Yes, it's an hour long, but so very worth watching. I can't recommend it enough.
Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
by AlicetheKurious » Wed Apr 08, 2015 3:35 pm
by seemslikeadream » Thu Apr 09, 2015 12:33 am
Ukraine Appoints Top Fascist to Key Military Advisory Post
Right Sector Brags they Will Now Be Funded by Military
by Jason Ditz, April 08, 2015
Failed fascist presidential candidate Dmytro Yarosh has been appointed to a top military advisory position in Ukraine this week, with officials saying he will serve as a link between the military and ultra-nationalist volunteer battalions in the civil war.
Yarosh only mustered about 1% of the vote in the last election, and since then he’s threatened to blow up the nation’s gas pipelines to spite Russia and in late January threatened to establish an “alternative government” with himself as the head.
Yarosh’s party, the Right Sector, was formed by various fascist and neo-Nazi factions in the Maidan protests. A spokesman for the Right Sector is now bragging that with Yarosh’s appointment the party will be funded directly by the Defense Ministry.
Yarosh is also on an Interpol wanted list since July, following a request by Russia, which has charged him with incitement to terrorism for the comments about the gas pipelines.
by Elvis » Thu Apr 09, 2015 4:29 pm
by seemslikeadream » Sun Apr 12, 2015 8:01 pm
Ukraine: The Truth Becomes Increasingly Apparent
by Gary Leupp / April 11th, 2015
Reuters headline, April 29: “Ukraine sets sights on joining NATO.”
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty headline, April 29: “Far-Right Leader Names Ukrainian Military Adviser.”
Moscow’s official line on Ukraine–and it should not be dismissed just because that’s what it is–is that the U.S. spent about $5 billion backing “regime change” in that sad, bankrupt country, resulting in a coup d’etat (or putsch) in Kiev in February 2014 in which neo-fascists played a key role. The coup occurred because the U.S. State Department and Pentagon hoped to replace the democratically elected administration with one that would push for Ukraine’s entry into NATO, a military alliance designed from its inception in 1949 to challenge Russia. The ultimate intent was to evict the Russian Black Sea Fleet from the bases it’s maintained on the Crimean Peninsula for over 230 years.
Personally, I believe this interpretation is true, and that any rational person should recognize that it’s true. Victoria Nuland, the neocon thug who serves as Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs and is the key official shaping U.S. Ukraine policy, openly admitted to an “international business conference on Ukraine” in December 2013 that Washington had “invested more than 5 billion dollars to help Ukraine achieve [the development of democratic institutions] and other goals.” The unspoken goal was NATO membership.
(Imagine if a top-ranking official in the Russian Foreign Ministry were to boast of a $5 billion Russian investment in undermining the Mexican or Canadian government, with an aim towards incorporating one of those countries into an expanding military alliance. John McCain and Fox News would be demanding the immediate nuking of Moscow.)
Russia, as you know, has relatively few naval bases for a country its size. These face the Barents and Baltic Seas to the north, surrounding Scandinavia. In 1904, when Russian forces were attacked by the Japanese navy at Port Arthur in Manchuria, Russia had to dispatch the Baltic fleet to the region in a voyage requiring six months (and ending in the disastrous Battle of Tsushima). Russian geography poses obstacles to a strong navy.
There is one Russian naval base in Astrakhan on the landlocked Caspian Sea (which is really a vast lake, from which one can sail to Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Iran or Azerbaijan but nowhere beyond). And there are several bases in or near Vladivostok on the Siberian Pacific coast, which is iced over part of the year, as well as bases on the Kamchatka Peninsula north of Japan. Russia has a modest naval base at Tartus on the Syrian coast, and a logistics base in Cam Rahn Bay in Vietnam. But the only bases with ready access to the Mediterranean and thence the Atlantic or Indian oceans are those in and around Sevastopol on the Crimean Peninsula on the Black Sea.
Compare the U.S. with over 30 major naval bases on its east and west coasts and Hawaii, and others–some of them huge–in Japan, Italy, Cuba, Bahrain, Diego Garcia and elsewhere! There are more naval bases in the state of California than in the entirety of the Russian Federation.
The U.S. has military personnel stationed in about 130 countries in the world–that is, in two-thirds of the countries who are members of the UN. In contrast, Russia has military forces stationed in, by my count, ten foreign countries, eight of them on its borders. And yet the U.S. press and political class depict Russia and specifically its president Vladimir Putin, a threatening juggernaut. (Just as they once did Saddam Hussein, that lame creature demonized as–as the warmongers always do, before attacking and destroying him–“a new Hitler.”)
Any student at a U.S. university, enrolled in an interdisciplinary program in “international relations” (and educated, as is the norm, by political scientists of the “realist” school) is likely to conclude that–leaving aside the vilified personality of Putin–any Russian leader would insist on retaining the Crimean military assets. Anyone at all! Retention of that historic real estate is a no-brainer. Any outsiders with designs on it (which would include the hawks leading the U.S. Republican Party) are simply unrealistic if not brain-dead.
How could any Russian leader say to Victoria Nuland, “Fine, go ahead, take it,” and hand over this ethnic-Russian region–locus of the Crimean War of 1853-56 and some of the bloodiest battles against the Nazis in World War II, locus of the fateful Yalta meeting between Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill in February 1945–to forces overtly hostile to Russia? Forces that moreover are inclined to praise Ukrainian fascists who during World War II collaborated with the Nazis, even rounding up Jews for the slaughter at their bidding?
The Reuters article referenced above confirms the intention of the U.S-installed regime to formally apply for NATO membership. It cites Oleksander Turchynov, head of the new regime’s national security council, as stating to the parliament that NATO membership was “the only reliable external guarantee” of Ukrainian “sovereignty and territorial integrity.” (As though Russia, which had a cordial relationship with the previous President Viktor Yanukovich–who, let us repeat, was elected in a poll universally regarded as legitimate and democratic in 2010–has in recent times challenged the “territorial integrity” of Ukraine or any other country!)
It thus validates the key Russian charge that this is all about NATO–the NATO that, following George H.W. Bush’s promise to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1989 that the alliance would not advance “one inch” towards Russia’s borders has in fact advanced to surround European Russia since 1999. NATO now includes Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia and Albania, all expected by group rules to devote 2% of their GDPs to the mutual “defense” effort.
If it does not include Russia’s other neighbors, Belarus, Moldova and Georgia, it is not for lack of trying. The “National Endowment for Democracy” (a “private, non-profit organization” used by the State Department to fund regime change abroad) has sought to draw all of them into NATO. As though this were the most natural thing in the world, for all peoples living in countries bordering Russia to aspire to join an anti-Russian alliance!
Nuland’s talking points for popular consumption on Ukraine include the assertion that the U.S. supports “the Ukrainian people’s European aspirations.” She ignores the fact that the country is deeply divided between east and west, and that in the east there are substantial “Russian aspirations” deeply rooted in a history she does not and indeed disdains to even try to understand. She also conceals the fact that U.S. support for regime change in Ukraine, leading up to the February 22, 2014 coup, was not really based on U.S. support for Ukraine’s entry in the European Union.
The EU is a trading bloc that challenges the U.S. and NAFTA. In a world of imperialist competition for markets and resources, the EU and the U.S. often disagree. Washington is angry that EU members Britain, France, Italy, Spain and Luxembourg are all joining the Chinese-led investment bank Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), mainly because it’s likely to boost the Chinese currency and contribute to the decline of the dollar as the international reserve currency. Congress fumes over the EU’s refusal to allow importation of Monsanto’s genetically modified food products. The U.S. State Department is not in the business of promoting EU membership. That’s not what this is about.
In 2003 Hillary Clinton’s State Department seized on the decision made by ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich to back away from a deal he’d initialed with the EU. His advisors told him the austerity regime the EU would impose would be unacceptable, while Russia offered a generous aid package including continued supply of cheap gas.
Yanukovich’s decision to opt for the latter option was based on economic logic, and eminently defensible in economic terms. But the U.S. actively fanned the flames of a movement which depicted Yanukovich’s decision as a betrayal of Ukrainian nationalism and a statement of fealty to Russia. Hence Nuland’s oft repeated sound bite about “European aspirations.” As though Ukraine hadn’t always been part of Europe! As though “Europe” were some shining star, and all those horrible inflictions of terror on the Ukrainian Socialist Republic by European fascists during the 1940s were irrelevant. And as though submission to a Greek-style EU-inspired austerity regime would bring relief to the suffering Ukrainian masses.
In fact, Nuland’s own thoughts on “European aspirations” were sweetly summarized in her phone conversation with U.S. ambassador to Kiev Geoffrey Pyatt just before the putsch in early February 2014. Quite probably leaked by Russian intelligence, and never disavowed by the State Department, the recording shows how Nuland had hand-picked the current prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, for his post over rivals Oleh Tyanybok (leader of the neo-fascist Svoboda Party, who has publicly inveighed against the “Moscow-Jewish mafia ruling Ukraine” and referred to “Muscovites” and Jews as “scum) and Vitali Klitschko, a former boxer and sometimes anti-corruption activist.
In the phone call, Pyatt tells her “I think we’re in play,” meaning everything’s set for a coup. “The Kitschko piece is obviously the complicated electron here, especially the announcement of him as deputy prime minister… I’m glad you sort of put him on the spot as to where he fits into this scenario.” Pyatt had apparently informed Kitschko that despite some EU backing, he was not a suitable candidate for the U.S. (In the call, Nuland blandly asserts that he needs more time “to do his homework.”)
Nuland wanted to marginalize Klitschko, who in the coup’s aftermath was awarded (as consolation prize) the post of Kiev mayor, She wanted to make sure that the former Minister of the Economy, Yatsenyuk, advocate of severe austerity measures and proponent of NATO membership, succeeded Yanukovich.
The phone call makes clear that Nuland had recruited UN officials to endorse the regime change.
