Victoria Nuland

No weapons to Ukraine: open letter to the U.S Senate opposing S. 452

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Posted on Global Research, February 25, 2015

Reject S. 452, “A bill to provide lethal weapons to the Government of Ukraine.”

Why is this important?

The United States is the leading provider of weapons to the world, and the practice of providing weapons to countries in crisis has proven disastrous, including Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. Expanding NATO to Russia’s border and arming Russia’s neighbors threatens something worse than disaster. The United States is toying with nuclear war.

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt played significant roles in orchestrating the political crisis that led to a violent coup overthrowing Ukraine’s elected President. Nuland not only exclaimed “Fuck the EU!” on that recorded phone call, but she also seemed to decide on the new prime minister: “Yats is the guy.”

The Maidan protests were violently escalated by neo-Nazis and by snipers who opened fire on police. When Poland, Germany, and France negotiated a deal for the Maidan demands and an early election, neo-Nazis instead attacked the government and took over. The U.S. State Department immediately recognized the coup government, and Yatsenyuk was indeed installed as Prime Minister.

The people of Crimea voted overwhelmingly to secede, and that — rather than the coup — has been labeled “aggression.” Ethnic Russians have been massacred by constant shelling from Kiev’s U.S.-NATO backed Army, while Russia has been denounced for “aggression” in the form of various unsubstantiated accusations, including the downing of Flight 17.

It’s important to recognize Western interests at work here other than peace and generosity. GMO outfits want the excellent farming soil in Ukraine. The U.S. and NATO want a “missile defense” base in Ukraine. Oil corporations want to drill for fracked gas in Ukraine. The U.S. and EU want to get their hands on Russia’s “largest supply of natural gas” on the planet.

We routinely recognize the financial corruption of the U.S. government in domestic policy making. We shouldn’t blind ourselves to it in matters of foreign policy. There may be a flag waving, but there is nuclear war looming, and that’s a bit more important.

Initial signers (organizations for identification):

David Swanson, World Beyond War. Bruce Gagnon, Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space. Nick Mottern, KnowDrones.com. Tarak Kauff, Veterans For Peace. Carolyn McCrady, Peace and Justice Can Win. Medea Benjamin, Code Pink. Gareth Porter. Malachy Kilbride, National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance. Buzz Davis, WI Impeachment/Bring Our Troops Home Coalition. Alice Slater, Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. Doug Rawlings, Veterans For Peace. Diane Turco, Cape Codders for Peace and Justice. Rich Greve, Peace Action Staten Island. Kevin Zeese, Popular Resistance. Margaret Flowers, Popular Resistance. Heinrich Buecker, Coop Anti-War Cafe Berlin. Dud Hendrick. Ellen Barfield, Veterans For Peace and War Resisters League. Herbert Hoffman, Veterans For Peace. Jean Athey, Peace Action Montgomery. Kent Shifferd. Matthew Hoh. Bob Cushing, Pax Christi. Bill Gilson, Veterans For Peace. Michael Brenner, University of Pittsburgh. Cindy Sheehan: Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox. Jodie Evans, Code Pink. Judith Deutsch. Jim Haber. Elliott Adams. Joe Lombardo and Marilyn Levin, UNAC co-coordinators. David Hartsough, World Beyond War. Mairead Maguire, Nobel peace laureate, Co founder peace people. Koohan Paik, International Forum on Globalization. Ellen Judd, University of Manitoba. Nicolas Davies. Rosalie Tyler Paul, PeaceWorks, Brunswick Maine.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/no-weapons-to-ukraine-an-open-letter-to-the-u-s-senate/5433364

 

Victoria Nuland: America’s riot-diplomat — Spiegel (English)

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By Matthias Gebauer und Holger Stark
February 10, 2015

Victoria Nuland: A clear opinion on what needs to be done in Ukraine

“Fuck the EU” – Victoria Nuland can be very direct. For the US government’s diplomat to negotiate in Ukraine crisis with Europe. At the Munich Security Conference but they drew another irritation.

Victoria Nuland is in Washington in front of an azure video screen of the Brookings Institution [her husband Robert Kagan is a Senior Fellow at Brookings Institution] and wants to say a few basic sentences on Ukraine crisis. “We have to help Ukraine to stop the blood loss,” she says. Even with deadly weapons? Nuland speaks of “defensive” measures and makes only just before stop, to press for the delivery of heavy weapons to the government in Kiev.

Nuland has a very direct way, you can focus on entertaining, but also be undiplomatic -. For a diplomat these are dangerous properties.

The 53-year-old is the European representative of the US government, it is the United States pass through Ukraine crisis and solve the problems with Russian President Vladimir Putin. But in the crisis Nuland has itself become a problem.

Last Friday the American woman of their delegation to the Munich Security Conference gave an internal briefing. She was on the sixth floor of the Hotel Bayerischer Hof. In the room were perhaps two dozen US diplomats and senators. Especially the German Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen had spoken publicly that arms sales could act as an accelerant in eastern Ukraine. The Americans were angry.

Nuland is supposed to have given the line: “We can fight against the Europeans, rhetorically fight them,” she said, according to the newspaper “Bild”.

Nuland called the journey of the Chancellor [Merkel] to Russian President Vladimir Putin, the report says, “Merkel Moscow stuff”. The atmosphere heated up, one of the senators spoke evilly of von der Leyen (“defeatist-Minister”), the term “Moscow bullshit” of the Europeans fell probably, too.

The top diplomat Nuland is considered conservative. In the case of an election victory of the Republicans in the coming year she will be considered a potential new Foreign Minister. She is married to Robert Kagan, a conservative thinker. He published last year a text, why America must remain the undisputed leading power in the world.

In Ukraine crisis Nuland is considered hardliner and follower of arms sales – unlike their President Barack Obama she has a clear opinion on what needs to be done.

Stroke of luck and burden for Obama

Nuland was on the US embassies in Moscow and Beijing, as a diplomat in NATO, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman in Washington. But no country fascinates her as much as Russia. She loves this country, she once said. Nuland speaks Russian fluently. As the “most important memory of her career” is the top diplomat day in August 1991, when it cooperated with 250,000 people in front of the Kremlin in Moscow confessed “and said no to the counter-revolution”. Victoria Nuland has therefore also made the fight against the forces of darkness in the former Russian Empire in the center of her career.

It is therefore a godsend and a burden at the same time for Obama. She made headlines after the Munich Security Conference last year. At that time she flew from Munich to Prague and Cyprus to Kiev, and on the way she called Geoffrey Pyatt, the American ambassador to Ukraine. Nuland renounced specific safety procedures and using her normal mobile phone. So the conversation was unencrypted.

On the evening of February 4, 2014 appeared on YouTube on a recording of four minutes and eleven seconds. The conversation between the two top diplomats gave a rare glimpse into the world of American diplomacy. At the end of the call Nuland said on a proposal by the US government, which was to outmaneuver the hesitant Europeans, and it has made world famous. Shortly before she had spoken with the United Nations, the United Nations should engage in Ukraine and send a messenger to the EU which would not have much to say. “That would be great, I think, to help things move, the UN would move things,” Nuland said and added: “. Fuck the EU”

“Absolutely unacceptable” were the words that the Chancellor was at that time aligned – an unusually sharp reaction. In the days that followed Nuland had to apologize. As a token of apology, she appeared in the next round with a homemade button “. I love the EU”

Now, for the second time Nuland’s derogatory statements have leaked out that were not meant for the public. The Germans were irritated, after all, the American had, at the meeting with German Minister Merkel, praised the initiative to defuse crisis in Ukraine.

