Category: Russia

  • Russian president Vladimir Putin on Friday, February 25, said that he is prepared to send a delegation to Minsk to discuss Ukraine’s neutrality, media reports said. This follows a call by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy who urged Putin to sit down for talks even while calling on the people of the country to keep fighting. Meanwhile, media reports say fighting is taking place around Ukraine’s capital Kiev, as well as other cities in Ukraine.

    The post Russia Says It Is Prepared To Send Delegation To Discuss Ukrainian Neutrality appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Putin has launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the goal of which he claims is not to occupy the country but to “demilitarize” and “de-Nazify” it. We’ve no reason to put blind faith in any of those claims. Only time will tell.

    As of this writing dozens have reportedly been killed so far. All war is horrific. We can only hope that this one winds up being the least horrific a war can be.

    Some thoughts:

    1. This whole thing could very easily have been avoided with a little bit of diplomacy. The only reason that didn’t happen was it would have meant the US empire taking a teensy, weensy step back from its agenda of total planetary domination.

    I’ve seen people call it “sad” or “unfortunate” that western powers didn’t make basic low-cost, high-yield concessions like guaranteeing no NATO membership for Ukraine and having Kyiv honor the Minsk agreement, but it’s not sad, and it’s not unfortunate. It’s enraging. That they did this deserves nothing but pure, unadulterated, white hot rage.

    The post Twelve Thoughts On Ukraine appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • The Russian operations in the Ukraine continue at a moderate pace. Some more troops were committed today. In all the Russian military may have now introduced some 20-40% of its prepared forces.

    The Ukrainian military is not so much holding a line but concentrating in and around its bigger cities. It has destroyed some bridges north of Kiev to make an approach more difficult. That will slow down the Russian moves but will not prevent them. Russia’s military is famously good at setting up combat bridges.

    So far the Russians have used their artillery sparsely. An exception was last night near Kharkiv in the northeast of Ukraine where a strike by multiple launcher artillery systems (MLRS) hit some area target with yet unknown results.

    The post Disarming Ukraine – Day Two appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Marshall McLuhan’s prophecy that “the successor to politics will be propaganda” has happened.  Raw propaganda is now the rule in Western democracies, especially the US and Britain.

    On matters of war and peace, ministerial deceit is reported as news. Inconvenient facts are censored, demons are nurtured. The model is corporate spin, the currency of the age. In 1964, McLuhan famously declared, “The medium is the message.” The lie is the message now.

    But is this new? It is more than a century since Edward Bernays, the father of spin, invented “public relations” as a cover for war propaganda. What is new is the virtual elimination of dissent in the mainstream.

    The great editor David Bowman, author of The Captive Press, called this “a defenestration of all who refuse to follow a line and to swallow the unpalatable and are brave”.

    The post War In Europe And The Rise Of Raw Propaganda appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Local residents are boarding an evacuation train driving to the west of Ukraine on February 26, 2022, in Kyiv, Ukraine.

    With Ukraine under attack, a Russian labor confederation boasting an estimated two million members on Friday called for a “cessation of military action” and “renewal of peaceful dialogue” between officials in Moscow and Kyiv, arguing that workers in both countries are the victims of war.

    “The Confederation of Labor of Russia [KTR], as a part of the international trade union movement, considering its direct responsibilities to the working people of Russia, Ukraine, and the whole world, and recognizing its role in promoting and ensuring peace between peoples, is extremely disturbed at the events now taking place,” the organization consisting of more than 20 unions said in a statement.

    “All disagreements and contradictions — however deep and however longstanding — must be resolved by negotiations, on the basis of goodwill and adherence to the principle of world peace,” KTR continued. “This vision has been an integral part of the global and anti-militarist outlook of the workers’ movement for more than a century, and has been realized through the establishment of international institutions and mechanisms tasked with ensuring peace.”

    KTR noted “with great bitterness” that “it is the working people of our countries, on both sides, who are suffering as a direct result of military conflict.”

    “Intensification of the conflict threatens a devastating shock to our nations’ economies and social support systems, and a fall in workers’ living standards,” added KTR. “It would open the door to a massive wave of breaches of working citizens’ labour rights.”

    In light of these observations, KTR called for “the cessation of military action, as rapidly as possible, and the renewal of peaceful dialogue and coexistence between the multinational peoples of Russia and Ukraine.”

    However, as Jeff Schuhrke, a lecturer in history at the University of Illinois at Chicago, pointed out on social media, there is not currently an anti-war consensus among leaders of the Russian labor movement.

    The Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia — a larger organization of 120 unions with roughly 20 million members, which Schuhrke said is “closely aligned” with Russian President Vladimir Putin — issued a statement supporting Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Article 33: Individual responsibility, collective penalties, pillage and reprisals. “No protected person may be punished for any offense he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.

    — Fourth Geneva Convention

    Rick Westhead of the Canadian sports network, TSN.ca, has presented the opinion of Bruce Kidd, a former Canadian Olympian, a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto and the school’s ombudsperson, advocating that the government of Canada suspend future travel visas to Russian athletes because of Russia’s military incursion into Ukraine.

    The western legacy media has been conducting its own witch hunt, calling on Russian athletes to denounce their fatherland. Hockey superstar Alexander Ovechkin decried war and was criticized afterward for “deliberately squandering an opportunity to make a real difference in this world” and for his relationship with Russian president Vladimir Putin. Russian Alexander Medvedev, the newly ascended number one male tennis player and his compatriot, Andrey Rublev, ranked number seven in the tennis world, were also called onto the media carpet where they stood for peace.

    That a sports website can be so opinionated can be shrugged off. But that its senior correspondent, Westhead, and a university professor emeritus, Kidd, would give such a poorly thought out opinion, one that is so morally repulsive, is disappointing. They have succumbed to the blatantly obvious logical fallacy of guilt by association.

    Kidd notes that Canada — ignoring that Canada is an apartheid country itself — fought apartheid by banning South African professional golfers and tennis players from competing and training in Canada in 1988. Kidd claims that banning South African athletes was an effective tool in bringing an end to apartheid. Whether or not the ban was successful is besides the point. It is morally wrong.

    Preceding the Fourth Geneva Convention, the Bible forcefully argued,

    The soul that sinneth, it shall die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son.

    — Ezekiel 18:20

    The Russian athletes are not politicians. They do not have a say in the day-to-day decisions of the government. Yet TSN.ca holds that Russian athletes should be banned based on the happenstance of their birth, regardless of their views on the fighting between Russia and Ukraine.

    There are several other moral quicksands in which Westhead and Kidd sink. Implicit in the argument propounded by TSN.ca and Kidd is that Canada is some paragon of morality. Far from it. That being the case, another piece of biblical wisdom is pertinent. When men, as prescribed by Mosaic law, were poised to stone a woman for adultery Jesus intoned: “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.” (John 8:7)

    COAT (the Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade), with an eye to Ukraine, has called upon the Canadian government since last October to cease the funding of groups that glorify Nazi collaborators.

    Canada has its own nasty history, past and current. It is a country established through genocide, a genocide that is ongoing. Witness the weaponized gendarmerie of Canada trespassing in unceded Wet’suwet’en territory to raze buildings and arrest Wet’suwet’en defenders and media members. And why? To force through a corporate pipeline despite the unanimous opposition of the hereditary chiefs.

    Do TSN.ca, Westhead, and Kidd condemn the great crimes in their backyard and call for the banning of Canadian athletes from competition?

    Did TSN.ca, Westhead, and Kidd call for the banning of Ukrainian athletes while Ukraine was shelling Donbass for the last eight years? Do they even know the history of the region?

    Do they know that the United States and NATO shrugged off Russia’s security concerns about NATO’s eastward expansion. That the eastward expansion represents a violated promise of the US secretary-of-state James Baker to USSR president Mikhail Gorbachev to not move one step further eastward? Bear in mind that former president Barack Obama absurdly declared Venezuela a national security threat to the US. Recall that president Ronald Reagan raised the alarm of a Central American threat, saying: “I’m speaking of Nicaragua, a Soviet ally on the American mainland only two hours’ flying time from our own borders.”

    Have TSN.ca, Westhead, and Kidd condemned Israeli war crimes, apartheid, the siege on Gaza, and slow-motion genocide against Palestinians? Have they denounced grave Israeli war crimes against Syrians, Iraqis, and Iranians? Have these sports pundits called for a ban on Israeli athletes?

    Canada, which occupies First Nation, Inuit, and Michif territory, is a staunch ally of the self-designated Jewish State that also occupies all of historical Palestine, the Golan Heights in Syria, and the Shebaa Farms in Lebanon?

    Does TSN.ca call for the banning of American athletes? In recent times, the US devastated Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria (with the support of Canada). The US occupies an area of Syria, an area of Cuba, Guam, Saipan, and more. Hawai’i was annexed, and there was no referendum by Hawaiians seeking such a union (unlike in Crimea). The continental US represents a colossal genocidal theft by European settlers/colonialists. The military-industrial-governmental complex of the US has been warring around the globe and breaking promises and treaties with Russia. Do TSN.ca, Westhead, and Kidd realize any of this or do they just refuse to denounce this?

    Are they aware that the Ukrainian government is a $5 billion US-leveraged coup by Neo-Nazi elements that form part of the government and military in Ukraine?

    Having recognized the independence of the People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, Russia had available the Responsibility-to-Protect doctrine used by NATO. Or do TSN.ca, Westhead, and Kidd think this doctrine only applies to western nations? In which case that would only compound the prejudice shown by the TSN.ca talking heads.

    Crimes and punishment must not be pick-and-choose affairs. All crimes must be denounced and punishment meted out must be equitable.

    Every side loses in war. But for a government to neglect the security of its territory and citizens, especially as a self-declared foe draws nearer and nearer while arming neighbors in the region, would be a severe dereliction of duty. Russia, which was twice denied NATO membership, made overtures, stated its red lines, sought mutual security guarantees and was pretty much dismissed. Russia was pushed. It is human nature, rightly or wrongly, that when one is pushed to want to push back.

    It is hoped that the Russian invasion ends soon with as few casualties as possible, that Ukraine is denazified, and that the US and western world will henceforth realize that western hegemony and bullying will no longer be tolerated in a multi-polar world. It is past time that the US return the militarily occupied Chagos archipelago to the Chagossians, stop stealing Syria’s oil and end its illegal occupation there, stop financing Israeli crimes against Palestinians, stop supporting the Saudi war against Yemen, return the Afghan people’s money to Afghanistan, and have its junior partner in crime, Great Britain, return the gold it confiscated from Venezuela. If so, then a lot of good will have come out of Putin’s steely resolve.

    The next step, the ultimate step, is to end war everywhere. The nations of the world must be verifiably disarmed. There are other urgent and important battles to be fought and won. Poverty must be eliminated. The environment must be rehabilitated and stewarded. Anthropogenic greenhouse gases, for which militaries bear a huge responsibility, must be reined in.

    Finally, until that glorious day when militaries are no more, let’s not go down the rabbit hole of witch-hunting and penalizing otherwise uninvolved athletes for the decisions of politicians.

    Image credit: The Island

    The post Russophobia in Western Sports Media first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Police officers detain a man holding a placard reading "No war" during a protest at Pushkinskaya Square on February 24, 2022 in Moscow, Russia.

    Hundreds of anti-war protesters were detained in Russia on Friday following over 1,800 arrests the previous day, as Russian President Vladimir Putin directed a brutal and long-anticipated invasion of Ukraine.

    The independent monitoring group OVD-Info said on its website that “622 people have already been detained in 28 cities” as of 4:03 am in Moscow on Saturday.

    “I felt extremely ashamed and helpless,” one Russian demonstrator said of the invasion. The 20-something school teacher asked The Moscow Times for anonymity to protect against reprisals.

    “It was important for me to show that Putin’s decision is not the people’s decision,” she said of protesting in Moscow. “Not even close.”

    Protesters knew they risked arrest as they took to the streets across Russia, with authorities warning “negative comments” about the invasion would be treated as “treason.”

    In a Friday statement denouncing the invasion, a spokesperson for United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet said that “we are also disturbed by the multiple arbitrary arrests of demonstrators in Russia who were protesting against war yesterday.”

    “We understand more than 1,800 protesters were arrested,” the spokesperson noted. “It is unclear whether some have now been released. Arresting individuals for exercising their rights to freedom of expression or of peaceful assembly constitutes an arbitrary deprivation of liberty. We call on the authorities to ensure the immediate release of all those arbitrarily detained for exercising these rights.”