Towards the end of the conversation, Nuland tells Pyatt “OK,” signaling that the two agreed on the general strategy. She then alludes to the welcome complicity of several other assets: Jeff Feltman, Robert Serry, and Ban Ki-moon.
She reports that Jeff Feltman has “now gotten both Serry and Ban Ki-moon to agree that Serry could come in Monday or Tuesday.” Meaning: to help facilitate the coup and validate it afterwards.
Who are these people? Geoffrey Feltman, a career U.S. diplomat, was at the time the UN Under Secretary-General of Political Affairs. He is perhaps best known for his tenure as U.S. ambassador to Lebanon between 2004 and 2008 when he exercised so much influence that Hizbollah–echoed by other parties–referred to the Fouad Siniora government as the “Feltman government.”
Robert Serry is a Dutch diplomat who served as NATO’s Assistant Secretary-General of Foreign Crisis Management and Operations between 2003 and 2005 and also had been Dutch ambassador to Ukraine. An advocate of Dutch participation in the Iraq War based on lies, he was a reliable U.S. ally.
Ban Ki-moon is of course the UN Secretary-General who, as South Korea’s foreign minister, pressed for the deployment of South Korean troops in that same Iraq war based on lies. We know from Wikileaks that, prompted by the U.S., he urged the UN Security Council to ignore the UN Board of Inquiry’s report on the Israeli bombing of Gaza in 2008-2009 to avoid U.S. and Israeli embarrassment. It’s safe to call him a reliable U.S. puppet.
Towards the end of the intercepted phone call Nuland signs off: “So that would be great, I think, to help glue this thing and to have the UN help glue it and, you know, Fuck the EU.” Fuck them, that is to say, if their ideas about Ukraine’s future differ from our own.
So much for respect for anybody’s “European aspirations.”
In the same phone call, Nuland notes that Yatsenyev “will need Klitschko and Tyahnybok on the outside, he needs to be talking to them four times a week.” One has to ask: what’s more disgusting, the fact that the U.S. State Department would so attempt to micro-manage a regime change in a sovereign state, or that this neocon Nuland (who just so happens to be Jewish) representing the U.S. government, would urge the U.S. puppet to routinely network with a neo-fascist who describes Jews as “scum”?
In this case, commitment to the expansion of NATO cause plainly trumps the resistance to anti-Semitism cause. Nuland ought to be ashamed.
When confronted last May in a House hearing by Rep. Dana Rohrabacher with photographic evidence of the role of neo-Nazis in the Maidan events, Nuland acknowledged that “there were many colors of Ukraine involved including very ugly colors.” She didn’t mention her own photos with Tyahnybok, all smiles, or her instruction to “Yats” to be on the phone with him four times a week with him.
The Radio Free Europe article referenced above begins: “The controversial leader of Ukraine’s ultranationalist Right Sector paramilitary group has been named an army adviser. Ukrainian Armed Forces spokesman Oleksey Mazepa announced on April 6 that Dmytro Yarosh would ‘act as a link between volunteer battalions and the General Staff.’ Yarosh’s Right Sector militia claims to have some 10,000 members, but so far has not officially registered with the government as other paramilitary forces have done. The Right Sector militia is fighting alongside Ukrainian government troops against pro-Russian separatists in the eastern part of the country.”
The neo-fascist Right Sector was formed in 2013 during the Maidan protests in Kiev, amalgamating a number of groups aligned to the Svoboda Party. As the latter was striving for international respectability, its leaders meeting with Nuland and John McCain among others, the Right Sector functioned as its violent activist contingent. It was almost certainly involved in sniper fire on the square, attributed to the regime and used to validate its overthrow.
Now its head is awarded a government post, to coordinate the actions of the right-wing militias (most notoriously the Azov Battalion, which proudly sports Nazi insignia and has attacked civilian targets in east Ukraine). Does this not validate the Russian charge that there is a strong fascist component to the regime?
The situation is complicated. The neo-fascist shock troops deployed to pull off the putsch are not in favor of EU membership. They don’t want its tolerance for diversity, its immigration rules. They have a vision of White Power manifest in their varied symbols, that include Confederate flags, certain Celtic crosses, and swastikas. They might not even favor NATO membership. But as the Radio Free Europe article indicates, their support is valued and needed by the regime.
No matter that Dmytro Yarosh is wanted by Interpol for “public incitement to terrorist activities” for threatening to destroy Russian pipelines in Ukraine. He’s a necessary part of a team, and Washington backs the team. And the State Department and captive media pooh-pooh any suggestion that there’s any fascism here, or any underhanded effort to encircle Russia. It’s all about Ukrainian “freedom,” supported by its benign self, which has in recent memory visited such memorable liberations on Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya.
There is a fascist-friendly regime in Ukraine, ushered into power by the U.S. State Department. And it does want to enter NATO, and weaken Russia–if possible, by re-establishing control over Crimea and booting the Russian fleet out. Given German opposition to its admission into the alliance, it is doubtful that will occur short-term.
But with crazies running the U.S. State Department, successfully promoting a bogus narrative about what’s happened in Ukraine over the last two years–a narrative echoed slavishly by a clueless mainstream media–it’s just barely conceivable that there might come a day in which U.S. forces join the Azov Battalion in battling forces of the People’s Republics of Luhansk and Donetsk.
It won’t have anything to do with “freedom,” any more than the last few U.S. wars have had anything to do with that abstraction. It will be about imperial expansion, which while it might serve the .01% that rules this country, is not in your interest at all.
Robert Kagan: Neocon Renegade?
by Jim Lobe
I, for one, am very eager to hear what Robert Kagan thinks about the framework agreement that has just been negotiated between the P5+1 and Iran. I’m particularly interested in what he thinks of Israeli and Republican efforts to sabotage it in one way or another.
He hasn’t addressed the issue much (that I’m aware of), other than to deplore Speaker Boehner’s invitation to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in two successive monthly columns for The Washington Post (here and here), the last on the eve of Netanyahu’s speech to Congress. Those dissents were striking not only because they contrasted rather dramatically with the aggressive defense mounted by the vast majority of prominent neoconservatives of both the invite and Bibi’s appearance, but also because Kagan’s long-time partner in neocon crime, Bill Kristol, had clearly played some role in arranging the affair and greeting the prime minister as one of Boehner’s specially invited guests in the gallery (along with Sheldon Adelson, of course).
Kagan, of course, has been perhaps the most influential neoconservative intellectual of his generation. And for much of the past 20 years or more, he has teamed up with Kristol, the neoconservatism’s other princeling, to define the movement’s agenda. In 1996, the duo appealed to fellow-Republicans to embrace America’s “benevolent global hegemony” and resist the siren song of isolationism that seemed ascendant in the party at the time in their Foreign Affairs article, “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy.” One year later, the two co-founded the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). After that group’s demise in the desert sands of Iraq, they also co-founded, along with Dan Senor and Eric Edelman, the equally hubristic Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) in 2009 as a neocon attack dog against the presumed realist impulses of the incoming Obama administration and any signs of resurgent isolationism in the GOP.
But in the last two years, in particular, it seems that Kagan may have become something of a renegade. Unlike the vast majority of the movement leading lights, who have promoted “democracy” and “human rights” as mainly tactical weapons for deployment against perceived enemies of the United States and Israel, Kagan appears to have taken these concepts seriously. Indeed, he has apparently taken them even more seriously than neoconservatism’s core tenet since its birth in the late 1960s: the defense of Israel no matter how obnoxious its leadership, policies, or actions (or how much those leaders, policies, and actions contradict basic democratic values).
Split over Egypt
The emerging split between the two princelings became pretty blatant shortly after the 2013 military coup d’etat against the democratically elected president of Egypt, Mohamed Morsi. Kagan came out emphatically against any normalization of relations with the new government controlled by Gen. Abdul Fattah al-Sisi. In contrast, despite two daylight massacres by the security forces of hundreds of peaceful protesters in Cairo and the detention of thousands more, Kristol argued against any suspension of military aid to the regime. In the weeks and months that followed, virtually every prominent neocon (with the notable exception of Elliott Abrams) rallied behind Kristol’s (and Israel’s) position, leaving Kagan as a lonely champion in the movement for the Wilsonian ideals that many commentators had foolishly (in my opinion) come to associate with neoconservatism. (I wrote a longer essay on this theme immediately after the coup in a post entitled “Neocons and Democracy: Egypt as a Case Study.”)
Kagan, however, has stuck resolutely to his guns. In an extraordinary column (“Why the United States Shouldn’t Support Egypt’s Ruling Generals) published by The Washington Post nearly a year ago, he complained about the growing pressure by Israel and its lobby here to restore military aid that the Obama administration had initially suspended:
Many members of Congress also believe that by backing the Egyptian military they are helping Israel, which, through the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, has actively lobbied Congress for full restoration of military aid. Even though the Morsi government did not pull out of the Camp David Accords or take actions hostile to Israel, the mere presence of a Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt frightened the Israeli government.
To Israel, which has never supported democracy anywhere in the Middle East except Israel, the presence of a brutal military dictatorship bent on the extermination of Islamism is not only tolerable but desirable. Perhaps from the standpoint of a besieged state like Israel, this may be understandable. A friendly observer might point out that in the end Israel may get the worst of both worlds: a new Egyptian jihadist movement brought into existence by the military’s crackdown and a military government in Cairo that, playing to public opinion, winds up turning against Israel anyway.
Israel has to be the judge of its own best interests. But so does the United States. In Egypt, U.S. interests and Israel’s perceptions of its own interests sharply diverge. If one believes that any hope for moderation in the Arab world requires finding moderate voices not only among secularists but also among Islamists, America’s current strategy in Egypt is producing the opposite result. [Emphasis added.]
