Guest Post by Paul Craig Roberts
It is just as I said, and Putin’s inability to recognize reality and endlessly prolonging the conflict in Ukraine is bringing Russia and the world more trouble.
Putin’s dithering has now brought the French Foreign Legion to the front lines in Ukraine, and western Ukraine is accumulating NATO troops. As I have emphasized from the beginning, wars need to be quickly won, not extended indefinitely.
Putin pretends he is engaged in a limited military operation when in fact he is at war with the West.
The limited operation has spun out of control precisely as I said it would. Now there are Western troops and intelligence services involved, and Russia has to defend against long-range missiles striking deep into Russia while Washington schemes to open a second front against Russia and to separate China from Russia. Utter disaster will be the consequence of Putin’s refusal to win the war. Putin’s dithering has greatly expanded NATO on Russia’s borders with the addition of Finland and Sweden and allowed NATO to plan for war with Russia just as Putin’s dithering over Donbas provided the US with eight years to create a large Ukrainian army. Consequently, Russia’s self-defense now requires the use of nuclear weapons. There is no sign of the West coming to its senses. Putin is relying on a chimera.
https://www.rt.com/russia/597004-georgian-us-spark-two-revolutions/
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It isn’t so much a hoax as it is a big sack O Jawea. Totally nailed it on the morality part though!
ITS ALL THE SAME OLE BS FOLKS!!!
ANYTHING TO GET A “WAR” STARTED…”DIVIDE& CONQUER”….REMEMBER???
Damn kennybot. Bold CAPS… calm down.
That’s his natural state. You piss him off? He’ll redact his own ass!
Then you got nuthin BUT black.
Putin’s dithering has now brought the French Foreign Legion to the front lines in Ukraine
How big of an IDIOT do you have to be to think like this?
That is one confusing headline! Can’t imagine much thought went into it.
Why? The US already did it to them once, back in the 2000s (I don’t remember which year), just like the US did Ukraine in 2014.
Wrong! In 2008, Putin once again used a free and sovereign Eastern European nation’s growing closer ties to America and the European Union & NATO as an excuse to invade Georgia and occupy South Ossetia, simply because a fairly large Russian-speaking population lived there; but it was still the sovereign territory of Georgia, and the Russian-speaking Georgians were under absolutely no threat from Georgia’s government at the time.
Stop with the misleading and erroneous revisionist history already.
Do you actually receive a paycheck from the US State Department?
And You are also grossly in error regarding what happened in Ukraine in 2014:
Liberate Ukraine
By Justin O. Smith
Sent: 3/8/2014 10:38 PM
The protesters in Independence Square have suffered a long train of abuses and usurpations from a succession of presumably democratically elected governments that consistently have sunk into the depths of corruption and arbitrary, illegal and despotic actions, forcing the people to oppose them and unify for the salvation of Ukraine. They did not initially ask for President Viktor Yanukovych’s removal, only that he honor the European Union – Ukraine Association Agreement. But, several hundred wounded and over eighty dead, at Yanukovych’s orders and Putin’s direction changed everything and created a call for new Guards, which is any freedom-loving people’s right.
The ouster of Yanukovych from office by the Ukrainian Parliament was no more a coup than was U.S. President Richard Nixon’s resignation over Watergate. Yanukovych was abandoned by his own Regions Party and accused of embezzling $40 billion over three years and betraying Ukraine. Assertions by Russian media and Putin that this was a “fascist coup” are outright Stalinist propaganda tactics, and pundits, such as Phil Valentine (Cumulus Radio), repeatedly calling this a “coup” are ignorant of the East-West dynamics, the ongoing trade war between the EU and Russia, and parliamentary procedures and “votes of no confidence.”
For months the protesters of Maidan held Berkut anti-riot police at bay, as they were injured and killed. They treated their wounded, prayed over their dead, and they fought for their right to form a new state governed, hopefully, by moral leaders, free from corruption. And now, they have been stunned by a new sense of betrayal, a new group of oligarchs, driving Mercedes and BMWs, form the interim government in the name of Ukraine’s people.