    Despite that call from the U.N. and similar criticism from around the world, arrests of anti-war protesters in Russia continued Friday.

    Russians’ protests and arrests came as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) activated parts of its Response Force, calls mounted for an investigation of Russia’s alleged war crimes, and civilians in Ukraine sought safety as their president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, warned that Friday night “will be very difficult” while Putin’s forces advanced on the capital city of Kyiv.

    The United States and European Union also ramped up sanctions in response to the ongoing assault, specifically targeting Putin and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

    In a series of tweets on Friday, Anton Barbashin, editorial director of Riddle, an online journal on Russian affairs, explained the risks that protesters face.

    For years, the “Russian legal and political system has been repressing the most active civic society leaders, those capable of gathering support for street activity,” and the government adapted a “multitude of laws that penalize protests of any kind,” he wrote.

    “Despite all that… we are seeing massive protests all across the country for the second day in the row,” he noted. “That is both inspiring and astonishing. I would like this to be known and reported. That Russians showed their disagreement with what Putin does to Ukraine.”

    Some public figures around the world recognized the bravery of Russian anti-war protesters.

    “Now is the time to stand in solidarity with the incredibly brave Russian people who are bravely resisting this aggression by holding huge anti-war protests,” said U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). “In an authoritarian country like Russia, protest is an extraordinary act of courage.”

    “In my view, the most important thing we can do right now is stand in solidarity with the Ukrainian people against this war, and with the Russian people who are risking so much to demonstrate against this corrupt, reckless president who started it,” he added. “Putin and his oligarch friends seek a divided world and the destruction of democracy. We seek a different world.”

    “Everyone is shocked and heartbroken,” Alina, a 24-year-old in Moscow, told VICE. “I am half Ukrainian and so are many of my friends.”

    “My father’s family is from a town that sits on the border between Russia and Ukraine, near Donetsk and Lugansk,” she noted, referencing territories in eastern Ukraine that have become self-declared “people’s republics” formally recognized as independent by Putin.

    “This conflict feels very personal to me,” she said. “My friends and I are going to the protest in Moscow today. It scares me a lot because you can go to jail for at least 15 days for this — and sometimes the consequences are even worse. But we can’t sit and watch how our government is basically killing people and ruining lives.”

    Russian police detained not only demonstrators but also journalists covering the protests.

    The Associated Press reported Friday that “Yelena Chernenko, a journalist with the Kommersant daily, said she was kicked out of the Foreign Ministry pool over an open letter condemning the attack on Ukraine that has been signed by nearly 300 reporters.”

    According to the AP:

    Chernenko said on the messaging app Telegram that the ministry cited her ‘lack of professionalism,’ and she urged officials not to retaliate against journalists who signed the letter.”

    “Apparently such are the times,” Chernenko wrote of the ban she now faces.

    Another journalist facing trouble was Yury Dud. Like many others on Thursday, Dud, a vocal Kremlin critic who runs one of the most popular YouTube blogs in Russia, wrote an elaborate social media post decrying the invasion of Ukraine.

    On Friday, an influential Kremlin-backed internet watchdog group, the League of Safe Internet, filed a request with the Prosecutor General’s office and the Justice Ministry to consider labeling Dud a “foreign agent”—a crippling designation that implies additional government scrutiny and strong pejorative connotations that would discredit him.

    The Russian government also partially restricted access to Facebook.

    “Yesterday, Russian authorities ordered us to stop the independent fact-checking and labeling of content posted on Facebook by four Russian state-owned media organizations. We refused. As a result, they have announced they will be restricting the use of our services,” said Nick Clegg, president of global affairs at Meta, the social media network’s parent company.

    “Ordinary Russians are using our apps to express themselves and organize for action. We want them to continue to make their voices heard, share what’s happening, and organize through Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger,” he added, referencing other Meta platforms.

    More than 620,000 people have signed a Change.org petition for Russians opposed to Putin’s military action, calling for an immediate withdrawal from Ukraine.

    Russian celebrities are speaking out against the deadly invasion.

    Rapper Oxxxymiron — who canceled six sold-out concerts in Moscow and St. Petersburg to protest Putin’s assault of Ukraine — said, “I know that most people in Russia are against this war, and I am confident that the more people would talk about their real attitude to it, the faster we can stop this horror.”

    “This is a crime and a catastrophe,” he said of the invasion, according to The New York Times. “I cannot entertain you when Russian missiles are falling on Ukraine… When residents of Kyiv are forced to hide in basements and in the metro, while people are dying.”

    Pitchfork reported Friday that “several other Russian musicians — including Kasta, Shym, Vladi, Khamil, Zmey, and Noize MC — voiced their opposition to the attack on Ukraine.”

    After defeating Polish competitor Hubert Hurkacz in the Dubai Tennis Championships on Friday, Russian 24-year-old Andrey Rublev wrote “No war please” on a television camera.

    “In these moments you realize that my match is not important. It’s not about my match, how it affects me. What’s happening is much more terrible,” Rublev said of the invasion on Thursday, according to Reuters.

    “You realize how important [it] is to have peace in the world and to respect each other no matter what, to be united. It’s about that,” he added. “We should take care of our Earth and of each other. This is the most important thing.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Why did so many leftists turn a blind eye to Russian aggression?

    This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.

  • Listen to a reading of this article:

    Pouring more weapons into Ukraine is not how you save lives; you save lives by negotiating a ceasefire. Pouring more weapons into Ukraine is how you create a long and expensive military quagmire for Russia at the cost of many thousands of lives to advance US strategic interests. While making a vast fortune for the arms industry.

    Issuing a guarantee that you would never add a nation to NATO who you don’t plan on adding anyway is a no-brainer when the alternative is mass military butchery.

    I mean, unless your goal was to provoke mass military butchery.

    If the Kremlin wanted to kill large numbers of people it should have done so with starvation sanctions and proxy militias like a civilized government.

    Fashion has moved on since the early 2000s, you savages.

    You’re not allowed to talk about the known US/NATO/Ukraine actions which experts have been warning for many years would lead us to where we’re at. You’re only allowed to say Putin attacked Ukraine completely unprovoked, in a vacuum, solely because he is evil and hates freedom.

    Only talking about the guilt of the invader and not the things that were done to provoke that invasion is exactly what I’d want people to be doing if I’d just provoked an invasion.

    Believe it or not it’s actually always completely legitimate to criticize the actions of the most powerful empire that has ever existed, especially when those actions clearly paved the way to a war.

    The fact that western media cover Ukraine in a wildly different way from US-led wars is actually immensely important and points to a problem that urgently need attention. Anyone who takes issue with that should shut the fuck up and stop interrupting adult conversations.

    Literally every single time I say NATO powers paved the way to the Ukraine invasion I get some liberal claiming that’s like asking what a rape victim was wearing. No, actually, victim blaming a rape survivor is not at all like criticizing the most powerful and deadly power structure in the world.

    Liberals have been bleating this line ad nauseum for days, and it’s about the most obnoxious and most shitlib thing you could possibly come up with.

     

    Empire apologists always try to distort power dynamics to make it seem like they’re the brave up-punchers sticking up for the little guy. It’s tiny Ukraine against big bad Russia, not Russia against a globe-dominating empire of which Ukraine is just one member state. It’s the brave freedom fighters of Syria versus Assad, not Assad against a planetary unipolar hegemon using proxy forces to effect regime change. It’s Israel against the big strong Muslim nations which surround it, not an entire empire of which Israel is just one member state picking on far weaker powers. Etc.

    For years anti-imperialists have been calling for detente and warning that all this cold war brinkmanship with Russia could lead to hot war. Now hot war is here as a direct result of refusing to pursue detente and they’re trying to act like we’re the assholes.

    Gonna be real fun when the consensus that it’s fine for government-tied Silicon Valley corporations to censor online speech in the fight against “misinformation” moves from targeting Covid skeptics to targeting people who disagree with mainstream cold war narratives about Russia.

    The solution to a crisis that was created by brinkmanship is not more brinkmanship. The solution to a crisis that was created by brinkmanship is detente.

    Saying the US government is still a far worse offender in the mass military slaughter department than Russia will be met with hysterical shrieking and the rending of garments now, but it’s still indisputably true and if you disagree with it it’s because you’re propagandized.

    That the US is the most murderous government in today’s world is just an easily quantifiable fact. Putin will have to work very, very hard to catch up to those numbers. This is important to note not because of some genocidal dick measuring contest, but because it points to what a healthy attitude toward US military butchery would look like through eyes untinted by propaganda manipulation.

    Theoretically the actual US/NATO military decision makers know imposing a no fly zone over Kyiv would be insane, since it’s a one-way ticket to another world war; probably a very fast and radioactive one. But the fact that so much of the official US political/media class has been calling for one discredits it forever.

    They sincerely don’t seem to understand what it is that would be stopping the Russian planes from flying under such a scenario. They think it’s like a rule you make and then the Russians go “Aww shucks I wanted to fly there but it’s against the rules now.”

    This is the only appropriate level of response to this madness:

    Obviously anyone who had anything whatsoever to do with supporting the Iraq invasion should shut the whole entire fuck up about Ukraine for all eternity.

    Don’t let people act like Iraq is some distant memory. It happened 19 years ago. The Simpsons stopped making good episodes longer ago than that. It just happened, the consequences are still unfolding, the occupation is still ongoing, and they’re still using the same old tricks.

    Hollywood teaches us that heroism looks like an individual stopping a bank robbery or leaving a criminal tied up outside the police station so we don’t realize that real heroism looks like a collective rising up against our plutocratic rulers and creating a healthy world.

    ________________________________

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Hypocrisy On Russia And Appeasement Of China - Welcome To Western Corporate Governance!

    Image: lucidpost

    While the populations of laughingly named liberal democratic nations are being subjected to yet another campaign of fear-mongering, deception and manipulation; this time the dreaded terror is Russia, the people of Tibet are enduring their seventy second year under the brutal tyranny of Chinese occupation.

    The decades of torture, executions, cultural genocide, forced-labor camps and coercive birth control atrocities has not though produced a unified determination to sanction the Chinese regime, no financial penalties, confiscation of assets or exclusion from credit transfers. Such is the hypocrisy and self-serving agenda of the USA, European Union and various allies. Pontificating and moralizing, while suffering an amnesia on their murderous destruction in Iraq, Libya, Syria and Afghanistan. The countless killings inflicted in those lands are it appears of no hindrance in demonizing Russia for its military incursion across Ukraine.

    Yet what of the misery, suffering, starvation, deaths inflicted upon Yemen? Any concerted action from Biden, Trudeau, Macron, Johnson et al? What response from those narcissist politicians to Saudi Arabia? Such double-standards are nauseating.

    The corporate driven, global agenda of the World Economic Forum and its political stooges is a universe away from the commitments and aspirations of President Dwight D Eisenhower, who in a proclamation announced that:

    “Whereas it is appropriate and proper to manifest to the peoples of the captive nations the support of the Government and the people of the United States of America for their just aspirations for freedom and national independence” – Jul17, 1959. Source: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/proclamation-3303-captive-nations-week

    Hypocrisy On Russia And Appeasement Of China - Welcome To Western Corporate Governance!

    Image: bwbx

    These days the State Department is afraid to even mention ‘freedom’ for Tibet; instead it talks of ‘autonomy’ and cultural rights, too concerned at upsetting profitable relations with the Chinese regime! Yet that right of Tibetans to national independence remains just and legitimate and even more critical, as China continues with it’s campaigns to eradicate Tibetan national and cultural identity.

    Which is why it remains of vital importance to remind, and inform political representatives about Tibetan independence and the common political aspiration of Tibet’s people for national freedom. March 1st we shall launch this years’ Lobby For Tibet’s Independence action. Stay tuned for news on this and how you can directly help and take part.

    This post was originally published on TIBET, ACTIVISM AND INFORMATION.

  • Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton are keen to mention the Community Party of China at every opportunity and how terrible they are – ignoring the fact that China is Australia’s number one trading partner and Australian athletes recently competed at the Winter Olympics in Beijing (so surely it can be all that bad) – and making the link between bad China and the Labor Party, especially its leader, Anthony Albanese.

    And creating that link between Albanese and pinko-communist-leftist-Maoist-Guevarian-socialist thoughts, all because (allegedly) he glanced at the Communist Party of Australia’s newspaper, The Tribune, at some point in 1992. The Liberal Party support team at News Corporation did fall short of calling for the execution of Albanese for thought crimes against the state, but the sentiment was there.