This, of course, was a remarkable passage given Kagan’s importance in a movement that has long promoted the notion that U.S. and Israeli interests (and values!) were fundamentally the same, especially as regards the Middle East and the “war against terrorism.” Particularly remarkable was the observation that Israel “has never supported democracy anywhere in the Middle East except Israel,” which concisely exposed not only the total hypocrisy of the pro-Israel hawks (and Netanyahu) who rallied behind George W. Bush’s “Freedom Agenda” after the invasion of Iraq, but also the deep contradictions between the aspiration of building a democratic Palestinian state and Israel’s long-standing preference for Arab autocrats. (Hence, the deeply ironic name one of the most aggressive pro-Israel groups in Washington: the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.)
A Double Heresy
Kagan has since returned to that theme. In his appeal for Netanyahu to politely decline Boehner’s invitation, Kagan noted that Bibi’s presence here was “not good for the American debate over Iran.”
At the end of the day, that debate has to rest on a consideration of U.S. interests, not those of Israel. The two sets of interests may be congruent in some instances, but they are never identical, because no two nations’ interests are ever identical. …
On issue such as Egypt and the broader question of supporting dictators in the Middle East, for instance, Israel always, and mistakenly, urges Congress and the administration to support autocrats who see that part of the world the way Israel does. In the case of Iran, Israel is uniquely threatened and, as a U.S. ally, it deserves a serious and appropriate hearing here. But it is a mistake for Congress to treat Israel as if it were fundamentally different from all other U.S. allies, some of whom also face dire threats.[Emphasis added.]
A passage like that amounts almost to a double heresy. Not only is Kagan arguing that U.S. and Israeli interests are “never identical,” but that Israel should not necessarily be treated any different from “other U.S. allies” (presumably including, Britain, France, and Germany, all of which support the ongoing negotiations with Iran). This is essentially a denial of, for lack of a better phrase, “Israeli exceptionalism,” which has been central to neoconservative foreign policy thinking since at least the 1967 Israeli-Arab war.
How different this is from Kristol’s persistent efforts to depict Bibi as a 21st-century Winston Churchill fending off the forces of barbarism and extremism on behalf of “civilization” and the entire Western world, or, more spectacularly, his 2012 Thanksgiving meditation, in which he made abundantly clear how he believes Americans should perceive their relationship with Israel:
[S]o these two very different nations—Christian and Jewish, large and small, new world and old (though the new world nation is older than its newly reborn old world counterpart)—find themselves allied. More than allied: They find themselves joined at the hip in a brotherhood that is more than a diplomatic or political or military alliance. Everyone senses that the ties are deeper than those of mere allies. Israelis know that if the United States fails, so shall Israel. Americans sense, in the words of Eric Hoffer, “as it goes with Israel so will it go with all of us. Should Israel perish the holocaust will be upon us.”[Emphasis added.]
It seems that Kagan does not agree.
Kagan’s Current Trajectory
Why am I writing this now? In part I’m genuinely curious what Kagan will have to say about the Iran deal, but also because I was struck once again by his latest column published last weekend in the Post (“Obama Repeats an Old U.S. Mistake in Egypt”) co-authored with Michele Dunne of the Carnegie Endowment. The op-ed reaffirms Kagan’s disgust over U.S. (and implicitly Israel’s) support for the al-Sisi regime—the column was provoked by Obama’s decision to release suspended aid to the Egyptian military. It also constitutes an eloquent defense of the long-term advantages of maintaining a strong human-rights policy and, as such, a remarkable repudiation of the late neocon goddess Jeane Kirkpatrick’s defense of “friendly authoritarian” regimes that dominated the Reagan administration in which Kagan served.
But I was especially struck by the rather pointed rebuke Kagan delivered to Bret Stephens, the Global View columnist at the Wall Street Journal and former editor of the Jerusalem Post who, next to Kristol and maybe Charles Krauthammer, has emerged as probably the most forceful and articulate proponent of hard-line foreign policy neoconservatism in the last few years. Indeed, the Kagan-Dunne op-ed begins with noting that Stephens in a recent column called Sisi a “geopolitical godsend”—a perfect reflection of Netanyahu’s and Kristol’s own assessments. (After a two-hour interview with Sisi, Stephen also penned a glowing review of the man entitled “Islam’s Improbable Reformer.”) Kagan seemed frankly infuriated by Stephens’s description and its approval of the Egyptian general’s performance.
We are back on the same old course in Egypt. It’s the Nixon Doctrine all over again, and we are falling prey to the same illusions that dictatorship equals stability, that brutal repression is the answer to radicalism. We lionize Sissi just as we lionized the shah, Mubarak and the other Middle East dictators before him. He is our guy, right up until the day his regime collapses. Geopolitical godsend? Try geopolitical time bomb.
There’s no doubt that Kagan still believes in the importance of maintaining the post-World War II, Western-dominated international order underpinned by Washington’s military primacy that remains sufficiently overwhelming to dissuade any potential peer rival from challenging it. This is and has always been an essential element of neoconservatism. There isn’t much question that he also believes in an American moral exceptionalism that presumably gives it the right to militarily preempt potential threats or mass atrocities with military force. But in his consistent and principled advocacy of democratic governance and human rights, as well as his refusal to privilege Israel’s interests over that of other allies, he seems to have parted ways with his erstwhile comrades, notably Kristol. Which is why, along with informed speculation that he has become an important advisor to Hillary Clinton, I’m so interested to find out what he’s going to write about Obama’s deal with Iran.
So far, very little. But, at the outset of Obama’s second term, he co-authored with his new boss at Brookings, Martin Indyk, a New York Times op-ed in which predicted that Iran’s nuclear program posed the president’s most important security challenge.
In the security realm, Obama’s primary “big bet” must be to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapons capability. The collapse of the nonproliferation regime that would follow Iran’s successful acquisition of nuclear weapons would strike a devastating blow to the international security order. Conversely, if Obama can succeed in achieving meaningful curbs on Iran’s nuclear weapons aspirations, he will do much to strengthen nonproliferation as a fundamental pillar of the new liberal global order.
by Nordic » Mon Apr 13, 2015 4:04 am
Putin Advisor: Novorossiya Will Never Be Part of Ukraine Again
Donbass will never rejoin Ukraine now that federalization has been categorically rejected by Kiev
Leonid Reshetnikov, a retired SVR general, director of the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies (RISI), and an advisor to Vladimir Putin, says that there is no possibility that Novorossiya will be part of Ukraine ever again because “the people of the south-east do not want to be Ukrainians.”
He also rules out the likelihood that the territories of the Donetsk Peoples Republic and Luhansk Peoples Republic, with their “millions of people,” could become something like a Transdniestria, a partially recognized country within the borders of another country recognized by most.
And thus he suggests that the immediate future is more war and the longer term future is the annexation of these areas and ultimately the rest of Ukraine and much of the former Soviet space into a new Russian state that will combine “the best features” of the pre-1917 Russian Empire and the USSR.
These are just some of the views that Reshetnikov offers in the course of a wide-ranging interview he gave to Aleksandr Chuikov, a journalist for “Argumenty Nedeli” (rgumenti.ru/toptheme/n481/394395).
Reshetnikov says that his institute which began as a secret part of the SVR has long specialized on “the analysis of available information on the far and near abroad,” information “which is needed not only for intelligence but for the structures which define the foreign policy of the country.”
“However strange it may seem,” until very recently, “there were no such serious analytic centers in the Presidential Administration of Russia,” the former SVR general says. Instead, what the Kremlin had too many of were “’institutions’” which consisted of “a director, a secretary, and the wife of the director” but without the staff that could make them effective.
RISI is different, he continues. It was created by Vladimir Putin, “and all government assignments for its investigations are signed off by Sergey Ivanov, the head of the Presidential Administration.”
When RISI was set up as a separate institution in 2009, Reshetnikov says he thought then that if Moscow would finance it the way Stratfor or RAND are financed, he would be in a position to leave Western analytic centers in the dust because “Russian analysts are the very strongest in the world.”
“I can say this with confidence,” he adds, “on the basis of 33 years of analytic work initially in the First Chief Directorate of the KGB of the USSR and then in the SVR.”
Reshetnikov says that his institute was one of two that has been working most intensively on Ukraine. (The other is the Institute of CIS Countries.) “From the very beginning of our activity, we wrote analytic reports about the growth of anti-Russian attitudes in central Ukraine and the intensification of pro-Russian ones in Crimea.”
He says that RISI was not alarmist about this but rather urged that Moscow take steps to use NGOs in both places to promote pro-Moscow feelings, something the Russian embassy in Kyiv did not do as much as it should have and as Russian embassies are now doing thanks to the intervention of President Putin.
The probability that there will be more war in Ukraine in the coming months is “very high,” Reshetnikov says, because the idea of the federalization of Ukraine has been rejected by Kyiv which is operating under pressure from the United States which wants a united Ukraine so that it can put cruise missiles there to be directed at Russia.
That is so important to Washington, the RISI director says, that “the US will fight for the Donbas down to the last Ukrainian.”
When Yanukovich was ousted by the Maidan, Moscow lost its “SOB” in Ukraine, even as the US installed its “SOB,” he says. But both Russia and the US received “compensation.” Russia got Crimea and the resistance of Ukraine’s south-east, even though “the enemy also received an enormous territory which was part of the Soviet Union and the Russian Empire.”
At the same time, Reshetnikov says that it is “too early” for Moscow to go for broke and attempt to seize all of Ukraine. That is because Putin understands that “in Europe there are taking place certain processes which are hidden for outsiders,” processes which “give hope that we will be able to defend our interests by other methods and means.”
Putin understands as many do not, Reshetnikov says, that the US has organized a plan to dismember Russia – something he says is “not propagandistic but real” -- even as it keeps its dominance over Europe. Washington is acting in Central Asia as well as Ukraine. Indeed, the US may strike first at Turkmenistan using various proxies, as some in Moscow have suggested.
