Washington’s decision to supply Ukraine with longer-range missiles and allow Kiev to use them at will can only lead to further escalation, former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev said on Saturday. He added that the US appears to not want the Ukraine conflict to end.
In an interview with Russian journalist Nadana Fridrikhson, Medvedev denied that Ukrainian strikes against the Crimean peninsula would force Moscow to sit down at the negotiating table. “The result would be exactly the contrary. There would be no talks in such a case. There would only be retaliatory strikes,” he warned .
Medvedev insisted that if Washington wanted peace in Ukraine, it could simply urge Kiev to engage in talks with Moscow, but that US President Joe Biden’s administration and “hawks” in Congress are “simply not interested in it.”
Russia could “retaliate in any way possible” should Ukrainian forces strike targets in Crimea or deep inside Russian territory, the former president warned. “We do not set any limits depending on the nature of threats, and are ready to use all types of weapons,” he insisted, adding that Russia would only be guided by its own doctrines, including the nuclear protocol.
“I can assure you a response would be swift, hard and convincing.”
Medvedev also accused European leaders, who have been supporting Kiev through various means, including weapon shipments, of acting at the behest of Washington and to the detriment of their own people. The cost of sanctions, military aid to Ukraine, trade wars, and embargoes are borne by ordinary EU citizens, he added.
Medvedev’s remarks came a day after the Pentagon announced it was supplying Kiev with ground-launched small diameter bombs (GLSDB) – munitions consisting of a rocket motor and an airplane bomb, with a range of up to 150 kilometers.
According to US Brigadier General Patrick Ryder, Washington will not prevent Ukraine from using these munitions to strike targets deep within Russia.
Moscow has repeatedly warned that providing heavy weapons to Ukraine could see the US and its allies directly involved in the conflict, and spiral into a military standoff between Russia and NATO.
Russian President Vladimir Putin delivered his traditional New Year’s Eve address on Saturday, speaking to the nation about the challenges the country has faced over the past year and the achievements it has made. The address venue differed drastically from the traditional Kremlin courtyard stand-up shots of the president, with Putin this year recording the annual message at the Southern Military District HQ. During his visit, he also met with top military brass and gave state awards to distinguished soldiers.
The unusually long address primarily revolved around the ongoing special military operation in Ukraine, the large-scale conflict which broke out late in February. The dramatic events have shown that Russia, “our multi-ethnic country has demonstrated its courage and dignity, as it always has during times of trouble,” he said, praising the country’s military and common citizens alike.
“Russian soldiers, militia and volunteers are fighting for our homeland, for truth and justice, to ensure peace and security for Russia. All of them are heroes to us. Their burden is the heaviest today. With all of my heart, I wish a Happy New Year to all participants of the special military operation,” the president said.
While the outgoing year has been “full of worries and anxiety” and many “tough, but necessary decisions” have been made, the country has made “critical steps towards achieving Russia’s full sovereignty and a vital consolidation of our society,” the president said.
“This was a year of pivotal and fateful events that set the foundation of our common future and our true independence. This is what we are fighting for today. We are protecting our people in our historic lands, new constituent territories of the Russian Federation,” the president stated, referring to the four formerly-Ukrainian regions, incorporated into Russia after September referendums.
Not only Russia but the whole world experienced a “significant change” over the past year, Putin said, adding that the efforts to harm Russia made by the collective West, which has been backing Ukraine in the ongoing conflict, have largely failed. The ongoing conflict has been “inspiring for other nations as they aspire to forge an equitable and multipolar world,” the president noted.
“Russia has been living under sanctions since the events in Crimea in 2014. Yet this year, an all-out sanctions war has been declared against us. The masterminds behind it expected our industrial, financial and transportation sectors to collapse. This didn’t happen,” Putin stressed.
Washington, London, Berlin and so on are playing a contemptible game of gaslighting. It is evident they are involved in fueling a war on Russia’s doorstep and it is evident that the objective of the war is the ultimate geopolitical prize of instigating regime change in Moscow. Russian President Vladimir Putin has on several occasions succinctly deprecated this Western imperialist agenda.
Surely a negotiated settlement to the conflict in Ukraine and the wider security concerns of Russia should be a priority. But regrettably, Washington and its European and Kiev minions are incapable of such diplomacy.
The Radio Free Europe outlet this week blatantly published satellite images of Russian military bases in Crimea and openly advocated for the Kiev regime to launch strikes. The reality is even more sobering and grim. It would not be the Kiev regime carrying out such strikes, but rather U.S., British and other NATO special forces acting as the brains and stealthy hands of the regime.
Moscow has already inveighed against NATO as being a direct participant in hostilities in Ukraine. The RFE report corroborates Russia’s claims. It is self-admission by the United States of being a party to the conflict.
The satellite images were provided by a private U.S. company called Planet Labs which has a history of working closely with the Pentagon. The images included an airbase at Dzhankoy which is described as the main logistics hub. Naval sites at Sevastopol were also listed in detail as well as purported ammunition tunnels in the surrounding mountains. Other targets included anti-aircraft positions near Feodosia on the Crimean Peninsula. From Moscow’s viewpoint, the peninsula is the sovereign territory of the Russian Federation. Yet here we have the U.S. government’s media mouthpiece giving out the coordinates and calling for air strikes on “prime targets”.
RFE is wholly owned by the U.S. government and it has a long and tawdry history of acting as a CIA conduit in Eastern Europe during the height of the Cold War. For the publication to publish targets for military attack and to advocate for such action is tantamount to Washington openly declaring itself to be director of war operations by the Kiev regime.
This role by Washington and its NATO allies has long been surmised since the conflict in Ukraine erupted in February this year. Indeed for the eight years since the coup in Kiev in 2014, the United States and its NATO partners have been weaponizing and prepping the anti-Russian regime for war, as former German Chancellor Angela Merkel recently admitted.
But since hostilities flared over the past 10 months, the United States, Britain, Poland and other NATO members have been actively involved in providing not just weapons, but training, logistics and intelligence for attacking Russian forces. It is believed that American and British advisers have been directing Ukrainian air strikes at the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant, as well as more recently on air bases deep inside Russian territory. The assassination of over a dozen senior Russian military commanders in the battlefields is also thought to be as a result of close targeting information provided by U.S. intelligence.
The sinking of the Moskva, the Russian navy’s flagship in the Black Sea Fleet, with the loss of many personnel onboard, is another incident that points to NATO’s overarching involvement in the pursuit of this war.
At the end of October, it is believed that American and British special forces were involved in a daring drone attack on Crimea. That incident led to Moscow temporarily cancelling the shipping arrangement for grain exports from the Black Sea.
All this apparent participation in the conflict has been brazenly stonewalled by Washington and its NATO allies who steadfastly claim to be not a party to the conflict. Just this week, the Biden administration announced that it was planning to supply Patriot missiles to Ukraine which Moscow condemned as another serious escalation. The Pentagon rebuffed Russian concerns and maintained that the “United States is not at war with Russia, and we do not seek conflict.”
Such blithe denials of responsibility in the conflict are either delusional or bare-faced lies. The fact is the United States and its NATO allies are at war in Ukraine against Russia. The arsenal of weapons and financial support for the Kiev regime is ensuring that the conflict is prolonged and near-impossible to halt. The United States and the European Union are bankrolling a self-declared NeoNazi regime to the tune of $100 billion in both military and financial aid.
The weapons being supplied to Ukraine have become incrementally more sophisticated and longer-range, including the HIMARS, ATACMS, IRIS-T and NASAMS artillery and anti-aircraft systems. The announcement of Patriot deliveries is a further escalation. These advanced systems necessarily mean that American, British, German and other NATO troops are on the ground in Ukraine firing weapons at Russian targets. It’s inconceivable that Ukrainian conscripts could operate these systems without NATO commanders and advisers, if not actual triggermen.
Besides, too, there have been admissions by U.S. and British military sources that their special forces are operating covertly in Ukraine.
All of this contradicts previous vows by U.S. President Joe Biden to not deploy American forces or ballistic weapons in Ukraine because that could unleash World War Three. Biden has been lying through his teeth. Which is hardly surprising. American political leaders have been habitually lying about NATO aggression toward Russia for decades.
Washington, London, Berlin and so on are playing a contemptible game of gaslighting. It is evident they are involved in fueling a war on Russia’s doorstep and it is evident that the objective of the war is the ultimate geopolitical prize of instigating regime change in Moscow. Russian President Vladimir Putin has on several occasions succinctly deprecated this Western imperialist agenda.
On the other hand, however, the Western opponents project an air of innocence, claiming against all the evidence that they are “not at war”.
The duplicitous dynamic is comparable to the boiling-frog scenario, as one commentator aptly put it recently. The slow, gradual shift of hostility is aimed at dissembling what is otherwise obviously malign intent.
The insidious game of gaslighting can often be difficult to uncover. That’s what makes it a particularly sinister ruse. It’s a cloaked dagger.
But in the case of the United States and NATO in Ukraine, the game is long past over as to what is really going on – that is, the calculated aggression towards Russia. That aggression has been seeded since the end of the Second World War. The defeat of Nazi aggression was followed by the succession of NATO as the manifest machinery of Western imperialism.
The historic aggression against Russia has culminated in the Kiev regime and its NATO-backed war. That war was a low-intensity campaign for eight years until its fully-fledged form this year.
When a U.S. government-owned media outlet is publishing satellite images of aviation and naval bases in Crimea and openly defining those sites as “prime targets” then we surely know that the conflict has broken through consciousness to the level of public admission. In short, it’s official.
Russia has warned that it will view U.S. and NATO batteries in Ukraine as legitimate targets. What happens when American, British, Canadian, German, Polish and other NATO soldiers start going back in bodybags?
Surely a negotiated settlement to the conflict in Ukraine and the wider security concerns of Russia should be a priority. But regrettably, Washington and its European and Kiev minions are incapable of such diplomacy.
That’s why it seems to be a dawning realization in Moscow that the war in Ukraine must be finished decisively by military means. There is no point trying to negotiate with liars and deluded knaves. That’s been tried already to no avail. The Kiev regime must be eradicated once and for all.
The United States and NATO are all the while threatening a dangerous escalation. But Russia has to finish this war on its terms.
Surely a negotiated settlement to the conflict in Ukraine and the wider security concerns of Russia should be a priority. But regrettably, Washington and its European and Kiev minions are incapable of such diplomacy.
The Radio Free Europe outlet this week blatantly published satellite images of Russian military bases in Crimea and openly advocated for the Kiev regime to launch strikes. The reality is even more sobering and grim. It would not be the Kiev regime carrying out such strikes, but rather U.S., British and other NATO special forces acting as the brains and stealthy hands of the regime.
Moscow has already inveighed against NATO as being a direct participant in hostilities in Ukraine. The RFE report corroborates Russia’s claims. It is self-admission by the United States of being a party to the conflict.
The satellite images were provided by a private U.S. company called Planet Labs which has a history of working closely with the Pentagon. The images included an airbase at Dzhankoy which is described as a main logistics hub. Naval sites at Sevastopol were also listed in detail as well as purported ammunition tunnels in the surrounding mountains. Other targets included anti-aircraft positions near Feodosia on the Crimean Peninsula. From Moscow’s viewpoint, the peninsula is the sovereign territory of the Russian Federation. Yet here we have the U.S. government’s media mouthpiece giving out the coordinates and calling for air strikes on “prime targets”.
RFE is wholly owned by the U.S. government and it has a long and tawdry history of acting as a CIA conduit in Eastern Europe during the height of the Cold War. For the publication to publish targets for military attack and to advocate for such action is tantamount to Washington openly declaring itself to be director of war operations by the Kiev regime.
This role by Washington and its NATO allies has long been surmised since the conflict in Ukraine erupted in February this year. Indeed for the eight years since the coup in Kiev in 2014, the United States and its NATO partners have been weaponizing and prepping the anti-Russian regime for war, as former German Chancellor Angela Merkel recently admitted.
But since hostilities flared over the past 10 months, the United States, Britain, Poland and other NATO members have been actively involved in providing not just weapons, but training, logistics and intelligence for attacking Russian forces. It is believed that American and British advisers have been directing Ukrainian air strikes at the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant, as well as more recently on air bases deep inside Russian territory. The assassination of over a dozen senior Russian military commanders in the battlefields is also thought to be as a result of close targeting information provided by U.S. intelligence.
The sinking of the Moskva, the Russian navy’s flag ship in the Black Sea Fleet, with the loss of many personnel onboard, is another incident that points to NATO’s overarching involvement in the pursuit of this war.
At the end of October it is believed that American and British special forces were involved in a daring drone attack on Crimea. That incident led to Moscow temporarily cancelling the shipping arrangement for grain exports from the Black Sea.
All this apparent participation in the conflict has been brazenly stonewalled by Washington and its NATO allies who steadfastly claim to be not a party to the conflict. Just this week, the Biden administration announced that it was planning to supply Patriot missiles to Ukraine which Moscow condemned as another serious escalation. The Pentagon rebuffed Russian concerns and maintained that the “United States is not at war with Russia, and we do not seek conflict.”
Such blithe denials of responsibility in the conflict are either delusional or bare-faced lies. The fact is the United States and its NATO allies are at war in Ukraine against Russia. The arsenal of weapons and financial support for the Kiev regime is ensuring that the conflict is prolonged and near-impossible to halt. The United States and the European Union are bankrolling a self-declared NeoNazi regime to the tune of $100 billion in both military and financial aid.
The weapons being supplied to Ukraine have become incrementally more sophisticated and longer-range, including the HIMARS, ATACMS, IRIS-T and NASAMS artillery and anti-aircraft systems. The announcement of Patriot deliveries is a further escalation. These advanced systems necessarily mean that American, British, German and other NATO troops are on the ground in Ukraine firing weapons at Russian targets. It’s inconceivable that Ukrainian conscripts could operate these systems without NATO commanders and advisers, if not actual triggermen.
Besides, too, there have been admissions by U.S. and British military sources that their special forces are operating covertly in Ukraine.
All of this contradicts previous vows by U.S. President Joe Biden to not deploy American forces or ballistic weapons in Ukraine because that could unleash World War Three. Biden has been lying through his teeth. Which is hardly surprising. American political leaders have been habitually lying about NATO aggression towards Russia for decades.
Washington, London, Berlin and so on are playing a contemptible game of gaslighting. It is evident they are involved in fueling a war on Russia’s doorstep and it is evident that the objective for the war is the ultimate geopolitical prize of instigating regime change in Moscow. Russian President Vladimir Putin has on several occasions succinctly deprecated this Western imperialist agenda.
On the other hand, however, the Western opponents project an air of innocence, claiming against all the evidence that they are “not at war”.
The duplicitous dynamic is comparable to the boiling-frog scenario, as one commentator aptly put it recently. The slow, gradual shift of hostility is aimed at dissembling what is otherwise obviously malign intent.
The insidious game of gaslighting can often be difficult to uncover. That’s what makes it a particularly sinister ruse. It’s a cloaked dagger.