    An incident between an Australian Defence Force aircraft and a Chinese vessel in international waters in the Arafura Sea was magnified in the media and by the federal government – we still are not sure what occurred – but who’s got time for the facts when there’s an election to be won. And if the electorate tires from hearing about ‘China’, there’s always an opportunity to drag Australia into the Russia–Ukraine conflict, even though it’s not within Australia’s field of interest.

    Yes, we need to be concerned about Russia’s invasions in Ukraine, but it’s a complex situation based on old Soviet Union politics, history, imperialism, economics and control of resources. But that doesn’t matter: it‘s an opportunity to push Australia towards a ‘khaki’ election, which the Coalition believes it has a stronger chance of winning, as well as being about to promote the idea that Albanese is ‘weak on border protection’. But will it work?

    The Liberal Party seems to be at war with everyone and when they’ve cycled through the usual suspects – China, communists, the Greens, Labor, pensioners, welfare recipients, the poor – they return to an old and trusted enemy: the unions. A shutdown of Sydney’s train system was caused by the NSW Government, with the intention of blaming the unions.

    Australia is poorly served by its mainstream media, and the Sydney Morning Herald provided a fine example of this when they pushed the idea that it was strike action caused by unions (no, it was a lockout by the NSW Government), and this provided attack points for Morrison over the next few days against unions – it’s a pity that it was all incorrect, but that was never the point.

    It allowed Morrison to push the message about life under an Albanese government – train strikes every day of week; misery; inconvenience; something about communism and the left.

    In Morrison’s dystopia, there are no shades of grey, just Neanderthal simplicity: Scomo, good. Albo, bad.

    And David Lewis catches up with Ryan Bruce, who is the candidate in Aston for The New Liberals: we find out about his campaign, and what The New Liberals are all about and what the future holds for them.


    Music interludes:


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    The post Scott Morrison’s War Against Everything and David Lewis interviews The New Liberals appeared first on New Politics.

    This post was originally published on New Politics.

  • RNZ Pacific

    The invasion of Ukraine is likely to have a signficant impact on the Pacific, warns a senior USP academic.

    On Thursday, Russia launched a massive invasion of neighbouring Ukraine.

    More than 100 Ukrainian soldiers and civilians have been killed in the fighting so far, with no figures for the Russians.

    The invasion has put a strain on diplomacy around the world, with both Australia and New Zealand imposing sanctions on Russia and protesters picketed the Russian embassy in the capital Wellington on Friday.

    Although geographically removed from the conflict the Pacific Nations should be concerned about the negative effect this war will have on multilateralism says Sandra Tarte, an Associate Professor at the University of the South Pacific and the Acting Head of the School for Law and Social Sciences.

    “Multilateralism is on its knees, it’s in tatters,” Professor Tarte said. “Particularly for the smaller island countries, we really need multilateralism to protect ourselves.

    “We don’t have power as such in the entire system. We rely on multilateralism and institutions like the UN and the rule of law.”

    Professor Tarte also said that Pacific countries would feel an economic impact.

    “We will see perhaps markets react, we will see confidence plummet,” she explained . “There might be supply chain issues with the oil markets.

    Associate Professor Sandra Tarte
    Associate Professor Sandra Tarte … “Multilateralism is on its knees, it’s in tatters.” Image: Sandra Tarte/RNZ

    “We are all connected. Through this global supply chain, we will see potential effects.”

    EU targets Russian economy
    The European Union leaders agreed on Thursday to impose new economic sanctions on Russia, joining the United States and Britain in admonishing President Vladimir Putin and his allies for invading Ukraine.

    Leaders of the 27-nation bloc lambasted Putin at an emergency summit in Brussels, describing him as “a deluded autocrat creating misery for millions”.

    The EU will freeze Russian assets in the bloc and halt its banks’ access to European financial markets.

    These moves are part of what EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell described as “the harshest package of sanctions we have ever implemented”.

    The EU’s Ambassador to the Pacific, Sujiro Seam, echoed the sentiments of world leaders and “condemned the unprovoked and unjustified military actions” of Russia.

    This is a gross violation of international law, Seam said, and he stated that the EU Office in Suva would reach out to its partners in the region to condemn Russia’s actions.

    Seam hoped that Fiji, which had championed multilateralism in the United Nations, would support sanctions against Russia.

    European Union Ambassador for the Pacific Sujiro Seam.
    European Union Ambassador for the Pacific Sujiro Seam … condemned the “unprovoked and unjustified military actions” by Russia. Image: Sujiro Seam/RNZ

    FSM severs diplomatic relations with Russia
    The Federated of the Micronesia has severed diplomatic relations with Russia following the brutal invasion of Ukraine.

    FSM President, David Panuelo
    FSM President, David Panuelo Photo: Office of the President of the FSM

    In a statement, the FSM government said it condemned the Russian Federation’s invasion of Ukraine and the unjustified and brutal assault on its people and territory.

    President David Panuelo said the FSM condemned any actions which threatened global peace and stability and the rules-based international order.

    He said the FSM would only entertain renewing diplomatic relations with the Russian Federation when the latter demonstrated actionable commitments to peace, friendship, cooperation, and love in common humanity.

    Fiji condemns Russia’s actions
    Fiji has joined the international community in condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

    In a Friday social media post, Fiji’s Acting Prime Minister Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum said that Fijians were praying for the people of Ukraine.

    He called for an end to all the “hostilities and any violations of the international rule of law”.

    Sayed-Khaiyum urged the warring parties to return to the diplomatic table, echoing the call for peace from UN Secretary-General António Guterres.

    Guterres addressed the UN General Assembly calling for negotiations, to save the people of Ukraine from the scourge of war.

    Fiji’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Satyendra Prasad, echoed his government’s support of the UN’s call for a de-escalation of conflict.

    On his official Twitter account, Prasad stated that Fiji supported the “UN’s efforts to have a swift return to the path of dialogue between the two warring nations”.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Potential hotspots between Russia and Ukraine, 2021. Panther Media GmbH / Alamy Stock Vector

    There is an adage that the first casualty in a war is the truth. The US and NATO allege that Putin’s Russia is a malevolent aggressor against neighboring Ukraine.  They assert that the US and NATO are simply defending the rights of an oppressed nation. Meanwhile, what the sycophantic legacy news media convey to the public is a gross distortion of the reality in this current Ukraine crisis. Some relevant facts which Western government spokespersons and the media almost invariably falsify or omit altogether.

    1. NATO. In exchange for needed Soviet consent to the reunification of East and West Germany in 1990, the US and NATO promised that NATO would not expand into former Warsaw Pact countries in central Europe. Said promise proved worthless as every US President, beginning with Bill Clinton in 1999, has violated that commitment even to the point that NATO now includes three former Soviet Republics and has plans to bring in two more (Ukraine and Georgia). Background:

    1. NATO was formed (in 1949) at the behest of the US and Britain as an anti-Soviet military alliance to fight Communism in postwar Europe, both: to prevent its spread to capitalist countries where Communist Parties were winning some elections, and (it was hoped) to undermine and rollback Communism in countries where Communist Parties held state power.  Assertions that NATO was a defensive alliance against the threat of a Soviet invasion of western Europe is pure fantasy; the USSR had been devastated by the War and very much wanted peaceful coexistence with the capitalist West.  In fact, Stalin and his successors always prioritized Soviet security over the spread of Communism.  With the disintegration of the USSR (in 1991) and the embrace of capitalism by Russia and all other former Warsaw-Pact member countries, NATO’s principal raison d’être ceased.
    1. With crony-capitalist President Boris Yeltsin in control of the dysfunctional corruption-ridden Russian state following the collapse of the USSR, both Yeltsin and the US wanted to align Russia with the capitalist West.  However, the US could not resist the temptation to expand the military component of its Western Empire so as to increase US hegemony over Europe as well as create new profit opportunities for US and west European transnational capital (including military contractors)  In so doing, the West disrespected and alienated Russia.
    1. As an increasingly antagonized Russia refused to comply with US and NATO dictates, the US placed intermediate-range missile batteries (planned from 2008, deployed in 2018) in new-NATO-member countries (Poland and Romania). Thus, the US increased the threat to Russian national security, apparently hoping to intimidate a weakened Russia into being more submissive. Said deployment also violated the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces [INF] Treaty.
    1. More recently, the US and NATO have conducted offensive military exercises in new-NATO-member states along Russia’s border, simulating preparations for an attack on Russia. Russian military exercises and deployments, as well as its diplomatic demands, are very much in response to threatening NATO actions.

    The US, NATO, and the legacy news media portray NATO as an instrument for maintaining peace and democracy in Europe. However, while NATO seeks to expand to the very borders of Russia, Russia is explicitly excluded from admission to membership. In fact, NATO is (as always) a key military force for Western imperialism; and that now includes actions to confine Russia so as to prevent it from having influence anywhere beyond its own borders.

    2. New NATO members. Most countries in central and eastern Europe have historically been antagonistic toward Russia. During much of the interwar period; Poland, Romania, and the Baltic states were ruled by usually-autocratic right-wing regimes which permitted their territories to serve as bases for infiltration (by France, Britain, and other anti-Soviet states) of assassins, saboteurs, spies, and other covert wrecking operatives into the Soviet Union. Moreover, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, and Baltic-state governments joined Nazi Germany in the War against the USSR. Further, former Warsaw-Pact countries are poor by comparison with western Europe. By joining the EU and NATO while claiming a need for protection against a purported Russian threat, they have been able to obtain considerable economic aid and benefits. As for the alleged Russian threat, it should be noted that the USSR consistently respected the postwar independence and territorial integrity of bordering capitalist Finland (which remained neutral in the Cold War). Moreover, despite the post-Soviet Baltic states often mistreating their ethnic Russian minorities, Russia has consistently respected their independence and territorial integrity.

    3. Russia. Most US and NATO-ally political leaders (including nearly every member of Congress from both parties) “justify” their hostility toward Putin’s Russia by claiming that it is an autocratic regime seeking to recreate the Russian Empire. In fact, the Russian government, like its US and other NATO counterparts, is a multi-party electoral regime. Is there repression?  There is; but there is also repression and political prisoners in the US (Leonard Peltier, Ricardo Palmera, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Edward Poindexter, Veronza Bowers, and several others). Is there some election rigging? There is; but that is true also of the US (electoral college, partisan gerrymanders, felon disfranchisement and other voter suppression practices directed especially at racial minority voters). Is the Putin regime semi-autocratic?  It is; but so are NATO allies Poland and Hungary, while NATO ally Turkey is much worse. Moreover, however deficient Russia is as a liberal democracy, Ukraine is far worse. Further, the US has no hesitation in supporting absolutely autocratic regimes such as Saudi Arabia. Do capitalist oligarchs exploit workers and national resources in Russia? They do, but that is so also in the US and its NATO allies. Self-righteous US and NATO disparagement of Russia as an “anti-democratic” outlier is the height of hypocrisy. Does Russia seek to maintain a sphere of influence (in Belarus, Kazakhstan, and a few other allies)? It does; but Russia’s foreign policy is primarily defensive, and its imperialism pales to insignificance in comparison with that of the US-led West. We do not have to approve of the Putin regime in Russia; but those who brand Russia as the aggressor, based upon nothing more than its commonplace deficiencies as a liberal “democracy”, are making a pretext to “justify” their stance as apologists for Western imperialism.

    4. Ukraine’s government. The US (thru NED and CIA) has funded (since the 1990s) pro-Western anti-Russian groups in Ukraine (and also in Belarus) in hopes of bringing it into the EU and NATO. This has emboldened chauvinistic ethnic-Ukrainian nationalists and fueled intense ethnic and partisan conflict within the ethnically diverse Ukrainian populace. Further, the US incited and supported the illegal 2014 overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically-elected President Viktor Yanukovych (in response to his decision to reject an EU economic proposal which would have aligned Ukraine with the West rather than maintain a more beneficial neutrality between Russia and the West). In fact, US State Department Assistant Secretary Victoria Nuland and other US government leaders (including Senator John McCain) attended anti-Yanukovych rallies in Kyiv and urged them to overthrow their elected government.  Ukrainian factions which spearheaded the violence in this coup d’etat consisted of anti-Russia neo-Nazi factions including the Right Sector paramilitary organization and the Svoboda Party .  Moreover, while the current regime outlaws the Communist Party and even criminalizes the use of Communist symbols, it embraces and erects monuments to wartime Nazi collaborators including Stepan Bandera whose OUN [Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists] participated in the mass murder of Ukrainian Jews. The coup regime subsequently incorporated neo-Nazi paramilitaries into its national armed forces (Azov Battalion) for use against rebel forces in the Donbas. The US and NATO now have a repressive racist client regime in Kyiv which is a pawn in their new cold war against Russia.