According to Reshetnikov, Russian-American cooperation in the struggle with terrorism is “a fiction,” because the US “creates, feeds, provides for and then gives orders” to groups like ISIS for its own purposes. “Perhaps,” it will shoot attack one group of terrorists but only to be in a position to better control the others.
But all these American actions, the RISI director says, are part of a general plan and thus they must be countered as a whole rather than responded to piecemeal. That affects how Putin acts in Ukraine, even if many do not recognize the reasons that he does one thing or another, Reshetnikov adds.
According to the RISI director, what is occurring in Ukraine is not a fight between Ukrainians and Russians, “but a war of world systems. Some consider they are ‘all Europe’ but others that they are Russia. For our country is not simply a territory; it is a separate and enormous civilization which has brought to the attention of the entire world its views on world organization.”
The next year is going to be difficult for Russia, he continues, but “in the course of the next five or six years, we will see” the restoration of “a Russian empire as a model of eastern Slavic civilization. The Bolsheviks destroyed it,” but they brought “a new civilization idea.” Now, Reshetnikov says, Russia is moving toward “a good symbiosis” of its two predecessors.
The West understands that and consequently, “an attack has begun” on Russia “from all sides,” he says. That attack is being made by American presidents, but the real power lies with “secret forces,” including “transnational financial corporations” which want to define the new rules of the game.
But both the attractiveness of what Russia is offering and the ugliness of what the West is doing is leading to “an explosive growth of anti-American attitudes,” in Hungary, Greece, Italy, Austria, France and so on. “If Russia holds out now,” he says, “then processes will occur in Europe that will not be helpful to those now seeking world domination.”
At the end of his interview, Reshetnikov says that he is “extremely” opposed to the idea of uniting the SVR and the KGB. Were that to happen, he argues, the number of sources of information available to the president would be reduce to one, and thus he would be subject to distortions that that one would almost inevitably introduce.
He says that when he was a captain in the KGB in Soviet times, he was aware of “such manipulations with information” by his employer.
Chuikov appends a biographical sketch of Reshetnikov. The RISI director was born in Potsdam in East Germany in 1947. He graduated from the Kharkiv State University and did graduate work at the University of Sofia in Bulgaria. From 1974 to 1976, he worked at the Moscow Institute of the Economics of the World Socialist System.
Then, from 1976 to 2009, when he became RISI director, Reshetnikov served in the analytic sections of Soviet and then Russian foreign intelligence. His last post was as chief of the SVR’s Information and Analysis Administration. In addition to his native Russian, he speaks Serbian and Bulgarian and can communicate in Greek.
by seemslikeadream » Thu Apr 16, 2015 2:08 pm
.Ukraine: Ally of Ex-President Yanukovych Found Shot Dead
4/16/2015 8:31AM
A former member of parliament and the pro-Russian Party of Regions, Oleg Kalashnikov is the latest ally of ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych’s government to have died in suspicious circumstances. Niki Blasina reports. Photo: AP
Pro-Russia journalist shot dead in Kiev
Oles Buzyna, a former editor-in-chief and one-time parliamentary candidate, was killed on Thursday by shots fired from a passing car
Shuvayev/AFP/Getty Images
Katya Gorchinskaya in Kiev and Shaun Walker in Moscow
Thursday 16 April 2015 09.48 EDT Last modified on Thursday 16 April 2015 12.32 EDT
A controversial pro-Russian journalist was shot dead outside his home in Kiev on Thursday, just hours after a prominent opposition politician was murdered under similar circumstances in Ukraine’s capital.
The two murders come after a series of apparent suicides among former supporters of Viktor Yanukovych, who was ousted as president by last February’s Maidan revolution.
The spate of deaths have led to fears of a witch-hunt against supporters of the old regime, but Ukraine’s president Petro Poroshenko immediately declared the two murders part of a “deliberate provocation” aimed at destabilising the country.
Journalist Oles Buzyna was murdered by two masked people at 1.20pm local time, according to the police. The suspects then drove off in a car with either Belarussian, or Lithuanian number plates, they said.
The previous evening, a former MP and supporter of Yanukovych, Oleh Kalashnikov, was also shot dead just outside his apartment. In the days before his death, Kalashnikov had told friends he was receiving “threats of physical destruction”.
Police said they are looking into several potential motives in Kalashnikov’s murder case, including his political activities, his business and debts, as well as his personal relations.
Ukrainian politicians were quick to insist the murders were provocations intended to undermine the pro-western government.
“It is evident that these crimes have the same origin,” said Poroshenko in a statement. “Their nature and political sense are clear. It is a deliberate provocation that plays in favour of our enemies.
“It is aimed at destabilising the internal political situation in Ukraine and discrediting the political choice of the Ukrainian people.”
Oles Buzyna, who was 45. Facebook Twitter Pinterest
Oles Buzyna, who was 45. Photograph: Sergei Vaganov/AP
Poroshenko’s language was eerily reminiscent of Putin’s words immediately after the murder of Russian opposition politician Boris Nemtsov in Moscow in February. Putin also claimed the murder was a “provocation” organised by Russia’s enemies.
A number of Ukrainian politicians agreed with Poroshenko. Both victims were suspected of involvement in organising a series of rallies last year against Ukraine’s revolution, known as Antimaidan. Ukraine’s authorities insist that the murders are an attempt to get rid of witnesses in the case, and called on other potential witnesses to seek police protection.
“Everyone who was involved in organising and financing Antimaidan, or other illegal acts against Maidan and feels their life is under threat, are advised to come to law enforcement organs to not go the same way as Kalashnikov and Buzyna,” Anton Gerashchenko, an MP and adviser to the interior minister, wrote on his Facebook page. He did not make clear who might be trying to eliminate them, but other politicians were more blunt.
“Looks like FSB provocation,” wrote MP Sergei Leshchenko, who until the Maidan revolution last year was an investigative journalist, on his Twitter feed, referring to the Russian security service.
“It looks as if an FSB shooting brigade arrived and is shooting them off,” MP Volodymyr Ariev told the Guardian. “It easily fits into the Russian narrative that Ukraine is all about fascists, a country where even basic right for life is violated.”
However, Kalashnikov’s former party colleagues said he talked about receiving threats in the weeks coming up to his death. In one letter he wrote to a colleague just two days before his death, made available to the Guardian, he complained about “an open genocide of nonconformity, threats of physical destruction and constant dirty insults.”
He claimed the threats were for his calls to celebrate the 70th anniversary of victory in the “Great Patriotic War”, which will be celebrated lavishly in Moscow on 9 May. The war has become a sensitive topic with Russian propaganda claiming Kiev is occupied by Nazis, and making tenuous links between the conflict in east Ukraine and the second world war.
Putin was told about the murder of Buzyna during his live phone-in session on Thursday and said: “This is not the first assassination. There is a whole series of such killings in Ukraine.”
Buzyna, known for his pro-Russian position, had also complained about methods used by the current authorities to deal with political opponents. Last month, during an interview with a Russian television channel he compared the tactics to those used by ex-President Yanukovych, who fled to Russia during last year’s revolution.
Pro-Russian journalist and MP killed a day apart in Ukraine
Big News Network (UPI)Thursday 16th April, 2015
KIEV, Ukraine -- A pro-Russian journalist and a pro-Russian former member of parliament have been killed in separate shootings one day apart in Kiev, Ukraine.
Pro-Russian journalist Oles Buzyna, 45, was killed outside of his home by shots fired from inside a car on Thursday. Another Russian supporter, former Ukrainian Minister of Parliament Oleg Kalashnikov, was found at his home on Wednesday -- killed by a gunshot.
Ukrainian Interior Ministry adviser Anton Herashchenko said he believed both killings were related to the "anti-Maidan" movement in Ukraine where pro-Russian activists attacked protesters in the Maidan Square uprising that removed former pro-Russian President Victor Yanukovych from power.
Buzyna and Kalashnikov were important witnesses in a criminal case, according to Herashchenko.
"Without any doubt the deceased knew a lot about who and in what way financed anti-Maidan, which cost Yanukovich and his camarilla several million," Herashchenko said. "He takes these secrets with him to the grave."
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has ordered an investigation into the killings.
"It is evident that these crimes have the same origin," Poroshenko said in a statement. "Their nature and political sense are clear. It is a deliberate provocation that plays in favor of our enemies."
At least eight officials have been killed in the last three months who are linked to Yanukovych's former government. Authorities labeled some of the deaths as suicides, but stated it was possible some were forced to take their lives.Andrew V. Pestano
by seemslikeadream » Fri Apr 17, 2015 10:01 am
by seemslikeadream » Sat Apr 18, 2015 11:56 pm
How Ukraine Commemorates the Holocaust
April 17, 2015
Exclusive: Pundit Thomas Friedman says the new Ukraine regime “shares our values” but – as much of the world marked the 70th anniversary of the Nazi Holocaust finally being ended by Russian and U.S. armies – politicians in Kiev were busy honoring Ukraine’s Nazi collaborators, writes Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
The U.S.-backed Ukrainian government came up with a curious way to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Holocaust being brought to an end. The parliament in Kiev voted to extend official recognition to Ukrainian fascists who collaborated with the Nazis in killing Jews.
Though Official Washington and the mainstream U.S. media continue to dutifully ignore the key role played by neo-Nazis in Ukraine’s February 2014 coup and in the post-coup regime’s subsequent military offensives against ethnic Russians in the east, Ukrainian politicians can’t stop their arms from snapping into Heil Hitler salutes like the fictional character Dr. Strangelove. They can’t hold back this reflex even as the world stopped this week to recall the Nazi barbarity that claimed the lives of some six million Jews as well as other minorities.
On April 9, the Ukrainian parliament passed a bill making the ultra-nationalist Ukrainian Insurgent Army eligible for official government recognition, a demand that has been pushed by Ukraine’s current neo-Nazi and ultra-nationalist movements, the same forces that spearheaded the overthrow of elected President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 and then the slaughter of thousands of ethnic Russians who resisted the new order.