The day after the report in the newspaper “Bild” Nuland wanted nothing more to do with the statements then. Rather, she was a fan of the diplomacy initiative of the German Chancellor. “In the public and internally all of us have, myself included, supported the diplomacy,” she said to the US newspaper “Wall Street Journal”, “and we have worked side by side with them.”

Source:

http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/victoria-nuland-barack-obamas-problem-diplomatin-a-1017614.html

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Victoria Nuland: Amerikas Krawall-Diplomatin — Spiegel (Deutsch)

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Von  und Holger Stark, Berlin und Washington
10.02.2015

“Fuck the EU” – Victoria Nuland kann sehr direkt sein. Für die US-Regierung soll die Diplomatin in der Ukraine-Krise mit Europa verhandeln. Bei der Münchner Sicherheitskonferenz aber sorgte sie erneut für Irritationen.

Victoria Nuland steht in Washington vor einer azurblauen Videoleinwand der Denkfabrik Brookings Institution [ihr Mann Robert Kagan ist Senior Fellow am Brookings Institution] und will ein paar grundsätzliche Sätze zur Ukraine-Krise sagen. “Wir müssen der Ukraine dabei helfen, den Blutverlust zu stoppen”, fordert sie. Auch mit tödlichen Waffen? Nuland spricht von “defensiven” Maßnahmen und macht nur knapp davor halt, auf die Lieferung von schweren Waffen an die Regierung in Kiew zu drängen.

Nuland hat eine sehr direkte Art. Sie kann scharf, unterhaltsam, aber auch undiplomatisch werden – für eine Diplomatin sind das gefährliche Eigenschaften.

Die 53-Jährige ist die Europa-Beauftragte der amerikanischen Regierung, sie soll die USA durch die Ukraine-Krise führen und die Probleme mit dem russischen Präsidenten Wladimir Putin lösen. Aber in der Krise ist Nuland selbst zum Problem geworden.

Am vergangenen Freitag gab die Amerikanerin ihrer Delegation bei der Münchner Sicherheitskonferenz ein internes Briefing. Sie saß im sechsten Stock des Hotels Bayerischer Hof, im Raum waren vielleicht zwei Dutzend US-Diplomaten und Senatoren. Gerade hatte die deutsche Verteidigungsministerin Ursula von der Leyen öffentlich davon gesprochen, Waffenlieferungen könnten in der Ostukraine wie ein Brandbeschleuniger wirken. Die Amerikaner waren sauer.

Nuland soll die Linie vorgegeben haben: “Wir können gegen die Europäer kämpfen, rhetorisch gegen sie kämpfen”, sagte sie nach Angaben der “Bild”-Zeitung.

Die Reise der Kanzlerin zum russischen Präsidenten Wladimir Putin nannte Nuland dem Bericht zufolge “Merkels Moskau-Zeug”. Die Stimmung heizte sich auf, einer der Senatoren soll über von der Leyen (“Defätismus-Ministerin”) gelästert haben, der Begriff “Moskau bullshit” der Europäer fiel wohl auch.

Die Top-Diplomatin Nuland gilt als konservativ. Im Fall eines Wahlsiegs der Republikaner im kommenden Jahr wird sie als mögliche neue Außenministerin gehandelt. Sie ist mit Robert Kagan verheiratet, einem konservativen Vordenker. Er veröffentlichte im vergangenen Jahr einen Text, warum Amerika die unumstrittene Führungsmacht in der Welt bleiben müsse.

In der Ukraine-Krise gilt Nuland als Hardlinerin und Anhängerin von Waffenlieferungen – anders als ihr Präsident Barack Obama hat sie eine klare Meinung, was getan werden muss.

Glücksfall und Hypothek für Obama

Nuland war an den US-Botschaften in Moskau und Peking, als Diplomatin bei der Nato und Sprecherin des Außenministeriums in Washington. Aber kein Land fasziniert sie so wie Russland. Sie liebe dieses Land, hat sie einmal gesagt. Russisch spricht Nuland fließend. Als die “wichtigste Erinnerung ihrer Karriere” bezeichnet die Spitzendiplomatin den Tag im August 1991, als sie zusammen mit 250.000 Menschen vor dem Kreml in Moskau gestanden “und Nein zur Konterrevolution gesagt” habe. Victoria Nuland hat deshalb auch den Kampf gegen die Mächte des Finsteren im einstigen Zarenreich in den Mittelpunkt ihrer Karriere gestellt.

Sie ist damit ein Glücksfall und eine Hypothek zugleich für Obama. Für Schlagzeilen sorgte sie bereits nach der Münchner Sicherheitskonferenz des vergangenen Jahres. Damals flog sie von München über Zypern und Prag nach Kiew, und auf dem Weg telefonierte sie mit Geoffrey Pyatt, dem amerikanischen Botschafter in der Ukraine. Nuland verzichtete auf besondere Sicherheitsvorkehrungen und benutzte ihr normales Mobiltelefon. Damit war das Gespräch unverschlüsselt.

Am Abend des 4. Februar 2014 tauchte bei YouTube ein Mitschnitt auf, vier Minuten und elf Sekunden lang. Das Gespräch zwischen den beiden Spitzendiplomaten gab einen seltenen Einblick in die Welt der amerikanischen Diplomatie. Am Ende des Telefonats sprach Nuland einen Vorschlag der US-Regierung an, der die zögerlichen Europäer ausmanövrieren sollte und sie weltberühmt gemacht hat. Kurz zuvor hatte sie mit den Vereinten Nationen gesprochen, die Uno sollte sich in der Ukraine engagieren und einen Gesandten schicken, damit hätte die EU nicht mehr viel zu sagen. “Das wäre großartig, denke ich, um zu helfen, die Dinge zu bewegen, die Uno würde die Dinge vorantreiben”, sagte Nuland und setzte hinzu: “Fuck the EU.”

“Absolut inakzeptabel” seien die Worte, ließ die Kanzlerin damals ausrichten – eine ungewöhnlich scharfe Reaktion. In den Tagen danach musste Nuland sich entschuldigen. Als Zeichen der Abbitte erschien sie bei der nächsten Runde mit einem selbstgemachten Anstecker: “I love the EU.”

Nun sind zum zweiten Mal abfällige Aussagen Nulands durchgesickert, die nicht für die Öffentlichkeit gedacht waren. Die Deutschen zeigten sich irritiert, schließlich hatte die Amerikanerin bei den Treffen mit deutschen Ministern Merkels Initiative zur Deeskalation in der Ukraine-Krise gelobt.