  • Note regarding the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).  NED was created by Congress in 1983 and receives virtually all of its funding from the US government.  While NED’s purported mission is the promotion of “democracy”, this is construed to mean: (1) support for opposition groups (media and civil society organizations) in countries with governments (including popularly elected governments) which oppose US foreign policy and the abuses perpetrated by transnational capital, and (2) provision of its funding and other assistance only to organizations which are pro-Western and supportive of private-enterprise capitalism.  NED, which like the CIA operates throughout the world, has funded partisan media and “civil society” organizations in scores of countries (Ukraine, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Syria among them).  It does not engage in democratic advocacy in autocratic US allies (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Qatar).  Meanwhile, the US government offers no more than lip-service concern for the victims of repression by Western-backed client regimes.

    5. New cold war. With the need for a unified international response to: impending climate catastrophe, the Covid-19 pandemic, the new nuclear arms race, and other existential issues; one would hope that the US would work cooperatively with other countries (including: Russia, China, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, DPRK, and so forth) to deal effectively with these threats. Why then this US determination to treat these other countries as enemies rather than as partners?  Said new cold war (along with another against China) provides “justification” for hugely excessive US military expenditures (providing huge profits to capitalist military contractors as well as to fossil fuel companies which provide huge amounts of product for US military operations). Moreover, any country which refuses to comply with Western imperial dictates sets an unpalatable example which undermines US world-domination and the neoliberal world order (which enables transnational capital to reap most of its profits). New cold wars (and false-pretense regime-change wars against vulnerable countries [e.g. Iraq in 2003 and Libya in 2011] which refuse to submit to Western imperial dictates) also provide opportunities for careerist foreign policy officials (in the State and Defense Departments, CIA, NSA, et cetera) and for major-party politicians (funded by capitalist interest groups) to bolster their credentials as hawkish champions of purported US “national security interests” (which are defined to include preserving the US position as the dominant superpower).

    6. Strife within Ukraine. Upon seizing state power, the US-backed coup regime in Ukraine acted to suppress language rights for the 29% of the population for whom Russian was their native language. The ousted President Yanukovych had been a proponent of making Russian the second state language of Ukraine (as it had been prior to the breakup of the USSR). Immediately after the coup, the new regime acted to repeal a 2012 Yanukovych-era law which gave language rights to all locally-sizable minorities (not only Russian-speakers) in regions with such minority populations. That repeal action provoked popular protests in southern and eastern Ukraine. The US-backed regime has subsequently enacted new legislation: substantially reducing the language rights of minorities, and also suppressing the use of Russian in education and the media. In 2016, the regime even imposed restrictions on the importation of Russian-language books (which, until then, had constituted 60% of such imports). Consequences of the anti-Russian and anti-minority policies: the 2014 secession of the (officially autonomist) Crimea region which soon after sought and obtained reintegration into Russia, and the current Ukrainian civil war between the central government and the breakaway Donbas regions. The US fuels this civil conflict: by denouncing Russia and the Donbas rebels, and by arming the central government as it seeks to crush said Donbas rebellion thru brute force.  The US portrays the Donbas rebels as separatist pawns of Russia; but, in fact, although the hostility of the anti-Russian regime in Kyiv has undoubtedly produced much separatist sentiment in the Donbas breakaway regions; their longstanding demand, consistently endorsed by Russia (until losing patience in 2022), was for autonomy within a unified Ukraine. Moreover, the Kyiv regime agreed to such autonomy in the 2014 and 2015 Minsk accords (which the US supported in a unanimous UN Security Council vote in 2015); but, yielding to pressure from anti-Russian chauvinists, Kyiv (with US acquiescence) has persistently refused to implement it.

    7. Crimea. The US and NATO use a double standard to justify their hostility toward Russia by branding the secession of Crimea from Ukraine and its subsequent re-unification with Russia, in defiance of the will of the US-supported client-regime, as a Russian aggression in violation of international law. However, the US exhibited a complete disregard for such purported international law when it intervened (1999) in Serbia with armed force to separate Kosovo (with the approval of its ethnic Albanian majority) from Serbia in defiance of the will of the Serbian government. Hence, a hypocritical double standard.  The West also evades the relevant fact that Crimea had a long history as part of Russia. In fact, sovereignty over Crimea had been transferred from Russia to Ukraine in 1954 by a decision (of disputed legality) by Soviet leader Khrushchev without the consent, and contrary to the wishes, of Crimea’s predominantly ethnic Russian population; and most of the Crimean population welcomed their 2014 reunification with Russia.

    Ω.  Conclusion.  If the US and NATO had really cared about what was best for the people of Ukraine, they would have urged its government to make peace with Russia, Crimea, and the Donbas rebels: by accepting the secessionist will of the Crimeans, by implementing the promised autonomy for the breakaway Donbas regions, by committing to respect the language and other human rights of its minorities, by suppressing its neo-Nazi and allied hate groups, and by rejecting NATO membership and other anti-Russian policies.  In fact, the Western powers have cynically used Ukraine as a pawn in their new cold war against Russia.  In their arrogance they have pushed nuclear-armed Russia to the point that it has concluded that it must respond with military force.  The West’s new cold wars may be a boon for powerful sectors of transnational capital (especially military contractors and fossil fuel producers); but it is detrimental for the peoples of Ukraine, Russia, and much of the EU.

    The post New Cold War Conflict over Ukraine first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • After the fall of the Soviet Union, there was a near universal understanding among political leaders that NATO expansion would be a foolish provocation against Russia. How naive we were to think the military-industrial complex would allow such sanity to prevail.

    The post Chronicle Of A War Foretold appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Oil pumps and equipment in the South Belridge oil field in Kern County pictured on March 4, 2014, about forty miles west of Bakersfield, California.

    Republicans, conservative pundits and Big Oil took less than 24 hours after Russia invaded Ukraine to begin advocating for more oil drilling and fracking in the name of supposed energy independence.

    As climate journalists Amy Westervelt and Kate Aronoff pointed out on Thursday, news outlets like Bloomberg and conservative commentators like The Atlantic’s David Frum are calling for expanding oil production and fracking in response to the conflict, even though the U.S. is currently already producing near its limit.

    “Fracking may be America’s most powerful weapon against Russian aggression,” read an op-ed from a Bloomberg columnist who formerly led a Standard Oil and Koch family funded think tank.

    The American Petroleum Institute (API) made a Twitter thread just as Vladimir Putin was announcing attacks on Ukraine. “As crisis looms in Ukraine, U.S. energy leadership is more important than ever,” API wrote, encouraging the White House to lease and permit even more drilling on and offshore.

    In an earnings call on Thursday by natural gas exporter Cheniere, CEO Jack Fusco said that the invasion is good for business, Aronoff reported. “It’s tragic what’s going on in Eastern Europe, and it saddens me to see the satellite images on the newscreen that we’ve all witnessed this morning,” Fusco said. “But if anything, these high prices, the volatility, drive even more energy security and long-term contracting.”

    Conservative lawmakers also hopped onto the Big Oil cronyism. Far right Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colorado) posted a video saying that the federal government should immediately start producing oil at full capacity and exporting gas to Europe in order to combat inflation. Boebert has close ties to the fossil fuel industry; her husband has made hundreds of thousands of dollars consulting for Texas driller Terra Energy Partners.

    Meanwhile, Republicans are saying that Democrats’ “green agenda” and supposed “war on American oil and gas” is to blame for Putin’s invasion – nevermind the fact that Biden approved oil and gas drilling at a higher rate than Trump did in 2021.

    It’s extremely cynical to use this moment to encourage expanding fossil fuel production – and thus attempt to worsen the climate crisis – as thousands of people in Ukraine face instability, vicious attacks and uncertainty due to Russian forces. As conservatives and Big Oil attempt to exploit this moment for profit, antiwar activists in Russia and Ukraine are potentially putting their lives on the line to protest the Russian invasion.

    Experts say that there’s not much that President Joe Biden can do to control gas prices and that there’s little connection between oil production and gas prices.

    Rather, oil and gas companies have already been making record profits by taking advantage of inflation and economic uncertainty, causing President Joe Biden and other Democrats to probe whether or not companies are breaking antitrust laws in order to pad their pockets. Indeed, in remarks on Thursday, Biden urged oil and gas companies to “not exploit this moment to hike their prices to raise profits.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • It is now clear the Russian statements and proposed peace treaty in December 2021 were deadly serious. At that time the Russians said the US and NATO were crossing red lines, they felt threatened and would not abide this endlessly.  Now they have taken action. President Putin compared the situation to WW2 where the Soviet was invaded and lost 27 million citizens to Nazi Germany. He vowed to not repeat the mistake of endlessly trying to appease the aggressor.

    The post How The US Instigated The Ukraine Crisis appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • In the early hours of Thursday morning, in what will perhaps finally result in the COVID-19 mainstream media narrative being permanently banished from the headlines, almost nine years of Western provocations via its Eastern European proxy state Ukraine would culminate in Russia launching a military intervention into its Western neighbour – with attempts to resolve the situation peacefully by Moscow over the past several months ultimately proving fruitless due to Kiev failing to implement its side of the Minsk Agreements, which would see a federalisation solution in which the breakaway pro-Russian Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, located in the predominantly ethnic Russian Donbass region of eastern Ukraine, being given a degree of autonomy whilst still remaining under the rule of Kiev – both Republics being given formal recognition by Moscow on Monday instead, in response to the breakdown in negotiations.

    The post Britain Forgets Its Recent History Of Unleashing War In Europe appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Less than 48 hours into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and so much remains unclear. Will Russia occupy? Will NATO respond militarily? What are the risks of nuclear escalation? But one thing should be very apparent. Looking to either NATO or Russia in search of a good guy in all of this is deeply naïve.

    On the one side we have the Russian regime. Viciously illiberal and oligarchic, it’s a model of authoritarian capitalism. Determined to reclaim its lost imperial status, it’s as willing to bomb Ukrainian cities as it is to batter its own courageous anti-war protestors off the streets of Moscow.

    In NATO, we have an organisation which today functions as a beard for US imperial ambitions. It comes with a bleak history of supporting fascists in Europe and of the kind of brinkmanship which has brought us to where we are today. It’s also played a direct part in the disastrous wars in – to name just two recent examples – Libya and Afghanistan.

    Putin’s regime is no more anti-fascist than NATO is the FBPE movement with guns. They both just like to claim otherwise because it suits them.

    How about… no.

    There is little to admire or endorse in either party, even if both make claims which contain an atom of the truth. Has NATO aggressively pushed into the buffer zone Russia wanted after the end of the USSR? Have NATO countries helped arm and train actual, real-life fascists in Ukraine? Absolutely. Is the Russian regime grotesquely corrupt? Does it oppress LGBTQI+ people? Has it just invaded a sovereign nation? Yes, yes, and yes.

    Then why the clamour to side with one over the other? Of course, part of it is effective propaganda. NATO, for example, is held up by many as a liberal institution which sustains peace. This is a line echoed by mainstream British politicians of all stripes. It’s a position which even notionally left-wing MPs invoke uncritically. Even the last Corbyn manifesto promised to fund NATO. I myself, however, have a NATO medal from the war in Afghanistan which tells a different story. A story of occupation, injustice and, ultimately, hubristic failure.

    For some on the Russia-supporting side there is a nostalgia for an ‘anti-fascist’ and ‘anti-imperialist’ Russia which, if it ever did exist in this pure, unblemished form, it certainly does not today. The point being this nostalgia makes Putin’s claims of his invasion being about clearing out Nazis from Ukraine seem appealing and genuine. At least for some people. The Russia of 2022 is many things, but it’s certainly not the Russia which inhabits the mind of today’s Stalinists – even if that is your bag. From a purely humanist viewpoint, it definitely isn’t mine.

    Software update

    We need to move past the Cold and World War framings which are being applied to Ukraine. New Hitler’s, New Stalin’s, ‘appeasement’, and so on – this is a crass brand of politics, and it only benefits the powerful. We need to look at the world as it is, and support the people who are suffering in this war.

    While Ukraine was being invaded, people across the political spectrum here in the UK were churning out any number of hot takes on Twitter. And that’s what Twitter is good for – pretending you have all the answers – something which should absolutely be avoided. The real questions we should be asking are where can practical forms of solidarity be given? And where is the resistance from below coming from?

    We can’t make sense of the world running on Windows 1945, or Windows 1954. It’s long past time for some of us to update our software on Russia/NATO antagonism. And that doesn’t involve backing one over the other.