Ukraine’s honor-the-Nazi-collaborators vote came amid increased repression of opposition politicians and journalists who dare to criticize the U.S.-backed regime as it moves to repudiate the political settlement envisioned by February’s Minsk-2 agreement and instead prepares for a resumption of the war to crush the resistance in eastern Ukraine once and for all. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Ukraine’s ‘Poison Pill’ for Peace Talks.”]
Emergence of ‘Death Squads’
Over the past several months, there have been about ten mysterious deaths of opposition figures – some that the government claimed to be suicides while others were clearly murders. It now appears that pro-government “death squads” are operating with impunity in Kiev.
On Wednesday, Oleg Kalashnikov, a political leader of the opposition Party of Regions, was shot to death in his home. Kalashnikov had been campaigning for the right of Ukrainians to celebrate the Allied victory in World War II, a gesture that infuriated some western Ukrainian neo-Nazis who identify with Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich and who now feel they have the current government in their corner.
On Thursday, unidentified gunmen murdered Ukrainian journalist Oles Buzina, a regime critic who had protested censorship being imposed on news outlets that didn’t toe the government’s propaganda line. Buzina had been denounced by a pro-regime “journalistic” outfit which operated under the Orwellian name “Stop Censorship” and demanded that Buzina be banned from making media appearances because he was “an agent of the Kremlin.”
This week, another dissident journalist Serhiy Sukhobok was reportedly killed in Kiev, amid sketchy accounts that his assailants may have been caught although the Ukrainian government has withheld details.
These deaths are mostly ignored by the mainstream U.S. news media – or are mentioned only in briefs with the victims dismissed as “pro-Russian.” After all, these “death squad” activities, which have also been occurring in government-controlled sections of eastern Ukraine, conflict with the preferred State Department narrative of the Kiev regime busy implementing “democratic reforms.”
But many of those “democratic reforms” amount to slashing old-age pensions, removing worker protections, and hiking the price of heating fuel – as demanded by the International Monetary Fund in exchange for a $17.5 billion bailout for Ukraine’s collapsing financial structure.
Similarly, the decision by the Ukrainian parliament to bend to the demands of neo-Nazi and other ultra-right groups to honor Ukraine’s World War II fascists is also downplayed or ignored by the major U.S. media.
The Holocaust in Ukraine
During World War II, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, an offshoot of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, collaborated with the Nazis in their orgy of mass murder against Jews, Poles and other minority groups. The UIA also joined with the Nazis in fighting against the Soviet Union’s Red Army, although some UIA elements did ultimately turn against the Germans over their occupation of Ukraine.
Ukraine was the site of several major Holocaust atrocities including the infamous massacre at Babi Yar in Kiev, where local Ukrainian fascists worked alongside the Nazi SS in funneling tens of thousands of Jews to a ravine where they were slaughtered and buried.
According to the Jerusalem Post, the Simon Wiesenthal Center condemned Ukraine’s recognition of the UIA as well as a second bill that equated Communist and Nazi crimes.
“The passage of a ban on Nazism and Communism equates the most genocidal regime in human history with the regime which liberated Auschwitz and helped end the reign of terror of the Third Reich,” said Wiesenthal Center director for Eastern European Affairs Dr. Efraim Zuroff, adding:
“In the same spirit the decision to honor local Nazi collaborators and grant them special benefits turns Hitler’s henchmen into heroes despite their active and zealous participation in the mass murder of innocent Jews. These attempts to rewrite history, which are prevalent throughout post-Communist Eastern Europe, can never erase the crimes committed by Nazi collaborators in these countries, and only proves that they clearly lack the Western values which they claim to have embraced upon their transition to democracy.”
Not Seeing Nazis
Despite propaganda efforts by the Obama administration and the major U.S. news media to play down western Ukraine’s legacy of Nazi collaboration, one of the heroes honored during the Maidan protests, which led to the Feb. 22, 2014 coup, was Stepan Bandera, an OUN leader who worked with the Nazis before falling out with them over issues of Ukrainian independence.
After spearheading the 2014 coup, the neo-Nazi and ultra-nationalist militias from western Ukraine were enlisted as the shock troops to attack ethnic Russian cities in eastern Ukraine, which had been the political base for ousted President Yanukovych. Even though some of those militias sported Swastikas and SS symbols, the mainstream U.S. news media either ignored those inconvenient realities or acknowledged them in the final paragraphs of long stories. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Seeing No Neo-Nazi Militias in Ukraine.”]
The recognition of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army was demanded last October by Ukraine’s right-wing and neo-Nazi groups, including the Svoboda party and the Right Sektor, which surrounded the parliament in Kiev with 8,000 protesters.
At that time, with U.S. officials sensitive to the image of the Ukrainian government caving in to rioters carrying neo-Nazi banners, the legislation was defeated. However, in recent weeks with the Kiev leadership leaning more heavily on the neo-Nazis and other ultra-nationalists to carry out the war against ethnic Russians in the east, more concessions are being made to the extremists.
Lurches to the Right
These lurches to the right have again been largely ignored by the mainstream U.S. media, which continues to blame the ethnic Russians for not submitting to the post-coup regime in Kiev and to demonize Russian President Vladimir Putin as the supposed instigator of all the trouble.
But the Jerusalem Post noted, “While Jewish worries over anti-Semitism have been on the back burner due to the war [in Ukraine], several recent developments have shown that antipathy toward Jews, or at least indifference toward such attitudes when held by important military or political figures, still exists in Ukraine.
“Last November Jewish organizations expressed their displeasure when it was disclosed that the newly appointed police chief for the Ukrainian province in which Kiev is located came under fire after it was alleged that he had past ties with a neo-Nazi organization.”
The Jerusalem Post also took note of the Kiev regime’s recent appointment of right-wing extremist Dimitri Jarosch, who organized many of the fighters behind the February 2014 putsch, to be an official adviser to the army leadership.
The larger historical context is that Nazism has been deeply rooted in western Ukraine since World War II, especially in cities like Lviv, where a cemetery to the veterans of the Galician SS, a Ukrainian affiliate of the Nazi SS, is maintained. These old passions were brought to the surface again in the battle to oust Yanukovych and sever historic ties to Russia.
The muscle behind the U.S.-backed Maidan protests against Yanukovych came from neo-Nazi militias trained in western Ukraine, organized into 100-man brigades and bused to Kiev. After the coup, neo-Nazi leader Andriy Parubiy, who was commander of the Maidan “self-defense forces,” was elevated to national security chief and soon announced that the Maidan militia forces would be incorporated into the National Guard and sent to eastern Ukraine to fight ethnic Russians resisting the coup.
As the U.S. government and media cheered on this “anti-terrorist operation,” the neo-Nazis and other right-wing battalions engaged in brutal street fighting against Russian ethnic rebels. Only occasionally did this nasty reality slip into the major U.S. news media. For instance, an Aug. 10, 2014 article in the New York Times mentioned the neo-Nazi paramilitaries at the end of a lengthy story on another topic.
“The fighting for Donetsk has taken on a lethal pattern: The regular army bombards separatist positions from afar, followed by chaotic, violent assaults by some of the half-dozen or so paramilitary groups surrounding Donetsk who are willing to plunge into urban combat,” the Times reported.
“Officials in Kiev say the militias and the army coordinate their actions, but the militias, which count about 7,000 fighters, are angry and, at times, uncontrollable. One known as Azov, which took over the village of Marinka, flies a neo-Nazi symbol resembling a Swastika as its flag.” [See Consortiumnews.com’s “NYT Discovers Ukraine’s Neo-Nazis at War.”]
Meeting the Nazis
The conservative London Telegraph offered more details about the Azov battalion in an article by correspondent Tom Parfitt, who wrote: “Kiev’s use of volunteer paramilitaries to stamp out the Russian-backed Donetsk and Luhansk ‘people’s republics’… should send a shiver down Europe’s spine.
“Recently formed battalions such as Donbas, Dnipro and Azov, with several thousand men under their command, are officially under the control of the interior ministry but their financing is murky, their training inadequate and their ideology often alarming. The Azov men use the neo-Nazi Wolfsangel (Wolf’s Hook) symbol on their banner and members of the battalion are openly white supremacists, or anti-Semites.”
Based on interviews with militia members, the Telegraph reported that some of the fighters doubted the reality of the Holocaust, expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler and acknowledged that they are indeed Nazis.
Andriy Biletsky, the Azov commander, “is also head of an extremist Ukrainian group called the Social National Assembly,” according to the Telegraph article which quoted a commentary by Biletsky as declaring: “The historic mission of our nation in this critical moment is to lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival. A crusade against the Semite-led Untermenschen.”
In other words, for the first time since World War II, a government had dispatched Nazi storm troopers to attack a European population – and officials in Kiev knew what they were doing. The Telegraph questioned Ukrainian authorities in Kiev who acknowledged that they were aware of the extremist ideologies of some militias but insisted that the higher priority was having troops who were strongly motivated to fight. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Ignoring Ukraine’s Neo-Nazi Storm Troopers.”]
Since the coup, the New York Times and other mainstream U.S. news outlets have decried any recognition of the significant neo-Nazi presence in Ukraine as “Russian propaganda.” So, Ukraine’s new initiative to honor Nazi collaborators – in legislation coinciding with the commemoration of the end of the Holocaust – also must be ignored.
The pro-coup propaganda in the U.S. media has been so pervasive that a powerful “group think” took hold with the Kiev regime revered as white-hatted “good guys,” certainly not brown-shirted neo-Nazis. Or as the New York Times’ dimwitted foreign policy pundit Thomas L. Friedman declared in a column earlier this year, the new leaders of Ukraine “share our values.”
by Nordic » Sun May 03, 2015 4:55 am
We’ve seen several photographs of the Malaysian Airlines MH17 cockpit remains on the ground in Eastern Ukraine. They show numerous 30mm entry & exit canon holes. These have been fobbed off by the propaganda media as ‘shrapnel’ damage from a BUK ground to air missile.