Am Tag nach dem Bericht in der “Bild”-Zeitung wollte Nuland von den Aussagen dann auch nichts mehr wissen. Vielmehr sei sie ein Fan der Diplomatie-Initiative der deutschen Kanzlerin. “In der Öffentlichkeit und intern haben alle von uns, mich eingeschlossen, deren Diplomatie unterstützt”, sagte sie der US-Zeitung “Wall Street Journal”, “und wir haben Seite an Seite mit ihnen gearbeitet.”

http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/victoria-nuland-barack-obamas-problem-diplomatin-a-1017614.html

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Victoria Nuland attempts another coup — Kiev Version 2.0 — in Macedonia

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Posted on Strategic Culture Foundation, February 16, 2015
By Wayne Madsen

After having initiated her well-planned Maidan Square uprising in Kiev in early 2014, triggering Europe’s worst conflict in Ukraine since the Balkan Wars of the 1990s, Victoria Nuland, the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, recently attempted a Kiev-style putsch in Macedonia aimed at overthrowing that nation’s democratically-elected government of Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski. It is a hallmark of neoconservatives like Nuland and her arch-neoconservative husband, the Brookings Institution’s Robert Kagan, to disregard democratic elections if their candidates fail to win election. Although Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and Macedonian Prime Minister Gruevski were elected in free and fair elections, by all international metrics and norms, their governments were not as pro-NATO and pro-U.S. enough for the liking of Nuland and the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) cabalists that surround her husband.

Nuland’s tactics differed somewhat in her Ukrainian and Macedonian campaigns. Her signature challah bread offerings to protesters at Kiev’s Maidan Square took the form of unsolicited offerings to the Macedonian press suggesting that Gruevksi was wiretapping as many as 20,000 Macedonians and that a videotape proving it was secretly made by Macedonia’s George Soros-financed leader of the opposition, Zoran Zaev, in a meeting he had with Gruevski.

Nuland has been charged by Macedonian intelligence with conspiring with Zaev of the Macedonian Social Democratic Union of Macedonia (SDSM), the former Communist Party that has been thoroughly co-opted by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Soros operative. Also charged in the attempted putsch against Gruevski is Radmila Sekerinska. Zaev and Sekerinska are said by Macedonian insiders to be nothing more than fronts for former Prime Minister and President Branko Crvenkovski who continues to head up the SDSM and accept large amounts of largesse from such CIA NGO laundry operations as the National Democratic Institute (NDI), National Endowment for Democracy (NED), Freedom House, and Soros’s Open Society Institute (OSI) to foment a themed revolution against Gruevksi’s right-of-center VMRO-DPMNE government.

Gruevksi, unlike many U.S.-installed and -influenced governments of the region has been reluctant to apply sanctions against Russia over Ukraine. That stance has earned the government in Skopje the enmity of the Obama administration and most notably, Nuland, whose rhetoric echoes leading neo-conservative war hawks such as Republican senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham. In fact, Nuland’s husband has the distinction of working as a foreign policy adviser for both McCain and presumptive 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

In response to Zaev’s charge that Gruevski wiretapped 20,000 Macedonians, including taping phone calls between Zaev and his young daughter, the Macedonian government charged that it was Zaev and his associates, working with a foreign intelligence agency believed to be the CIA, to overthrow Gruevski’s government. An obvious flight risk, Zaev was ordered to turn in his passport to the authorities. Others, in addition to Zaev, accused of working with the CIA to oust Gruevski include Zaev’s associates Sonja Verusevska and Branko Palifrov, as well as the former director of the Office of Security and Counter-intelligence (DBK), Zoran Verusevski. Gruevski charged that Zaev threatened to disclose sensitive information about his government provided to the SDSM by the CIA, referred to as “the bomb” in the Macedonian media, unless Gruevski appointed a caretaker government that would lead to early parliamentary elections. Gruevski has called Zaev’s gambit nothing more than blackmail pressure in order that a snap election be called. As far as pressuring the Gruevski government to resign and call early elections, Nuland resorted to the same gambit that was used in Kiev to oust Yanukovych.

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reporter Michael Martens, who reported on the Macedonian coup plot, claimed in an interview with Macedonian television that his initial report on the wiretapping issue had been altered by certain parties inside Macedonia. Martens said that with a population of 2 million, to wiretap 20,000 people would have even far exceed the capabilities of the East German Stasi. In any event, Martens said the 20,000 figure was not true and that Macedonian media and politicians had misquoted him and his article. However, the truth has never been on the side of provocateurs like Nuland and her neoconservative cabal of plotters and disinformation specialists.

The unapologetic foul-mouthed Nuland met on the side of the 51st Munich Security Conference in Germany with Macedonian Foreign Minister Nikola Poposki and President Gjorge Ivanov to express her displeasure at Gruevski’s insurrection charges against her friend Zaev and his SDSM co-conspirators. Earlier, Nuland had offered to mediate a long-standing dispute between Greece and Macedonia over the latter’s use of the name Macedonia, which some Greeks consider to be a solely Greek name. Macedonian observers viewed Nuland’s interest in the name dispute to be a trap that would enable a pro-U.S. government, along with the Zionist and global banker baggage that comes with any such «themed» coup d’etat, to seize power in Skopje. Nuland and her co-conspirators were hoping for a replay of Kiev in what can be termed «Kiev Version 2.0.»

Nuland and her co-conspirators in Skopje are alarmed over the speed at which the Macedonian security services rounded up the coup plotters. Macedonian police, in raids conducted in Skopje and Veles, seized five laptop computers, three desktop computers, 19 mobile phones, 100 CDs and DVDs, 17 hard disks, and 9 savings deposit books used by the coup plotters, including a number linked to Soros-financed NGOs. The bank accounts of the plotters reportedly were flush with healthy cash deposits from the CIA as the date of the planned coup approached.

The use of social media by the Soros/CIA coup plotters should come as no surprise. Social media served at the very core of the themed revolutions sponsored by the CIA and Soros twice in Ukraine (Orange Revolution and Euro-Maidan uprising), Jasmine Revolution (Tunisia), Lotus Revolution (Egypt), Rose Reviolution (Georgia), Tulip Revolution (Kyrgyszstan), and Green Revolution (Iran). In the case of Macedonia, there are clear indications that the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor (DRL) Thomas Melia, responsible for DRL’s work in Europe, including Russia, as well as the Middle East and North Africa, conspired directly with Zaev to mount a coup against the Gruevski government. Melia is the former deputy director of Freedom House, a Cold War-era neoconservative bevvy of U.S. war hawks based in New York. Although founded in 1941 by such progressives as Eleanor Roosevelt, Ralph Bunche, journalist Dorothy Thompson, novelist Rex Stout (creator of Nero Wolfe), and Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie (who would be considered by today’s Republicans in the U.S. as a stark-raving liberal), Freedom House has devolved into a neoconservative chatter source having employed as their board members in recent years such war hawk cretins as Paul Wolfowitz, Ken Adelman, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Donald Rumsfeld, and Otto Reich. Freedom House has been caught red-handed funneling CIA money to opposition groups in Iran, Sudan, Russia, and China. In essence, Freedom House, like Soros’s NGOs, serves as a conduit for CIA support for rebellious opposition forces in dozens of countries around the world, countries that now include Macedonia, as well as Hungary, Venezuela, Syria, Egypt, Serbia, Jordan, Mexico, and Cuba.