    If not them, who?

    While their crowdfunders and posts haven’t gained the same mass traction as some others, there are Ukrainians and Russians who are resisting both fascism and Russian militarism. The website CrimethInc has published the positions of some of these groups. Its article includes both Russian and Ukrainian perspectives.

    Russian anarchists released a statement on the invasion which CrimethInc published:

    Palaces, yachts, and prison sentences and torture for dissenting Russians are not enough for Putin’s imperial gang, they should be given war and the seizure of new territories. And so, “defenders of the fatherland” invade Ukraine, bombing residential areas. Huge sums are being invested in murder weapons while the people are impoverished more and more.

    The Anarchist Black Cross Dresden group have also established a fundraiser to help those caught up between these two forces. It said:

    You can help people to bring their relatives and friends in safety, support people who need to leave the country and establish a place to live, organize resistance to protect their neighborhoods, get needed goods and medical supply to survive. There are also a lot of people from other countries in the region like Belarus and Russia who seek in the last years refugee in Ukraine. With a Russian invasion they are threatened in Ukraine and are not safe anymore.

    Neither NATO nor Putin

    Partly, what we have seen in the last days are two sets of nostalgists relitigating old conflicts while Ukraine burns. This does nothing to help a population caught between two rapacious powers. There is a suggestion at times that because Ukraine – like Russia and, indeed, Britain – has fascists in it, the whole population is fascist and thus undeserving of solidarity. On the other side, there is considerable apologia for the bosses club that is NATO, and myth-peddling about its commitment to some liberal, ‘rules-based order.’

    These are positions which cannot stand. They are no use to thinking people, because they are factually wrong and fundamentally immoral. On the left, we are meant to be engaged in the project of reason. We are meant to back people, not power. And the time to do so is now.

    Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/ Russian defence ministry, cropped to 770 x 440, licenced under CY BB 4.0.

    By Joe Glenton

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Ukraine Country Has Become a Battlefield for Major Powers. End the War Now

    As officials in Moscow threaten to replace the democratically elected Ukrainian government and Russian forces appear set to overpower Ukrainian defenses, is this the end of an independent Ukraine? We speak with Ukrainian peace activist Nina Potarska, who fled the country after Russian troops entered Ukraine on Thursday, even as her 11-year-old daughter with COVID-19 had to stay behind. She is participating in CodePink’s international emergency online rally on Saturday to advocate against war and against NATO membership for Ukraine. “I feel that my country now is like a battlefield for all other countries’ ambition,” says Potarska. “We want to be in peace.”

    Please check back later for full transcript.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • People stage an anti-war demonstration following Russia's military operation in Ukraine, on February 24, 2022, in St. Petersburg, Russia.

    Thousands of people filled the streets of Moscow in 2014 to protest Russia’s involvement in the conflict in eastern Ukraine, where separatists were fighting for control of the Donbas region after an uprising supported by the West pushed out an elected president in Kyiv. In 2003, tens of thousands protested against the invasion of Iraq by the United States in Washington, D.C. and in mass protests across the world.

    Now, both Russia and the U.S.-led NATO coalition have escalated the conflict in Ukraine. Russian forces invaded the Ukraine on Thursday, and fierce fighting across the country is raising fears that the war will spiral into bloody chaos and spill across Eastern Europe. Russian missiles have destroyed Ukrainian military installations and airfields bringing in NATO weapons, according to the Kremlin. The Ukrainian government says dozens of soldiers and civilians lost their lives.

    Scattered protests are popping up in Russia, Germany, the U.S. and across the world as the violence intensifies, but antiwar activists in Ukraine and Russia say their demonstrations rarely get Western media coverage and are often repressed by police.

    The U.S. and its powerful allies placed economic sanctions on Russia this week after Putin recognized two pro-Russian breakaway “republics” in Donbas and deployed troops Russia calls “peacekeepers.” Putin also argued in a speech that Ukraine is essentially part of Russia. The Russian military claims its “peace enforcement operation” has no intention to “occupy” Ukraine, according to a statement passed along by a Russian military analyst, although it is unclear how that statement should be interpreted.

    Both sides accuse the other of being the aggressor, and antiwar activists in Russia and Ukraine are drawing attention to escalating militarism on the part of both Russia and NATO.

    “When Ukrainian and Western media mention Russian security concerns, it is usually to dismiss them, claiming that NATO is a defensive alliance and Ukraine has a right to align with it,” said Yurii Sheliazhenko, the executive secretary of the Ukrainian Pacifist Movement, in an email. “When they show maps of amassing Russian troops on Ukrainian borders, they never show where NATO’s and Ukrainian military forces are positioned, despite there [being] a lot of public information of the sort; experts definitely know it.”

    Sheliazhenko said that militarism is pervasive in Ukraine and Russia, although antiwar activists are raising their voices against the escalating violence.

    “You should understand that due to the underdeveloped peace culture in Ukraine and all post-Soviet countries, including Russia, we have no independent impartial mass peace movement here and very few consistent pacifists,” Sheliazhenko said.

    News outlets in the U.S. report a muted response from antiwar activists in Russia, where the 2014 protests were met with a harsh crackdown by police. Some experts say street protests have little impact on a government beholden to Putin. Antiwar protest organizers are now being arrested on a daily basis, according to a Russian activist who asked to remain anonymous due to fear of repression and sent messages in encrypted texts.

    “There [are] no big street protests in Russia as all protests are banned ‘due to COVID,’ however, pro-war protests are accepted,” said the activist, who is currently living in a neighboring country but maintains contact with activists in Moscow. “In Moscow there are small actions daily and arrests.”

    Sheliazhenko said there is also repression of the small antiwar movement in Ukraine, where violent elements of the far right were emboldened by a friendly government and its military supporters in NATO after a U.S.-backed uprising deposed a pro-Russian president in 2014.

    Sheliazhenko said pickets and protests were recently held in several Ukrainian cities, including in front of the Ukrainian Parliament and the U.S. embassy in Kyiv. The media paid little attention, and protesters were searched by police and forced to say on video that they would not organize more demonstrations. Petitions to protect human rights tend to be more popular online than petitions to stop the conflict, and petitions have little effect on politicians to begin with, activist say.

    “Again, I should say that street actions for peace are effective when genuine peace movements have people’s solidarity because of developed peace culture, and when there is little threat of persecution and violent attacks of far-righters,” Sheliazhenko said. “Now the state of emergency is introduced and Ukrainian government started to introduce the state of war, it limits freedom of assembly anyway.”

    Plenty of people in Russia, the U.S. and across the world oppose the war in Ukraine. Activists say a return to diplomacy would prevent needless bloodshed, and cooperation rather than fighting among governments is desperately needed to confront global problems such as climate change and the COVID pandemic.

    Some peace activists want to dismantle NATO or transform the military coalition into an “alliance of disarmament,” according to Sheliazhenko. NATO has supported multiple U.S.-led wars and enraged Putin by arming Russia’s neighbors with weapons, and the conflict Donbas escalated after the U.S. and its allies rejected Putin’s demand that Ukraine be barred from joining the military alliance.

    “The conflict is the product of thirty years of failed policies, including the expansion of NATO and U.S. hegemony at the expense of other countries as well as major wars of aggression by the USA, Britain and other NATO powers which have undermined international law and the United Nations,” said a statement from the Stop the War Coalition in Britain this week.

    In a poll this week, 72 percent of Americans said the U.S. should play either a minor role in the conflict or no role at all. Respondents want Biden focused on domestic issues such as gun violence and inflation, according to the Washington Post. Still, the threat of war in Ukraine did not prompt large protests in the pandemic-weary U.S. as negotiations between the U.S. and Russia over NATO expansion broke down.

    Public opinion is muddled by former President Donald Trump, whose praise for Putin continues to be a favorite attack line for liberals. In fact, the poll found that Democrats are more likely than Republicans to support the U.S. taking a “major” role in the conflict, with 32 percent of Democrats in support compared to 22 percent of Republicans.

    However, antiwar groups in the U.S., Russia and beyond oppose the U.S. and NATO’s role in the conflict while also condemning Putin’s militarism and autocratic control of Russia.

    “This is an act of imperialist aggression by Russia,” said Autonomous Action, a Russian anarchist collective involved in the 2014 antiwar protests, in a statement this week. “We have no illusions about the Ukrainian state, but it is clear to us that it is not the main aggressor in this story — this is not a confrontation between two equal evils.”

    Putin’s supporters see him as a protector of Russian-speaking people in Eastern Ukraine, but there are also dissidents who dismiss Putin’s latest moves as blatant imperialism that will spread Russian authoritarianism. Indeed, the conflict in Ukraine puts Russian leftists in a difficult position. While many oppose Putin, they also oppose paramilitary right-wing ultranationalists on the Ukrainian side.

    Meanwhile, the U.S. continues to deploy troops, attack helicopters and fighter jets to Eastern Europe, although Biden has said U.S. troops will not fight a war in Ukraine. In Russia, the U.S. and NATO are seen as the aggressors after meddling in Ukrainian affairs for years and surrounding Russia with advanced missiles in Poland, Romania and on the Black Sea.

    “This conflict, in the first place, happened because of right-wing nationalists on all sides and their militant policies,” Sheliazhenko said. “Western governments and private benefactors invested a lot in development of right-wing and moderate nationalist Ukrainian civil society, while Russia funded networks of right-wing and moderate Russian nationalists and Putin sympathizers.”

    For now, Ukrainian peace activists are pushing back against forced conscription into the Ukrainian military and “telling the truth about the belligerents” on both sides of the conflict “amidst their battle of arrogant lies,” according to Sheliazhenko. Activists are calling on the U.S. to pursue diplomacy above all, sending a message to all parties that peace talks must resume before more people die.

    “Any apologies of war are essentially based on a mother of all lies: We are angels and they are demons,” Sheliazhenko said. “All wars are usually alleged to be defensive.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • By Tom Kitchin and Emma Hatton, RNZ News reporters

    Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been met with despair and anger in New Zealand.

    Nearly 100 people gathered at the Russian embassy in the capital Wellington today, at a protest organised by the Ukrainian Gromada of Wellington.

    Fake blood was plastered over the gate and driveway, and protesters were shouting the likes of “blood on your hands” and “hands off Ukraine”.

    Tanya Harper has family in Ukraine and did not know if her nephew was still alive.

    “I spoke [to him] this morning, he sent a message saying they’re not evacuating, they’re not allowed to leave the building.They can see fighting on the streets from the apartment where he is and it’s very scary.”

    Protesters holding peace signs in the colours of the Ukrainian flag
    Protesters holding peace signs in the colours of the Ukrainian flag. Image: Samuel Rillstone/RNZ

    Sanctions have come thick and fast from Western nations — but it was cold comfort for Harper.

    “Sanctions aren’t going to save our lives, they know it’s too late for sanctions again – I want to see my Mum again, I want to see my brother.”

    Lana, who did not give her last name, said she was afraid for her community.

    “I can’t tell you how scared we are – my Mum almost ended up in the hospital this morning, she’s at home, she couldn’t even come here. I didn’t sleep last night, she didn’t sleep last night, I don’t think anyone in the Ukrainian community had one hour of sleep last night — we are constantly in contact because of our relatives and friends back there.”

    Igor Titov had been speaking to his family back in Kyiv.

    “Yesterday, I was on the phone with my Mum, I was preparing her to evacuate from her own apartment, I was waking up my friends from the shelling.”

    Tetiana Zhurba and Nataliya Stepuroi wrapped the colours of the Ukraine flag around a brick post by the entrance of the embassy.

    Tetiana Zhurba (left) and Nataliya Stepuroi put the colours of the Ukranian flag around a brick post by the embassy's driveway.
    Tetiana Zhurba (left) and Nataliya Stepuroi put the colours of the Ukranian flag around a brick post by the embassy’s driveway. Image: Samuel Rillstone/RNZ

    “Why we did it here near Russian embassy, [is] because Russia — everywhere in our territory — when they come … they [put] up their flags in every village,” Zhurba said.

    “I want [the embassy staff] to see our colours when they wake up in the morning, and go to dinner in the evening — I want them to see those colours when they leave and they’re coming back,” Stepuroi said.

    Elsewhere in New Zealand, Ukrainians told RNZ they were horrified.

    Inga Tokarenko spent all morning on the phone to her family who were sheltering underground.

    “Yesterday, they woke up to a bombing, because of the hit of the wave from the bomb – it shook their windows. So they woke up I called them this morning and they were already heading off to the underground facility. They can feel the shockwaves.”