The consistent circularity and size corresponding to 30mm bullet holes, or the fact that they are concentrated on the cockpit doesn’t bother apologists who have an agenda to promote.
In a CNN report (see below) there is footage of Donbass militia looking at the newly fallen wreckage of MH17, some of it still on fire. The video was broadcast by CNN. As the images run past us a barely noticeable item is briefly in view of the camera:
A combatant spots something amongst the debris. He bends down to pick it up. What he has retrieved is a 30mm bullet that was in the fallen material.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDtqf0cqOCE
The bullet is in view only for 3 seconds; from 1′ 36″ to 1′ 39″. And the way it was casually passed by the camera lens for so short a time indicates that the man who found it took it for granted that the plane was shot at by the trailing fighter jet(s).
This was within minutes of the shooting down, and before the mass media propaganda machine started its deception a few hours later about a rebel or Russian launched BUK missile. So the Donetsk combatant would not have known the significance of the 30mm canon bullet he was holding.
Previously, Global Research has published articles showing the bullet holes and witness evidence about the downing of MH17 [1], but so far as I am aware no video clips have been noticed showing the damning evidence of this 30mm bullet.
A quick search of Global Research [1] and any web search engine [2] will give numerous links to evidence and photographs of the bullet holes, as well as witnesses who saw the fighter jet(s). This, together with the flight route diverted directly over the battle area indicates a premeditated plan to bring the plane down.
As to whether air to air missiles were fired from the fighter jet(s) or a bomb had been planted in the plane, those could well have been additional factors. But we now know for certain that the plane was machine gunned by fighter jets. The bullet holes in the cockpit, and now this 30mm bullet in plain view proves it.
One is left to wonder, what kind of irrational psychopaths would order such a murderous act, what brain-dead automatons would carry it out, and what supine and servile corporate mainstream media would try to deflect attention from the perpetrators and blame other parties.
Notes:
[1] http://www.globalresearch.ca/who-was-be ... le/5394693
http://www.globalresearch.ca/dutch-safe ... le/5400526
http://www.globalresearch.ca/evidence-i ... le/5394814
http://www.globalresearch.ca/another-mh ... sy/5421386
http://www.globalresearch.ca/how-the-ma ... ge/5435094
[2] https://www.google.com.au/search?q=MH17+30mm+bullet
by seemslikeadream » Fri May 15, 2015 9:42 am
by conniption » Sun May 17, 2015 6:52 am
RT
‘Bigger role’ for US in Minsk II accords: Are you sure, Ms. Nuland?
Phil Butler
Published time: May 17, 2015
US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland (Reuters / Gleb Garanich)
One year into the Ukrainian crisis, Washington reveals a desire to jump on the bandwagon of the Minsk peace accords – brokered by France and Germany. Not bad news, after all, but when it comes from Victoria Nuland...
News that US Secretary of State John Kerry flew to Sochi to meet with Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov and President Putin came as only a small surprise this week. In the wake of the most impressive Victory Day celebration ever across Russia, most experts agreed that the Russia people’s vigilance held a fairly massive sway over world public opinion afterwards. Western media was not oblivious to this either.
However much of a positive this trend may be, news that the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland and sidekick Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt are on the loose again tends to quell hopes of peace.
On Saturday Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland told reporters she (and the United States of America) wanted to play a more significant role in the Minsk accords upcoming. To be honest, everyone I mention this to seems to come down with the shivers, whether they’re from western or eastern Europe. Given the US bureaucrat’s past tenor, and her “F” bomb flubs the United States could NOT do worse in belaying either Russian or rebels’ fears.
For those unfamiliar with the Minsk II situation: The leaders of Ukraine, Russia, France, and Germany agreed on February 11 to a package of measures aimed at alleviating the crisis in war torn east Ukraine. The deal, overseen by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), revived the failed protocol agreed to on September 5, 2014.
From the onset of both these efforts, Nuland and her Tonto conspirator Geoffrey Pyatt have been part of the problem in Ukraine, rather than part of the peaceful solution.
Thus, Pyatt seems to think his Twitter account is judge and jury of all regional international conflict. The ambassador tweets quasi-evidence of Russian invasions of Ukraine every time the wind blows. His latest imagery supposedly caught red handed Russian mobile artillery in eastern Ukraine, which turned out to be a two-year-old picture of an air defense system from an air show near Moscow. I think the American taxpayers should ask for a refund on this.
http://twitter.com/GeoffPyatt/status/59 ... 28/photo/1
Long before the eve of the Euromaidan protests that led to the Ukraine coup d'etat Washington called democratic reformation [today], Victoria Nuland was an instigator in Iraq under then Vice President Dick Cheney. Nuland was a "democracy promotion" officer back then too, one so adept at making liberty happen she was later promoted by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, first to State Department spokesperson, then later to her current position as Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs.
In hindsight, there's no wonder Moscow raised eyebrows when Nuland appeared in Maidan Square sharing loaves and fishes with protesters there. The veteran State Department operative is virulently anti-Russia, despite proclaiming her love for the country. Between Nuland and NATO Commander General Philip Breedlove it's hard to figure who has been more in favor of the US arming Kiev. As for her "killer instinct" in spreading democratic ideals, Nuland is a cagey operator. On the first day of the recent Munich Security Conference Nuland and Breedlove held a meeting of delegates behind closed doors to discuss a strategy for getting Europe to agree to arm Ukraine. Nuland was credited with saying:
"While talking to the Europeans this weekend, you need to make the case that Russia is putting in more and more offensive stuff while we want to help the Ukrainians defend against these systems."
Now, she is also coming to Russia to hold talks with Lavrov deputies, Sergey Ryabkov and Grigory Karasin. The talks are expected to focus on Ukraine - and Minsk Accords.
If the Kerry visit to Sochi could be seen as an olive branch to President Putin, then choosing an alternative voice for direct connecting the so-called Normandy Four and America would have been advisable here. Speaking after talks on Saturday with Ukrainian Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, Nuland attempted to put herself and the United States diplomatic mission at the forefront of negotiations Washington tried to scuttle from the beginning. Nuland stressed:
"The United States deepens our engagement in the Minsk implementation process in lockstep with our European allies and partners, with the EU and particularly with the Normandy powers.”
Outside “deepening” a Washington engagement that has at every turn been adversarial toward Russia and the rebels, Nuland gave the Obama administration’s “insistence” on a ceasefire on the borders of the Donbass. Now that a peace accord and a reversal of EU-US-Russia sanctions madness seems at hand, the very instigators of chaos want a place at the peace table. If ever there were an American peace saboteur running about, Victoria Nuland is she. Legendary investigative reporter Robert Parry frames that argument here.
Meanwhile back in Washington the daily press briefing at the State Department after Nuland’s Kiev comments returned to hard line posturing. Press Office Director, Jeff Rathke returned to the Kerry State Department hyperbole we’ve come to expect after every visit with Vladimir Putin. Speaking of Nuland’s talk with Avakov and Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko on US commitments, Rathke added this:
“We continue to stand shoulder to shoulder with the people of Ukraine and reiterate our deep commitment to a single Ukrainian nation, including Crimea, and all the other regions of Ukraine.”
So Kerry, with Nuland in tow, go into Russia’s back door to lay a wreath at the feet of heroes Obama and most of the west forgot. Then hours later the same bozo team tries to ramrod the Minsk peace show upcoming. One has to wonder if Lavrov and Putin did not acquiesce to Kerry (for Obama) begging and allow the US officials to save some face for those waiting back home along the Potomac. The images from Sochi bear out that Vladmir Putin seemed amused (maybe disgusted?).
Russian President Vladimir Putin (second left) meeting with US Secretary of State John Kerry (second right) at the Bocharov Ruchei residence in Sochi, May 12, 2015.(RIA Novosti / Aleksey Nikolskyi)
To conclude, as we witness the hawkish Nuland mutating into the great white dove of European peace in Kiev, her NeoCon husband, Brookings think tank fellow Robert Kagan gesticulates on more military spending on the Washington Post. For this Washington think tank thinker it’s hard to decide which member of the family is a less likely peacemaker for great nations. Since we mentioned Pyatt and Twitter viability, here’s a bit of United States of America social media proof, there’s a big fat hawk with a Raytheon emblem flying over the peace process in Minsk. As an American citizen this whole US involvement in Ukraine is simply an embarrassment for me.
Finally, what serves as proof for the US State Department, should be verifiable proof for everyone, no?
_______
Phil Butler is journalist and editor, and a partner at the digital marketing firm, Pamil Visions PR. Phil contributes to the Huffington Post, The Epoch Times, Japan Today, and many others. He's also a policy and public relations analyst for Russia Today, as well as other international media. You can find Phil's blog at http://www.phillip-butler.com.
by Sounder » Tue May 19, 2015 6:34 am
by seemslikeadream » Sun May 24, 2015 1:16 am
TUESDAY, MAY 19, 2015 06:00 PM CDT
John Kerry admits defeat: The Ukraine story the media won’t tell, and why U.S. retreat is a good thing
The U.S. seems to admit it overplayed its hand over Ukraine. Caving to reality is actually the best possible policy
PATRICK L. SMITH
John Kerry admits defeat: The Ukraine story the media won't tell, and why U.S. retreat is a good thing
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry puts in an ear piece for translation during a news conference with Saudi Foreign Minister Saud bin Faisal bin Abdulaziz Al Saud on Thursday, March 5, 2015, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Kerry sought Thursday to ease Gulf Arab concerns about an emerging nuclear deal with Iran and explore ways to calm instability in Yemen and other troubled nations in the Middle East. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, Pool)(Credit: AP)
It is just as well Secretary of State John Kerry’s momentous meetings with Russian leaders last week took place in Sochi, the Black Sea resort where President Putin keeps a holiday home. When you have to acknowledge that two years’ worth of pointless hostility in the bilateral relationship has proven none other than pointless, it is best to do so in a far-away place.