But in the case of the United States and NATO in Ukraine, the game is long past over as to what is really going on – that is, the calculated aggression towards Russia. That aggression has been seeded since the end of the Second World War. The defeat of Nazi aggression was followed by the succession of NATO as the manifest machinery of Western imperialism.
The historic aggression against Russia has culminated in the Kiev regime and its NATO-backed war. That war was a low-intensity campaign for eight years until its fully-fledged form this year.
When a U.S. government-owned media outlet is publishing satellite images of aviation and naval bases in Crimea and openly defining those sites as “prime targets” then we surely know that the conflict has broken through consciousness to the level of public admission. In short, it’s official.
Russia has warned that it will view U.S. and NATO batteries in Ukraine as legitimate targets. What happens when American, British, Canadian, German, Polish and other NATO soldiers start going back in bodybags?
Surely a negotiated settlement to the conflict in Ukraine and the wider security concerns of Russia should be a priority. But regrettably, Washington and its European and Kiev minions are incapable of such diplomacy.
That’s why it seems to be a dawning realization in Moscow that the war in Ukraine must be finished decisively by military means. There is no point trying to negotiate with liars and deluded knaves. That’s been tried already to no avail. The Kiev regime must be eradicated once and for all.
The United States and NATO are all the while threatening a dangerous escalation. But Russia has to finish this war on its terms.
Never forget that 95% of Crimeans voted to rejoin Russia. Lou
Kiev has repeatedly insisted that it considers Crimea, which became part of Russia following a referendum in 2014, to be an “occupied territory” and has vowed to seize the peninsula “by any means necessary.”
A Ukrainian presidential adviser has told people to get ready for “de-occupation measures”
Kiev has issued a warning to people living in what it called “occupied territories,” including Crimea, to prepare shelter and stock up on supplies. The appeal was posted to Twitter on Monday by an adviser to Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky.
Mikhail Podolyak urged “residents of the occupied territories, including the Crimean peninsula, to follow the officials’ recommendations during de-occupation measures.”
Furthermore, people should “prepare a bomb shelter, stock up on a sufficient amount of water and charge power banks right now.” Podolyak concluded his warning with the line “Everything will be Ukraine.”
The warning comes after Podolyak announced last week that Ukrainian authorities are developing evacuation routes for Ukrainians living in Crimea “who want to leave the island during the active de-occupation.”
Kiev has repeatedly insisted that it considers Crimea, which became part of Russia following a referendum in 2014, to be an “occupied territory” and has vowed to seize the peninsula “by any means necessary.”
The US-led NATO alliance also considers Crimea to be “illegally annexed” Ukrainian territory and has demanded that Moscow return the region to Ukrainian control. A US official told Politico last month that Washington had given Ukraine its blessing to strike targets of its choosing in Crimea.
Kiev’s warning to Crimeans comes after months of warnings of a counteroffensive in the south of the country, vowing to reclaim the whole of Donbass, parts of the Zaporozhye and Kharkov regions currently held by Russian forces, as well as Crimea, which is part of Russia.
There is no prospect of Ukraine retaking Crimea by force, as the vast majority of the local population are ethnic Russians, former German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has claimed in an interview.
Speaking to Spain’s ABC newspaper last Saturday, Schroeder said: “the idea that President Zelensky could reconquer [Crimea] militarily makes no sense.” Schroder, who led Germany from 1998 until 2005, pointed out that it was Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev who made Crimea part of the then-Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, thinking the USSR would “last as long as the Catholic Church.”
Schroeder mentioned his own repeated condemnation of Russia’s military offensive against Ukraine, describing it as a “mistake of the Russian Government.” However, he expressed doubt as to whether distancing himself personally from Russian President Vladimir Putin “would do any good.”
“There must be concessions on both sides” if the parties in the conflict are serious about peace, the ex-chancellor insisted. However, according to Schroeder, such negotiations cannot succeed without the consent of the US as “this conflict is part of a larger geopolitical confrontation.”
The former chancellor believes Washington is anxious as it knows it is losing its global hegemony, with China being the main rival. Russia, however, is not on a par with the US economically, and is therefore not a serious competitor, Schroeder opined.
The 78-year-old veteran of German politics said that “Beijing is acting in this conflict in an extraordinarily rational way,” buying Russian oil and gas at a discount.
European nations, by contrast, might be making a big mistake by relying too much on the US, and could end up losing their autonomy.
However, there is currently no threat to the existence of the European Union in Schroeder’s eyes. He described as a “positive step” Sweden’s and Finland’s decision to join NATO.
Commenting on the deepening energy crisis in Germany, the ex-chancellor said that just like many families in the country, his is already feeling the impact. He called on the German government to launch the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which is ready to pump gas to Europe. Schroeder warned of “huge” consequences unless his advice is heeded.
If I hear one more ignorant political pundit say that Russia invaded Crimea I am going to puke on their website. Damn, what part of 95 % of Crimeans chose to remain with Russia don’t these pinheads understand? Western propaganda is just that and it corrupts all those involved. That is why we don’t really have journalists in the West anymore: They all work as propagandists of the state.
Earlier this month, Canada hosted the third Ukraine Reform Conference, a gathering of diplomats and officials from over 100 countries aimed at bringing Kiev even more directly under the geopolitical and economic domination of the western imperialist powers.
After meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on the conference sidelines, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau vowed “to stand with Ukraine against Russian interference and aggression,” and to support it in the struggle to end Russia’s “illegal annexation” of Crimea.
Trudeau’s portrayal of Russia as the aggressor in Ukraine and Eastern Europe turns reality on its head. It conceals the fact that Canada played a major supporting role in the US-orchestrated, fascist-spearheaded February 2014 coup that chased Ukraine’s elected president from power and brought a far-right, pro-western regime to power in Kiev; and that the 2014 coup was the continuation of a longstanding US-led, Canadian-backed drive to expand NATO to Russia’s borders and harness Ukraine to the West.
Moreover, Canadian imperialism has been playing a leading role in the subsequent US-NATO war drive against Russia. This includes supporting Washington’s withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Russia; taking command and providing the bulk of the troops for one of NATO’s four new “forward deployed” battalions in Poland and the three Baltic states; and deploying 200 Canadian Armed Forces personnel to Ukraine since 2015 to help prepare its army and National Guard to, in Trudeau’s words, “liberate” Ukrainian territory.
But Canada’s intimate alliance with far-right Ukrainian nationalists did not begin in 2014, or even Dec. 1991, when Canada became the first western country to recognize Ukraine as a sovereign state. In the decades following World War II, Canada became a haven for far-right Ukrainian nationalists, many of whom had collaborated with the Nazis both in their drive to find “lebensraum” (living space) through the conquest of the Soviet Union and their genocidal “final solution to the Jewish problem.”
Under conditions of the postwar US-led military-strategic offensive against the Soviet Union—what euphemistically came to be known as the Cold War—these ultra-reactionary political forces came to be seen as useful allies due to their virulent anticommunism and hostility to anything and anyone associated with the Soviet Union.
In the immediate postwar period, Canada’s then Liberal government, working in close cahoots with US and British intelligence, opened Canada’s doors to Ukrainian Nazi collaborators. These included members of the infamous 14th Grenadier Division of the Waffen SS, also known as the Galicia Division.
Among the beneficiaries of this policy was Mikhail Chomiak, the grandfather of current Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland. Chomiak served as editor of a pro-Nazi Ukrainian nationalist newspaper during the war, Krakivs’ki Visti, which used publishing equipment commandeered by the Nazis from a Jewish newspaper they had shut down. Chomiak emigrated to northern Alberta after fleeing to Vienna in late 1944 in the face of the advancing Red Army (see: Canadian media denounces exposure of foreign minister’s grandfather as Nazi collaborator).
The scale of the influx of Nazi collaborators only became public knowledge in the 1980s. A comprehensive study carried out by Alti Rodal on behalf of the federal government-appointed Deschênes Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals in Canada uncovered records proving that US intelligence agents in Europe had funneled Nazi collaborators from Eastern Europe through the Canadian immigration system using false papers. Rodal revealed that large numbers of identically typed applications were received by Canada’s immigration department from one address in West Germany. On closer inspection, this address turned out to be a US military base.
The Progressive Conservative government of Brian Mulroney established the Deschênes Commission in 1985, in response to a mounting public outcry over exposures of Nazis and Nazi accomplices who had found a safe haven in Canada and tasked the inquiry with identifying Nazi war criminals residing in Canada.
Around the same time, the Simon Wiesenthal Center estimated that upwards of 2,000 Nazis and Nazi collaborators emigrated to Canada in the years after the war. A quarter-century later, in 2011, it would give Canada an “F minus” in its annual report ranking countries on their efforts to prosecute war criminals. This placed Canada on a par with Ukraine and the former Baltic republics, i.e. countries where the right-wing, nationalist regimes that have emerged since the Stalinist bureaucracy’s dissolution of the Soviet Union openly venerate the ultranationalists who aligned with the Nazis when they invaded the USSR.
War criminals in Canada
A significant number of those who made their way to Canada were members of the Nazi SS’s Galicia Division, which was made up of Ukrainian nationalist volunteers who fought on the side of the Wehrmacht against the Red Army during the Nazis’ war of annihilation against the Soviet Union. This preplanned onslaught—launched in June 1941 when a 3 million-strong force comprised of German troops, their Axis allies and fascist volunteers invaded the Soviet Union—led to the deaths of 27 million Soviet citizens and the Holocaust.
In waging war, suppressing the population, and pursuing the annihilation of the Jews, across Eastern Europe and above all in the USSR, Hitler’s Wehrmacht and SS shock troops relied on the loyal collaboration of ultraright-wing, anti-Semitic forces. Among the Ukrainian nationalists, in both occupied Poland and the USSR, the Nazis found eager collaborators. The Galicia Division was formed in 1943 out of a faction of the Stepan Bandera-led Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists Bandera (OUN-B) and fought with the Nazis against the Red Army throughout 1944.
Massacres perpetrated by the division against Polish and Jewish civilians have been well documented, including at Huta Pieniacka, Podkamien, and Palikrowy. At Podkamien, 100 Polish civilians were massacred in a hilltop monastery, and at least a further 500 in surrounding villages as the Red Army approached the German-occupied area in March 1944.
Members of the Galicia Division were initially prohibited from entering Canada due to their membership in the SS. But in 1950, Britain made an appeal to the Commonwealth for volunteers to accept a total of 9,000 division members who were at that time residing in the UK after being disarmed by British troops at the war’s end.
When Canada’s External Affairs Department, prompted by complaints from the Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC), raised concerns about the division’s ties to the Nazis and role in Nazi atrocities, the British government insisted that it had carried out background checks. “While in Italy these men were screened by Soviet and British missions and neither then nor subsequently has any evidence been brought to light which would suggest that any of them fought against the Western Allies or engaged in crimes against humanity,” claimed the British Foreign Office. “Their behaviour since they came to this country,” added London, “has been good and they have never indicated in any way that they are infected with any trace of Nazi ideology.”
With this letter serving as political cover, Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent and his cabinet declared that Galicia Division members would be permitted to immigrate to Canada unless it could be proved that they had personally committed atrocities against civilian populations based on “race, religion or national origins.” Simply having been a Galicia Division member would not be considered a valid reason to prevent entry, even though after the war all Waffen-SS members had been deemed complicit in war crimes.
The immigration of Nazi and Nazi-allied war criminals continued for more than a decade after the war and was a significant factor in Canada’s emergence during the Cold War as a political-ideological centre of far-right Ukrainian nationalism.
Speaking to a CBS “60 Minutes” programme in 1997, Canadian historian Irving Abella, who is currently Professor for Canadian Jewish history at York University, bluntly summed up the political climate of the time. “One way of getting into postwar Canada,” he said “was by showing the SS tattoo. This proved that you were an anti-Communist.”
Ottawa carried out this policy in close collaboration with US authorities, who similarly permitted ex-Nazis to settle in the US and recruited hundreds to act as spies against the Soviet Union and the Soviet-allied regimes in Eastern Europe. According to investigative reporter Eric Lichtblau, up to 1,000 former Nazis were made use of by the CIA in Europe, within the US itself, the Middle East, and in Latin America.
The open-door policy towards Nazi collaborators stood in stark contrast to the cold shoulder given by Canada to Jews desperately fleeing persecution. Abella coauthored a well-known book, None is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe, which was published in 1983 just prior to the establishment of the Deschênes Commission. Abella and Harold Troper detailed how Canada accepted a mere 5,000 Jewish refugees between 1936 and 1945. Most infamously, Canada was among the countries to refuse to provide asylum to the 900 Jewish refugees on the ship the MS St Louis, which sailed from Hamburg for the Americas in April 1939. Canada’s refusal to accept any of the refugees forced the St. Louis to return to Europe, where over 200 of its passengers later died in the Holocaust.
Exoneration of the Galicia Division
Due to the continued high-level protection members of the Galicia Division enjoyed from the government and other establishment circles, the Deschênes commission granted the Brotherhood of Veterans of the First Division of the Ukrainian National Army (Galicia Division) special intervener status in its hearings. This meant it was able to cross-examine testimony from witnesses, as well as make use of the standard right to submit legal documents and provide its own testimony.
The Nazi War Criminals commission also refused Soviet offers to gather testimony in the USSR, on the purported grounds that Moscow had refused to allow Canadian officials to interrogate witnesses in accordance with Canadian rules of evidence.
Outrageously, the Deschênes commission exonerated the Galicia Division of any wrongdoing in its December 1986 final report. Its most important findings in this connection read: “The Galicia Division (14 Waffengrenadierdivision der SS [gal. Nr. 1]) should not be indicted as a group,” and “Charges of war crimes against members of the Galicia Division have never been substantiated, either in 1950 when they were first preferred, or in 1984 when they were renewed, or before this Commission.”
The commission also summarily dismissed the charge that hundreds, if not thousands, of Nazi and Nazi-allied war criminals had immigrated to Canada, declaring these figures to be “grossly exaggerated.”
Another Ukrainian nationalist outfit given special representation rights before the Deschênes commission was the Ukrainian Canadian Committee (UCC), which has since renamed itself the Ukrainian Canadian Congress. In 1950, the UCC had successfully campaigned for the lifting of the ban on Galicia Division veterans entering the country.
The UCC continues to uphold the legacy of the Galicia Division. On Remembrance Day in 2010, the organisation saluted Ukrainian veterans of the Waffen SS as fighters for “freedom of their ancestral Ukrainian homeland.” The press release came from Paul Grod, the current head of the UCC. Grod has accompanied both Trudeau and his predecessor, Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, on their trips to the Ukraine.
The case of Vladimir Katriuk
Nobody should believe that the Canadian ruling elite’s defence of pro-Nazi war criminals is a thing of the past.
In 2015, Vladimir Katriuk, a Ukrainian and member of the SS during World War II, died in Quebec at the age of 93. His personal fate exemplifies how the Canadian state actively connived to ensure Nazi war criminals escaped justice.
Katriuk, who came to Canada under a false name in 1951, was accused of war crimes, the most documented of which was his participation in a the Khatyn massacre, carried out in what is now Belarus, in early 1943. In the last years of Katriuk’s life, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre placed his name near the top of its list of the ten most-wanted war criminals.