    Northland woman Olya Tolpyhina said what was happening in her home country felt surreal.

    Her parents live in the west of the country and chose to stay and fight — offering up their home to those who have been displaced.

    “So they’re waiting for people to arrive and they keep safe — but they have a lot of people stuck in traffic, because all major airports were bombed.”

    She said people in New Zealand and around the world needed to protest against Russia’s attacks and she did not believe they would stop with Ukraine.

    “My biggest desire is no World War III. I don’t know what sick thoughts Putin has in his mind, but he will not stop at Ukraine when he gets it.”

    Protests condemning Russia’s actions will continue over the weekend across the country.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • RNZ News

    Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern says New Zealand joins its international partners in condemnation of Russia’s attack on Ukraine and has immediately taken a range of measures against the Russian government.

    Giving a statement today about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Ardern said Russia began a “military offensive and an illegal invasion” yesterday.

    Russian President Vladimir Putin declared war on Ukraine and launched a full-scale land, sea and air attack on the country.

    Putin said his goal was the “demilitarisation and denazification” of Ukraine, but US President Joe Biden has asserted the evidence clearly showed Russia was the aggressor and it had no evidence for its justifications.

    New Zealand has joined with the United Nations in launching economic sanctions against Russia.

    Ardern said: “The UK’s Ministry of Defence communicated this morning that more than 80 strikes have been carried out against Ukrainian targets and that Russian ground forces are advancing across the border on at least three axis from north and northeast, and south from Crimea.

    “There are reports of attacks in a range of locations around Ukraine, including heavy shelling in eastern Ukraine and fighting in some areas, including around airports and other targets of strategic importance.

    ‘Unthinkable’ loss of lives
    “By choosing to pursue this entirely avoidable path, an unthinkable number of innocent lives could be lost because of Russia’s decision,” she said.

    New Zealand called on Russia to do what was right and immediately cease military operations, and permanently withdraw to avoid a “catastrophic and pointless loss of innocent life”, she said.

    The invasion posed a significant threat to peace and security in the region and would trigger a humanitarian and refugee crisis, she said.


    Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s media briefing today. Video: RNZ

    Russia had demonstrated a disregard for diplomacy and efforts to avoid conflict in the lead-up to the attack, she said, and “must now face the consequences of their decision to invade”.

    As a permanent UN Security Council member, Russia has “displayed a flagrant disregard for international law and abdicated their responsibility to uphold global peace and security” and now must face the consequences, Ardern said.

    New Zealand has immediately imposed measures in response which include targeted travel bans against Russian officials and other individuals associated with the invasion. They will be banned from obtaining visas to enter or transit New Zealand.

    Secondly, this country is prohibiting the export of goods to Russian military and security forces.

    Blanket ban a ‘significant step’
    “While exports from New Zealand under this category are limited, a blanket ban is a significant step as it removes the ability for exporters to apply for a permit and sends a clear signal of support to Ukraine,” she said.

    Finally, New Zealand has suspended bilateral ministry consultations until further notice.

    Ardern says there will be a significant cost imposed on Russia for its actions. New Zealand will also consider humanitarian response options, she said.

    “Finally our thoughts today are with the people in Ukraine affected by this conflict. Decades of peace and security in the region have been undermined.

    “The institutions built to avoid conflict have been threatened and we stand resolute in our support for those who now bear the brunt of Russia’s decisions.”

    She again called for Russia to cease military actions and return to diplomatic negotiations to resolve the conflict.

    During questions from journalists, Ardern said New Zealand was not constrained by being unable to launch autonomous sanctions.

    Additional measures
    “There are additional measures that we can take. Obviously already you’ll see those targeted travel bans, we do have the ability to extend those as required and as those involved with this activity grows,” she said.

    “We also have the ability to continue to restrict the amount of diplomatic engagement that we have … and obviously the autonomous sanction regimes that have been proposed in the past don’t for instance cover situations of human rights violations.”

    Ardern admitted there were some limitations on economic sanctions New Zealand could impose, but the government continued to get advice from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs about the tools that could be used and “we want them all to be on the table”.

    The measures New Zealand has imposed are limited but send a very clear message.

    “What this does say is that there’s no ability to apply or seek to export … this is a blanket ban,” she says.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • One major nuclear war catastrophically interrupts the progress of human civilization and ushers in God only knows how many decades of dystopian madness. Pray that NATO’s march on Moscow doesn’t make Napoleon look like a genius and Hitler a brilliant military strategist. Bonaparte’s retreat during the winter of 1812? A walk in the park compared to a nuclear winter. The Battle of Stalingrad? A minor skirmish compared to the destruction attendant upon a major nuclear conflagration.

    At a moment when wise leaders would spare no effort to move heaven and earth to find and implement new ways to encourage all of us to work together to solve the several potentially existential threats — all of them of mankind’s own making — to the uninterrupted continuity and progress of human civilization, instead we find ourselves on the brink of a nuclear war.

    Donald Trump has declared that Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine strategy is a stroke of “genius.” Apropos Trump, one might observe that even a stopped clock is right twice a day but to do so would give the former US president too much credit and misrepresent both changing political and geopolitical realities and Russia’s options as Putin no doubt understands them.

    Wise statesmen have an ability to understand their opponents’ perspectives. American politicians have typically failed to understand Putin or appreciate the gravity of his concerns, which he has often sought to make quite clear. Post-WWII American leaders have too often seen themselves as masters of the geopolitical universe despite the ignominious defeat of U.S. forces in Vietnam and more recent debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan, and wars in Libya and Yemen that have further destabilized Southwest Asia and Africa and flooded much of Europe and even Australia with refugees (never mind the refugee crisis on our own southern border). Putin addressed those issues and more quite frankly in his speech at the United Nations on Sept. 28, 2015 asking, “Do you realize what you have done?

    In his August 30, 2017 article for War on the Rocks, Prof. Ian Johnson noted, “For President Vladimir Putin, the war remains personal. Putin’s older brother, whom he never met, died during the Siege of Leningrad. His father was maimed in the war. Much of his extended family died in the conflict. Putin himself has repeatedly attended the wreath-laying ceremony at Stalingrad’s central monument to the battle at Mamaev Kurgan. In 2014, he also said he favored a referendum to consider renaming the city Stalingrad. He has also used the historical memory of the war to shore up his own base of power and to justify his foreign policy worldview.”

    On the face of it, given Russia’s history of horrendously destructive military invasions from the West, why would anyone be surprised that Putin or any other Russian leader would take a very dim view of what, to them, looks very much like a US-organized NATO march on Moscow? What should Putin make of assurances by then-US Secretary of State James Baker and other Western leaders that, in return for Russian agreement to the reunification of Germany, NATO would advance “not one inch eastward,” as documented by Mr. Seppo Neimi on December 6, 2021?

    Does anyone suppose that Russian leaders have forgotten the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, brought about by the presence of Soviet missiles in what US leaders considered their “back yard,” which brought the US and the USSR to the brink of nuclear war? Would any Russian leader sit silently and acquiesce to NATO expansion into Ukraine and, presumably, US missiles in Russia’s “front yard”?

    Ukraine is a fight that Russia did not want. The US forced the issue, inciting a coup d’etat in Ukraine in 2014. Thank Victoria Nuland for that, reported Gary Leupp on Jan. 25, 2021: “Nuland is perhaps best known for her pithy ejaculation: ‘Fuck the EU!’ in a telephone call with the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine in 2014. In that year, while Nuland built support for the coup in Kiev (Feb. 18 to 21), she boasted openly that the U.S. had invested $5 billion in supporting ‘the Ukrainian people’s European aspirations.’  (This referred to the support of some Ukrainians for the violent overthrow of the democratically elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, on the basis of his alleged pro-Russian policies and his opposition to European Union affiliation under the conditions the EU was then offering.) To state the matter honestly: the U.S. spent $5 billion to install a government in Kiev that would request NATO membership (ostensibly to protect it from always aggressive, always expanding Russia) and bind it forever to the U.S. military-industrial complex and ‘Free World.’”

    On the heels the coup d’etat Nuland orchestrated in Ukraine, her former boss, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, at a political fundraiser/campaign event in California, compared Putin, who lost family members in the Nazi invasion of his homeland, to Adolph Hitler. How about that for pouring salt in a wound?

    Both Mikhail Gorbachev and President Putin had previously proposed or inquired about Russian membership in NATO. Moreover, after the terror attacks of 9/11/2001, Putin was the first foreign leader to call then-President George W. Bush. On Nov. 15, 2001 Putin visited the site of the terrorist attack that destroyed the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York. According to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Putin followed up by directly aiding “the U.S.-led military operation in Afghanistan — where the Taliban had shielded Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, who was behind the 9/11 attacks — by opening Russian airspace for U.S. humanitarian flights, sharing intelligence, and acquiescing to U.S. deployments in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia, which Russia still considers part of its sphere of influence.”

    The closer one looks at the situation, the more difficult it becomes to avoid the realization that the US government and NATO are aggressors in relations with Russia, that the fight over Ukraine is one Official Washington’s first family of war has picked and is determined to pursue even at the real risk of nuclear war.  It is a strategy some say reeks of deception and desperation. Israel, enjoying lavish and slavish US support and always anxious to expand its yet to be officially declared borders, would benefit should a withdrawal of Russian forces from Syria become necessary because a hot war in Ukraine strained Russian military capabilities.

    The post The US and NATO Cross a Line first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Introduction

    Russia has sent troops into Ukraine and attacked Ukrainian military forces .

    In a one hour address, President Putin said the goal was the “de-Nazification” of Ukraine.

    It is now clear the Russian statements and proposed peace treaty in December 2021 were deadly serious. At that time the Russians said the US and NATO were crossing red lines, they felt threatened and would not abide this endlessly.  Now they have taken action.

    In his address yesterday,  Russian President Putin gave a frank explanation which comes after years of complaints. The Russians have complained bitterly about the US-promoted 2014 coup in Ukraine, the eastward expansion of NATO, the installation of missiles in Romania and Poland, the pretense that the missiles were for defense against Iran, the 2019 US withdrawal from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces agreement, the aggression against Russian speaking Ukrainians in the east.

    President Putin compared the situation to WW2  where the Soviet was invaded and lost 27 million citizens to Nazi Germany. He vowed to not repeat the mistake of endlessly trying to appease the aggressor.

    Comparison to the Cuba Crisis

    This conflict is unnecessary. It could have been avoided by simple agreement to not include Ukraine in NATO and to withdraw missile systems from Romania and Poland. Unless NATO is planning war with Russia, those agreements are eminently sensible.

    In 1962 the United States drew a red line saying the Soviet Union could not install missiles in Cuba. They threatened world war to make this stand. The distance from Havana Cuba to Washington DC is over 1100 miles. In contrast, the distance from Kiev, Ukraine to Moscow in Russia  is under 500 miles.  Is it not clear why the Russians feel threatened?

    Essential Background and Facts

    Following are factors to consider in evaluating who is to blame for the current crisis and bloodshed.  When we hear analysis of the situation which entirely ignores the following facts, it is a sure sign of distortion and bias.

    Fact 1: In February 2014, a coup overthrew the Ukrainian government which came to power in an election certified by the OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation). The president, Viktor Yanukovich, was forced to flee for his life.

    This situation was presciently analyzed  at the time by Seumas Milne who wrote:

    The attempt to lever Kiev into the western camp by ousting an elected leader made conflict certain. It could be a threat to us all.

    Fact 2: The coup was promoted by United States officials. Neo-conservatives such as Victoria Nuland and John McCain actively supported the protests. As confirmed in a secretly recorded phone call,  Nuland determined the post-coup composition weeks in advance. Later,  Nuland bragged they spent $5 billion in this campaign over two decades. Before the coup was “midwifed”,  Nuland forcefully rejected a likely European compromise agreement which would have led to a compromise government. “F*** the EU!”,  she said.  Nuland managed the coup but Vice President Biden was overall in charge. As Nuland says in the phone call, Biden would give the ultimate “atta boy” to the coup leaders. Subsequently, Joe Biden’s son personally benefited from the coup.  Victoria Nuland has even more power now as the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs. Secret US forces such as the Central Intelligence Agency must also be involved.

    Fact 3: The coup government immediately acted with hostility toward its Russian speaking citizens. Approximately 30% of Ukrainian citizens have Russian as their first language, yet on the first day in power, the coup regime acted to make Russian no longer an official state language. This was followed by more actions of hostility. As documented in the video “Crimes of the Euromaidan Nazis”, a convoy of buses going back to Crimea was attacked. In Odessa, over thirty  opponents of the coup government died when they were attacked and the trade union hall set afire.