Arriving in the morning and leaving in the afternoon, Kerry spent three hours with Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s very competent foreign minister, and then four with Putin. After struggling with the math, these look to me like the most significant seven hours the former senator will spend as this nation’s face abroad.
Who cannot be surprised that the Obama administration, having turned the Ukraine question into the most dangerous showdown since the Cold War’s worst, now declares cordiality, cooperation and common goals the heart of the matter?
The question is not quite as simple as one may think.
On the one hand, the policy cliques’ long swoon into demonization has been scandalously juvenile, and there has been no sign until now of sense to come. Grown men and women advancing the Putin-is-Hitler bit with straight faces. Getting the Poles, paranoids for understandable reasons on all questions to with Russia, to stage ostentatious displays of teenagers in after-school military exercises. American soldiers in those silly berets they affect drilling Ukrainian Beetle Baileys in “war-making functions,” as the officer in charge put it.
When the last of these theatrics got under way in mid-April, it was time for paying-attention people to sit up. As noted in this space, it seemed to indicate that we Americans were prepared to go to war with another nuclear power to rip Ukraine from its past and replant it in the neoliberals’ hothouse of client states—doomed to weakness precisely because corrupt leaders were enticed with baubles to sever their people from history.
On the other hand, it took no genius to see what would eventually come. This column predicted long back—within weeks of the American-cultivated coup that deposed President Yanukovych in February of last year—that the Obama administration would one day be forced to retreat before it all came to resolution.
It was hard then to see how anyone could anticipate any other outcome, and so it has remained. You cannot turn basic miscalculation, indifference to history and diplomatic insensitivity into a winning hand. You turn it into an overplayed hand. And that is what sent Kerry to Sochi last week.
Surprise and no surprise, then.
What does the Sochi visit make Kerry? Is he Neville Chamberlain just back from Munich? The appeasement paranoids are not in evidence yet, which is curious. But the question is interesting nonetheless.
“Now if this sounds familiar, it’s what Hitler did back in the ’30s,” Hillary Clinton said of Putin’s Ukraine policy a month after the Yanukovych coup. Given the corner Clinton has painted herself into, can you wait to hear how she fields questions about Kerry’s new démarche? To hear her explain how she would, if elected, address Putin? I have trouble keeping my seat.
Emphatically, let us forget Clinton’s problems and dismiss any argument that Kerry is an appeaser before one is even made. There is no question of appeasement—a loaded word implying a false equivalence. Kerry is caving to realities, a very different thing.
As I have argued, the best thing American diplomats can do now is admit the failure of our long-expired strategies abroad. Implicitly, at least, Kerry has just done so in one of the most important theaters of American foreign policy. This is a sensible, productive thing to do. When you hit a wall, you can either sit there indefinitely or turn around.
What are these realities Kerry has caved to? I count five, two more than the State Department listed when it outlined Kerry’s agenda in Sochi:
* My sources in Moscow tell me that 80 percent of the exchange concerned the pending deal governing Iran’s nuclear program. Look back: Kerry and Obama have one significant foreign policy success to their credit—the opening to Cuba the exception—and a string of messy failures and successes (the restored dictatorship in Egypt, for instance) that would have been better had they failed.
Look forward: Kerry and Obama, both ambitiously aware of “legacy,” have 18 months to land a big one. It does not get much bigger than rapprochement with Tehran.
Kerry should have come to his senses on Iran long before this. Lavrov has been instrumental in bridging an imposing divide between Iran and the P5 + 1 negotiating group—the U.S., Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany. Most immediately, it was the Russian foreign minister who persuaded Tehran to consider (for a second time) shipping its uranium stockpiles to Russia and re-importing what it needs for peaceful applications. This provision is on the table now and could prove make-or-break as the June 30 deadline for a deal approaches.
More broadly, relations between Russia and (what is now) Iran are 250 years older than the United States and make a complex, on-again-off-again tale. They are very “on” now, and of all P5 + 1 members, Russia holds more keys to the kingdom than any other.
* Same in Syria: A nearby neighbor, longtime relations. Moscow has supported Damascus since the 1940s and signed a non-aggression pact in 1950. Given how evident American impotence in the Syria crisis has become since the bombing campaigns began last September—and how obvious the common cause between Washington and Damascus—Kerry has been saying the unsayable since March: It is time to talk to Assad. And there is no point talking to Assad without talking to Moscow.
Let us not forget that it was Lavrov, once again, who got Obama and Kerry out of a serious political jam in September 2013, a month after the gas attacks in Damascus the administration instantly and implausibly (and wrongly, it soon turned out) assigned to Assad. The “red line” Obama drew brought the U.S. to the eve of airstrikes, Lavrov then persuading Assad to give up his chemical-weapons inventories.
* Ukraine, like Syria, got 10 percent of Kerry’s time in Sochi. I would have thought more, but this is what I am advised by sound Moscow sources. Of all the questions Kerry raised in Sochi, indeed, the new stance on Ukraine amounts to capitulation as well as a request for cooperation.
Readers will recall a rapid-fire sequence of events earlier this year. As the week of February 1 opened, the administration let it be known via a Times story—a straight feed, newspaper as bulletin board—that it was considering arming the Kiev regime. Next day came an announcement that Kerry was traveling to Ukraine, due for meetings Thursday. The topic seemed obvious.
That Wednesday things got interesting. Chancellor Merkel called François Hollande, the French president, and told him to fly to Kiev immediately. Why interesting: These three—Kerry, Merkel and Hollande—were there the same day, talking to the same government, and did not meet. All three then went to Moscow, again separately.
So far as I can make out, all that has occurred since flowed from that week. Merkel, Hollande and Putin convened another round of ceasefire talks with the Ukrainians in Minsk, where the Minsk II agreement was signed on February 11. Short work, which tells us something. Minsk II is fragile but still in effect and remains the basis for a negotiated settlement.
The Americans were excluded from Minsk—point blank, so far as one can make out. And I love the Times sentence on this in Monday’s paper: “Russia, Germany and France previously made it clear that they did not necessarily welcome the Americans at the negotiating table…” It reminds me of Hirohito announcing the surrender on Japanese radio: “The war has not necessarily proceeded to our advantage.”
At the moment described a long-simmering confrontation between the Europeans and Americans was about to boil over. It was the suggestion that American arms might begin to flow into the Ukrainian conflict that prompted Merkel, with Hollande behind her, to tell Washington, “Enough. Cut it out. We are not with you. We settle this at the table, not with missile systems.”
What we saw in Sochi was Kerry’s acceptance that Washington has been trumped in Ukraine: No one else will any longer stand by as Washington agitates for a military solution, no one is on board for ever-heightened confrontation with Moscow and—miss this not—no one else will any longer pretend that the Poroshenko government is other than a new crop of corrupt incompetents.
Where else does an American diplomat go at such a moment but to a Black Sea beach?
* Fourth reality. European Union leaders are due to meet next month to consider whether to renew or drop sanctions against Russia that expire in July. What I get from sources in Europe is that six E.U. members are likely to oppose renewal and that Germany may make seven by the time of the E.U. talks. Since renewal requires a unanimous vote, the outcome seems to be clear.
As noted at the start of this year, Washington’s overly assertive strategy toward Russia risked a breach in one of two relationships: Europe’s with Russia or America’s with Europe. In my view, the increasing risk of trans-Atlantic damage was another factor in Kerry’s travels last week.
* Last but maybe first, in the best outcome the Obama administration has learned the most important lesson available to it in its foreign relations. No need to do any other than quote Stephen F. Cohen, the Russianist interviewed here a few weeks ago.
“The road to American national security still runs through Moscow,” Cohen said with that conviction that comes of long experience. “There is not a single major regional or issue-related national security problem we can solve without the full cooperation of whoever sits in the Kremlin, period, end of story. Name your poison: We’re talking the Middle East, we’re talking Afghanistan, we’re talking energy, we’re talking climate, we’re talking nuclear proliferation, terrorism, shooting airplanes out of the sky, we’re talking about the two terrorist brothers in Boston.”
My reservation about the best outcome is that it is unlikely. To draw lessons from errors you have to acknowledge them, and our policy cliques rarely do, so missing all opportunity to learn from them. Kerry’s démarche has failure written all over it, but, per usual, it is advanced as merely the successful outcome of a successful strategy. This is how you will read of it, I assure you.
More interesting choreography comes our way already. Kerry was in Sochi last Tuesday. The frightening Victoria Nuland, his assistant secretary for European affairs, was in Kiev by Friday. There, and then in Moscow, Nuland was a misleading claim a minute, suggesting, among much else, that she and Kerry were “fully committed to Minsk implementation.”
What a charade. No one other Americans bamboozled by bad media can take this stuff seriously. Not only were Americans kept away from Minsk—not necessarily invited, I should say—but Nuland and her boss vigorously sought to undermine it as soon as it was signed.
Remember Al Haig at the White House after Reagan was shot in 1981? “I’m in charge here!” This is Victoria Nuland bouncing between Kiev and Moscow as we speak. She runs to catch up while claiming to lead, having been left behind by ministers and diplomats with better things to do than provoke confrontation.
We will have to see where this latest turn leads. I credit Kerry. I do not assign him any transcendently imaginative new take on American strategy in the Middle East, in Ukraine, or in Washington’s ties to Moscow. He has acknowledged failure without admitting it. It is force of circumstance, not more. It is not everything, but it could be a lot more than nothing.
by conniption » Sat May 30, 2015 6:53 pm
The Saker
Please tell me this is a joke?!