What occurred in Macedonia was a classic disinformation ploy to mire the democratically-elected government in a bogus political scandal. The ploy is directly from the CIA playbook and it is now being carried out against Presidents Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner of Argentina, Dilma Rousseff of Brazil, and Michelle Bachelet of Chile. All face financial scandals cooked up by the CIA and its owned and operated media in the three nations. In Macedonia, the Soros-influenced media and Radio Free Europe are part of the operation.

Nuland’s vulgar language is only matched by the vulgarity of her backroom operations to unseat democratically-elected governments. «Nuland» should become a noun meaning disgraceful diplomatic conduct, in the same manner as the terms «quisling,» meaning «traitor» and derived from the actions of Norwegian Nazi leader Vidkun Quisling, and «boycott,» meaning the cessation of all business with a targeted entity and made famous by Irish land agent Captain Charles Boycott, became part of the English language.

 

http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2015/02/16/nuland-attempts-kiev-version-2-skopje.html

Congress is failing the Tonkin Gulf test on Ukraine

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by Robert Parry
Posted on  Information Clearing House, February 21, 2015

As the Ukraine crisis worsens, Official Washington fumes only about “Russian aggression” — much as a half century ago, the Tonkin Gulf talk was all about “North Vietnamese aggression.” But then and now there were other sides to the story – and questions that Congress needed to ask, writes Robert Parry.

February 21, 2015 “ICH” – “Consortium News” – Many current members of Congress, especially progressives, may have envisioned how they would have handled the Tonkin Gulf crisis in 1964. In their imaginations, they would have asked probing questions and treated the dubious assertions from the White House with tough skepticism before voting on whether to give President Lyndon Johnson the authority to go to war in Vietnam.

If they had discovered what CIA and Pentagon insiders already knew – that the crucial second North Vietnamese “attack” on U.S. destroyers likely never happened and that the U.S. warships were not on some “routine” patrol but rather supporting a covert attack on North Vietnamese territory – today’s members of Congress would likely see themselves joining Sens. Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening as the only ones voting no.

Bravery in hindsight is always easy, but things feel quite different when Official Washington is locked in one of its pro-war “group thinks” when all the “important people” – from government to the media to think tanks – are pounding their chests and talking tough, as they are now on Russia and Ukraine.

Then, if you ask your probing questions and show your tough skepticism, you will have your patriotism, if not your sanity, questioned. You will be “controversialized,” “marginalized,” “pariahed.” You will be called somebody’s “apologist,” whether it’s Ho Chi Minh or Vladimir Putin.

And nobody wants to go through that because here’s the truth about Official Washington: if you run with the pack – if you stay within the herd – you’ll be safe. Even if things go terribly wrong – even if thousands of American soldiers die along with many, many more foreign civilians – you can expect little or no accountability. You will likely keep your job and may well get promoted. But if you stand in the way of the stampede, you’ll be trampled.

After all, remember what happened to Morse and Gruening in their next elections. They both lost. As one Washington insider once told me about the U.S. capital’s culture, “there’s no honor in being right too soon. People just remember that you were out of step and crazy.”

So, the choice often is to do the right thing and be crushed or to run with the pack and be safe. But there are moments when even the most craven member of Congress should look for whatever courage he or she has left and behave like a Morse or a Gruening, especially in a case like the Ukraine crisis which has the potential to spin out of control and into a nuclear confrontation.

Though the last Congress already whipped through belligerent resolutions denouncing “Russian aggression” and urging a military response – with only five Democrats and five Republicans dissenting – members of the new Congress could at least ascertain the facts that have driven the Ukraine conflict. Before the world lurches into a nuclear showdown, it might make a little sense to know what got us here.

The Nuland Phone Call Continue reading →

Will Nuland’s Nazis push the world into war?

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From Executive Intelligence Review, February 20, 2015
by Jeffrey Steinberg

Feb. 17—As of midnight on Feb. 15, a ceasefire went into force in eastern Ukraine. The deal that was hammered out among Russian President Vladimir Putin, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President François Hollande, and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko—i.e., without the direct involvement of the Obama Administration and the U.K. government—after 17 hours of non-stop negotiations in Minsk last week, is fragile, to say the least.

 

The immediate danger lies with an identifiable force—the neo-Nazi militias who are an integral part of the Kiev government, which came to power one year ago in a Nazi-driven coup d’état. Those Nazis are acting as protected assets of the Obama Administration, specifically Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland.

 

These neo-Nazi forces have officially rejected the ceasefire. The battalions they control in southeastern Ukraine are not fully under the control of the central government in Kiev, but are armed by Ukraine’s “oligarchs”—big businessmen such as Dnepropetrovsk Governor Ihor Kolomoysky. They are the offshoot of the Bandera movement, which was fascist in its own right even before World War II, then welcomed Hitler’s invasion of Ukraine and carried out atrocities against the people of Ukraine and Poland that should have landed them in the dock at the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal. Instead, they were recruited by British and American intelligence services for the Cold War against the Soviet Union.

 

The neo-Nazi representatives within the government in Kiev are also out to sabotage any peace agreement. According to Russian media, former Commandant of the Maidan and current First Deputy Speaker of the Ukrainian parliament (the Supreme Rada) Andriy Parubiy is coming to Washington this week. A cofounder of the neo-Nazi Svoboda party and of one of the paramilitary groups that became the Right Sector spearhead of the February 2014 coup, Parubiy today is a leader in the People’s Front, the political party of the man Victoria Nuland hand-picked as Ukraine’s post-coup prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk.

 

Speaking Feb. 14 on Ukrainian TV, Parubiy announced the purpose of the trip: to get weapons. He said that Ukraine needs to strengthen its armed Forces and get “the USA to give us highly precise modern weaponry.” He added,

 

“Next week I am going to the United States, to discuss this in a very concrete and targeted way.”

 

The possibility that the U.S. would arm Ukraine—a move Moscow would see as an act of war—is precisely what impelled the leaders of France and Germany to work frenetically to get a ceasefire in Ukraine. It would be a step to World War III.

 

The Rush for a Ceasefire

 

President Hollande and Chancellor Merkel saw the Minsk talks as existential. They agreed that, if there were no diplomatic breakthrough, the Obama Administration would begin arming the Ukrainian military and this would escalate the crisis. Over the past weeks, more and more strategic analysts and policymakers have come to view the Ukraine crisis as a potential trigger for thermonuclear war between the United States and Russia. Articles headlining the danger have appeared in Germany’s Der Spiegel and even Britain’s Daily Telegraph.

 

The specter of a war of annihilation starting in the center of Europe was a powerful incentive for Merkel and Hollande to team up to preempt the U.S. weapons flows by the last-ditch diplomacy.

 

On the eve of the Minsk talks, Chancellor Merkel flew to Washington on Feb. 9 to confer with President Obama. She delivered a blunt message, according to German and American sources. First, she told the President that Europe was adamantly opposed to the U.S. arming the Ukrainian Army. Second, she told Obama that the lack of a direct dialogue between him and Russian President Putin was putting the world at risk. Only the leaders of the two nations with the thermonuclear arsenals that could destroy the planet could be the ultimate guarantors of mankind’s survival. They had to resume a direct, personal dialogue, Merkel insisted.