Betrayals came one after another, once Yanukovych appeared in Russia. Putin violated several international treaties by invading Crimea, as the European Union ringed their collective hands over Putin’s threats to raise gas prices from Gazprom, and Obama frantically floundered around the U.S.-Russian “reset button”, giving empty lip-service to sanctions no one will honor; don’t look for Russia’s removal from the G-8 either, since Chancellor Angela Merkel is pursuing angles for Germany during this internationally clustered imbroglio.
Ukrainians have long sought closer ties with the EU and the U.S. and their markedly freer cultures and political systems, not Putin and Russia. Five-hundred thousand dollars have gone towards this goal annually, since 2011, through the U.S. Agency for International Development [USAID], because many influential Ukrainians, such as Vitali Klitshko – member of Ukraine Parliament, feared Yanukovych’s growing subservience to Putin; Putin’s $15 billion bribe was intended to coax Ukraine into his Eurasian Union, and, in appealing to Yanukovych’s corrupt nature, it effectively sabotaged the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement: So, an East-West confrontation emerged, which is based on Putin’s desire to keep Russian hegemony in the region and enhance his own power.
The new interim President of Ukraine, Oleksandr Tuchynov, is a Baptist pastor and the one time head of the SBU (Ukraine’s secret service), which was essentially an extension of the KGB during the old USSR days. He is also Yulia Tymoshenko’s right hand man, and while she holds no official post in the new government, she is directing government affairs through him.
Elections are scheduled for May throughout Ukraine, and should Tymoshenko get elected, it will signal the continued reign of oligarchs and communists, along the lines of Leonid Kuchma, Ukrainian president (1994-2005), who ordered the murder of journalist Georgiy Gongadze in 2000. Many of Tymoshenko’s countrymen refer to her, as “Putin in a skirt.”
A separate referendum is being called for in Crimea in order to decide if Crimea stays with Ukraine or joins Russia. Even though Putin stated he would ensure Ukraine’s territorial integrity last month, he has exacerbated the situation, and he is using this as leverage against the interim government in Kiev, because he can. And, he can because Obama has failed to offer global leadership and clarity of vision, offering in its stead meaningless warnings and weak statements that invited this aggression.
Currently, even if some older ethnic Russian pensioners, the old communist apparatchiks, want to return Crimea to the Russian state, the majority of the Russian-speaking easterners __ Russo-sympathetic __ are not so indoctrinated by Russian propaganda that they would accept slavery in Putin’s totalitarian state over membership in NATO or the EU. At different times during recent history, Crimea has voted to be independent of the Soviet Union (December 1991) and Ukraine (May 1992-rescinded then reconsidered 1994), so Crimea will do what it will. But, all the signatories of the 1975 (non-intervention) Helsinki Final Act and the Budapest Memorandum, which includes the U.S. and the Soviet Union (Russia affirmed 1994) assured Ukraine’s security and territorial integrity.
To imagine Germany today occupying western Poland under a pretext of protecting ethnic Germans living there conveys a strong analogy of the historical offense Putin committed against Ukraine, and it explains the fear that many other nations with Russian minorities and dire memories of Moscow are now experiencing.
George W. Bush attempted to gain NATO membership for both Georgia and Ukraine in 2008, but Europe refused their membership out of fear of Russia’s reaction, and four months later Putin entered Ossetia, claiming then, as now, that he was protecting ethnic Russians. This precise sort of weakness and policy must be rejected by both Europe and future U.S. administrations, not in favor of war but in the name of peace.
If Europe and the U.S. do not help Ukraine resist Russia successfully, who is next? Belarus? Poland?
On March 1, 2014, Jim DeMint, former U.S. Senator from South Carolina, said, “The Ukrainians who rose to demand freedom need to be comforted by our words and intentions, and the thugs in the Kremlin need to fear them” (Heritage Foundation).