Katriuk’s case first came to prominence in 1999, when a federal court ruled that he had gained Canadian citizenship on false pretenses, because he had neglected to inform Canadian immigration officials about his Nazi past. After a lengthy period of deliberation, the Conservative government decided in 2007 that it would not revoke Katriuk’s citizenship and claimed there was insufficient evidence for him to be charged with war crimes.
Katriuk, who later joined the SS, was identified by multiple sources as being a machine gunner at the Khatyn massacre, which occurred on 22 March 1943. A total of 149 villagers were either burnt alive or shot by members of Battalion 118, a volunteer auxiliary police battalion of which Katriuk was a member, with the support of a Waffen SS unit. Evidence of his participation in other lesser known crimes has also been documented, as mentioned in a 2012 article by Swedish academic Per Anders Rudling.
Even in the last weeks of his life, when a Russian extradition request was submitted for the Ukrainian-born Katriuk, a spokeswoman for the Conservative government justified Canada’s refusal to allow Katriuk’s extradition to face trial on the basis of the political situation in Russia and its alleged “aggression” against Ukraine. “While I cannot comment on any specific extradition request, to be clear, we will never accept or recognize the Russian annexation of Crimea or the illegal occupation of any sovereign Ukrainian territory,” a spokeswoman for then Justice Minister Peter McKay declared.
Nothing has changed under Justin Trudeau’s Liberals. Anxious to cover up the ultraright-wing character of the forces Ottawa and Washington have allied with in their drive to harness Ukraine to western imperialism and these forces’ ties to the Ukrainian nationalist collaborators with the Nazis, Foreign Minister Freeland has denounced the revelations of her grandfather’s ties to the Nazis as Russian-orchestrated “disinformation.”
When Trudeau visited Ukraine in 2016, he was accompanied by a strong UCC delegation and members of the Army SOS group, set up to procure military equipment for the pro-Kiev volunteer militias, which are drawn overwhelmingly from far-right, fascistic groups.
In a controversial snub to international law, the United States signaled last week that it is moving to officially recognize the Golan Heights as part of Israeli territory. If the US does so, then it forfeits any moral authority to sanction Russia over allegations of “annexing Crimea”.
In its annual US State Department report, the section dealing with the Golan Heights reportedly refers to the contested area as “Israeli-controlled”, not “Israeli-occupied”. The change in wording deviates from United Nations resolutions and international norm which use the term “Israeli-occupied” to designate the land Israel annexed from Syria following the 1967 Six Day War.
Israel has occupied the western part of the Golan since 1967 as a spoil from that war. In 1981, Tel Aviv formally annexed the Syrian territory. However, the UN Security Council in 1981, including the US, unanimously condemned the annexation as illegal. The resolution mandates Israel to return the land to Syria which has historical claim to the entire Golan. The area of 1,800 square kilometers is a strategic elevation overlooking the northern Jordan Valley.
If Washington confirms its recent indications of recognizing the Golan as officially part of Israel, the development would mark an egregious flouting of international law.
But what’s more, such a move totally prohibits Washington from posturing with presumed principle over the issue of Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula which since 2014 voluntarily became part of Russia.
Just last month, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo repeated accusations against Russia of “annexing” Crimea. Pompeo insisted that US sanctions against Moscow would be maintained until Russia “returns Crimea to Ukraine”.
“The world has not forgotten the cynical lies Russia employed to justify its aggression and mask its attempted annexation of Ukrainian territory,” he said. “The United States will maintain respective sanctions against Russia until the Russian government returns control of Crimea to Ukraine.”
Last year, Pompeo’s State Department issued a ‘Crimea Declaration’ in which it was stated that, “Russia undermines a bedrock of international principle shared by democratic states: that no country can change the borders of another by force.”
Claims by Washington and the European Union of “illegal annexation” of Crimea by Russia are the central basis for five years of economic sanctions imposed on Moscow. Those sanctions have contributed to ever-worsening tensions with Russia and the build-up of NATO forces along Russia’s borders.
Those claims are, however, highly contestable. The people of Crimea voted in a legally constituted referendum in March 2014 to secede from Ukraine and to join the Russian Federation. That referendum followed an illegal coup in Kiev in February 2014 backed by the US and Europe against a legally elected president, Viktor Yanukovych. Historically, Crimea has centuries of shared cultural heritage with Russia. Its erstwhile position within the state of Ukraine was arguably an anomaly of the Cold War and subsequent break-up of the Soviet Union.
In any case, there is scant comparison between the Golan Heights and Crimea, save, that is, for the latest hypocrisy in Washington. While Crimea and its people are arguably historically part of Russia, the Golan Heights are indisputably a sovereign part of Syria which was forcibly annexed by Israeli military occupation.
The illegality of Israel’s occupation of Golan is a matter of record under international law as stipulated in UNSC Resolution 497.
There is no such international mandate concerning Crimea. Claims of Russia’s “annexation” are simply a matter of dubious political assertion made by Washington and its European allies.
The latest move by Washington towards recognizing Golan as part of Israel – in defiance of international law – comes on the back of several other recent developments.
US Republican Senator Lindsey Graham made a tour of Israeli-occupied Golan last week in the company of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, pointedly transported by an IDF military helicopter. Graham said following his tour that he would recommend the Trump administration to officially recognize the area as under Israeli sovereignty.
Currently, there is legislation going through both the US Senate and House of Representatives which is aimed at declaring the entire Golan as Israeli territory.
The stark shift in pro-Israeli bias in Washington under the Trump administration is consistent with the White House declaring at the end of 2017 that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. Again, that move by President Trump overturned international consensus and UN resolutions which have stipulated Jerusalem to be a shared capital between Israel and a future Palestinian state, to be worked out by (defunct) peace negotiations.
Why Washington has taken up the Golan issue as a prize for Israel at this time is not precisely clear. It could be seen as the Trump administration giving a political boost to Netanyahu for next month’s elections.
There has been previous speculation that Trump is doing the bidding for a US-based oil company, Genie Oil, which is linked to his administration through his son-in-law Jared Kushner’s family investments. The New Jersey company has a subsidiary in Israel, is tied to the Netanyahu government, and has long been aiming to drill the Golan for its abundant oil resources.
The Golan move could also be retribution meted out to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad over his country’s historic defeat of the US-backed covert war for regime change. The nearly eight-year war was also covertly backed by Israel which sponsored jihadist militia operating out of the Golan against the Syrian army. Having vanquished the US regime-change plot, thanks to crucial military support from Russia, Iran and Hezbollah, the payback could be Washington stepping up Israeli claims to annex the Golan.
But whatever the background explanation is, the initiative by Washington to legalize the annexation of Golan by Israel is a brazen violation of international law. In doing so, the US is officially sponsoring war crimes and theft of Syria’s sovereign territory. Or as the Crimea Declaration would put it: “changing the borders of another country by force” – supposedly a “bedrock principle” that Washington continually sermonizes about to Russia.
Crimea and Golan are different issues of territorial dispute, as noted already. Nevertheless, the duplicity of Washington over Golan makes its posturing on Crimea null and void. If the Europeans meekly go along with the US move on Golan, then they too should shut their mouths and their moralizing sanctions over Crimea.
Finian Cunningham (born 1963) has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages. For over 20 years, he worked as an editor and writer in major news media organisations, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent.
Crimea is essential to Russia strategically and economically, but speculation over Ankara helping to boost the US presence in the Black Sea is far-fetched given Turkey’s energy deals with Moscow…
A power struggle over the Black Sea between Russia and the US plus NATO has the potential to develop as a seminal plot of the 21st century New Great Game – alongside the current jostling for re-positioning in the Eastern Mediterranean.
By now it’s established the US and NATO are stepping up military pressure from Poland to Romania and Bulgaria all the way to Ukraine and east of the Black Sea, which seems, at least for the moment, relatively peaceful, just as Crimea’s return to Russia starts to be regarded, in realpolitik terms, as a fait accompli.
After a recent series of conversations with top analysts from Istanbul to Moscow, it’s possible to identify the main trends ahead.
Just as independent Turkish analysts like Professor Hasan Unal are alarmed at Ankara’s isolation in the Eastern Mediterranean energy sphere by an alliance of Greece, Cyprus and Israel, Washington’s military buildup in both Romania and Bulgaria is also identified as posing a threat to Turkey.
It’s under this perspective that Ankara’s obstinance in establishing a security “corridor” in northern Syria, east of the Euphrates river, and free from the YPG Kurds, should be examined. It’s a matter of policing at least one sensitive border.
Still, in the chessboard from Syria and the Eastern Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf, Turkey and Crimea, the specter of “foreign intervention” setting fire to the Intermarium – from the Baltics to the Black Sea – simply refuses to die.
‘Russian lake’?
By the end of the last glacial era, around 20,000 years ago, the Black Sea – separated from the Mediterranean by an isthmus – was just a shallow lake, much smaller in size than it is today.
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The legendary journey of Jason and the Argonauts, before the Trojan war, followed the Argo ship to the farther shore of Pontus Euxinus (the ‘Black Sea’) to recover the Golden Fleece – the cure for all evils – from its location in Colchis (currently in Georgia).
In Ancient Greece, steeped in mythology, the Black Sea was routinely depicted as the boundary between the known world and terra incognita. But then it was “discovered” – like America many centuries later – to the point where it was configured as a “string of pearls” of Greek trading colonies linked to the Mediterranean.
The Black Sea is more than strategic, it’s crucial geopolitically. There has been a constant drive in modern Russian history to be active across maritime trade routes through the strategic straits – the Dardanelles, the Bosphorus and Kerch in Crimea – to warmer waters further south.
As I observed early last month in Sevastopol, Crimea is now a seriously built fortress – incorporating S-400 and Iskander-M missiles – capable of ensuring total Russian primacy all across the eastern Black Sea.
A visit to Crimea reveals how its genes are Russian, not Ukrainian. A case can be made that the very concept of Ukraine is relatively spurious, propelled by the Austro-Hungarian empire at the end of the 19th century and especially before World War I to weaken Russia. Ukraine was part of Russia for 400 years, far longer than California and New Mexico have been part of the US.
Now compare the reconquest of Crimea by Russia, without firing a shot and validated by a democratic referendum, to the US “conquests” of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya. Moreover, I saw Crimea being rebuilt and on the way to prosperity, complete with Tatars voting with their feet to return; compare it to Ukraine, which is an IMF basket case.
Crimea is essential to Russia not only from a geostrategic but also an economic point of view, as it solidifies the Black Sea as a virtual “Russian lake”.
It’s immaterial that Turkish strategists may vehemently disagree, as well as US Special Representative for Ukraine Kurt Volker who, trying to seduce Turkey, dreams about increasing the US presence in the Black Sea, “whether on a bilateral basis or under EU auspices.”
Under this context, the building of the Turk Stream pipeline should be read as Ankara’s sharp response to the rampant Russophobia in Brussels.
Ankara has, in tandem, consistently shown it won’t shelve the acquisition of Russian S-400 missile systems because of American pressure. This has nothing to do with pretentions of neo-Ottomanism; it’s about Turkey’s energy and security priorities. Ankara now seems more than ready to live with a powerful Russian presence across the Black Sea.
It all comes down to Montreux
Not by accident the comings and goings on NATO’s eastern flank was a key theme at last summer’s biennial Atlanticist summit. After all, Russia, in the wake of reincorporating Crimea, denied access over the eastern Black Sea.
NATO, though, is a large mixed bag of geopolitical agendas. So, in the end, there’s no cohesive strategy to deal with the Black Sea, apart from a vague, rhetorical “support for Ukraine” and also vague exhortations for Turkey to assume its responsibilities.
But because Ankara’s priorities are in fact the Eastern Mediterranean and the Turkish-Syrian border, east of the Euphrates river, there’s no realistic horizon for NATO to come up with permanent Black Sea patrols disguised as a “freedom of navigation” scheme – as much as Kiev may beg for it.
What does remain very much in place is the guarantee of freedom of navigation in the Dardanelles and Bosphorus straits controlled by Turkey, as sanctioned by the 1936 Montreux Convention.
The key vector, once again, is that the Black Sea links Europe with the Caucasus and allows Russia trade access to southern warm waters. We always need to go back to Catherine the Great, who incorporated Crimea into the empire in the 18th century after half a millennium of Tatar and then Ottoman rule, and then ordered the construction of a huge naval base for the Black Sea fleet.
By now some facts on the ground are more than established.
Next year the Black Sea fleet will be upgraded with an array of anti-ship missiles; protected by S-400 Triumf surface-to-air missile systems; and supported by a new “permanent deployment” of Sukhoi SU-27s and SU-30s.
Far-fetched scenarios of the Turkish navy fighting the Russian Black Sea fleet will continue to be peddled by misinformed think tanks, oblivious to the inevitability of the Russia-Turkey energy partnership. Without Turkey, NATO is a cripple in the Black Sea region.
Intriguing developments such as a Viking Silk Road across the Intermarium won’t alter the fact that Poland, the Baltics and Romania will continue to clamor for “more NATO” in their areas to fight “Russian aggression”.
And it will be up to a new government in Kiev after the upcoming March elections to realize that any provocation designed to drag NATO into a Kerch Strait entanglement is doomed to failure.
Ancient Greek sailors had a deep fear of the Black Sea’s howling winds. As it now stands, call it the calm before a (Black Sea) storm.
Let’s tar and feather the next mind-controlled imbecile who repeats the lie that Russia invaded Crimea. When a nation votes 94% to rejoin Russia, that is not an invasion.
“For the past four years, the EU has imposed sanctions on Russia in line with Washington over pejorative claims that Moscow “annexed” Crimea. This claim is made in spite of the fact that the Crimean people voted in a referendum to secede from Ukraine, which had been taken over by a NATO/EU-backed Neo-Nazi coup, and to join the Russian Federation.” Are we not sick of these lying propagandists, right-wing lunatics?
Lithuania’s Diplomatic Hitman Takes Aim at Irish-Russian Relations
Lithuania’s Foreign Minister Linas Linkevicius is no ordinary diplomat. He is more a diplomatic hitman whose ideological mission is to blow holes in European-Russian relations at every opportunity.
One of his recent “jobs” was to write an op-ed for the Irish Times in which he castigated the European Union for appeasing Russian President Vladimir Putin. Linkevicius used a hoary old historical analogy comparing the EU with British leader Neville Chamberlain and his appeasement in 1938 of Nazi Germany’s Hitler.
Apart from the ignorant historical waffling, the other curious thing about Linkevicius’ op-ed piece in Ireland’s so-called “paper of record” was the timing. It was published on December 17, three days before EU foreign policy officials were to meet in Brussels on the issue of extending sanctions against Russia.
As it turned out, the EU agreed to extend sanctions on Moscow by another six months until July 31, 2019, when the matter will come up for review again.
For the past four years, the EU has imposed sanctions on Russia in line with Washington over pejorative claims that Moscow “annexed” Crimea. This claim is made in spite of the fact that the Crimean people voted in a referendum to secede from Ukraine, which had been taken over by a NATO/EU-backed Neo-Nazi coup, and to join the Russian Federation.
