It’s a sweet irony that declared winner of Ukraine’s presidential election, the billionaire «chocolate tycoon» Petro Poroshenko, proclaimed that his electoral victory «showed that people have chosen the path of European Union integration». Meanwhile, this…
Tag: EU
In Defense of the Donetsk People’s Republic This week the war in East Ukraine continued, despite the referenda held in Donetsk and Lugansk on Sunday. In the circumstances, the referenda were well organised….
Following the massive popular votes calling for independence in Eastern Ukraine, Western political leaders engaged in a predictable contest of who could throw the biggest stones in a glass house. The referenda held in the…
Looking back, the whole debacle might have been avoided – if only certain actors had behaved differently. On February 21st, against the background of the deadly violence of the previous two days in…
The US State Department, via spokeswoman Jennifer Psaki, said that reports of CIA Director John Brennan telling regime changers in Kiev to “conduct tactical operations” – or an “anti-terrorist” offensive – in eastern Ukraine are “completely false”. This means Brennan did issue his marching orders. And by now the “anti-terrorist” campaign – with its nice little Dubya rhetorical touch – has degenerated into farce. Now couple that with NATO secretary general, Danish retriever Anders Fogh Rasmussen, yapping about the strengthening of military footprint along NATO’s eastern border: “We will have more planes in the air, mores ships on the water and more readiness on the land.”
Ok, first the necessary caveats: 1) Kerry and Lavrov already had a deal on Syria, also made in Geneva, but then the USA reneged. 2) The EU also had a deal on the Ukraine with Yanukovich, who was overthrown literally the next day. 3) The USA, NATO and the EU have lied, cheated, mis-represented, twisted and simply betrayed pretty much every promise which they made to Russia ever since Russia freed itself from the yoke of Communism in 1991. 4) The USA probably has as much control over the Ukrainian crazies a la Right Sector as it does over al-Qaeda, tenuous at best. 5) Putin does have a lot of “street cred” in the eastern Ukraine, but it is far from being infinite. 6) The USA does have full control over the Ukrainian oligarchs, but they, in turn, are clearly in a struggle with the nationalist crazies who probably have more firepower and crowd muscle than these oligarchs.
There are many potentially worrying signs in the ‘de-escalation’ process in theory agreed by the US, Russia, EU and Ukraine this Thursday in Geneva. For starters; the regime changers in power in Kiev did not commit themselves, explicitly, to constitutional reform (the draft language is slippery, to say the least); they did not commit, explicitly, to leaving Ukraine out of NATO; and a minor but still significant point – this was not a joint press conference by the two key players, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and US Secretary of State John Kerry. Arguably, the US State Department is bound to interpret ‘de-escalation’ as a sort of ultimatum to every anti-fascist, pro-autonomy and pro-Russia group in eastern Ukraine, as in ‘disarm or else’. That’s the same logic behind the nefarious March 2011 UN approval of a no-fly zone over Libya.
Russia is not responsible for the crisis in Ukraine. The US State Department engineered the fascist-backed coup that toppled Ukraine’s democratically-elected president Viktor Yanukovych and replaced him with the American puppet Arseniy Yatsenyuk, a former banker. Hacked phone calls reveal the critical role that Washington played in orchestrating the putsch and selecting the coup’s leaders. Moscow was not involved in any of these activities. Vladimir Putin, whatever one may think of him, has not done anything to fuel the violence and chaos that has spread across the country.
12,000 others have been authorized by the United Nations Security Council Additional foreign troops are arriving in the troubled Central African Republic (CAR) where 2,000 French soldiers have failed to halt the forced removal and…
The United States has always tried to do its best to weaken Russia. Driving a wedge between Russia and the European Union is a priority mission. But Crimea and Ukraine frustrate the plans. Entangled in the Ukrainian crisis, Europe starts to doubt the expediency of following the US policy and displays its unwillingness to escalate the confrontation with Russia. As they say «Mutiny on the Bounty» is getting ripe, though most likely the revolt will go no further than undermining some US initiatives… Looks like Brussels is going to quietly let Ukraine go. Revolutionary frenzy behind, the EU is not prone to take further anti-Russian actions. They gradually start to listen to the Kremlin. Russia has taken diplomatic initiative away from Washington and takes a more adamant stand insisting that an all-Ukraine dialogue should be a foundation for crisis management. The Western hopes for Moscow’s at least indirect recognition of the illegal government in Kiev are getting stymied.