 

Her admonition appears to have had some impact. On Feb. 11, on the eve of the Minsk talks, Obama called Putin, and the two men had a 90-minute conversation, the content of which has been kept secret. According to Spiegel Online, which published a detailed account of Merkel’s and Hollande’s diplomatic efforts, the mere fact that the phone call took place demonstrated that Washington was deeply interested in the outcome of the Minsk talks.

 

At one point in the marathon diplomatic session, according to the Spiegel account, Putin, in private, spoke by phone to the heads of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics (DPR and LPR). He secured their agreement to the ceasefire terms. In addition, Kremlin aide Vladislav Surkov shuttled between the Hollande-Merkel-Poroshenko-Putin meeting and the Minsk contact group, which also met through the night at another location in Minsk (because Poroshenko refused to speak with the DPR/LPR delegation directly). It was the contact group, consisting of Alexander Zakharchenko (DPR), Igor Plotnitsky (LPR), Ukrainian ex-President Leonid Kuchma, Russian Ambassador to Kiev Mikhail Zurabov, and OSCE negotiator Heidi Tagliavini, who actually signed the 10-point Minsk accord.

 

In the previous months of renewed fighting in eastern Ukraine, after the September 2014 ceasefire broke down, the DPR/LPR forces captured an additional belt of territory, especially within the Donetsk Region, as they moved to push the Kiev battalions out of the range from which they could shell Donetsk and other cities. While the Minsk talks were proceeding, the DPR/LPR militias had nearly encircled 6,000 to 8,000 Ukrainians in the town of Debaltseve, the major rail junction between Donetsk and Lugansk. With growing defections, collapsing morale, and widespread draft evasion, the Ukraine Armed Forces were already at a break-point. For Merkel and Hollande, the idea of arming such a disintegrating army was a grave mistake, reflecting a lack of understanding of the reality of the Ukraine crisis in official Washington.

 

The Nuland Factor

 

Indeed, the policy of the Obama Administration towards Ukraine and Russia has been hijacked from day one by a collection of neo-conservatives and humanitarian interventionist ideologues—led by Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland. The wife of neo-con Robert Kagan, Nuland served as a foreign policy advisor to then-Vice President Dick Cheney, before being appointed as the Bush Administration’s Ambassador to NATO.

 

Nuland publicly boasted that the U.S. had poured $5 billion into the “democracy” movement in Ukraine since the end of the Cold War, and she made clear, in an infamous taped phone call in January 2014, that the man who is now Ukrainian Prime Minister, Yatsenyuk, was owned by Washington. She is responsible for covering up the powerful role of the Banderite Nazis in the Maidan coup and the conflict in eastern Ukraine.

 

Nuland’s current role in sabotaging efforts for peace was highlighted in a Feb. 15 article in Germany’s Der Spiegel, entitled “America’s Riot Diplomat.”[1] The column stated that Nuland poses a threat to America’s allies, and that while she is supposed to solve the crisis of Ukraine and relations with Russia, “in the crisis, Nuland herself has become the problem.”

 

Der Spiegel described a closed-door meeting, apparently reported anonymously both to it and to the Bild newspaper, held by Nuland at the Munich Security Conference one week ago, with “perhaps two dozen U.S. diplomats and Senators.” There Nuland gave instructions to “fight against the Europeans” on the issue of arming Ukraine to fight Russia. She was described as referring “bitterly” to the German Chancellor’s and French President’s meeting with President Putin as “Merkel’s Moscow junk,” and “Moscow bullshit,” and she welcomed a Senator’s calling German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen the “Defeatism Minister.”

 

These reports give the lie to Nuland’s claim on the morning of Feb. 11, when the Minsk Agreement was announced, that “we [the United States] enthusiastically support it.”

 

Der Spiegel says that Nuland does not stop short of calling for “heavy weapons” to be given by NATO to Ukraine.

 

Raising the Alarm

 

In a statement issued on Feb. 14, Lyndon LaRouche warned that the war danger would persist until Nuland was fired and her links to hardcore Banderite Nazis exposed publicly (see box).

 

The larger threat of thermonuclear war, stemming from the Ukraine crisis, was a dominant theme behind the scenes at the annual Munich Security Conference. On the eve of that meeting, three national security specialists, former U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), former Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov, and former British Secretary of State for Defence Des Browne, wrote an op-ed calling for an overhaul of the Euro-Atlantic security architecture, with an inclusive role for Russia.

 

The same view was echoed in two other high-visibility venues. On Feb. 11, Jack Matlock, who was President Reagan’s ambassador to the Soviet Union during the closing days of the Cold War, told a packed audience at the National Press Club in Washington that the West had violated some of the most essential agreements with Moscow, those which had allowed for the peaceful demise of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, and that the danger of a world war was grave (see transcript in this Feature).

 

Two days later, Markus Becker, writing about the Munich Security Conference in Spiegel Online, warned that the “Threat of War Is Higher than in the Cold War.” He presented some of the same arguments as the Nunn-Ivanov-Browne article.

 

Unless LaRouche’s demand for Nuland’s ouster is acted upon swiftly, the chances of the neo-Nazis in Ukraine wrecking the fragile peace are immense. Nuland’s ouster must be followed by the agreement among governments to disqualify and remove the Nazi elements now running rampant, and participating in government, in Ukraine. This demand has been raised repeatedly by the Russian government, and by LaRouche.

 

If the cycle of violence in eastern Ukraine resumes full-force, the prospects of escalation into a direct Russia-U.S. military confrontation are very high.

 

Richard Burt, who was one of the chief U.S. arms control negotiators with the Soviets, told Spiegel Online (Feb. 9) that the danger of nuclear war is very great. “Both American and Russian nuclear arms are essentially on a kind of hair-trigger alert. Both sides have a nuclear posture where land-based missiles could be authorized for use in less than 15 minutes.” He acknowledged that the kind of “hybrid warfare” now underway in eastern Ukraine adds greatly to the danger of miscalculation into thermonuclear confrontation. Former Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov concurred, telling Spiegel, “Now the threat of a war is higher than during the Cold War.”

 

It must be understood, in addition, that the primary driver for war is the bankruptcy of the trans-Atlantic financial system, centered in London and Wall Street. The desperation of financier circles over the looming doom of their system and the collapse of their political power is driving the war danger. As Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has observed in recent statements, if there had been no Ukraine crisis, some circles in the West would have created one—to deal with the larger collapse they are facing.

Source:
http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2015/4208nuland_nazis_world_war.html

[1] Der Spiegel article is here (in German):
http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/victoria-nuland-barack-obamas-problem-diplomatin-a-1017614.html

Crimea: was it seized by Russia, or did Russia block its seizure by the U.S.?