Obama will likely not negotiate this crisis well, and this will be a severe geopolitical blow to the U.S., in many respects, and those patriotic activists in Maidan and across Ukraine, who understand that democratic Ukraine is on the frontline of the struggle against authoritarianism. Let us resolve, despite Obama, to see Ukraine enter the EU and NATO under the next administration, if that is truly their desire. Let us immediately erect a tactical nuclear shield, across the European fault lines and aimed directly at Moscow, as was planned for by Ronald Reagan, and only then worry with making Putin pay an economic price. Let us move forward unwilling to permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed and more determined than ever to not tempt our adversaries with weakness, as we prevent one tyranny, once removed, from being replaced by a far more iron tyranny.
By Justin O. Smith
Justin OOHH Smith. The Minsk agreement was negotiated in good faith and agreed upon by all parties in 2014. Then the agreement was 100% violated by Ukraine at the behest of the West.
wHo wIlL rEsiSt RusSia?!? derp. The “rus” people are from the Donbas dumb ass.
Which Putin promptly violated by sending in Spetsnaz soldiers to influence the local referendum to stay a part of Ukraine or become a part of Russia once more. You and others also fail to understand that Putin and Russia also violated the Budapest Memorandum to which Russia was a signatory, that stated Russia, the U.S., France and Great Britain would ensure the integrity of Ukraine’s borders in exchange for it relinquishing its nukes. Putin has never engaged in “good faith” negotiations or kept a treaty’s mandates if they went against his agenda on any given day — DUMBASS.
DUMBASS- That same agreement, Clinton et. al promised to NEVER Move NATO east. Putin response was to the broken NATO promises.
The fact that Spanish-speaking Mexicans live in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico & California no more gives Mexico the right to invade and occupy these states, than Russian-speaking people living in Georgia & Ukraine gives Russia the right to invade these nations in the manner Putin has done — AnonNoMoresDUMBASS.
Maidan Hasn’t Won Yet
By Justice O. Smith
Sent: 2/28/2014 12:20 PM
The Ukrainian Parliament heard the Bell of Freedom ringing on February 22, 2014, and they ousted President Viktor Yanukovych, their corrupt leader. Since the collapse of the former U.S.S.R, many corrupt men and women have sought to govern Ukraine, in order to empty her treasury; historically, Ukraine has been deliberately exploited geopolitically by many nations over the past five centuries, such as Poland, Germany and Russia, and its language and culture suppressed by all, except for the Hapsburg Monarchy. And, now that Ukraine’s Parliament has issued an arrest warrant for Yanukovych and answered their people’s call for freedom, the vast majority want Ukraine’s course to be uncorrupted and set by the Ukrainian people, without outside interference from the U.S., the European Union and Russia.
President Yanukovych’s arbitrary decision to nullify an economic agreement with the European Union (EU), with few strings attached, and accept a $15 billion aid package from Russian President Vladimir Putin was viewed with horror and revulsion. The specter of life under Russian influence and control surfaced, and this is a life that the majority of Ukrainians will never willingly accept again – something they will fight to the death before being forced once more down the road to serfdom.
From the first day of acquiring most of Ukraine from Poland, under the Treaty of Andrusovo (1667), Russian Tsars sought to destroy any sense of national identity in the Ukrainian people. In 1876 Alexander II actually banned books from being published in Ukrainian and speaking Ukrainian in theater plays.
Taras Shevchenko, Ukraine’s first major poet (1814-1861), synthesized urban and rural linguistic usages with Church Slavonic to articulate a full range of ideas and feelings. Shevchenko railed against the autocratic Russian state in the name of “this land of ours which is not ours”. His nationalist verses reassured literate Ukrainians that they were at least a potential nation.