May 30, 2015
68 Comments
Absolutely amazing news today. See for yourself:
Poroshenko appoints Saakashvili as governor of Odessa
Uncle Sam tries to get the Nobel Peace Prize for Poroshenko
This is so crazy as to actually be comical.
The good news is that if they have truly “gone fishing” then they are desperate.
The bad news is that these lunatics can start a war.
God help us all…
Have a great-week end everybody!
The Saker
by conniption » Thu Jun 04, 2015 5:25 am
The Saker
Ukraine SITREP
June 3rd, 2015
by Scott
27 Comments
Graham Philips rebukes US Today slanderous article that portrayed Donetsk as a lawless city in Eastern Ukraine [Source]Calling out the Western Media #1 – USA Today Attempts to Do Over Donetsk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAzVRbx_Khc
Graham Phillips
Published on Jun 1, 2015
Here is article that enraged many people, not just Graham Philips, “Donetsk has become eastern Ukraine’s lawless city” [Source]
Here is yet another rebuttal of the same article, A Resident of Donetsk responds to bias USA Today Article about her city [Source]
USA TODAY article claims that people in Donetsk are just like ISIS, killing each other, burning people on the streets, stealing, and looting the last kilos of baloney from stores.
The article based on an interview with Khaled Sijer, an alleged restaurant owner in the center of Donetsk who told USA Today that “he would never consider calling the police for help if he needed it, even if the problem was unrelated to the militias. At this point, he said, everyone has some connection to a militia that could cause a much larger problem.”
“The militias run this city now,” Sijer said. “There is no law here. The police are powerless. Everyone knows that.”
An online search didn’t yield a restaurant, owned by Khaled Sijer. Not one listing of the Donesk restaurants named “Khaled Sijer.” The following is the list of the best restaurants of Donetsk Рестораны Донецка
Another person interviewed for this article was Olexandra Matviichuk. During the unholy Maidan days she was a Soros funded EuroMaidanSOS Coordinator cooperating with over 400 lawyers throughout Ukraine. They flooded the Ukrainian criminal court systems with approximately 5000 complaints, crippling it at a time when the foreign organized violent coup against the democratically elected government of Ukraine was underway.
Nowadays, Olexandra Matviichukacts as a head of the Center for Civil Liberties in Ukraine, a subsidiary of the Soros Open Society Foundation. Hacked Emails Expose George Soros As Ukraine Puppet-Master [Source]
The slanderous article de-humanizing Donetsk’s citizens was published by USA Today on May 18th and authorized by a bizarre double personage, Sheren Khalel and Matthew Vickery.
According to some online sources, Sheren Khalel is a freelance multimedia journalist who works out of Israel, Palestine, Iraq, and Jordan. She is 26, she is a Webster University graduate and also a former officer of the SPJ student chapter in St. Louis, part of DePauw University.
According to her personal twitter account, Sheren Khalel is a freelance journalist covering conflict. Currently in Iraq. Her twitter account
In addition to the USA Today, Sheren Khalel is also a journalist for Aljazeera, which is the Washington and Tel-Aviv financed western shill. Here is the link to Khalel’s profile on the Aljazeera website [Source]
Matthew Vickery is also a Aljazeera and USA Today freelancer. [Source]
Vickery is an independent multimedia journalist based in the Middle East with a focus on the Levant and Iraq. He is also curiously identified as “Scottish photojournalist Matthew Vickery, who is part of Khalel’s freelancing entourage.”
Just recently, on April 15th, Aljazeera proudly displayed another pro-war article of these two freelancers, ‘Christian Taliban’s’ crusade on Ukraine’s front lines [Source]
“As officials work on peace deals with separatists, a rogue religious battalion vows to fight its way to Moscow.” Sheren Khalel claims that “Christians” are fighting against Russians in Ukraine. Just as we thought that the Western information war on Russia had reached the bottom , somebody came knocking from beneath.
It’s proven to be impossible to try to establish a timeframe for Sheren Khalel and Matthew Vickery’s travel to Ukraine On her twitter, she claims to be in Donetsk recently, or how she puts it “last time I was in Donetsk.”
Here she claim on March 31, that “#Ukraine is giving exit stamps when leaving their territory to enter #DNR and entry stamps upon return, acknowledging the de facto country.” However, she doesn’t provide any images for this alleged stamp. [Source]
March 30, she posts a picture of a bridge that was destroyed last Sept. It’s clearly a winter picture of a bridge. There are no colorful September foliage, nether this picture is taken in March or April, when trees are getting green. [Source]
Sheren Khalel has not provided any images of her being in Ukraine and in Donetsk.
Along with the article in USA Today that describe people of DPR as “lawless,” and the article in Aljazeera that labels the Ukraine’s Civil War as “the Christian was on Russians,” Sheren Khalel and Matthew Vickery authored article for Haaretz
On February 3rd, these two published material titled, Ukraine led by ‘miserable Jews,’ says rebel leader [source]
“Head of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic says the country’s traditional nationalists would ‘turn in their grave’ if they could see who was leading the country today.” Thus Sheren Khalel and Matthew Vickery marked people of Donetsk as anti-Semites.
Sheren Khalel and Matthew Vickery, have not stopped calling people in the Eastern Ukraine “lawless anti-Semites in war with Christens.” On May 4, 2015, a duo published an article in Foreign Policy, the division of the Washington Post Company, titled: “In Eastern Ukraine, Doctors Are ‘Terrorists’ and Antibiotics Are Herbs
The article is based on a interview with a doctor “Alexander Petrovich Stanitskly, the head of the traumatology department.” Needles to say that this doctor who treats people with herbs and kind words doesn’t exist, and even the last name “Stanitskly” is a made-up name.
Sheren Khalel and Matthew Vickery author articles that are completely false and designed to de-humanize people of the Eastern Ukraine and to cause hatred towards Russian Ukrainians as an ethnic group.
If the people in Donesk, a restaurant owner, a doctor, some militia members are not real, what about the journalists that invented them? Sheren Khalel might own a phone number from Saint Louis, MO, US. However the same phone number is listed for God’s Little Footprints, a child care center, and also listed as phone number for Maurice Worthy who also lives in Saint Louis, MO. Allegedly on Jan 28, 2015 – Maurice Worthy, of St. Louis County, was charged with assault on a law enforcement officer by allegedly dragging an officer during a traffic stop.
Perhaps, they are all friends and share phone numbers and underwear. Why does it look like Sheren Khalel didn’t exist prior to 2014? There is no records of her graduating from high school. There are no school awards. She never participated in any extracurricular activities. There is no records of her parents, or relatives. She just appeared from thin air in 2014. She made herself known using a Kickstarter, raising funds to “Please, help to keep me safe.”
A brilliant move, I must say. Right upon graduation, her articles appeared in USA Today, Haaretz, Aljazeera, and Foreign Policy. You, hundred thousands of holders of BA in Journalism who can’t get published, eat your heart out.
If these look bizarre, it is. If you make a timeline for Sheren Khalel and Matthew Vickery’s published articles, looks like they magically travel though Middle East countries, Israel, Ukraine and Donetsk, being in several parts of the globe at the same time. You never see their pictures at some geographically identifiable place. It looks like Sheren Khalel and Matthew Vickery, if these people are indeed real, work from the US and never put a foot in any of those countries, they claim to traverse.
This is a link to SPJ Code of Ethics that Khalel is violating by spreading disinformation, de-humanizing innocent civilian population of the eastern Ukraine and facilitating terroristic attacks on the civilians and on Russia and the Russian people. Complaints can to be filed with SPJ and with the Webster University.
We know the West de-humanizing certain ethnic groups before and during the war on these people. It’s clear now that the West is de-humanizing Russians living in the Eastern Ukraine while conducting the war against them The West is de-humanizing and demonizing Russians in general because it’s a pretext to the war on Russia. Europe’s problem is with Russia, not Putin, writes Thomas Graham [Source]
Maybe, to repel these attacks, Russia should hire an army of attorneys and flood the US court system with lawsuits against every single journalist and every single newspaper that authorized and published de-humanizing article about the Russian people. And make this all public information. Of course, it’s all cost money, but it would be cheaper than the war.
Today, June 3rd, sure enough, we have yet another article about Donetsk of the authors, Sheren Khalel and Matthew Vickery, Chased by war: Syrian refugees caught in Ukraine warzone [Source]
“There are about a dozen Syrian refugees stranded in Donetsk who fled Syria only to end up on an unlikely European battlefield.” The article talks about two Syrian refugees: Abdelsattar Nassar, the owner of the Shisha House Cafe, and Khaled Sijer, that we have already met.
Shisha is a Russian chain of oriental café houses and kalian smoking rooms. Here is the Donetsk Shisha’s website: You can see that they have young customers, that have standup comedians’ performances, and serve alcohol and pork.
My question to our readers from Donetsk, is it possible to talk to these Syrian refugees to see if they need any help. I would also ask them, why do they claim to the Western media that Donetsk is a lawless city with everybody being afraid of the “militias.” Who are those “militias”? Is this the Militia, a law enforcement police force? Are those some kind of military people? I would also ask the authorities of Donetsk about Sheren Khalel and Matthew Vickery. When did these people visit Donetsk? What mandate did they have?
Ukraine
1. Ukraine: it’s time to run, but no Ukrainian is welcome anywhere [Source]
The New York Time reports that Ukrainian Migrants Fleeing Conflict Get a Cool Reception in Europe [Source] may 30, 2015 – Warsaw
2.Research on foreign militants engaged in ATO against Donbass [Source] [Source] О наемниках в зоне АТО In Russian, but lots of pictures
continued...
Published on Jun 2, 2015
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov interview to Bloomberg TV channel, Moscow, June 2, 2015
Интервью Министра иностранных дел России С.В.Лаврова телеканалу «Bloomberg», Москва, 2 июня 2015г.
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