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By Eric Zuesse

Both before and after Crimea left Ukraine and joined Russia in a public referendum on 16 March 2014, the Gallup Organization polled Crimeans on behalf of the U.S. Government, and found them to be extremely pro-Russian and anti-American, and also anti-Ukrainian. (Neither poll was subsequently publicized, because the results of each were the opposite of what the sponsor had wished.) Both polls were done on behalf of the U.S. Government, in order to find Crimeans’ attitudes toward the United States and toward Russia, and also toward Ukraine, not only before but also after the planned U.S. coup in Ukraine, which occurred in February 2014 but was actually kicked off on 20 November 2013, the day before Ukraine’s democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych publicly announced that Ukraine had received a better economic offer from Russia’s Eurasian Economic Community than from America’s European Union. (The EEC subsequently became the Eurasian Economic Union, now that it was clear that Ukraine was going with the EU.) That decision by Yanukovych in favor of the EEC was mistakenly thought by him to be merely an economic one, and he didn’t know the extent to which the U.S. Government had set up an operation to overthrow him if he didn’t go along with the EU’s offer. (If some of these basic historical facts don’t come through from merely the wikipedia articles alone, that’s because the CIA is among the organizations that edit wikipedia articles, and so wikipedia is unwittingly a political propaganda vehicle. It is especially used for propaganda by the CIA and FBI.)

 

More recently, a poll of Crimeans was issued on 4 February 2015, by the polling organization GfK, and paid for this time by the pro-American-Government Canadian Government, via its Canada Fund for Local Initiatives, and via Free Crimea, which is itself funded by the latter organization. However, the Canadian Government got no better news than the U.S. Government had gotten: 82% of Crimeans “Fully endorse” Crimea’s having become part of Russia (of which it had been part between 1783 and 1954, and which the public there had never wanted to leave); 11% “Mostly endorse” it; 2% “Mostly disapprove”; 3% “Don’t know”; and only 2% “Fully disapprove.” Or, to put it simply: 93% approve; 3% don’t know, and 4% disapprove. This poll was publicly issued only in the polling organization’s own report, which was made available only in Russian (the Ukrainian Government’s main language for international business) and therefore not comprehensible to English-speakers. It was titled, “СОЦИАЛЬНО-ПОЛИТИЧЕСКИЕ НАСТРОЕНИЯ ЖИТЕЛЕЙ КРЫМА Исследование проведенное GfK Ukraine по заказу компании” or “SOCIO-POLITICAL SENTIMENTS IN CRIMEA: Research conducted by GfK Ukraine on the order of the company.” On February 10th, an English-language article reported and summarized the poll’s findings.
During the 16 March 2014 public referendum in Crimea, 96% voted to rejoin Russia. One question on the post-referendum, April 2014, U.S.-sponsored Gallup poll in Crimea, was headlined, “Perceived Legitimacy of March 16 Crimean Referendum” (on page 28 of the poll-report), and 82.8% of Crimeans agreed with the statement, “The results of the referendum on Crimea’s status likely reflect the views of most people here.” 6.7% disagreed. According to the newer poll (4 February 2015), 96% were for annexation to Russia, and 4% were opposed, which happens to be exactly what the 16 March 2014 referendum had actually found to be the case. But, continuing now with the description of the April 2014 Gallup poll: its “Views of Foreign Parties’ Role in the Crisis — Crimea” (p. 25), showed 76.2% of Crimeans saying that the role of the U.S. was “Mostly negative,” and 2.8% saying the U.S. role was “Mostly positive”; while Crimeans’ attitudes towards Russia were the exact opposite: 71.3% said Russia’s role was “Mostly positive,” and 4.0% said it was “Mostly negative.”
An accurate reflection of the reason why Crimeans, during the lead-up to the referendum, were appalled by America’s extremely violent and bloody takeover of the Ukrainian Government (as the EU itself had confirmed), was given on Crimean television shortly before the referendum, when a former criminal prosecutor in the Ukrainian Government, who lived and worked in Kiev and saw with her own eyes much of the violence but was not personally involved in the events, quit her office, and got in her car and drove back to her childhood home in Crimea, now unemployed, because she was so revulsed at what had happened to her country. On this call-in show, which was watched by many Ukrainians, she explained why she could no longer, as a lawyer and a supporter of the Ukrainian Constitution, support the Ukrainain Government — that it was now an illegal Government. She closed her opening statement, just before taking the calls from people over the phone, by saying, “Despite that our ‘great politicians’ who seized power by bloodshed, are now claiming that we don’t have the right to decide our own future — citizens of Crimea, you have every right in the world. Nobody is allowed to usurp power.” She subsequently became a criminal prosecutor in the new Crimean government, enforcing now the Russian Constitution, in Crimea.
However, anyone who says that Russia “seized Crimea,” is clearly lying or else is fooled by people who are.
Here, then, are highlights from a typical Western ‘news’ report about Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin, in the issue of TIME magazine (December 10th online, December 22nd issue on newsstands), headlining “Vladimir Putin, The Imperialist,” in which Putin was a “runner-up” as the “Person of the Year” — a year when, actually, Obama overthrew Ukraine’s Government and replaced it with one run by racist-fascist (or nazi) haters of Russia, who were setting up to yank the remaining years on Russia’s lease of its crucial Black Sea Naval Base in Crimea, and the Crimeans were imminently fearing a Ukrainian invasion (the author was Simon Shuster):
His decision in March to invade and then annex the region of Crimea from Ukraine marked the first growth of Russia’s dominions since the fall of the Soviet Union. …
With the conquest of Crimea, a derelict peninsula about the size of Massachusetts, Putin at last restored a scrap of Russia’s honor, says Gorbachev, by “acting on his own,” unbound by the constraints of U.S. supremacy and the table manners of international law. …
That name [Crimea], redolent with the history of Europe’s 19th century wars, has become a byword in Russia for national revival, a taste of the imperial glory that a generation of Russians have long hungered for. …
Already expelled from the G-8 club of wealthy nations in March after the annexation of Crimea, Putin was further ostracized at the G-20 summit. …
So, was Putin’s taste of empire worth the cost to Russian prosperity? For those who carry the grudges of Russian history, it was. …
Russia now seeks to position itself as an alternative to the Western model of liberal democracy—and it’s had some success. Right-wing politicians in France and the U.K., not to mention Central and Eastern Europe, are not shy about declaring their admiration for Putin. The ultraconservative government of Hungary, a member of NATO and the European Union, has announced its intention to develop as an “illiberal state” modeled on Russia, cracking down harshly on civil society. …
Putin will face challenges of his own as the West begins to rally against his aggressiveness. …
Make no mistake, though: Russians also remember that their country once dominated a sixth of the earth’s landmass and stood as a global player second to none. That is the role Putin seeks to regain. …
Nothing was said about the Black Sea fleet, nor about any strategic issue. Nothing was provided in order to help readers understand what was happening. Readers’ Cold-War buttons were being pushed; that is all. America’s aristocracy despises its public, whom they merely manipulate and control.
Here is an article about (and linking to) U.S. President Barack Obama’s “National Security Strategy 2015,” in which Obama uses the term “aggression” 18 times, 17 of them referring to Russia. Obama never once cites a reason for applying that term; for example, unlike Simon Shuster, he doesn’t even so much as mention “Crimea.”
And, here is the best video that has yet been issued on Obama’s February 2014 coup, the coup that installed the Ukrainian regime that has been carrying out the ethnic cleansing operation, which Ukraine calls their ‘Anti Terrorist Operation,’ in the Donbass region, though it’s really the anti-resident operation there.
That fate of ethnic cleansing or local genocide — the fate which befell the residents of Ukraine’s Donbass region, the region that’s shown in dark purple in this election-map for the man whom Obama overthrew in February 2014 and which is the area that voted 90% for him — is the fate that Crimeans were protected from when they rejoined Russia.
Russia’s using its troops, who were permanently stationed in Crimea already and didn’t need to ‘invade’ anything in order to protect the residents in Crimea so that they could hold their referendum in peace, is what blocked the seizure of Crimea by the newly installed Ukrainian regime.
The invader was the United States, in its typically sneaky post-1950 way: a coup d’etat. What Dwight Eisenhower’s, Allen Dulles’s, and Kermit Roosevelt’s CIA operation had done to Iran in 1953, Barack Obama’s and Victoria Nuland’s operation did to Ukraine in 2014: a violent coup installing a far-right government — in Obama’s case, even a nazi government (and see this and this and this).
That — and the firebombings and other horrors that Washington’s Brookings Institution think tank want U.S. taxpayers to finance yet more of in Donbass — is what RussiaprotectedCrimeans from.