The Ukrainian people have never forgotten the millions of peasants who were murdered during the 1919 de-Cossackization of the Don region, they have never forgotten the 10 million Ukrainians who were starved to death by Stalin’s regime between 1932 and 1934, and they remember the forced exiles to Siberia during 1944-45. Their resentment and hostility towards Russia and communism/authoritarianism has remained into the present, and, in large part, this explains the anger Ukrainians felt towards the corrupt Viktor Yanukovych and his cozy arrangement with the former director of the KGB, Vladimir Putin.
Ulrich Speck of Carnegie Europe (New York Times) recently pointed at Hungary, Slovakia, Poland and Romania as EU success stories, and declared that “the protest movement… centered in Kiev’s Independence Square, has won,” although many others declare that Ukraine will not find real freedom within a European Union economic stricture and the immigration burdens that accompany the EU’s open borders policy; however, the initial EU deal was simply an offer of economic aid, a loose association and a free trade agreement, and EU membership was not offered. But no matter how one views the EU, the Ukrainian people are obviously in desperate need of assistance, and perhaps an effective joint economic aid plan will soon be managed by the U.S., the EU and the International Monetary Fund, with mutually beneficial terms included.
Of course, the big pink Russian Bear’s reaction remains to be seen, as Russian military “maneuvers” are now occurring along Crimea’s border. Right or wrong, Ukraine, “Little Russia”, has been seen as critical to Russia’s national security, because it was the breadbasket of the old Soviet Union and it was also used as an invasion route by numerous past enemies, including Napoleon and the Nazis. Russian technological advances in missile delivery and other armaments negates this as a serious concern. But, no one should be overly hopeful that Putin will follow Boris Yeltsin’s declaration that “The Russian state…will never be an empire…It will be an equal among equals.”
At Putin’s urging, Yanukovych intensified the use of force against the Maidan protesters, resulting in 82 people dead. Since then, Putin has questioned the legitimacy of the recent actions by the Ukrainian Parliament. And, with a heavy imprint in the Crimea (eastern Ukraine) from decades of “russification” programs, Putin’s pure naked desire, thinly veiled in a proposed Eurasian Union, to reconstruct the old Soviet Union may result in an Ossetia-style Russian intervention, despite Obama’s warnings and Putin’s assurances to the contrary; or, at the very least, this means several more months of civil strife and turmoil, since pro-Russian protesters were flying Red Communist flags in Donetsk on February 23rd, and armed men occupied all the government buildings in Simferopol (Crimea) on February 27, 2014 (Reuters).
On Sunday, February 23, Yanukovych’s Party of Regions abandoned him and accused him of facilitating the deaths of the protesters and betraying his country. This same day, Yanukovych appointee and military chief of staff, Yuriy Ilvin said, “As an officer I see no other way than to serve the Ukrainian people honestly and assure that I have not and won’t give criminal orders.”
To the heart of the matter, Serhiy Sobalev, a member of Parliament from the Balkivshchyna Party, stated: “We will come out of Maidan either free or as slaves. But we don’t want to be slaves.”
After Leonid Slutsky, chairman of the Russian parliamentary committee that deals with former satellite states, exclaimed, “They are trying in every possible way to tear Ukraine away from Russia” (Interfax), the world should have asked, “So?” – Russia’s claim to the Ukraine has always been illegitimate, and the Ukrainians have never wanted to be integrated into Muscovy. Doesn’t Ukraine have a natural right to self-determination and their own independent state? History says “Yes.”
Interim Ukrainian President Oleksandr Turchynov, Petro Poroshenko – opposition member of Ukraine’s Parliament, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Barack Obama all agree that Ukraine’s territorial integrity must be preserved. Each has a different understanding of this term “territorial integrity.” Just as in the 1950s, today some Ukrainians in the Orthodox east and south still long for the Russian state, while in the west, with its Hapsburg and Polish traditions and its strong Uniate Church, Ukrainian nationhood is understood as inherently anti-Russian.
Recently, Yulia Tymoshenko, former Ukrainian Prime Minister, announced she would run for the presidency, even though much of her former appeal has been tarnished by being seen as part of a corrupt power structure. In many respects, Tymoshenko was much closer to Putin than Yanukovych could ever have hoped to be. But she did herself and her country proud, when she tearfully told a crowd on February 22, “After what you did, Ukraine is yours.”
