noted that, following Nato's campaign in 2011, "Libya has become a terrorist safe haven".
The name of "our" enemy has changed over the years, from communism to Islamism, but generally it is any society independent of western power and occupying strategically useful or resource-rich territory, or merely offering an alternative to US domination. The leaders of these obstructive nations are usually violently shoved aside, such as the democrats Muhammad Mossedeq in Iran, Arbenz in Guatemala and Salvador Allende in Chile, or they are murdered like Patrice Lumumba in the Democratic Republic of Congo. All are subjected to a western media campaign of vilification – think Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, now Vladimir Putin.
Washington's role in Ukraine is different only in its implications for the rest of us. For the first time since the Reagan years, the US is threatening to take the world to war. With eastern Europe and the Balkans now military outposts of Nato, the last "buffer state" bordering Russia – Ukraine – is being torn apart by fascist forces unleashed by the US and the EU. We in the west are now backing neo-Nazis in a country where Ukrainian Nazis backed Hitler.
Having masterminded the coup in February against the democratically elected government in Kiev, Washington's planned seizure of Russia's historic, legitimate warm-water naval base in Crimea failed. The Russians defended themselves, as they have done against every threat and invasion from the west for almost a century.
But Nato's military encirclement has accelerated, along with US-orchestrated attacks on ethnic Russians in Ukraine. If Putin can be provoked into coming to their aid, his pre-ordained "pariah" role will justify a Nato-run guerrilla war that is likely to spill into Russia itself.
Instead, Putin has confounded the war party by seeking an accommodation with Washington and the EU, by withdrawing Russian troops from the Ukrainian border and urging ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine to abandon the weekend's provocative referendum. These Russian-speaking and bilingual people – a third of Ukraine's population – have long sought a democratic federation that reflects the country's ethnic diversity and is both autonomous of Kiev and independent of Moscow. Most are neither "separatists" nor "rebels", as the western media calls them, but citizens who want to live securely in their homeland.
Like the ruins of Iraq and Afghanistan, Ukraine has been turned into a CIA theme park – run personally by CIA director John Brennan in Kiev, with dozens of "special units" from the CIA and FBI setting up a "security structure" that oversees savage attacks on those who opposed the February coup. Watch the videos, read the eye-witness reports from the massacre in Odessa this month. Bussed fascist thugs burned the trade union headquarters, killing 41 people trapped inside. Watch the police standing by.
A doctor described trying to rescue people, "but I was stopped by pro-Ukrainian Nazi radicals. One of them pushed me away rudely, promising that soon me and other Jews of Odessa are going to meet the same fate. What occurred yesterday didn't even take place during the fascist occupation in my town in world war two. I wonder, why the whole world is keeping silent."
Russian-speaking Ukrainians are fighting for survival. When Putin announced the withdrawal of Russian troops from the border, the Kiev junta's defence secretary, Andriy Parubiy – a founding member of the fascist Svoboda party – boasted that attacks on "insurgents" would continue. In Orwellian style, propaganda in the west has inverted this to Moscow "trying to orchestrate conflict and provocation", according to William Hague. His cynicism is matched by Obama's grotesque congratulations to the coup junta on its "remarkable restraint" after the Odessa massacre. The junta, says Obama, is "duly elected". As Henry Kissinger once said: "It is not a matter of what is true that counts, but what is perceived to be true."
In the US media the Odessa atrocity has been played down as "murky" and a "tragedy" in which "nationalists" (neo-Nazis) attacked "separatists" (people collecting signatures for a referendum on a federal Ukraine). Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal damned the victims – "Deadly Ukraine Fire Likely Sparked by Rebels, Government Says". Propaganda in Germany has been pure cold war, with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung warning its readers of Russia's "undeclared war". For the Germans, it is a poignant irony that Putin is the only leader to condemn the rise of fascism in 21st-century Europe.
A popular truism is that "the world changed" following 9/11. But what has changed? According to the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, a silent coup has taken place in Washington and rampant militarism now rules. The Pentagon currently runs "special operations" – secret wars – in 124 countries. At home, rising poverty and a loss of liberty are the historic corollary of a perpetual war state. Add the risk of nuclear war, and the question is: why do we tolerate this?
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