EU sanctions have been rolled over every six months for the past four years, each time given impetus by some new dubious issue, such as the shooting down of the Malaysian airliner over Ukraine in July 2014 or the alleged poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal in England in March 2018.
Typical of the Baltic states and their rightwing governments, Linkevicius’ world view is dominated by an abiding Russophobia.
Before becoming Lithuania’s foreign minister in 2012, he was the country’s permanent representative to the NATO military alliance. The 58-year-old politician’s top concern is to ensure that European states never normalize relations with Russia. He is frequently quoted in Western media or writes op-ed pieces in which he lambasts European calls or inclinations for re-engagement with Moscow.
His recent diatribe in the Irish Times was thus his usual run-of-the-mill Russophobia. Given Lithuania’s appalling history of collaborating with Nazi Germany, it surely is twisted irony for Linkevicius to level duff analogies about Russia.
However, the poison pen of Linkevicius is not just a simple matter of one politician airing his warped view of the world. Linkevicius and his rightwing anti-Russian ilk are appointing themselves as the arbiters of relations between the entire 28-member EU bloc and Russia. In other words, a minority of ideologues who view everything through a prism of Russophobia are trying to dictate to the rest of Europe on how to conduct relations with its biggest and, arguably, most strategically important neighbor, Russia. And that dictated conduct is to be unrelentingly hostile. How democratic of Linkevicius.
The Republic of Ireland, like several other EU members, has counted the cost of sanctions on Russia dearly. Between 2014 and 2016, Irish exports to Russia were slashed by half, from €722 to €364 million. The loss was due to Moscow enacting counter-sanctions on EU countries which badly hit Irish agricultural exports of beef, pork and dairy.
As with other EU economies, the Irish have been rueing the whole sanctions war with Moscow. Last year, a senior Irish government delegation travelled to Russia in a bid to “reset relations”. As the Irish Times reported: “Trade the target as Ireland seeks a reset in relations with Russia.”
More recent data shows that trade relations between the Irish republic and Russia have recovered hugely from the low-point in 2016. Total bilateral trade had risen by 40 per cent to €800 million for the year ending 2017, which is almost back to the level it was before the Ukraine conflict started. (Ireland’s bilateral trade with Lithuania is estimated to be about half that with Russia.)
There are plenty of indicators that the Irish economy is still struggling from the 2008 global financial crash. Ireland’s rural economy is particularly hurting with harrowing cases of farmers going bust and having their dwellings repossessed due to debt arrears.
As with many other EU countries, the Irish economy and society can’t afford the continuing futile new Cold War with Russia. The premises for the conflict are entirely bogus but the damage is entirely palpable for many ordinary people from loss of jobs and business.
The crucial thing about the EU sanctions policy on Russia is that it requires unanimity among the 28 member states for the measures to be extended.
If, say Ireland, were to have voted against the renewal of sanctions at the last December 21 European Council meeting, then the EU would be have to revoke its policy against Russia.
Given the background trends in the Irish economy and the behind-the-scenes moves by Irish officials to restore trade relations with Moscow, it can be fairly speculated that the Lithuanian foreign minister spotted a possible “weak link” in the EU chain of sanctions.
Linkevicius’ article in the Irish Times on December 17 was a diplomatic hit job, knowing that the paper is widely read by Irish representatives in the Brussels administration.
There was no news value in Linkevicius’ op-ed piece. It was a pointed sabotage against any notion of normalizing trade ties between the EU and Russia. Historical appeals about appeasing Nazi Germany were grotesque falsification of current events, and a blatant bid at moral blackmailing. The article was headlined: “How many wake up calls about Putin do we need?” More to the point, the Irish Times should publish an article with headline: “How many wake up calls about Russophobia do we need?’
Here’s a prediction. Next time the EU meets to decide on extending sanctions against Russia on July 31, you can bet Linkevicius will dust off another poison pen piece to some paper in a European capital considered to be going soft (that is, coming to its senses) on ending sanctions.
We are at the remains of Panticapaeum, the capital of the Kingdom of Bosphorus, founded in the second quarter of the 6th century BC on both sides of the Kerch Strait.
We start our walk on the hilltop of Mithridates, in the heart of modern Kerch, where “terrible” king Mithridates of Pontus (134 – 64 BC) was killed. Greek geographer Strabo (63 BC – 23 AD) said Panticapaeum was the mother country of “all the Milesian cities of Bosphorus”. It was a big city that boasted a convenient harbor and a shipyard.
As we climb higher, we come across an obelisk celebrating victory in the Great Patriotic War. This is one of the last ridges in eastern Crimea. To the left is Kerch harbor with no warships, only coastguard patrol boats. To the right, the dark blue Sea of Azov, the Kerch strait – now one of the geopolitical hot spots of the young 21st century – and far in the distance is Krimsky Most, the Crimea bridge.
Crossing the bridge – a 19km-long engineering marvel, built in only two years – is as smooth as it gets and takes less than 15 minutes. On the right, work proceeds on the rail bridge, which will be ready next year.
The Crimea Bridge. Photo: Asia Times
I cross in the direction of Novorossiysk, then turn back from the Russian mainland. There’s a passport control and customs check, even though Crimea is now Russian territory. Cars and buses are carefully examined; a terror attack is always a concern. The guards are polite: “Welcome to Krym”. I say I was already in Krym. They smile.
Bridge over troubled water
Washington officially insists all Crimea-related sanctions will remain until Moscow returns the peninsula to Ukraine. This will never happen. For Moscow, Crimea is already back to where it belongs. After all, Nikita Khrushchev, a sentimental Ukrainian, had transferred Crimea to Ukraine in 1954 in a fit of proletarian brotherhood, while blatantly violating the Constitution of the USSR.
US neocons and assorted Russophobes insist that Washington should further weaponize Kiev’s land, sea and air forces to counter “Russian aggression”, but Crimeans treat this as a bad joke.
Everyone knows Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko needs a diversion from his dismal, corrupt government. Thus the illegal – according to the Minsk agreements – bombing of cities in Donbass and the recent Kerch “incident”.
Poroshenko is polling at a meager 8%. He used the Kerch incident to declare martial law. He wanted three months, but Kiev’s legislature gave him just one. He is bound to lose the next elections. Meanwhile, over two million Ukrainians have already voted with their feet and sought refuge in Russia. Poroshenko can’t afford to launch a full-scale war on Donbass with no weapons, funds and little support from the EU.
For four years, Poroshenko has used a propaganda tsunami to manipulate the Ukrainian far right, which always abhorred Russians, Poles and Jews, to direct their blind hate towards Russians, the country’s largest minority. But that was not enough to “solve” any of the myriad problems of a de facto failed state.
After Washington destroyed any possible detente with Moscow, President Putin’s position remains very clear, as expressed during the 15th anniversary of the Valdai International Discussion Club in Sochi last October:
“Crimea is our land. We are still not going anywhere. Why is it our land? Not because we went there and took it… People came to a referendum in Crimea and voted for independence, first, and then for being part of Russia. Let me remind you for the hundredth time that there was no referendum in Kosovo, only the parliament voted for independence, that was all. Everyone who wanted to support and destroy the former Yugoslavia said: well, thank God, we are fine with that. Here, however, they disagree. Ok then, let’s have a discussion, go over the UN documents, see what the UN Charter is all about, and where it talks about the right of nations to self-determination. This will be an endless discussion. However, we proceed based on the will expressed by the people who live on that territory.”
Traveling from Simferopol to Kerch via Sevastopol, everyone I talked to confirmed they voted to re-join Russia, with no regrets.
For Russia-loving Crimeans, and Russians as a whole, Crimea back with the Motherland is a geopolitical, national security and national pride fait accompli. It also helps that Russia has done more for Crimea in four years than Ukraine did in six decades.
Airport making waves
My first impression, arriving at the brand new Simferopol International Airport, with its elegant design featuring 146 waves, is that any mid-sized city across the West would kill for it.
Simferopol International Airport. Photo: Asia Times
Marina Borodina, very well educated at the University of Crimea, and a producer at Rossiya Segodnya, shows me around the capital, thriving in a real estate boom, including the area around the airport. Crimea is under sanctions, but businesses adapt. No Visa or Mastercard? Everyone uses the Mir payment system, or rubles. Smartphones with SIMs by Russian providers are only good for local calls. So, there is no 4G network and no international roaming.
There’s a road-building boom as well. The coastal road from Sevastopol to Kerch is being upgraded, but the jewel in the crown is the 240km-long east-to-west Taurida highway, to be completed next year, linking to the Crimea bridge.
Sevastopol – where Christianity, according to a complex mix of legend and fact, entered Russia – was built entirely by Russia along beautiful blue creeks always jammed with ships. It’s indelible in the Russian national psyche especially because of its spirited two-year defense during the Crimean war, as well as repelling the 10-month siege by the Nazis during World War II.
The delicious old-world Hotel Sevastopol still reigns supreme, complete with an attached French brasserie and faint echoes of 19th century Paris that influenced Tsarist times.
Military officers parading their families by the famous promenade embellished with Christmas decorations dismiss the potential for more confrontation in the Sea of Azov. It and the Black Sea are de facto “Russian lakes”.
When the Mongol Tatars of the Golden Horde first arrived in Crimea, they saw a tower and called it Kerim (“fort”), thus Crimea. Then the Tatars moved inland, to Bakhchisaray, where they built the gracious palace of the independent khanate in a green valley protected by stone hills. That was the apex of the Crimean Tatar khanate; Krym Tartary.
Bakhchisaray Palace. Photo: Asia Times
I had time to explore a virtually deserted Bakhchisaray when a bride and groom celebrating their Tatar marriage arrived to pose for the obligatory photos, escorted by a fleet of black Mercedes sporting the light blue Tatar flag with its yellow seal. They were well off and spoke of good business opportunities, saying there were no problems whatsoever with the Russian administration. There are roughly 300,000 Tatars in Crimea out of a population of 2 million.
The ‘civilized’ and the ‘barbarians’
Anna Naumenko at the Kerch museum. Photo: Asia Times
At the Kerch museum, a stone’s throw from Mithridates hill, I was privileged to engage with one of the caretakers, Anna Naumenko – also finely educated at the University of Crimea – on a thrilling historical ride. The museum has a small collection of precious Greek and Byzantine artifacts even though most of the archeological treasures are at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg.
Crimea was the site of a groundbreaking historical encounter. Imagine Greek colonists, essentially urban, who had reached Crimea after navigating at least one month from the Bosphorus to southern Russia, finding themselves face to face with nomads from Central Asia who had crossed a sea of grass; the Scythians – an Indo-Iranian speaking confederation who were already deploying their nomadic skills around the Crimean steppes when the Greeks arrived in the 8th century BC.
Then came Sarmatians, Goths, Huns, Khazars – Turkic-speaking pastoral nomads from Central Asia, the Cuman (other Turkic-speaking nomads), Mongol-Tatars of the Golden Horde, before Byzantium, and the Ottoman empire. Crimean Tatars converted to Islam in the 14th century. The khanate went on until Catherine the Great conquered Crimea in 1783.
This shows how Crimea has always been an unparalleled crossroads intertwining “civilization” with what Athenian Greeks might describe as “barbarism”. The clashes forever permeate the Western self-perception of superiority in relation to an alleged inferior, usually nomad, Other.
The fabled Golden Horde – actually the western arm of the Tatar-Mongol empire – controlled the steppes north of the Black Sea as well as Crimea from the mid-13th Century until at least the mid-15th Century.
This is crucial because they were actually the first unifiers of Eurasia, assuring stability across the steppes from China to Hungary. And that led to trade connectivity; the Ancient Silk Roads, stretching from China all the way to the Black Sea, then sailing towards the Mediterranean. This is impregnated in the collective memory of all Eurasian peoples.
Byzantium was what Russian scholar Mikhail Rostovtzeff, in his fabulous book Iranians and Greeks in South Russia, described as a “very interesting” mixed civilization. So was the Black Sea, and Crimea.
The Ancient Silk Road brought silk, spices, porcelain, bronze and gold from China, Persia and India, while the Greeks exported wine, pottery, jewelry and ornaments first made in Greece and then in the Bosphorus kingdom in Kerch.
Peace in the steppes translated into free passage between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. The Mongol Tatars arrived in the Black Sea when the Byzantine empire was nearly dead. Behind the land armies of the Crusaders were the powerhouses of Venice and Genoa, eager to enhance trade connectivity with the markets of the Black Sea.
After the Crusaders had stormed Constantinople in 1204, they slipped through the Bosphorus to finally reach Crimea. For a while merchants in Tana, an important Venetian colony in the Sea of Azov, were able to monopolize through Venice virtually all the trade with China.
The Europeans could not help but see an opening. Sudak, in southeast Crimea, was a Greek, Byzantine and then Genoese colony. Yet as we know, this all ended when the Turks captured Constantinople in 1453 – and there was no more Byzantine empire around the Black Sea.
Empires falling
The Nazis had designs on Crimea. Two months before Germany invaded the USSR, it was decided that Crimea would be separated from Russia and handed to a puppet Ukraine; that was the Gotland project.
Most of the Nazi collaborators in Crimea during WWII were not Tatars. Still, under Stalin, the Tatars were the first ethnic minority to be entirely deported. When Soviet power was back in Crimea, those who remained were expelled en masse to Central Asia because of “treason to the Fatherland”. Now their sons and grandsons are coming back in droves.
When the USSR dissolved, the 19th-Century Tsarist Russian empire, plus Catherine the Great’s 18th century Novorossiya, across the northern shore of the Black Sea, also dissolved.
Crossing parts of the Crimean steppe, it’s easy to be reminded of Chekhov, who grew up in Taganrog on the Sea of Azov and loved the scent of herbs in the summer steppe.
It’s also fitting terrain to reflect on the collapse of empires. The Russian drive to reach the warm waters of the Mediterranean always clashed with the Turkish drive to hold on to the Ottoman conquests around the Black Sea. This history reverberated through the Crimean War in the 1850s and also through WWI, with Turkey allied with Germany and Austria-Hungary and Russia invading Anatolia. Yet even before WWI was over, both the Tsarist and Ottoman empires were gone.
Now Crimea is back to Russia, virtually for good, the union sealed by Krimsky Most. It is a sobering reality graphically visible from the ruins of Panticapaeum.
Donald Trump campaigned with a promise to put ‘America first’ and to stay out of foreign conflicts. As president, Trump has followed the same interventionist policies that failed his predecessors, says former Congressman Ron Paul.
Donald Trump campaigned with a promise to put ‘America first’ and to stay out of foreign conflicts. As president, Trump has followed the same interventionist policies that failed his predecessors, says former Congressman Ron Paul.
Rather than back out of the meeting, Paul wrote on Monday, Trump should have used the opportunity to declare that the US is not the “policeman of the world,” and that “what flag flies over Crimea is none of our business.”