In the years leading up to 1917, Ukraine was torn through national and social upheaval and embroiled in chaotic violence, much like Ukraine after the establishment of the Commonwealth of Independent States and the Trans-Dniester Republic in 1991, much like present day Ukraine. Professional people, rural cooperatives and officers from the imperial army convened a Ukrainian Military Congress, which proclaimed the Ukrainian People’s Republic in November 1917, and it was immediately challenged by a Soviet government in Kharkov and supported by many of the workers and peasants in eastern Ukraine. But, the memory of their national independence from 1917 to 1921, no matter how brief, precarious and embattled, generates a powerful longing for fulfillment in the modern day Ukraine.
I would like to leave you with two of the most poignant thoughts I received from two young activists, as I communicated with them on the 23rd and 24th of February:
4:45 pm Sunday 23rd/ Galyna Kolodkevych, Professor of Ukrainian literature in Kiev, asked, “What is the way forward now?” She continued, “Maidan has become (the) opposition now and (the) new authority has to listen to the people of Maidan, but not to the West or Russia. Our politicians receive the power but then forget us…We demand full lustration of official power, without previous communists, party of regions, (and) (Yulia) Tymoshenko. So, Maidan hasn’t won yet. People will stand until the murderers are punished.”
4:37 am Monday 24th/ Yevgeniya Goncharuk cried out, “There is a pain in my heart. Ukraine (is) washed with tears. Many different and difficult thoughts are in my head. Fear to forget. Fear to allow politicians to forget what happened. There is no feeling something great was achieved. I do not see a clear plan for how to remove the old politicians, judges and policemen. But I know that people have to learn by new, normal rules – moral law. The main thing is to remember all the mistakes and lies of every person, who worked in the government. The criminals have to sit in jail. How long will they avoid punishment? …There is hope….Ukrainians are great, they are beautiful people. They surprised themselves. Suddenly they show that they are brave, desperate and they deserve a better life.”
No, Maidan hasn’t won yet, but the Ukrainian people have always been brave, and they do deserve a better life. They have the right to choose and to create for themselves a more perfect union, with one’s liberties and human dignity guaranteed, where equality under a moral law reigns and everyone lives and dies free; today I, all of us, and the world share the chains of the Ukrainian people, since the destruction of just a single person’s freedom creates a ripple effect throughout civil society: So, without undue influence, the Free World must enable, through every available means, the destiny of the Ukrainian people to manifest itself through the people’s own free will, uncorrupted by immoral men.
By Justin O. Smith
WTF?
“President Yanukovych’s arbitrary decision to nullify an economic agreement with the European Union (EU), with few strings attached, and accept a $15 billion aid package from Russian President Vladimir Putin was viewed with horror and revulsion.”
Revulsion to whom? the Neocons? The international banksters?
The Eastern 1/3 of the Ukraine territory has always been Russian.
To most of the freedom and liberty-minded people of Ukraine who were trying to end the corruption within their country and escape the heavy-handed influence that Putin and Russia was exerting within their country through his puppet. And no … historically, the region long known as Ukraine proper hasn’t “always been Russian”.
However wrong or right either of us may be, we certainly don’t want to see this war escalate any further and become a scene from the Far Side shown in today’s “Government & Media Ridicule” — two fishermen watching a nuclear plume in the distance:
GOVERNMENT & MEDIA RIDICULE – The Burning Platform
Si.
haven’t seen anything about the legion on any of the web sites like this one. wouldn’t doubt it though. macron is out to distract the Frenchies from the take over of France by the islamics in country. the dumb ass should be using the legion and Grand Armee to get rid of the muslims, but alas he getting paid to well to do what needs doing.
US – We overthrow governments, and we start wars, that is what we do. But it confuses us just why, everyone hates us…..