The aggressor here is not Vladimir Putin; it is Barack Obama. All honest news media (such as here and here and here and here and here and here and here) are reporting that. For economic analysis and reporting on these and other events, here is an excellent general news source. (It autotranslates if viewed in google’s chrome browser.) As for dishonest ‘news’ media, such as TIME  and Fox ‘News,’ they serve a different purpose than truth; so, none of them will be listed here, where the only interest is truth.
PS: For further insights into the lying that is prevalent in the West regarding Crimea, Ukraine, and Russia, see this remarkably honest testimony to the U.K. House of Lords’ 20 February 2015 Committee report, “The EU and Russia: before and beyond the crisis in Ukraine,” linked there on p. 108 as “RUS0012” and titled “Irina Kirillova MBE – Written evidence,” in which that Cambridge university professor describes the profound disappointment of ordinary people she had encountered in Russia, as they saw the misrepresentations in the West regarding the situations in Russia, Ukraine and Crimea. Outside of the English-speaking world, and especially in the regions that are not controlled by the U.S., the fakery of ‘journalism’ in the English-speaking world is becoming shockingly more evident than it formerly was. As usual, however, the House of Lords’ final report ignored these realities; and, throughout, it starts with the assumption that Russia is aggressive and that the West is merely responding to that. This professor’s written testimony was thus ignored. Most of the other individuals in the “Appendix 2: List of Witnesses” were the Anglo-aristocracy’s usual Russia-haters, such as Ian Bond, Director of Foreign Policy, Center for European Reform, saying that, “The most important thing is that the EU, as a rules-based organisation, should follow a rules-based approach to Russia,” as if that would be something alien to Russians. This type of bigoted condescenscion was rife throughout the report. If those people are as blind to evidence and science as they put themselves forth as being, they are dangerous in any governmental role; and to call the U.K. a ‘democracy’ is questionable, at best. Britain is an aristocracy, not a democracy. And the U.S. is at least as bad. In regards to the relationships between Russia, Ukraine, and Crimea, the West might be as bad as Ukraine, and should just quit the entire matter and try to start over from scratch, which means to let the nazis whom Obama placed into power there sink, not provide them with more weapons. Or, if more weapons are provided to them, then the rest of the West should issue sanctions against any nation that does that. Under liars and fools the West is drifting towards a totally unwarranted nuclear conflict with Russia.

German newspaper BILD gets inside US-NATO-Nuland planning session

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General Breedlove tells US diplomats and select members of Congress what Ukraine needs.
Das Bild, published February 19, 2015
The Bild headline:
“Cold Feet” “Bullshit,” “Angst”
What US Politicians REALLY think about the Germans in the Ukraine-crisis
February 19, 2015
Translated from German by Tom Winter
Munich — While a bloody war rages in eastern Ukraine, the next dangerous conflict is breaking out in the Security Conference, a diplomatic battle of nerves centered on the question whether the West ought to supply armaments to the regime in Kiev. The opponents are actually allies: the USA against Europe,  and Germany in particular.
Behind the soundproof doors of the conference room in the Bayerischer Hof hotel, the Americans speak about Germans in rather derogatory terms.
Friday evening a bit after 7 p.m. on the sixth floor of the luxury hotel, according to BILD’s sources, American four-star generals, diplomats, and high-ranking US politicians held a frank discussion in a “briefing room,” and held forth about the Germans.
“Defeatist,” is what a US Senator called German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen, because she no longer believes in a Kiev victory. The phrase “German defeatist,” according to our information, was often heard in the room.
Defense minister Ursula von der Leyen, (here with NATO General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg) counts as a defeatist among the US diplomats since she no longer believes in a victory of Ukraine against Russia.
Obama’s top diplomat for Europe, Victoria Nuland, called the Chancellor’s trip to Putin, “Merkel’s Moscow thing.” Another US Foreign office type spoke of the Europeans’ “Moscow bullshit.”
And US Senator John McCain talked himself into a rage: “History shows us that dictators always take more, whenever you let them. They can’t be brought back from their brutal behavior when you fly to Moscow to them, just like someone once flew to this city.”
Merkel’s diplomatic initiative in the Ukraine crisis stands at the center of American anger. Reason: the Americans don’t believe that Putin can’t be made to back off without a massive push, and the Europeans have no wish to build up a greater push.
“They’re afraid of damage to their economy, counter-sanctions from Russia,” said Nuland. Another US politician: “It’s painful to see that our NATO partners are getting cold feet.”
Obama’s close confidante Victoria Nuland is the one who set the tone for her American colleagues at the prelude to the evening: “We can fight against the Europeans, we can fight with rhetoric against them.”
Several US politicians appeared to have hesitations about weapons supply to Kiev. One asked whether it was only a tactic, a false promise to get the Europeans to put more pressure on Putin. “No, it’s not a tactic to push the Europeans,” answered Nuland dryly. “We’re not going to sent any four divisions into Ukraine, as the Europeans fear. It’s only a relatively moderate delivery of anti-tank weapons.”
“But what will we tell the Europeans if we really decide on delivering weapons,” asked one Congressman. “What’s our story then?”
NATO Commander General Philip Breedlove was there. He answered: “We’re not on a footing to deliver so many weapons they could defeat Russia [!!! —tr] That’s not our goal. But we have to try to raise the battlefield cost for Putin, to slow down the whole problem, so sanctions and other measures can take hold.”
Again top diplomat Nuland, who speaks fluent Russian and served as Dick Cheney’s security advisor took it up: “I’d strongly urge you to use the phrase ‘defensive systems’ that we would deliver to oppose Putin’s ‘offensive systems.’”
General Breedlove clarified for the US politicians, what an actual arms delivery would look like. “Russian artillery is by far what kills most Ukrainian soldiers, so a system is needed that can localize the source of fire and repress it. Ukrainian communications are disrupted or completely swamped, so they need uninterceptible communications gear. Then I won’t talk about any anti-tank rockets, but we are seeing massive supply convoys from Russia into Ukraine. The Ukrainians need the capability to shut off this transport. And then I would add some small tactical drones.”
NB: These planned weapons and systems are so technically demanding that US soldiers would probably have to train the Ukrainian army. Thus the USA would be intervening with their own troops in the conflict.
There hasn’t been this much conflict between Europeans and Americans since the Munich Security conference of 2003, shortly before the beginning of the Iraq war. In the morning Chancellor Angela Merkel travels to Washington to US President Barak Obama. The two have much to discuss…
Translator’s note: This material is visible throughout the German press, and it all comes back to this article in Das Bild, and the source for this Bild article had to be German Intelligence. The German press is full of praise for their peace-making Chancellor, and apparently the Chancellory is committed to making Minsk II a success. Further, this item removes, and was doubtless intended to remove, any doubts about NATO being a US instrument. Also to be noted here is a complete zeroing out of the five or six million Russian-speaking inhabitants of Lugansk and Donetsk; they don’t exist, it’s just Russia. 