“Instead of being the president who ships lethal weapons to the Ukrainian regime, instead of being the president who insists that Crimea remain in Ukraine, instead of being the president who continues policies the American people clearly rejected at the ballot box, Trump could have blamed the Ukraine/Russia mess on the failed Obama foreign policy and charted a very different course,” Paul wrote.
Crimea’s majority-Russian residents voted to rejoin Russia in 2014, rather than side with the US-supported pro-Western regime in Kiev. Trump’s messaging on Crimea has been inconsistent since. Before incurring the wrath of the media in June by reportedly telling world leaders that “Crimea is Russian because everyone who lives there speaks Russian,” Trump agreed to sell Javelin anti-tank missiles to Poroshenko’s anti-Russian government.
In a press conference after last month’s midterm elections, Trump castigated his predecessor Barack Obama for allowing “a very large part of Ukraine to be taken” on his watch, not blaming Russia but not contradicting State Secretary Mike Pompeo’s referral to Crimea in June as under Russian “occupation.”
Torn between the demands of the American electorate and the influence of foreign policy ‘experts’ in Washington, Trump seems to have been listening to the latter in recent months, Paul wrote.
On the campaign trail, Trump had slammed President George W. Bush’s $1.9 trillion wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and promised to stay out of Syria. Since taking office, however, he signed off on multiple cruise missile strikes against Syria, continues to arm anti-government rebels there –many of whom have links to Al-Qaeda–and continues to hit all three countries with airstrikes, some of them deadly to civilians.
Trump responded to the tragic news of three US soldiers losing their lives to a roadside bomb in Afghanistan last week with a pledge to continue fighting the longest war in US history, because, Paul said, he listened to neoconservative ‘experts.’
“Virtually every expert that I have and speak to say if we don’t go there, they’re going to be fighting over here,” Trump said after the fatal attack. “And I’ve heard it over and over again.”
“That is the same bunkum the neocons sold us as they lied us into Iraq!” countered Paul, before offering some advice to the president.
“Listen to the people who elected you, who are tired of the US as the world’s police force. Let Ukraine and Russia work out their own problems. Give all your ‘experts’ a pink slip and start over with a real pro-American foreign policy: non-interventionism,” the former congressman from Texas wrote.
“The next Crimean War would be the last war and no poet would be left alive to chronicle it for the remaining cockroaches, the only beings which would likely survive it.”
A new Crimean War would be the last, but few amongst the general public realize that endless baiting of Russia, the cycle of war games, sanctions, and false accusations could well lead to all-out war between NATO and Russia.
George Galloway was a member of the British Parliament for nearly 30 years. He presents TV and radio shows (including on RT). He is a film-maker, writer and a renowned orator.
A new Crimean War would be the last, but few amongst the general public realize that endless baiting of Russia, the cycle of war games, sanctions, and false accusations could well lead to all-out war between NATO and Russia.
“Half a league, half a league, half a league onward, into the Valley of Death rode the six hundred,” – Alfred Lord Tennyson
The last time Britain fought Russia, we were the most powerful empire in the history of the world and our adversary a ramshackle obscurantist autocracy. The British suffered over forty thousand dead and wounded. It was the first modern war – red in tooth and claw – predating the American Civil War, which is often awarded that dubious honor. The terrible suffering of the British (and French) soldiers, virtually none of whom even had the right to vote for the parliament which ruled “their” empire, began to be unpopular at home. Tennyson’s braggadocio ballad “The Charge of the Light Brigade” gave rise to the first whispers of doubt amongst British people generally as to whether our soldiers were lions led by donkeys, into one valley of death after another. Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die.
Surprisingly, few amongst the general public had yet to wake up to the fact that the endless baiting of Russia, the cycle of war-games sanctions and false accusations could well lead to all-out war between NATO and the Russian Federation – multiple nuclear-armed superpowers, ramshackle no longer. Events this week in the Russian waters off Crimea and the subsequent war-mobilization of the Ukrainian neo-fascist government may well prove a wake-up call.
Ukrainian coup-president Poroshenko, with his country mired in debts and his presidency hanging by a thread trailing miles behind his main rival, has decided on the “Wag the Dog” manoeuvre – look over there he cries as he mounts the most serious provocation yet by sailing military and other ships into Russian territorial waters with the inevitable Russian response.
Invoking martial law, he may even cancel the forthcoming presidential poll and will certainly fundamentally change the political landscape through draconian legislation, including closing down opposition using the actually fascist militias in Ukraine as his shock troops.
Also on rt.comBlack Sea standoff: Kiev’s ‘provocation’ aims to score political points ahead of elections – MoscowPredictably he has called upon his allies in NATO to come to the aid of his beleaguered regime, beggared by his own recklessness. Trump – facing imminent Armageddon in Washington as the Mueller Enquiry closes – may welcome the opportunity to wag his own Dog. Theresa May – possibly in the last days of her premiership otherwise – ditto. Macron, the streets of his capital on fire with 77% of his people favoring the arsonists rather than him, likewise.
A dangerous constellation of weak, collapsing Western governments and leaders suddenly find their interests coinciding with the tin-pot tyrant Poroshenko. And into the Valley of Death they might just be ready to send their people charging. If they do they will find a resolute Russia far stronger than at Balaclava. Strong and united enough in fact to prevail. Unity in NATO countries is something even the Victorian master propagandist Tennyson would find it hard to spin. And certainly the moth-eaten second-rate spin-doctors of the NATO hirelings – the laughably named “Integrity” unmasked by Anonymous last week – “ain’t no Lord Tennyson, bruv.”
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Wednesday that the US will never recognize Crimea as part of Russia.
According to Pompeo, in annexing the peninsula, Russia “acted in a manner unworthy of a great nation and has chosen to isolate itself from the international community.”
“Russia, through its 2014 invasion of Ukraine and its attempted annexation of Crimea, sought to undermine a bedrock international principle shared by democratic states: that no country can change the borders of another by force,” the 54-year-old said in a statement ahead of testimony before the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “In concert with allies, partners, and the international community, the United States rejects Russia’s attempted annexation of Crimea and pledges to maintain this policy until Ukraine’s territorial integrity is restored.”
“The United States calls on Russia to respect the principles to which it has long claimed to adhere and to end its occupation of Crimea,” he added.
During his subsequent testimony to the committee, Pompeo said he was committed to working with Congress on new sanctions and that “there will be no relief of sanctions until Russia returns control of the peninsula to Ukraine.” However, he did also indicate that the Trump administration wishes to restore relations with Russia, as a fellow nuclear super power.
Pompeo reiterated that Trump’s administration has been tough on Russia, recalling that it had approved $200 million for Ukraine in security cooperation funds. According to an earlier news release from the US Department of Defense, the funding will be for “additional training, equipment and advisory efforts to build the defensive capacity” of the country. Since 2014, the Pentagon has given Ukraine more than $1 billion.
A spokesperson for the Russian Foreign Ministry responded to Pompeo’s remarks shortly after they were made, saying “we know the worth of such momentous declarations.” The Trump administration has made several noteworthy withdrawals from international agreements and declarations, among them existing agreements like the Paris climate accord and the Iran nuclear deal and planned treaties like the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
Russia accepted Crimea into the Russian Federation in 2014 after Crimeans voted in favor of joining following the ouster of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, which created a wave of fear in Ukraine’s Russian-speaking population. Since then, critics have claimed that the referendum was fraudulent and have refused to recognize the results.
Silly drama teacher, get us out of NATO. It has nothing to do with Canada. NATO should be disbanded in the first place. Russia is not a threat. The USA, our main partner, is. Mr. Trudeau is coming up for re-election next year and two issues will prevent him from being re-elected: His commitment to the USA/ NATO war games and the Kinder-Morgan pipeline that he is trying to force down our British Colombians throats.
Dear Justin drama teacher: Crimea voted 94% to remain with Russia. If this is not democracy I don’t know what is. Eejit, you will regret this next year.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has reaffirmed Canada’s staunch support for NATO and increased its commitments to US-led NATO military missions.
Canada is expanding its involvement in NATO’s drive to threaten and encircle Russia and is assuming command of a NATO training mission in Iraq. These actions underscore the determination of Canada’s ruling elite to aggressively pursue its own predatory interests and ambitions around the world, under conditions of deepening inter-imperialist rivalries.
In a visit to Latvia July 10, Trudeau announced that Canada’s current contingent of 455 troops, which were sent to the Baltic last year to lead one of NATO’s four “advance-deployed” battle groups in the region, will be increased to 540. Canadian leadership of the battle group was also extended through 2023. The other three NATO battle groups stationed on Russia’s borders are located in Estonia, Lithuania and Poland, and are led by Britain, Germany and the United States respectively.
Following the announcement, the Liberal Prime Minister sharply denounced Russia for its alleged acts of “aggression,” including the annexation of Crimea in 2014.
“We certainly hope that the message is passed clearly to President Putin that his actions in destabilizing and disregarding the international rules-based order that has been successfully underpinned by NATO amongst others over the past 75 years or so is extremely important,” Trudeau declared.
Trudeau followed this up by delivering an anti-Russian tirade in the wake of US President Donald Trump’s July 17 summit with Putin in the Finnish capital of Helsinki. Trudeau inveighed against Russia’s “illegal annexation of Crimea” and “their incursion into the Donbas in Ukraine,” and stated he was “glad” that 200 Canadian troops are training Ukrainian military and security forces in the west of the country. He then turned to criticizing Moscow’s support for the “murderous Assad regime,” before concluding with a reference to the Skripal affair in Britain.
Although Trudeau studiously avoided criticizing Trump by name, his government has made no secret of its sympathy for the faction of the US ruling elite, led by the military-intelligence apparatus and the Democratic Party, which has attacked Trump for his conciliatory stance towards Moscow. This reached new heights following the Helsinki meeting, with media outlets including the New York Times denouncing Trump’s actions as “treasonous.”
Trudeau has proven no less strident in his anti-Russian stance than his Conservative predecessor, Stephen Harper. This has included appointing Chrystia Freeland, who is a notorious anti-Russian hawk, as Foreign Minister. Trudeau defended Freeland against all criticism when it emerged that her Ukrainian nationalist grandfather was a Nazi collaborator during World War II, denouncing this historically accurate description of his activities as a “smear” and an “attack on Canadian democracy.”
Trudeau’s boast that Canadian troops are training pro-government forces in Ukraine underscores his government’s backing for the far-right nationalist regime in Kiev, which was brought to power in a US-orchestrated, fascist-spearheaded coup in February 2014.
The Canadian ruling elite’s support for the hardline anti-Russia stance being championed by the “deep state” and the Democrats in the US is bound up with the bourgeoisie’s preferred option of deepening its three-quarter century old military-strategic alliance with Washington, as the most effective means of advancing its global interests. At the same time, the Canadian bourgeoisie views Russia as a direct competitor in certain spheres, such as in the mounting conflict over control of the Arctic, which, due to climate change, is opening up as a new transit route and lucrative source of oil and other raw materials.
The day after his Latvia trip, Trudeau attended the NATO summit in Brussels, where he committed 250 Canadian troops and helicopters to lead a new NATO training mission in war-ravaged Iraq. The mission, which will bolster Canadian forces in the war-ravaged country above a thousand, will involve training Iraqi government forces in counter-terrorism techniques, including disarming roadside bombs and improvised explosive devices. Trudeau also committed Canadian personnel and aircraft to maintaining NATO’s Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS).
These moves were widely interpreted as an attempt to undercut Trump’s criticism of Canada for its failure to meet the military alliance’s commitment to spend 2 percent of economic output on defence by 2024. Last month, Trump addressed an official letter to Trudeau in which he took Ottawa to task for its military budget, which currently stands at around 1 percent of GDP.
Trump’s criticisms are part of a deepening crisis in Canada-US relations. On the economic front, Trump’s imposition of tariffs on steel and aluminum imports and his threats to rip up NAFTA and enforce tariffs on auto imports have thrown the Canadian ruling elite into turmoil. The Trudeau government, supported by the trade unions, has responded with the largest package to date of counter-tariffs against the US, totaling some $16 billion. These tariffs came into force just weeks after Trump blew up the G-7 summit in Charlevoix, Quebec and denounced its host, Trudeau, as “very dishonest and weak.”
Trump’s economic nationalism, coupled with the breakdown of international multilateral institutions that is rooted in the global capitalist crisis, is undermining the strategy used by Canadian imperialism since the end of World War II to advance its interests on the world stage. This was to maintain an intimate strategic partnership with US imperialism, while at the same time relying on NATO, the trans-Atlantic alliance between the North American and European imperialist powers and other multilateral institutions and alliances to offset the vast power imbalance between the two countries.
Like their counterparts around the world, the Canadian elite is responding to the surge in global trade and geopolitical tensions with economic protectionism and rearmament. The Trudeau government is committed to hiking military spending by more than 70 percent over the next decade, taking overall defence spending to over 1.4 percent of GDP. This will include an expansion of the army, the purchase of new fleets of fighter jets and warships, and the upgrading of the North American Aerospace Defense command (NORAD) in conjunction with the Pentagon.
Trudeau’s attempts, continued at the Brussels summit, to pose as an opponent of the 2 percent NATO spending target, are driven solely by domestic political considerations, above all the understanding that an explicit commitment to such a dramatic spending increase would provoke popular opposition to militarism and war.
The new Iraq mission was accompanied by propaganda about Canada’s supposed determination to uphold “democracy” and the “rule of law.” Such claims are utterly fraudulent. Ever since Canadian troops were dispatched to Iraq by the Harper Conservative government in 2014, they have played a key role in waging a ruthless US-led war—a war that has arisen out of the series of ruinous wars that Washington has waged in the Middle East over the past three decades in an attempt to shore up its domination over the world’s principal oil-exporting region.
After coming to power in 2015, the Trudeau government expanded the number of special forces deployed in the north of the country. As part of their support for Kurdish Peshmerga militias in northern Iraq, Canadian forces participated in the murderous offensive on Mosul, which claimed the lives of thousands of civilians and laid waste to what had been Iraq’s second largest city.
Trudeau’s new commitments have failed to satiate the ruling elite’s appetite for a further militarization of Canadian foreign policy. Rosie Dimanno, writing in the liberal Toronto Star, declared, “Trump is right about Canada’s military spending.” For its part, the neoconservative National Post said Canada should be “embarrassed” by its defence budget. “Trudeau,” it declared, “needs to smarten up on defence and pay our share to NATO.”
I had just turned 15 when the Cuban Missile Crisis suddenly erupted. Like everyone else my age I had been propagandized from early childhood to see the Reds as America’s mortal enemy and to fear their designs to wipe us off the map. So in October of 1962 I was shocked to learn that the Soviets had installed nukes only miles from our shores. It went without saying that we were innocent victims of a deadly plot. How monstrous! But it wasn’t long before I was also frightened, darkly so. The images I had seen as a child of about eight of the desolation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki came back to me and I suddenly realized that the same fate could befall us. How had this happened?