    Fact 4: During World War 2, there were some Nazi sympathizers in western Ukraine when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union.  This element continues today in the form of Svoboda and other far right nationalist parties. The Ukrainian government has even passed legislation heroizing Nazi collaborators while removing statues honoring anti-Nazi patriots.  The situation was described three years ago in an article “Neo-nazis and the far right are on the march in Ukraine“.  The author questioned why the US is supporting this. Under President Poroshenko (2014 to 2019) nationalism surged and even the Orthodox Church split apart.

    Fact 5: The secession of Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk are a direct result of the 2014 coup. In Crimea, a referendum vote was rapidly organized. With 83% turnout and 97% voting in favor, Crimeans decided to secede from Ukraine and re-unify with Russia. Crimea was part of Russia since 1783.  When the administration of Crimea was transferred to the Ukraine in 1954. they were all part of the Soviet Union. This was done without consulting the population.

    Author’s note: I visited Crimea in 2017 and talked with diverse people including the popularly elected city council officials. There is no doubt about the overwhelming support for re-unification with Russia.

    In the provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk on the border with Russia, the majority of the population speaks Russian and had no hostility to Russia. The Kiev coup regime was hostile and enacting policies they vehemently disagreed with.  In spring 2014,  the Luhansk and Donetsk Peoples Republics declared their independence from the Kiev regime.

    Fact 6: The Minsk Agreements of 2014 and 2015 were signed by Ukraine, Ukrainian rebels, Russia and other European authorities.  They were designed to stop the bloodshed in eastern Ukraine and retain the territorial integrity of Ukraine while granting a measure of autonomy to Luhansk and  Donetsk. This is not abnormal; there are 17 autonomous zones in Europe. These agreements were later rebuffed by the Kiev government and Washington. Ukrainian militias have escalated their attacks in the Donbas region. The US and other NATO countries have been pouring weapons into Ukraine.  Russell Bentley, a US citizen who now lives in Donetsk just miles from the front-lines, provides a compelling description of the situation.

    After eight years trying to implement the Minsk Agreements, the Russian government gave up and recognized the Peoples Republics of Donetsk (DPR) and Luhansk (LPR) on 21 February 2022.

    The US and NATO have little credibility to oppose secession since they promoted the breakup of Yugoslavia, secession of Kosovo from Serbia,  secession of South Sudan from Sudan, and Kurdish secessionist efforts in Iraq and Syria, etc.. The secession of Crimea is justified by its unique history and overwhelming popular support. The secession of Luhansk and Donetsk may be justified by the illegal 2014 Kiev coup.

    Conclusion

    US intervention, both open and secret, has been a major driver of the events in Ukraine. The US has instigated the conflict.  Ukrainians and Russians are now paying the price.

    Let us hope that the violence ends quickly and a genuinely independent Ukraine, no longer a tool of the United States, emerges.

    The post How the US instigated the Ukraine crisis   first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  •  

    Janine Jackson interviewed Bryce Greene about Ukraine for the February 18, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

          CounterSpin220218Greene.mp3

     

    WaPo: The less Americans know about Ukraine’s location, the more they want U.S. to intervene

    Washington Post (4/7/14)

    Janine Jackson: Many Americans are confused or just unknowledgeable about Ukraine. They couldn’t find it on a map. A 2014 Washington Post story noted that the less Americans know about Ukraine’s location, the more they want the US to intervene.

    Well, into that void have rushed corporate news media, telling us for weeks now that there is a threat—presumably to us—over there, and we need to get ready for war. The ease with which media step into saber-rattling mode, the confidence as they soberly suggest people other than themselves might need to be sent off to a violent death in service of something they can only describe with vague platitudes, should be disturbing. US officials accusing journalists who ask basic evidentiary questions of consorting with the enemy—should be disturbing.

    The very fact that news media have a framework in which there are enemies whose actions don’t merit thoughtful consideration, and a US “us” whose actions are always good, all of this should disturb you—not just about foreign policy, but about the power of news media to amp people up to accept horrific, avoidable actions.

    The current crisis with the US and Russia about Ukraine is a test of many things, not least news media’s ability and willingness to disengage themselves from these frozen narratives, from uncritical parroting of official sources, and from the devastating idea that diplomacy is weakness, and massive violence, or threats of massive violence, are the best way to address conflict.

    Bryce Greene’s piece, “What You Should Really Know About Ukraine,” appeared recently on FAIR.org. He joins us now by phone from Indianapolis. Welcome to CounterSpin, Bryce Greene.

    Bryce Greene: Thanks for having me on. I’m happy to be here.

    FAIR: What You Should Really Know About Ukraine

    FAIR.org (1/28/22)

    JJ: Your straightforward piece, an explainer about explainers, got more than 3,000 shares on FAIR.org. People needed it. And I’m just going to ask you to talk us through the official line on Ukraine, and the questions that we should have about it. Because all of the elements—Russians as cartoons; the US, as ever, engaged in democracy promotion; oh, are there material interests there? How dare you suggest!— It’s all so dusty, this playbook, you know?

    And part of what feels so dated about it is that it’s about NATO. I know for a fact that listeners under, like, heck, 40 years old are like, well, I’ve heard the word NATO, but whaat? You know, why? Isn’t the Cold War over? And yet NATO, and what it represents in 2022, are at the core here. So just start us off wherever you would like to, in terms of helping people understand what’s actually going on right now.

    BG: Right, so most media outlets try to put the current escalation in context. And when they do, they usually start at one event, the 2014 annexation of Crimea. And they use this to demonstrate how Russia has imperial ambitions to reconquer the old Soviet territories and reestablish the old Soviet Union.

    But for that to have any real credibility, you need to ignore what happened right before 2014, what happened right before the Donbas uprising, what happened before Russia began backing the separatist rebels.

    And that takes you back to early 2014, when the US government helped violently oust the president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, in what was called the Maidan Coup. After he fled the country, the new government immediately established closer ties to Europe and the US, and turned away from Putin’s Russia.

    Now, understanding why and how we did that is key to understanding Putin’s actions today. Like, if the United States had a neighbor who recently had a government change, instigated in part by Russia, and then that country tried to join a hostile military alliance, I think the US would be rightly concerned. They’d lose their minds. But you don’t really see that same concern extended to what’s going on over there in Ukraine.

    So this whole story of NATO expansion and economic expansion, it begins right after the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The US and Russia made a deal that NATO, the Cold War alliance, would not expand east past a reunified Germany. No reason to escalate tensions unnecessarily.

    But unfortunately, Washington decided to expand anyway. And, you know, they were the only superpower left, there was no one to challenge them, so they decided they could do it. They ignored Russian objections and continued to enlarge the military alliance one country at a time.

    And even at the time, Cold Warriors like the famed diplomat George Kennan warned that this was a recipe for disaster. It would make Russia feel trapped and surrounded, and when major nuclear powers feel trapped and surrounded, it doesn’t really make for a peaceful world.

    But as we all know, Washington isn’t in the interest of peace, and they did it anyway. In 2004, the US poured millions of dollars into the anti-Russian opposition in Ukraine. They funded media and NGOs supporting opposition candidates. And they did this using organizations like the NED, the National Endowment for Democracy, and USAID. These organizations are broadly understood to serve regime change interests in the name of “democracy.”

    Now, in 2004, it didn’t work exactly, but Ukraine began to start making closer ties to the EU and US. And that process continued up to 2014.

    Shortly before the overthrow, the Ukrainian government was negotiating closer integration into the EU, and closer integration with the Western economic bloc. And they were being offered loans by the International Monetary Fund, the major world lending agency that represents private interests around the Western world. So to get those loans, they had to do all sorts of things to their economy, commonly known as “structural adjustment.” This included cutting public sector wages, shrinking the health and education sectors, privatizing the economy and cutting gas subsidies for the people.

    And at the time, Russia was offering a plan for economic integration to Ukraine that didn’t contain any of these strings. So when President Viktor Yanukovych chose Russia, well, that set off a wave of protests that were supported and partially funded by the United States. In fact, John McCain and Obama administration officials even flew to the Maidan Square to help support the protesters who wanted to oust the president and change the government.

    BBC: Ukraine crisis: Transcript of leaked Nuland-Pyatt call

    BBC (2/7/14)

    So at this point, I want listeners to ask themselves, what if Russia were sending high-level government officials to anti-government protests in Canada or Mexico? What if one of Putin’s advisors right now went to go encourage the trucker protests in Canada, and said that they should get rid of their kind of government? We’d lose our minds. And rightfully so. That’s just ridiculous. And what’s worse is that right after the protests started, there was a leaked phone call between Victoria Nuland, one of Obama’s State Department advisors—

    JJ: Right.

    BG: —and the US ambassador to Ukraine, in which they were describing how they wanted to set up a new government. They were picking and choosing who would be in the government, who would be out.

    Well, a few weeks after that, the Ukrainian government was overthrown. And the guy who they designated as our guy, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, became the prime minister.

    So clearly, clearly, there’s a lot of US involvement in how the Ukrainian government has shifted over the last decade. After 2014, the Ukrainians opted to accept the IMF loans, they opted to further integrate with the EU economically. And Russia is watching all of this happen. And so immediately after the overthrow, the eastern regions in Ukraine, who were ethnically closer to Russians, and they speak Russian and they favor closer ties to Russia—

    JJ: Right.

    Bryce Greene

    Bryce Greene: “This current escalation started because of the US involvement in the Ukrainian government’s politics.”

    BG: They revolted. They started an uprising to gain more autonomy, and possibly to separate from the Ukraine entirely. The Ukrainian government cracked down hard. And that only fueled the rebellion, and so Russian sent in volunteers and soldiers to help back these rebels. Now, of course, Russia denies it, but we all know they are.

    And so since 2014, that sort of civil war has been at a stalemate, and every so often there would be a military exercise on the border by one side or another. But really nothing much has changed. And so this current escalation started because of the US involvement in the Ukrainian government’s politics.

    JJ: Right.

    BG: And when Russia started building up troops on the border, the United States started saying, hey, they’re about to attack. Of course, they didn’t have any evidence for that. The Russians had built up troops on the border in similar numbers in the past without a similar panic.

    JJ: Right.

    BG: But this time there was a lot of panic. So at this point the US media starts saying that, yes, this is Russia; they’re building up to invade Ukraine. They’re similar to Hitler or some other dictator that’s violating national sovereignty. And so now you have the US sending millions and millions and millions of dollars in weapons. They’re claiming that an invasion is imminent. There was this strange thing from the State Department about the Russians planning a false flag attack to justify an invasion. Of course, the State Department didn’t provide any evidence of that.

    JJ: And in fact, a reporter,  Matt Lee of AP, pushed back on that, famously.

    BG: Yeah. Like a normal person should. Then Ned Price, the State Department spokesperson, accused him of being pro-Russia, or consorting with the enemy. It was really ridiculous.

    But those are the roots of this entire escalation, this situation, these heightened tensions. And all of that is completely omitted from the Western media. How can you talk about the current situation without talking about the past? How can you understand Russia’s actions without understanding how the United States might have provoked them? And yet you have pundits all over the place asking, what does Putin want? Who knows if Putin’s going to invade? Or on another end is, like, Putin won’t stop with Ukraine. He’ll keep going. His goal is to reestablish the Soviet Union, or the Russian empire. And this is all ridiculous.

    From the start, Putin has been clear that he does not want NATO to expand, that he does not want missiles stationed just across his border. He doesn’t want troops there. He doesn’t want those problems on his border. But that doesn’t seem to be something that the United States media can understand. In fact, when Putin sent a proposal to Biden, talking about NATO, talking about the weapons, talking about the missiles, the media described these as non-starters.

    JJ: Mmhm.

    BG: As if asking for missiles not to be pointed at you at, point blank range, is out of the question to ask. Putin should accept that there will be a bunch of missiles, there will be a bunch of soldiers and military bases, all pointed at him. And that doesn’t square. Imagine, again, if the US were being asked to tolerate missiles pointed at us in Mexico or Canada. Again, we would go crazy.

    JJ: Well, US exceptionalism is part of the price of admission to serious news media conversation. You’re supposed to accept that the US has the right to intervene anywhere, anytime. If we’re going to talk about who owes who what, or the US, James Baker, made a commitment about NATO and its reach, and somehow that’s also off the page.

    WaPo: Putin’s fight with Ukraine reflects his deep distrust of the West. There’s a long history behind that.