Ukraine denouement: From the military battlefield to the arena of international finance

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From Counterpunch, February 16, 2015
By Michael Hudson

The fate of Ukraine is now shifting from the military battlefield back to the arena that counts most: that of international finance. Kiev is broke, having depleted its foreign reserves on waging war that has destroyed its industrial export and coal mining capacity in the Donbass (especially vis-à-vis Russia, which normally has bought 38 percent of Ukraine’s exports). Deeply in debt (with €3 billion falling due on December 20 to Russia), Ukraine faces insolvency if the IMF and Europe do not release new loans next month to pay for new imports as well as Russian and foreign bondholders.

Finance Minister Natalia Yaresko announced on Friday that she hopes to see the money begin to flow in by early March.[1] But Ukraine must meet conditions that seem almost impossible: It must implement an honest budget and start reforming its corrupt oligarchs (who dominate in the Rada and control the bureaucracy), implement more austerity, abolish its environmental protection, and make its industry “attractive” to foreign investors to buy Ukraine’s land, natural resources, monopolies and other assets, presumably at distress prices in view of the country’s recent devastation.

Looming over the IMF loan is the military situation. On January 28, Christine Lagarde said that the IMF would not release more money as long as Ukraine remains at war. Cessation of fighting was to begin Sunday morning. But Right Sector leader Dmytro Yarosh announced that his private army and that of the Azov Battalion will ignore the Minsk agreement and fight against Russian-speakers. He remains a major force within the Rada.

How much of Ukraine’s budget will be spent on arms? Germany and France made it clear that they oppose further U.S. military adventurism in Ukraine, and also oppose NATO membership. But will Germany follow through on its threat to impose sanctions on Kiev in order to stop a renewal of the fighting? For the United States bringing Ukraine into NATO would be the coup de grace blocking creation of a Eurasian powerhouse integrating the Russian, German and other continental European economies.

The Obama administration is upping the ante and going for broke, hoping that Europe has no alternative but to keep acquiescing. But the strategy is threatening to backfire. Instead of making Russia “lose Europe,” the United States may have overplayed its hand so badly that one can now think about the opposite prospect. The Ukraine adventure turn out to be the first step in the United States losing Europe. It may end up splitting European economic interests away from NATO, if Russia can convince the world that the epoch of armed occupation of industrial nations is a thing of the past and hence no real military threat exists – except for Europe being caught in the middle of Cold War 2.0.

For the U.S. geopolitical strategy to succeed, it would be necessary for Europe, Ukraine and Russia to act against their own potential economic self-interest. How long can they be expected to acquiesce in this sacrifice? At what point will economic interests lead to a reconsideration of old geo-military alliances and personal political loyalties?

The is becoming urgent because this is the first time that continental Europe has been faced with such war on its own borders (if we except Yugoslavia). Where is the advantage for Europe supporting one of the world’s most corrupt oligarchies north of the Equator?

America’s Ukrainian adventure by Hillary’s appointee Victoria Nuland (kept on and applauded by John Kerry), as well as by NATO, is forcing Europe to commit itself to the United States or pursue an independent line. George Soros (whose aggressive voice is emerging as the Democratic Party’s version of Sheldon Adelson) recently urged (in the newly neocon New York Review of Books) that the West give Ukraine $50 billion to re-arm, and to think of this as a down payment on military containment of Russia. The aim is old Brzezinski strategy: to foreclose Russian economic integration with Europe. The assumption is that economic alliances are at least potentially military, so that any power center raises the threat of economic and hence political independence.

The Financial Times quickly jumped on board for Soros’s $50 billion subsidy.[2] When President Obama promised that U.S. military aid would be only for “defensive arms,” Kiev clarified that it intended to defend Ukraine all the way to Siberia to create a “sanitary cordon.” Continue reading →

The Paet-Ashton transcript and the snipers at Maidan

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Excerpt from annotated transcript below:

It is, and actually the only politician the people from civilian society mentioned positively was Poroshenko, so that he had some so to say trust among all these Maidan people and civilian society; and  second, what was quite disturbing, the same oligarch [Poroshenko] told that well, all the evidence shows that the people who were killed by snipers, from both sides, among policemen and people from the streets, that they were the same snipers, killing people from both sides.
Well, that’s yes, …
So that and then she [Dr. Olga Bolgomets] also showed me some photos, she said that as medical doctor, she can, you know, say that it’s the same handwriting, the same type of bullets, and it’s really disturbing that now the new coalition that they don’t want to investigate, what exactly happened; so that now there is stronger and stronger understanding that behind the snipers, it was not Yanukovych, but it was somebody from the new coalition.
I think that we do want to investigate.  I mean I didn’t pick that up, that’s interesting. Gosh?
So that it was in this instance disturbing that if it’s us now to live its own life very powerfully, then it already discreditates from the very beginning also this new coalition.

Posted on Fort Russ
By Eric Zuesse, 3 Feb. 2015

Here is a complete transcript of the extraordinarily revealing phone conversation, that occurred on 26 February 2014, in which the foreign-affairs chief of the European Union, Catherine Ashton, was informed by her investigator, Urmas Paet, into his findings regarding what had been the cause of the violence that brought down the Ukrainian Government of President Viktor Yanukovych — whether it was Yanukovych himself, or the people who had opposed Yanukovych and who had supported Ukraine’s joining the EU (which Yanukovych had finally decided not to do). 
This conversation makes absolutely clear that the EU had not participated in bringing down Yanukovych and was shocked to learn that Yanukovych had not been behind the violence on that historic occasion, which had occurred only days prior.
This conversation goes by so fast so that a transcript of it is really necessary, in order for one to be able to absorb the full import of what’s happening and being revealed in it. Consequently, what now follows will be the transcript of this entire astounding phone call, with explanatory notes added in brackets by myself, for the reader’s comprehension of what was being referred to by these officials, in this phone-call that shows the truly astonishing extent of U.S. President Barack Obama’s depravity — a depravity that clearly shocked these EU officials, even while they seemed to have been resigned to it. (Subsequently, they went along with it, with only weak ongoing resistance to it.)
Estonia’s Foreign Minister Urmas Paet phones the EU’s foreign-affairs chief Catherine Ashton, to report on the findings of his February 25th inquiry for the EU, into the situation in Ukraine right after the coup that had just overthrown Ukraine’s democratically elected (in 2010) President Viktor Yanukovych:

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