Thus for the first time in my life I questioned the world view fed to me since I had reached the age of reason only to discover (albeit gradually) that reason and logic were far from operative in our world. It dawned on me then as never before that if the American response to the crisis was a military one then we were finished. Just how perilous the situation was I would only fully appreciate much later but the fear was real enough at the time. Though I had been a newsboy I had never really read newspapers but began devouring every story on the crisis. My neighbors, like my own family, were inner-city working class people who didn’t pay much attention to politics but suddenly there was a palpable tension among adults. In the local A&P supermarket canned goods disappeared from the shelves. While no one in my neighborhood had summer homes in New Hampshire or Maine the newspapers reported an exodus of the well-to-do to the remote countryside. Here was an existential crisis of the first order.
I say these things now in the context of the manufactured hysteria over the widely accepted scenario of Russian “meddling” in our “democracy” and the all but total insistence that Russia is our enemy. All across the corporate media, with Fox News excepted, and mainly from Democratic Party politicians, the drumbeat is insistent that “proof” exists of Russian efforts to undermine our system. I am in no position to know the truth of this but there are plenty of voices challenging the storyline and many of them are former highly placed intelligence operatives. Their various dissents from the official narrative of course get zero traction in the media outlets owned, operated and influenced by that faction of the oligarchy and its retainers who have deep vested interests in permanent preparation and production for war. That means that the vast majority of Americans get a distorted, esentially false view of geo-political issues
The drumbeat is incessant and appears to have won most of the public to the faith that Russia is our mortal enemy again and a dire threat to our security. The lesson all should have learned in the wake of the missile crisis has been deep-sixed so long that few citizens today understand how our deliberately overwrought relations with the Soviets during the Cold War brought us within an eyelash width of nuclear holocaust. As many who were embedded in the national security state during those fraught years, like Daniel Ellsberg and former Defense Secretary William Perry and many others, have admonished us lately we are now in circumstances every bit as perilous as the darkest days of the Cold War. We have utterly forgotten the fact that the intense and growing extreme nationalism that is overtaking the planet is precisely the social virus that promoted two global wars in the last century.
The scenario that the Kremlin is conspiring against us functions effectively to disappear from public awareness facts that our own nation has engaged in numerous interventions, violent or otherwise, against popularly elected governments on far worse terms than what is alleged against Russia, including Russia itself. Given the intense and virulent nationalism of the moment I doubt that many people will be open to an expose of these transgressions that actually go back to the founding of this nation but none of our American Pravdas and Izvestias will allow that in any case. Endless charges of Putin’s “thuggishness” and criminal behavior resound throughout the indoctrination echo chamber but nary a peep about the crimes of the assorted gangsterlike dictators Washington does and has blessed. The sanctimonious hypocrisy emanating from approved talking heads is ever more depressing and presages worse to come.
The armed intervention in Russia in 1918 began our adverse and toxic relations with the Soviets. Most Americans are duly ignorant of this event. Russians are not! Had Russian troops ever set foot on American soil kids would be taught that fact on the first day of the first grade. But few ever learn about our own “meddling” in the affairs of any other countries and if there is mention of such intrusion into the sovereignty of others is always claimed to be in the service of “freedom and democracy.”
Washington sent a small but nevertheless serious force to Russia intended to undermine the Bolshevik Revolution and restore a government of which it approved. That foray had nothing to do with democracy but with the fear in American banking and corporate circles that the Bolshies were serious about replacing capitalism with socialism in a huge area of the globe. The fact that Soviets actually established no such socially benevolent system is irrelevant. The U.S. political and economic oligarchy undertook to “meddle” in Russian affairs not because its principals cared about Soviet citizens and their “freedoms” but because the success of the new system would then close much of Europe to American investment and profit. Having entered World War I to ensure that Germany did not dominate the Central European markets and then largely exclude American access to them, (and to ensure that Britain, France and Russia paid their debts to American banks and the U.S. Treasury), Washington and Wall Street then were faced with much of Eurasia closed to American investment on American terms in an even more complete way when the communists won power in Russia.
Much the same dilemma faced the oligarchs, especially those in the Democratic Party, when Nazi Germany sought to dominate Europe again and gain the lebensraum it desired in Eastern Europe. American officials saw the “nightmare of a closed world” in the already beset world of the Great Depression. So when Germany invaded the USSR in 1941 just prior to American entry into WWII, Franklin Roosevelt entered into an unofficial alliance with Stalin. Otherwise the Nazis might have kept half of Europe while the Reds controlled the other half. Harry Truman, then a U.S senator, opined that if the U.S. saw the Nazis winning it should help them or vice versa. So the “alliance” with the USSR was merely a marriage of convenience. Divorce would follow rapidly after 1945.
Once Hitler and the top Naziswere gone American elites had to devise a plan to deal with the Soviet Union. One measure that never ever gets notice is that the U.S. and its new intelligence agencies immediately exempted key Nazis from prosecution for war crimes and recruited them to aid in overthrowing Soviet rule. This measure in itself demolished the myth of the U.S. as “arsenal of democracy.” The roster included major rocket scientists and Nazi intelligence officials. One of the first forays involved Ukraine wherein Ukrainians who had aided the Nazis in their invasion of Russia were parachuted back into their country to overthrow the Reds. The current tumult over Ukraine is nothing new. Theattempted coup was ridiculous and absurd and failed miserably but it demonstrates how early the US began to ramp up its anti-Soviet resolves and also explains to a great degree why the Soviets came to view the U.S. as a mortal enemy. But seeing our “adversaries” from their own perspectives is an impermissible intellectual or moral pursuit.
The Russians had endured centuries of invasion from the West; three times within the previous century and a half. They justifiably wanted Germany de-industrialized and dis-armed. Interestingly Henry Morgenthau, Secretary of the Treasury, also called for the “pastoralization” of Germany but then he was Jewish and many Jews felt similarly. Wall Street wanted Germany reindustrialized on its terms and subject to new international agencies like the IMF and World Bank so as to expand the frontier of American style capitalism and investment. The American post-war design for the reconstruction of Europe revolved around Germany as the fulcrum for the extension of American style capitalism over much of Europe, whereas for the Soviets security from further invasion was paramount. As the Berlin crisis of 1948 began to playout Washington overtly dispatched numerous B-29 Superfortresses to British bases, the very plane that had dropped the infernal weapons that had vaporized Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The message was clear. By 1949 it was also certain that the U.S. was ready to re-arm Germany and foster the anti-Soviet NATO Pact based on the claim that the Red Army was poised to invade and takeover Western Europe- a false, mendacious proposition.
Seen from the Soviet perspective NATO represented that which they most feared- another hostile and bellicose force on their doorstep. The Soviets meanwhile had been ramping up their own nuclear program because they knew that Hiroshima and Nagasaki had not been incinerated because that was the only way finally to defeat Japan but to force rapid Japanese surrender before the Reds could invade Japan itself and therefore divide Nippon between the two giant powers just as Germany had been. In other words the world’s first atomic bombings were a deep communiqué from Washington to Moscow. The NATO alliance from the perception of the USSR then appeared worse a threat than Germany had been. The Americans had nukes and had demonstrated they could be as ruthless as any other great power in history. The result? The Soviet A-Bomb and the creep toward Armageddon!
In no time at all the U.S. completely encircled the USSR from Norway to the Aleutians with numerous bases in which nuclear capable aircraft, and later missiles, were stationed at the ready. Anyone who read Fail-Safe or On the Beachor viewed Dr. Strangelove: Or How I learned To Stop Worrying And Love the Bomb during those worst Cold War years should understand that many citizens came to realize the insanity of the situation and made the political waves that led to the first arms limitations talks… all but forgotten today as our nation’s elites deliberately embark upon the new Cold War.
The Soviet system was dysfunctional and fell apart of its own internal “contradictions,” not to forget Zbigniew Brezezinski’s plot to give the Soviets “their own Vietnam War” in Afghanistan. The Soviet Premiere Gorbachev bravely tried to foster a new and peaceful relationship with the U.S. and the first Bush Administration actually promised not to expand NATO eastward, a promise long since broken and the principal reason the Russians re-annexed Crimea. Then Washington meddled in Russia’s first elections after the dissolution of the USSR to ensure that the clownish Boris Yeltsin was elected and persuaded him to allow western investment to flow into the former USSR wherein a new capitalistoligarchy developed with ties, interests and dependencies upon western banks and hedge funds. This wiped away any remaining social welfare programs of the Soviet-era and reduced many Soviet citizens to dire penury while enriching the favored. It is tragic that Gorbachev is held in such low esteem in Russia today since his ideas, had they been brought to fruition, might have made for a far more peaceful world today but key interests in the U.S. had longstanding ideas about how to make Russia dependent on western finance.
It was the rise of that newly capitalist Russian oligarchy, indebted and at the mercy of Harvard economists and western investors, which fostered a deep Russian nationalist response and brought Vladimir Putin to power. There seems little doubt but that a majority of Russians support him, western charges of vote fraud notwithstanding. While he dominates an authoritarian state he is no Stalin as the western media insists. The real problem for the west is that the Russian state now controls Russian capitalism (whereas in the U.S. the capitalists control the state) and the result is that capitalist Russia competes with American capitalism on unequal terms and is far too friendly with China which as a capitalist nation is really is more of a threat to American global economic and political objectives than the commies ever were.
In 1959 the Soviets shot down a U-2 spyplane flying in violation of international law over the USSR. The pilot, Francis Gary Powers, had been ordered and trained to die with his aircraft rather than enable the Reds to capture it and him. He didn’t and the Soviet Premiere, Nikita Kruschev informed the world of the U.S. dereliction. Not believing Kruschev, President Dwight Eisenhower claimed the Soviet claim was spurious. And then the commies produced the pilot and the plane for all the world to witness, thereby demonstrating Ike’s lie. But of course when the U.S. lies about its foreign policies and affairs, and it does so regularly, that is defined as striking a blow for freedom whereas whenever the Reds perjured themselves this was evidence of evil. This longstanding double standard is everywhere evident and in play today as the new Cold War ratchets up.
Today the newly enlarged NATO sits squarely on Russian borders. Since the original Bush I promise not to expand the alliance eastward 11 new members have been recruited, mostly former Soviet republics or eastern European statelets once under Soviet domination: Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia. All plus the original members are armed to the teeth, overwhelmingly with weapons produced by American companies that have vested profits at stake and no interest in peace breaking out. NATO forces, including American troops sit squarely on Russia’s doorstep claiming that they are keeping the Russian bear at bay though no evidence exists that the Russians were intent on invading or re-occupying former territories of the USSR like Latvia or Lithuania or Georgia. But they do have legitimate concerns about the safety of ethnic Russians living in the territories of the former USSR. Obviously the Russians perceive NATO forces, including American troops, as an ominous threat. Can Americans foreign imagine armies possessed of the most advanced weapon systems sitting on our borders? Yet most citizens accept this utterly chilling state of affairs as if nature itself had nurtured it.
The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty signed in 1972 by President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premiere Brezhnev was unilaterally abrogated in 2001 by Bush II. Such missiles have now been placed in Poland and the Czech Republic and Ukraine has announced that it wishes to accept ABMs on its territory, and enter NATO.
The Russian re-annexation of Crimea is condemned widely in Congress and the media as proof positive of Russia’s expansionary intent. Matters are hardly so simple…or simple-minded.
The Crimean Peninsula was annexed originally from Turkey in the 18th Century and remained as part of Russia until 1954 when the Soviets turned it over to Ukraine partly to cement ties between the Russian and Ukrainian Socialist Republics. At that time no one in the USSR envisioned a breakup of the union. When the USSR collapsed and Ukraine became an independent nation the question of whether Ukrainian control of Crimea had been constitutional under the old communist regime surfaced. There was even a movement in the mid-1990s to re-annex it to Russia. But it was not until 2014 that matters heated up between Russia and Ukraine, and then with the U.S.
The population of Ukraine is approximately 40% Russian mainly in the eastern areas bordering Russia where the population identifies with Russia. The western population is largely ethnically and linguistically Ukrainian. In 2014 the elected government of pro-Russian Victor Yanukovych was overthrown by violence in which the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency was involved. Pro-Western Ukrainians expressed a desire to join NATO and Washington under Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton supported the street violence that led to Yanukovych’s ouster from power. U.S. Senator John McCain spoke publically in the main square of Ukraine’s capital Kiev in favor of Yanukovych’s overthrow, while lionizing the neo-fascist goons who stoked violence in the streets while Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland worked behind the scenes to install a new president approved by the Obama Administration. The U.S. contributed $5 Billion to the efforts of western Ukrainians to replace the pro-Russian government.
Does it require exceptional intelligence to understand that Russia’s Vladimir Putin saw this as a coup d’etat aimed a Russian security interests? Yanukovych was replaced by the pro-western president who began lobbying for Ukraine’s admission to NATO. This was the primary reason Russia re-annexed Crimea. For more than two centuries the Russian Fleet had been based in the Crimean port of Sevastopol on the Black and Azov Seas, the only southern access Russia has to the Mediterranean Sea and Atlantic Ocean. For this vital naval base to fall into the hand of anti-Russian forces and therefore pass to NATO control was absolutely intolerable. And so under the circumstances the inevitable occurred. Russia re-occupied Crimea with the full approval of its overwhelmingly Russian population. Yes this violated international law but the U.S. has violated international law many times with the resulting deaths literally of millions. Think Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen. Where in all the media or Congress are these ever admitted as the foul crimes they were and are? The Russian occupation of Crimea was virtually bloodless. However, the Russian actions also inspired a revolt of ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine, primarily in the Donbass region. Russian troops and local militias are still involved in a shooting war with the western oriented Ukrainian government. None of this will be resolved soon as the hysterical howls and wails from the retinue of servants of the permanent war economy and the Military Industrial Congressional Intelligence Media Complex signify.
I personally hold Donald trump in contempt for many of the obvious reasons. Given everything he has supported since appearing on the political scene he seems the least-likely president to seek genuine rapprochement either with North Korea or Russia. Yet he is also ramping up conflict with Iran and supports the criminal war by Saudi Arabia against Yemen, the poorest and perhaps most ravaged nation on the planet. Still I cannot but support his attempt to find some way to reduce and stop the growing tensions with Russia and so should every sane American and demand key actions for a more peaceful world before events run out of control. Trump’s emphasis on reducing the threat of nuclear war and of shrinking the military spending that is bankrupting the U.S. by seeking some solid non-hostile relationship with Russia is astonishingly the sanest argument to come out of Washington, perhaps ever. Sanity exists in Russia too. I would fervently hope too that we can perceive that a growing antagonism toward China bodes ill as well.
But we must beware! The Hawks and the vultures are circling.
“Russia is an adversary.” How many times have we heard this lately? Perhaps in some schoolmarmish reminder from a CNN, MSNBC or Fox anchor. Everybody’s just supposed to know this.
But when did it become received wisdom?
How many times did we hear that Russia was an adversary in the 1990s, when Boris Yeltsin ruled over the Russian Federation, presiding over a bleak decade of economic downward spiral, banning the Communist Party (1991-93), bombarding the Duma building in 1993 during a constitutional crisis, colluding with the U.S. to fix the 1996 Russian presidential election, tolerating repeated U.S./NATO interventions in former Russian ally Yugoslavia from 1994 to 1999, welcoming Harvard Business School advisors to Moscow to reform the Russian economy?