    Washington Post (12/1/21)

    BG: It’s sometimes discussed in media. Like, there was a Washington Post article, and they interviewed Mary Sarotte. And she wrote one of the major books talking about this promise not to expand to the east, and she said, straight up, Washington got greedy, and that destabilized the region. That was just one interview in a sea of the official line, in a sea of opinions and articles talking about how Vladimir Putin wants to expand the Soviet empire. Just having one article in the midst of all the noise, it doesn’t really do much to cut through.

    So it is admitted by the media, but it isn’t really addressed. They don’t take it into account when they do their analyses. And that reflects a major American exceptionalist bias.

    JJ: Let me just say, polls, despite the media onslaught, despite corporate media slipping so easily into saber-rattling mode—it’s just so unsettling to see the ease with which news media go back into yeah, them, they’re horrible. Yes, us, we’re great, and surely killing is the answer. Despite all of that, and despite disinformation, polls are still showing that people in the US don’t want a war with Russia. Apparently Russian polls show that Russian people don’t want a war. People understand the harms of these things that pundits are blithely tossing about.

    BG: Mmhm.

    JJ: And so I just want to ask you, there are other voices. There are other ideas about how to go forward. Can you just talk about other avenues, what diplomacy might look like, what media that take diplomacy seriously might look like, or might include or exclude?

    BG: Part of the stalemate between the eastern Donbas rebels and the Ukrainian government, part of that was started because they agreed to a ceasefire in something called the Minsk II agreement.

    JJ: Right.

    BG: The Minsk agreements were an arrangement where the Ukraine would provide a degree of autonomy to the Donbas region, and Russia would withdraw all of its volunteers and troops. The area would be sort of demilitarized, and then there would be elections in that region and some sort of special status for that region afterwards.

    Well, Ukraine has refused to implement it, and Washington and the rest of the European Union, they don’t really push Ukraine on this. There are a lot of reasons for that;  mainly one of them is because they don’t think that they would be able to join NATO if they had a region of their country that isn’t fully controlled by the country. And so there’s been sort of a stagnation there.

    But there’s been a lot of people, analysts, who are talking about restarting these Minsk II agreements, talking about how can we get to a point where we’re talking about it again, and implementing it and maybe reimagining it for a more recent time, a more modern time? But those voices are very rarely included in the mainstream media. People talk about negotiations, and then they talk about all the “non-starters” that Putin’s offering, but they don’t talk about the framework for diplomacy that already exists.

    Nation: Ukraine: The Most Dangerous Problem in the World

    The Nation (11/15/21)

    One of the best commentators is Anatol Lieven of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He writes very clearly. He had a very good article in The Nation about the Minsk II agreements. And there are some in the media who do take his voice and amplify it. He was on Mehdi Hasan’s show on MSNBC, one of the only decent people on MSNBC.

    JJ: Right.

    BG: And then I think he was interviewed once on NPR. But beyond that, no one hears about that. No one hears that there is a diplomatic solution that can apply to the situation. And so the result is that people are scared that, OK, there’s going to be a war. And the only off-ramp seems to be non-starters.

    JJ: And it’s disheartening, in the sense that people who, I’m talking about US citizens, they really don’t have a beef with Ukraine. They don’t know what’s going on in Ukraine. They are only looking at news media for their cues —

    BG: Mmhm.

    JJ: —of what to understand and how to feel. And we didn’t even get started on if you learn more about Ukrainian movements and what they’re about, would those be the team that you would back, you know?

    BG: Right, right.

    JJ: That’s a whole other story, yeah?

    BG: Yeah. So part of the opposition that helped topple the government in 2014 were made up of the far right. And I know we in America throw around the term “Nazi.” Sometimes it applies, sometimes it doesn’t.

    JJ: Mmhm.

    BG: Here, in this case, it absolutely applies. These are open Nazis flying Nazi symbols, Nazi flags, doing Nazi salutes, and they have an ethnic purity idea about why they’re opposed to Russia.

    And so the United States utilized these people to help overthrow the government. There was a lot of violence around the time of the overthrow. Some of these Nazis, they actually gathered a bunch of protestors in a building, locked the doors, and set the building on fire, killing dozens. But none of this is talked about when we talk about the current situation.

    And part of those far-right groups, part of those far-right militias, they were integrated into the Ukrainian military, the Ukrainian National Guard. And this is the same national guard that the US has given about $2.5 billion. And we don’t talk about it.

    Congress did have a provision that restricted aid to this specific sector of the Ukrainian military. But there was a report from, I think, the Daily Beast that said that there really is no mechanism for enforcing that. Like, it’s on paper, but it’s not in practice. And so the United States is actively funding Nazi militias. That’s just a fact.

    Twitter: Ukrainian great grandmother, Valentina Constantinovska, on an Ak-47, training to defend against a possible Russian attack.

    Twitter (2/13/22)

    And, in fact, recently there was a picture of an old woman holding an AK-47 in a training session. And it was used in Western media to show that the Ukrainian people are ready to defend their homeland. Well, people did some digging on the ground, and it turns out that this was a public relations event staged by these Nazis, by the Azov Battalion. But no one reported that in Western media. In fact, I think it was Richard Engel of NBC, I believe, who tweeted a picture of it. People called him out, they said, hey, these are Nazi people. There was actually a Nazi patch visible in the footage that was used on TV. No accountability.

    JJ: No.

    BG: No accountability, no one is forced to say, oops, sorry, I didn’t mean to spread Nazi propaganda to Western audiences.

    JJ: Right.

    BG: No one is saying that.  But that’s US media for you. You see it in Czech press, in Irish press, and all over the world. They’re like, yeah, these were straight-up Nazis, this was a Nazi event. And the US media can’t seem to grasp this.

    JJ: I’ll just finish up where we started, because I know that listeners are uninformed, and almost ashamed of being uninformed, about what’s going on, as is often the case in foreign policy. And then they’re relying on US media to tell them which side they’re on, and to explain the interest. And just in a final minute or so, somebody’s picking up a paper, looking at Ukraine. What are some questions that you would just say, keep this in your mind as you read this coverage? ‘Cause it’s not done. It’s not done, you know; it’s going forward.

    BG: Mmhm.

    JJ: What should we keep in mind as we look at media coverage, going forward from today?

    BG: One of the biggest questions that I ask myself whenever I’m reading a piece like this, aside from taking history into account, which is important, but you should also ask yourself, who are the sources being utilized in this story? Very often you’ll see a story that says “according to US intelligence” or “according to this State Department official” or “according to someone in the government.” Like, official sources. Well, if you look at the history of US media and US government public relations, there’s a well-documented and very extensive history of the government lying to the public. The classic example, WMD.

    JJ: Yeah.

    BG: WMD, for many people, destroyed the credibility of the media, because they credibly took government statements at face value. They didn’t question them. They didn’t seek out alternative explanations. They didn’t challenge the government when they said what they said. And so that’s sort of what they’re doing here. Repeatedly, you’re seeing stories about intelligence officials who say that an invasion is imminent without providing any evidence.

    And so you have to take intelligence and official government sources with a grain of salt. When an intelligence agency says that Russia is going to invade, well, the only information you have is that an intelligence agency wants you to believe that Russians are going to invade, regardless of whether or not they are going to. And so that’s one filter that might help cut through the noise when reading the media.

    JJ: We’ve been speaking with Bryce Greene. Bryce Greene’s piece, “What You Should Really Know About Ukraine,” appeared recently on FAIR.org. Bryce Greene, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

    BG: I’m very happy to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

    The post In Ukraine, ‘No One Hears That There Is a Diplomatic Solution’ appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a TV address Thursday morning that the goal of Russia’s military operation was not to take control of Ukraine, but to “demilitarize” and “de-Nazify” the country.  Moments after he spoke, explosions were heard in several Ukrainian cities.

    The Russian Defense Ministry said these were “precision” attacks against Ukrainian military installations and that civilians were not being targeted.  It said Ukraine’s air force on the ground and its air defenses had been destroyed.

    The post What Putin Says Are The Causes & Aims Of Russia’s Military Action appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • “This is not going to be a war of Ukraine and Russia. This is going to be a European war, a full-fledged war.” So spoke Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky just days after berating the U.S. for beating the drums of war.

    It is not hard to imagine how Zelensky’s words must have fallen on those European ears that were attentive.  His warning surely conjured up images of World War II when tens of millions of Europeans and Russians perished.

    The post WWII Redux: The Endpoint Of U.S. Policy, From Ukraine To Taiwan appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • In the midst of turmoil and controversy, it is useful to review the most important preceding events and analyze how did this happen. Following are some key events and historical facts leading to the current crisis in Ukraine.

    Fact 1. In February 2014, a coup overthrew the Ukrainian government which came to power in an election certified by the OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation). The president, Viktor Yanukovich, was forced to flee for his life.

    This situation was presciently analyzed  at the time by Seumas Milne who wrote:

    The attempt to lever Kiev into the western camp by ousting an elected leader made conflict certain. It could be a threat to us all.

    Fact 2. The coup was promoted by United States officials. Neo-conservatives such as Victoria Nuland and John McCain actively supported the protests. As confirmed in a secretly recorded phone call,  Nuland determined the post-coup composition weeks in advance. Later,  Nuland bragged they spent $5 billion in this campaign over two decades. Before the coup was “midwifed”,  Nuland forcefully rejected a likely European compromise agreement which would have led to a compromise government. “F*** the EU!”,  she said.  Nuland managed the coup but Vice President Biden was overall in charge. As Nuland says in the phone call, Biden would give the ultimate “atta boy” to the coup leaders. Subsequently, Joe Biden’s son personally benefited from the coup.  Victoria Nuland has even more power now as the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs. Secret US forces such as the Central Intelligence Agency must also be involved.

    Fact 3. The coup government immediately acted with hostility toward its Russian speaking citizens. Approximately 30% of Ukrainian citizens have Russian as their first language, yet on the first day in power, the coup regime acted to make Russian no longer an official state language. This was followed by more actions of hostility. As documented in the video “Crimes of the Euromaidan Nazis”, a convoy of buses going back to Crimea was attacked. In Odessa, over thirty  opponents of the coup government died when they were attacked and the trade union hall set afire.

    Fact 4. During World War 2, there were some Nazi sympathizers in western Ukraine when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union.  This element continues today in the form of Svoboda and other far right nationalist parties. The Ukrainian government has even passed legislation heroizing Nazi collaborators while removing statues honoring anti-Nazi patriots.  The situation was described three years ago in an article “Neo-nazis and the far right are on the march in Ukraine”.  The author questioned why the US is supporting this. Under President Poroshenko (2014 to 2019) nationalism surged and even the Orthodox Church split apart.

    Fact 5. The secession of Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk are a direct result of the 2014 coup. In Crimea, a referendum vote was rapidly organized. With 83% turnout and 97% voting in favor, Crimeans decided to secede from Ukraine and re-unify with Russia. Crimea was part of Russia since 1783.  When the administration of Crimea was transferred to the Ukraine in 1954. they were all part of the Soviet Union. This was done without consulting the population.

    Author’s note: I visited Crimea in 2017 and talked with diverse people including the popularly elected city council officials. There is no doubt about the overwhelming support for re-unification with Russia.

    In the provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk on the border with Russia, the majority of the population speaks Russian and had no hostility to Russia. The Kiev coup regime was hostile and enacting policies they vehemently disagreed with.  In spring 2014,  the Luhansk and Donetsk Peoples Republics declared their independence from the Kiev regime.

    Fact 6. The Minsk Agreements of 2014 and 2015 were signed by Ukraine, Ukrainian rebels, Russia and other European authorities.  They were designed to stop the bloodshed in eastern Ukraine and retain the territorial integrity of Ukraine while granting a measure of autonomy to Luhansk and  Donetsk. This is not abnormal; there are 17 autonomous zones in Europe. These agreements were later rebuffed by the Kiev government and Washington. This led to the decision by Russia on 21 February 2022 to recognize the Peoples Republics of Donetsk (DPR) and Luhansk (LPR).

    But isn’t secession illegal under international law? The US and NATO have little credibility to oppose secession since they promoted the breakup of Yugoslavia, secession of Kosovo from Serbia,  secession of South Sudan from Sudan, and Kurdish secessionist efforts in Iraq and Syria, etc.. The secession of Crimea is justified by its unique history and overwhelming popular support. The secession of Luhansk and Donetsk may be justified by the illegal 2014 Kiev coup.

    US intervention, both open and secret, has been a major driver of the events in Ukraine. The US has been the major instigator of the conflict.

    The post The US is the major instigator of the Ukraine conflict first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.


  • This content originally appeared on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and was authored by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.