(Oops, I must remind myself that my current university students were for the most part born in the late 90s. So they might not remember hearing much about Russia at all.)
Actually we didn’t as I recall hear anything at all about enmity with Russia.
Russia had gone from being the hulking Eurasian brown bear of the Cold War era to the cuddly teddy bear of a drunken buffoon, Boris Yeltsin. Russia was not an enemy but a pathetic foil, the other superpower experiencing abject defeat as the U.S. asserted “full-spectrum dominance” during the “American Century” of the 2000s, an object of amusement by those crowing over the U.S.’s (imagined) victory in the Cold War.
Russia was not an adversary when, following the 9/11 attacks, Yeltsin’s successor Vladimir Putin offered NATO a transport route through Russia to supply the alliance in its Afghan War. I don’t recall hearing any official announcement to the effect that Russia had been judged an adversary at that point—by anyone I respect, anyway.
Was it in June 1999 when the Russian Army moved to secure Pristina Airport in Kosovo, at the end of NATO’s aggressive campaign in the Serbian province? This incident strikes me not as a provocation but as a measured move and pointed statement to NATO (the anti-Soviet military alliance that refuses to fold as the Warsaw Pact did in 1990, and which has increasingly become a tool of U.S. imperialism) that Russia too retains historical interests in the Balkans.
The fact that Russia opposed the cruelly absurd Rambouillet ultimatum followed by the NATO war on Serbia did not make Russia my enemy; I absolutely agreed that the war was wrong. My adversary was Madeleine Albright, who wanted war in Kosovo and delighted in the result (an independent country of Kosovo, a failed state wrenched illegally from Serbia, a drugs hub and ceter of human trafficking scheduled for NATO admission).
Did Russia become an adversary in 2008, when (after the U.S. had recognized Kosovo’s independence, as a thing needing no justification because it was as Condi Rice put it “sui generis”) Russia went ahead and recognized two separatist republics in what had been the Georgian SSR, South Ossetia and Abkhazia? Did it become such when Russia briefly invaded Georgia, where a poathetic U.S. puppet (Mikhail Saakashvili) brought to power during the “color revolution” (Rose Revolution) of 2003 emboldened by a promise of foture NATO membership provoked Russian forces stationed in South Ossetia?
Recall how at the time Sen. John McCain said, “We are all Georgians now” and called for military aid to Georgia. (McCain’s always been clear on who the enemy was, and while you might suppose that his extreme militarist views would have wholly discredited him, he is every news anchor’s ideal, the ultimate U.S. patriot and war hero.) But the Bush administration declined to provoke Russia; had not Bush seen into Putin’s soul, the soul of a man deeply concerned about the interests of his country?
Enter the Obama administration and Hillary Clinton as secretary of state intent on arranging a “reset” of the bilateral relationship. But the expansion of NATO to include Albania and Croatia was not helpful. Nor was the campaign, waged by the “National Foundation for Democracy” and other foreign NGOs in Ukraine, to topple the elected president Viktor Yanukovych (an opponent of Ukraine’s NATO entry) and replace him with one that would join the anti-Russian alliance.
In February 2014 a coup plainly conceptualized in Washington, amply documented by intercepted calls between Victoria Nuland and the U.S. ambassador in Ukraine, succeeded in toppling Yanukovych, who fled to Russia. Ethnic Russians who dominate in the eastern Donbas region predictably rebelled against the fascist-tinged new Kiev government. Russia predictably annexed (re-annexed) Crimea to insure its continued control over its bases.
Look at the map. Look at how big Russia is. Look at where it has naval bases. Russia is not like the U.S. with coasts dotted with naval bases. It has some on the Baltic Sea, one in Vladivostok on the Pacific, Murmansk on the Barents Sea in the far north. The Black Sea Fleet present in Crimea from the 1770s is important to what any objective professor of international relations would call “Russian national security.” Of course the Russians were angry and concerned.
That I think was the decisive point. Yes, February 2014. The relentless drive of the U.S. to complete the expansion of NATO, to integrate the largest nation on the European continent, which some neocons call “the crown jewel” into the alliance, using in this case the cause of “the Ukrainian people’s European aspirations” failed. It invited an immediate, decisive Russian response. An investment of $ 5 billion and preposterous interventions such as the visits of Nuland, John McCain and Lindsey Graham to the Maidan Square in Kiev had produced a new government of dubious legitimacy as well as a frozen conflict.
Russia became an “adversary” because it refused to accept massive U.S. intervention in the politics of a neighboring country more closely integrated into Russian history and civilization that Mexico is integrated into the U.S. in such respects. It’s an adversary because it opposes NATO, which is to say, it resists its own military encirclement. As any U.S. leadership would under similar circumstances. (Imagine an existing Russia-centered military pact including most of Central America, Cuba and Venzuela moving to include Mexico. The “Monroe Doctrine” forbids colonization and the establishment of military bases by Old World powers in the New World. But the U.S. expects Russia to accept NATO bases on its very borders. And no TV journalist bothers to raise this, or think historically, critically, comparatively.)
But don’t expect cable commentators to dwell on NATO. No, Putin is hostile to the west because he hates liberal democracy, the value of the free ballot, human rights. He just wants to divide Europe, supporting nationalists over mainstream parties. He wants to disrupt democracies like the Grinch wanted to spoil Christmas. It’s not a matter of attributing him a particular ideology like Marxism. He’s just evil, and you, dear viewer, are supposed to realize that.
* * * *
The basis of Kantian ethics is Matthew 7:2. Do unto others what you would have them do unto you. The U.S. is—through NATO expansion, provocations of Russia, application of sanctions of Russia and demand for allies’ participation in them—subjecting its one-time (Yeltsin-era) “partner” to insulting treatment.
NATO announces expansion. Moscow complains, asks “Why?” NATO responds: “Don’t worry. This is not directed at you.” Russia replies: “Of course it’s directed against us. Don’t be silly.”
In its long history, Russia has been attacked from eastern or central Europe many times (as well as from the Caucasus in southern Europe). German crusader knights invaded in 1242. Lithuania invaded in the fourteenth century, when the Lithuanian state was greater than Muscovy. In the seventeenth and eighteenth century there were multiple invasions from Sweden and/or Poland. Napoleon invaded between 1798 and 1815; Tolstoy’s War and Peace chronicles this epic conflict. Probably around 400,000 civiian casualties. In 1940 the Germans launched Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia that took eleven million soldiers’ lives and those of 26 million civilians.
What has the U.S. experienced comparable to these invasions? How well can a brainwashed North American understand the problem of securing borders, not against poor immigrants, but against invasion? How many are equipped, by education, media, and political discourse, to understand geopolitics from the point of view of Russians?
(I do not mean to suggest that Russians have a common view; Russia is a civil society and debates rage. But my sense is that Russians of many different stripes see NATO as frightening and threatening and will support the regime in resisting its expansion. As they and all of us should.)
The summit is imminent. I would hope that Putin in Helsinki says, “Look, let’s agree state-sponsored hacking and surveillance, as conducted by many governments, are big problems. Let us work to resolve these issues. I’m just glad you were elected, not Hillary, because she was horrible. Look what she did in Libya and Syria. You seem sincere about improving relations but we’re concerned about apparent divisions in your staff since we keep getting conflicting messages….
“In Syria we want a stable secular (not religiously-based) regime. We think the Syrian Arab Army is the best guarantor of stability and the defeat of ISIL and other al-Qaeda spin-offs. We understand your desire to continue to confront ISIL in northeastern Syria, such as it is, and although our Damascus ally condemns it as a violation of Syrian sovereignty we have been cooperating with you off and on against ISIL—even though in Sept. 2016 you sabotaged an agreement with us to coordinate strikes when you attacked Deir Ezzor killing 100 of our Syrian allies.
“We want to facilitate the departure of your forces as you’ve indicated you want to accomplish. As for arranging Iranian departure, we do not control Iran and the Iranians have made it clear they will withdraw advisors from Syria and Iraq only at their governments’ request. I our view they have played a positive role against ISIL and other al-Qaeda factions and spin-offs. We do not agree with your vilification of Iran and indeed will be expanding commercial and military ties. We urge you not to pressure your allies to cut all trade ties with Iran; we and the Chinese will profit in any case.
“On Ukraine, you know, Russia will never return Crimea to Ukraine. You must please decide whether you want to sanction us forever for something that is not going to change, or do what Condi Rice did in 2008 (recognize a sui generis) and reset the U.S.-Russian relationship as loser Hillary could not do. We can make a deal about concrete implementation of the Minsk Agreements.
“We are still very interested in an Exxon-Gasprom deal on Arctic oil drilling, the one Rex Tillerson was negotiating when the sanctions were applied in 2014. Of course we want a Trump Tower eventually. Why can’t we be friends?
“Let’s announce U.S. full participation in the Astana negotiations with Syria, Turkey, Iran and Russia to facilitate inter-Syrian dialogue to produce a peace settlement and new elections, and in the Minsk talks between Russia, Ukraine, the Ukrainian opposition, and European parties. And maybe an agreement not to expand NATO to include Ukraine or Georgia. That will show the world tensions are declining an enhance your prospects for that Nobel Peace prize you so deserve.”
May flattery make Putin a friend. He is not my adversary, or this country’s adversary. He’s the adversary of those who, in their desire to topple Trump on any basis whatsoever, are happy to mentally leapfrog back to the McCarthy era, trash their object of disdain as a Russian puppet and even demand that Trump cancel his summit because of a suspiciously time Mueller Investigation announcement of more Russian indictments.
Russophobia has proven as strong as “anticommunism” as a persistent, unquestioned force in this country at this critical time. Both its strength and stupidity are frightening. If Trump’s uniquely odd presidency sees the possibility of rapprochement with Russia—smothered by the traditional wise and evil councilors—-we might as well have Goldwater Girl Clinton in the White House, labeling Putin Hitler and likening Crimea to the Sudetenland.
How and Why the US Government Perpetrated the 2014 Coup in Ukraine
This will document that the ‘new Cold War’ between the US and Russia did not start, as the Western myth has it, with Russia’s involvement in the breakaway of Crimea and Donbass from Ukraine, after Ukraine — next door to Russia — had suddenly turned rabidly hostile toward Russia in February 2014. Ukraine’s replacing its democratically elected neutralist Government in February 2014, by a rabidly anti-Russian Government, was a violent event, which produced many corpses. It’s presented in The West as having been a ‘revolution’ instead of a coup; but whatever it was, it certainly generated the ‘new Cold War’ (the economic sanctions and NATO buildup on Russia’s borders); and, to know whether it was a coup, or instead a revolution, is to know what actually started the ‘new Cold War’, and why. So, this is historically very important.
Incontrovertible proofs will be presented here not only that it was a coup, but that this coup was organized by the US Government — that the US Government initiated the ‘new Cold War’; Russia’s Government reacted to America’s aggression, which aims to place nuclear missiles in Ukraine, less than ten minutes flight-time from Moscow. During the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, America had reason to fear Soviet nuclear missiles 103 miles from America’s border. But, after America’s Ukrainian coup in 2014, Russia has reason to fear NATO nuclear missiles not just near, but on, Russia’s border. That would be catastrophic.
If America’s successful February 2014 overthrow and replacement of Ukraine’s democratically elected neutralist Government doesn’t soon produce a world-ending nuclear war (World War III), then there will be historical accounts of that overthrow, and the accounts are already increasingly trending and consolidating toward a historical consensus that it was a coup — that it was imposed by “somebody from the new coalition” — i.e., that the termination of the then-existing democratic (though like all its predecessors, corrupt) Ukrainian Government, wasn’t authentically a ‘revolution’ such as the US Government has contended, and certainly wasn’t at all democratic, but was instead a coup (and a very bloody one, at that), and totally illegal (though backed by The West).
The purpose of the present article will be to focus attention on precisely whom the chief people are who were responsible for perpetrating this globally mega-dangerous (‘Cold-War’-igniting) coup — and thus for creating the world’s subsequent course increasingly toward global nuclear annihilation.
If there will be future history, then these are the individuals who will be in the docks for that history’s harshest and most damning judgments, even if there will be no legal proceedings brought against them. Who, then, are these people?
Clearly, Victoria Nuland, US President Barack Obama’s central agent overseeing the coup, at least during the month of February 2014 when it climaxed, was crucial not only in overthrowing the existing Ukrainian Government, but in selecting and installing its rabidly anti-Russian replacement. The 27 January 2014 phone-conversation between her and America’s Ambassador in Ukraine, Jeffrey Pyatt was a particularly seminal event, and it was uploaded to youtube on 4 February 2014. I have discussed elsewhere that call and its significance. Nuland there and then abandoned the EU’s hope for a still democratic but less corrupt future government for Ukraine, and Nuland famously said, on that call “Fuck the EU,” and she instructed Pyatt to choose instead the rabidly anti-Russian, and far-right, Arseniy Yatsenyuk. This key event occurred 24 days before Ukraine’s President Victor Yanukovych was overthrown on February 20th, and 30 days before the new person to head Ukraine’s Government, Yatsenyuk, became officially appointed to rule the now clearly fascist country. He won that official designation on February 26th. However, this was only a formality: Obama’s agent had already chosen him, on January 27th.
The second landmark item of evidence that it had been a coup and nothing at all democratic or a ‘revolution’, was the 26 February 2014 phone-conversation between the EU’s Foreign Minister Catherine Ashton and her agent in Ukraine investigating whether the overthrow had been a revolution or instead a coup; he was Estonia’s Foreign Minister, Urmas Paet, and he told her that he found that it had been a coup, and that “somebody from the new coalition” had engineered it — but he didn’t know whom that “somebody” was. Both Ashton and Paet were shocked at this finding, but they proceeded immediately to ignore that matter, and to discuss only the prospects for Europe’s investors in Ukraine, to be able to get their money back — their obsession was Ukraine’s corruption. Ashton told Paet that she had herself told the Maidan demonstrators, “you need to find ways in which you can establish a process that will have anti-corruption at its heart.” So, though the EU was unhappy that this had been a coup, they were far more concerned to protect their investors. In any case, the EU clearly wasn’t behind Ukraine’s coup. Equally clearly, they didn’t much care whether it was a coup or instead what the US Government said, a ‘revolution’.
The American scholar Gordon M. Hahn has specialized in studying the evidence regarding whom the actual snipers were who committed the murders, but he focuses only on domestic Ukrainian snipers and ignores the foreign ones, who had been hired by the US regime indirectly through Georgian, Lithuanian and other anti-Russian CIA assets (such as via Mikheil Saakashvili, the ousted President of Georgia whom the US regime subsequently selected to become the Governor of the Odessa region of Ukraine). Hahn’s 2018 book Ukraine Over the Edge states on pages 204-209:
“Yet another pro-Maidan sniper, Ivan Bubenchik, emerged to acknowledge that he shot and killed Berkut [the Government’s police who were protecting Government buildings] before any protesters were shot that day [February 20th]. In a print interview, Bubenchik previews his admission in Vladimir Tikhii’s documentary film, Brantsy, that he shot ahd killed two Berkut commanders in the early morning hours of February 20 on the Maidan. … Bubenchik claims that [on February 20] the Yanukovich regime started the fire in the Trade Union House — where his and many other EuroMaidan fighters lived during the revolt — prompting the Maidan’s next reaction. As noted above, however, pro-Maidan neofascists have revealed that the Right Sector started that fire. … Analysis of the snipers’ massacre shows that the Maidan protesters initiated almost all — at least six out of a possible eight — of the pivotal escalatory moments of violence and/or coercion. … The 30 November 2013 nighttime assault on the Maidan demonstrators is the only clear exception from a conclusive pattern of escalating revolutionary violence led by the Maidan’s relatively small but highly motivated and well-organized neofascist element.”
Although Hahn’s book barely cites the first and most detailed academic study of the climactic coup period of late February, Ivan Katchanovski’s poorly written “The ‘Snipers’ Massacre’ on the Maidan in Ukraine”, which was issued on 5 September 2015, Hahn’s is consistent with that: both works conclude that the available evidence, as Katchanovski puts it, shows that:
“The massacre was a false flag operation, which was rationally planned and carried out with a goal of the overthrow of the government and seizure of power. It [his investigation] found various evidence of the involvement of an alliance of the far right organizations, specifically the Right Sector and Svoboda, and oligarchic parties, such as Fatherland. Concealed shooters and spotters were located in at least 20 Maidan-controlled buildings or areas.”
On 19 November 2017 was issued Gian Micalessin’s “The hidden truth about Ukraine – Part 1”
& Part 2
Summarizing them here: Two Georgian snipers say Saakashvili hired them in Tbilisi for a US-backed operation. But they know only about the “Georgian Legion” part. They think it was patterned on Georgia’s Rose Revolution. They each got $1000 for the operation and flew to Kiev on 15 January and were promised $5000 on return. (9:00) “We had to provoke the ‘Berkut’ police so they would attack the people. By February 15th the situation [at the Maidan] was getting worse every day. Then the first shots were fired.” It was February 15 or 16. Mamunashvili [Saakashvili’s man] introduced them to “an American military guy, … Brian Christopher Boyenger” a former “sniper for the 101st Airborne Division” who “after Maidan he went to Donbass” to fight in the “Georgian Legion” but during the coup-climax, the far-right Andriy “Parubiy came very often,” and “Brian always accompanied him” and also instructing there was Vladimir Parasyuk, one of the leaders of the Maidan. The snipers were told not to aim but just to kill people randomly, to create chaos. There were also two Lithuanian snipers in the room. Some went down from the Ukraine Hotel to the second floor of the Conservatory Building, balcony. “They started to take out the guns and distributed them to each group.” “Then I heard shots from the next room” It lasted 15 minutes, then they were all ordered to escape.
On 1 February 2016 was posted to youtube a French documentary, “Ukraine — Masks of the Revolution” which shows, from a meeting at Davos, at 48:00, Victoria Nuland, the announcer trying to speak with her and saying to the audience, “The US diplomat who came to support the Revolution, could she really ignore the existence of the paramilitaries?”; 48:50 Larry Summers at a meeting in Kiev during 10-12 September 2015 and then later at the “12th YES Annual Meeting” saying, “Ukraine is an essential outpost of our fundamental military interests”; 49:25: Petraeus also shown there and the announcer says, “He also thinks that Ukraine is essential to block Putin.” Petraeus urges investment in Ukraine to block Russia; 51:00 McChrystal there also urges arming Ukraine; 51:50 Nuland is there and the announcer says: “The country that is most invested in Ukraine’s future is the US” “She is the architect of America’s influence in Ukraine.” Nuland says there at the “YES” meeting, “We had a significant impact on the battlefield.” But the US regime blames Russia for that war.
This week, Russian President Vladimir Putin unveiled a new 19-kilometer bridge linking the Crimean Peninsula with mainland southern Russia. Thousands of kilometers away, in occupied Palestine, a massacre was being carried out by Israeli soldiers with full support of the United States as it opened a new embassy.
The two events are not as disparate as one might think at first glance. They both involve “annexation” – one fictitious, the other very real. But Western hypocrisy inverts the reality.
While US dignitaries were opening the new American embassy in Jerusalem amid pomp and ceremony, some 60 unarmed Palestinian protesters were shot dead in cold blood by Israeli snipers. Among the dead were eight children. Thousands of others were maimed by live fire. The bloodshed could increase in coming days.
The relocation of the American embassy from Tel Aviv to the Israeli-occupied city of Jerusalem, ordered by President Trump, has been rebuked by the majority of nations. The American move pre-empts any negotiated peace settlement which was supposed to bequeath East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state.
Trump’s decision to relocate the American embassy effectively endorses Israeli claims to the whole of Jerusalem as the “undivided capital of the Jewish state”. Israel has occupied all of Jerusalem in contravention of international law since the 1967 Six Day War.
In other words, Washington has shifted from tacit acceptance to an openly complicit policy in Israeli annexation of Palestinian territory, an annexation which has been going on for seven decades since the inception of the Israeli state in 1948. The now de facto American approval of the annexation of all Jerusalem marked by the opening of the US embassy is the culmination of 70 years of Israeli expansion and occupation.
Meanwhile, Putin’s unveiling this week of the bridge linking southern Russian mainland to the Crimea Peninsula is a timely reminder of the brazen hypocrisy of American and European states.
Since Crimea voted in a referendum in March 2014 to rejoin its historic homeland of Russia, Washington and its allies have continually complained about Moscow’s alleged “annexation” of the Black Sea peninsula.
Never mind that the Crimean people were prompted to hold their accession referendum following a bloody coup in Ukraine against an elected government by CIA-backed Neo-Nazis in February 2014. The people of Crimea voted in a peacefully constituted referendum to secede from Ukraine to join Russia, which it was historically a part of until 1954 when the Soviet Union arbitrarily assigned Crimea to the jurisdiction of the Soviet Republic of Ukraine.
For the past four years, Western governments, their corporate news media and think-tanks, as well as the US-led NATO military alliance, have mounted an intense anti-Russian campaign of economic sanctions, denigration and offensive posturing all on the back of dubious claims that Russia “annexed” Crimea.
Relations between the US and the European Union towards Russia have descended into the freezer of a new and potentially catastrophic Cold War, supposedly motivated by the principle that Moscow had violated international law and changed borders by force. Russia’s alleged “annexation” of Crimea is cited as a sign of Moscow threatening Europe with expansionist aggression. Putin has been vilified as a “new Hitler” or “new Stalin” depending on your historical illiteracy.
This Western distortion about the events that occurred in Ukraine during 2014, and subsequently, can be easily disputed with hard facts as a blatant falsification to conceal what was actually illegal interference by Washington and its European allies in the sovereign affairs of the Ukraine. In short, Western interference was about regime change; with the objective of destabilizing Moscow and projecting NATO force on Russia’s borders.
That is one way of challenging the Western narrative about Ukraine and Crimea. Through weighing up factual events, such as the CIA-backed false-flag sniper shootings of dozens of protesters in Kiev in February 2014. Or the ongoing Western-backed military offensive by Kiev’s Neo-Nazi forces against the breakaway republics of Donbas in Eastern Ukraine.
Another way is to ascertain the integrity of supposed Western legal principle about the general practice of annexation of territory.
From listening to the incessant public consternation expressed by Western governments and media about Russia’s alleged annexation of Crimea, one might think that the putative expropriation of territory is a most grievous violation of international law. Oh how chivalrous, one might think, are Washington and the Europeans in their defense of territorial sovereignty, judging by their seeming righteous repudiation of “annexation”.
However, this week’s grotesque opening of the US embassy in Jerusalem accompanied by the massacre of protesting unarmed Palestinians shows that Western professed concerns about “annexation” are nothing but a diabolical sham. In seven decades of expanding illegal occupation of Palestinian territory by the Israelis, Washington and the Europeans have enacted no opposition.
But when it comes to Crimea, even though their case is not valid, the Western powers never stop hand-wringing about Russia’s “annexation” as if it was the biggest crime in modern history.
Worse than hypocrisy, the US and European Union have been silently complicit in allowing Israel to continue annexing more and more Palestinian territory despite the stark violation of international law. Periodic massacres and whole populations held under brutal military siege in the Gaza Strip and West Bank have never registered any effective opposition from Western powers.
This week, Washington has gone one step further to, in effect, exult in the Israeli annexation of Palestinian territory in the most provocative way by opening its embassy in occupied Jerusalem. Then on top of that violation of international law, we have the obscenity of the Trump White House defending the massacre of unarmed civilians as “an act of self-defense” by the illegally occupying and US-armed Israeli military. A White House license to kill.
The pathetic, muted response from the European Union and the United Nations towards this state terrorism and criminality exposes their cowardly complicity.
US ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley has for months been hysterically accusing Russia of violations in Ukraine and Syria. Yet, on the mass murder of Palestinians this week, Haley was silent. Her only remarks were to congratulate Israel over the new US embassy in occupied Jerusalem.
So, the next time we hear Washington and its European allies pontificate to Russia about “annexation”, the only fitting response should be one of contempt for their vile hypocrisy towards Palestinian rights and the ongoing genocide of its people under Western-backed occupation.
Dutch newspaper articles promoting pedophilia in the 80s
Twenty years ago, unspeakable crimes committed against children became public knowledge when the Dutroux pedophile networks in Belgium came to light. Soon thereafter, the authorities – through careful perception management and historical revisionism – sent it back into the darkness. Dutroux and his ex-wife Michelle Martin (a teacher) abducted several young girls and delivered them to an international ring that tortures, rapes and murders children. Martin, who drove the van, filmed her husband raping girls, and left two girls to starve to death while her husband was incarcerated, was released from prison in 2012, despite angry public protests.
But when the news about the Dutch Zandvoort pedophile rings broke two years later in 1998, the Dutch people did not take to the streets to voice their outrage the way Belgians had done during their ‘White March’ which nearly brought about a revolution. In an earlier article we wondered why this horrendous case did not shock Dutch society to its core.
The newspaper NRC wrote the following in 1998 about the ‘Zandvoort File’:
The Dutch language has a new word: baby porn. The ‘Zandvoort porn affair’ brought to light a trade network of child sexual abuse so vast and so violent that it also shook very experienced experts to their core.
[…]
It means The Netherlands has a serious problem when such indescribable practices can take place here. In light of the strong reactions from abroad one mainly recognizes this outside The Netherlands. With the Dutroux case as a reference point, The Netherlands is once again – and this time it is justified – depicted as having a serious vice problem. With the Zandvoort case there is now proof that The Netherlands is indeed an important child porn producing and distributing country, an allegation American and German authorities have asserted repeatedly since the eighties and the authorities over here have always denied.
Note that the journalist calls these rings a ‘trade network‘.
“The case took off when the Belgian working group, a pressure group against child porn obtained disks and paperwork [including bank account details] from members of the network. The head of Morkhoven, the former private detective Marcel Vervloesem, said early this morning that “tremendous developments” occurred last night. He said he had the names of hundreds of purchasers of child porn from The Netherlands and other countries, found on the disks and in the paperwork. He says he will hand them over to the Dutch police.”
So he did, and for his trouble the authorities threw him in jail for a couple of years, which should give us pause. One year later in 1999 the NRC published an article, which denied the existence of networks by claiming that a lone wolf had been responsible for the horrors in Zandvoort (remember Dutroux, he was not a lone wolf either, but part of a network).
But why did the paper write in 1998 “this time it is justified” and then subsequently deny it? Was this another stab in the back of child abuse experts (including the local police and prosecution) by media moguls and their powerful friends? In 1987, experts and local police found that a few dozen children had been sexually abused in the small village of Oude Pekela in the Groningen province and that the abuse may have been part of a pedophile ring. Yet at the time the media tried desperately to make the affair appear as nothing more than the fantasy of hysterical villagers.
As a result of this media propaganda campaign a GP who was convinced that children had been abused committed suicide a few years later and a child psychiatrist and Member of Parliament who investigated the case was hounded by the press and died from a heart attack shortly after. No-one was ever accused or brought to trial. In 1995, the newspaper Trouw published an article in which a professor of child psychiatry of the Leuven University came out in support of the village by stating that the browbeaten villagers and the experts had told the truth. NRCstill denies that fact to this day.
Another child abuse scandal – The Bolderkar affair (1988) – may have been fabricated in order to deflect attention from widespread pedophilia in high places. In this case an ill-equipped psychologist of a medical daycare center who used puppets to establish sexual abuse claimed that some of the children who attended the center had been abused. Fourteen of them were removed from their homes and their fathers were arrested. Three men admitted to the ‘sexual abuse’, but retracted their statements, claiming their confessions had been forced from them by way of harsh police interrogation methods. Another father was acquitted.
In their 2011 article the NRC had the temerity to allege that the Bolderkar and Oude Pekela affairs had led to a “more critical attitude towards abuse accusations”, but that they didn’t lead to “a turning point in thinking about pedophilia”.
In 2010, news about another Dutch-based international child porn network broke. At least 83 children had been sexually abused in a daycare center in Amsterdam by a worker whose international network had produced at least 220,000 pictures and videos according to the daily AD .
As in so many other cases, authorities took control of the case and ensured that this international pedophile ring would be swept under the rug pretty efficiently. They also changed the language used to refer to such cases from ‘pedophile case’ to ‘vice case’ and encouraged the media to focus on a few ‘lone wolves’.
When a principal of a school in Amsterdam was caught with child porn in his possession, defense attorney Bart Swier attended a meeting that was organized for worried parents to tell them that there was no indication that pupils were harmed. Never mind that the principal had edited child porn by sticking the faces of boys of his school on the images. He also kept quiet about the faceless victims who were harmed during these child pornography productions. In addition, he later blamed the police for exposing the actions of his client.
“That carelessness came to light in a painful manner in 1984 when Secretary Korthals Altes had ‘forgotten’ to include a ban on the distribution and public display of child pornography in the law. That ban was only implemented at the very last moment. Trade in child pornography was in fact unrestricted until the mid eighties, as an unintended consequence of the liberalization of adult pornography in earlier decades”.
Knowing now that The Netherlands is a leading country in the production and distribution of child pornography, it’s unlikely this state of affairs was ‘unintended’.
With this level of deliberate obfuscation of the reality of high level and widespread pedophilia, it’s no surprise that the majority of the Dutch population is meek when it comes to taking a stand against the abuse of children. Manipulated and worked on from the very beginning by massive amounts of pro-pedophile propaganda meant to support the child pornography ‘trade’ and the psychopaths at the top, more billboards will probably have to fall from the skies on the heads of those who do not wish to face the horrendous reality that there are many pedophiles ‘at the top’ in Western societies.
“Our citizens should know the urgent facts…but they don’t because our media serves imperial, not popular interests. They lie, deceive, connive and suppress what everyone needs to know, substituting managed news misinformation and rubbish for hard truths…”—Oliver Stone
Tales from the Conspiratum 
