OMNI
UKRAINE WAR ANTHOLOGY #32, May 5, 2024
Compiled by Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace, Justice, and
Ecology
What’s at stake: We are a part of the US
Peace Movement. I described 1,200 organizations in Peace Movement
Directory (2001), and the spirit continues inside the US Warfare State, as
Code Pink and World Beyond War demonstrate. Our own OMNI, mainly on the
local level likewise comprehensive, ranges from feeding people to opposing
war and climate change. (Btw, Medea Benjamin has visited us twice.)
Join Code Pink, Join World Beyond War.
Join OMNI. They need your support to be even better. There's no time to play or pretend
temperature is not rising, or the Doomsday Clock is not ticking closer to
midnight, or totalitarian domination of our institutions is not increasing.
Thank you Mr. President for stimulating
the peace movement with your doublespeak:
“We should all remember: Democracies don’t have to die at the end of a
rifle. They can die when people are silent, when they fail to
stand up.” Dick
UKRAINE WAR ANTHOLOGY #28, February 18, 2023
https://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2023/02/omni-us-nato-ukraine-russia-war.html
UKRAINE WAR ANTHOLOGY #29
https://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2023/05/omni-us-nato-ukraine-russia-war.html
UKRAINE WAR ANTHOLOGY #30a, June 4, 2023
https://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2023/06/omni-ukraine-war-anthology-30A-june-4.html
UKRAINE WAR ANTHOLOGY #30b
OMNI's War and Warming Newsletter:
OMNI UKRAINE WAR ANTHOLOGY #30B, July 24, 2023
(jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com)
UKRAINE WAR ANTHOLOGY #31
OMNI's War and Warming Newsletter:
OMNI UKRAINE WAR ANTHOLOGY #31 August 17, 2023
(jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com)
CONTENTS
UKRAINE WAR #32
What’s
at Stake: “I think that this is something the people of
the West need to come to grips with; that the government of Ukraine has done
great violence against its own people in the Donbas, and that the people of the
Donbas had every right to choose to leave Ukraine and join Russia. If
Westerners understood this reality, they would think twice about ‘standing with’
and continuing to arm Ukraine.” Daniel
Kovalik
Part
I: ORIGINS OF THE WAR : Why Is the US in
Ukraine?
THE
WAR (9 articles)
Vijay Prashad. “UN or NATO?”
Ivan
Katchanovski. “Buried Trial Verdict Confirms
False-flag Maidan Massacre in Ukraine.”
Natylie Baldwin. “The Maidan Massacre, Censorship &
Ukraine.” Interview of Katchanovski.
Joe Lauria. “US Victim
of Own Propaganda in Ukraine War”:
Odessa.
Swiss Standpoint. Background and elements of the war in
Ukraine [Minsk Agreements etc.]: Interview of Jacques Baud.
Schwarz
and Layne. US and NATO Expansion.
Oleg Nesterenko. Ukraine’s “Atlanticist” Narratives.
Jeremy Kuzmarov. Western Intelligence Services.
Yossi Alpher: “Ukraine, NATO: the ‘Israel
Model’?”
(Sources:
Canadian Dimension, Consortium News, Covert Action Magazine, Donbas Insider,
Harper’s Magazine, Schweizer Standpunkt)
Part
II: THE WAR
(6 articles)
Seymour
Hersh. “Harold Pinter had it right.” Destruction of
Nord Stream Pipelines, Roles of Biden and Scholz , Consequences.
A
Scott Ritter Investigation: “Agent Zelensky (Part 1).” Audio.
Daniel Kovalik. “Russia,
Donbass and the Reality of Conflict in Ukraine.”
M. K. Bhadrakumar.
“Glimpses
of an Endgame in Ukraine.”
VijayPrashad. “World
Hunger & War in Ukraine. “
Yossi
Alpher. “Ukraine, NATO: the ‘Israel
Model’?”
(Sources: Consortium News, Covert Action Magazine, Indian
Punchline, Peoples Dispatch, Scheer Post, Scott Ritter Extra)
Part
III: MAKE PEACE
(8
articles)
Roger
Harris. “The North American Peace Movement at an Inflection Point.”
Veterans
Speak in NYT Ad. “The U. S.
Should Be a Force for Peace in the World.”
Gerry
Condon, Veterans for Peace. “Why
Veterans are Calling for Peace.”
Jeffrey Sachs. YouTube Interview.
John
Mearsheimer. “What Should Be Done.”
Abel Tomlinson. Three Essays. Senator Blumenthal. “Negotiate Ukraine Peace Now.” “Stop
the War, Make Peace.”
(Sources: Dissident Voice, NYT advert., Popular Resistance,
Abel Tomlinson direct, YouTube)
Texts
A note on importance of historical context in assessing
wars.
PBS Frontline, April 2, 2024, presented a
documentary on the Russian decimation of Mariupol with utter disregard of
civilians. Until I learn otherwise, I
will assume the filmmakers told the truth.
While the Ukrainian Army fought against the advancing Russian troops,
Russian planes and artillery bombed the civilians inside the perimeter until
the city was destroyed and thousands of civilians were killed. If the film is true, Russia is guilty of war
crimes and its leaders should be prosecuted.
But that’s
only half the story, and that is a chief motivation for these anthologies. The filmmakers present a Western version of a
fragment of the conflict, a version,
backed by the US and NATO that omits all
that led up to the Russian invasion: the numerous provocations leading to the
Russian invasion, the Donbas insurrection, the coup overthrowing President
Yanukovitch. Putin and Russia are not
the only criminals in this war, and if we single out one side as the demons, we
will never understand this war, and never stop wars. –Dick
PART
I: Origins of the War
EXPANSION OF NATO
Vijay Prashad. “UN or NATO?” Consortium News, Volume 29, Number 121 (July 23, 2023). https://consortiumnews.com/2023/07/23/un-or-nato/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=e02df148-f5b5-4354-afb5-bc13944abbf1 Communique from the summit in Vilnius.— Friday, May 3, 2024.
Orig. pub.
AFGHANISTAN, CHINA, COMMENTARY, FINLAND, IRAQ, LIBYA, MILITARISM, PAKISTAN, PORTUGAL, SOVIET UNION, SWEDEN, TURKEY, UKRAINE, UNITED NATIONS, YUGOSLAVIA
Two main topics: NATO’s self-defined universalism and Ukraine’s
path into the Western military alliance.
By Vijay Prashad
Tricontinental: Institute for Social
Research
The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation ‘s
communiqué released after the first day of its annual summit earlier this month
claimed that “NATO is a defensive alliance,” a statement encapsulating why many
struggle to grasp its essence.
A look at the latest military spending
figures shows, to the
contrary, that NATO countries, and countries closely allied to NATO, account
for nearly three-quarters of the total annual global expenditure on weapons.
Many of these countries possess state-of-the-art weapons systems,
which are qualitatively more destructive than those held by the militaries of
most non-NATO countries.
Over the past quarter century, NATO has used its military might to
destroy several states, such as Afghanistan (2001) and Libya (2011), shattering
societies with the raw muscle of its aggressive alliance. It ended Yugoslavia
(1999) as a unified state. It is difficult, given this record, to sustain the
view that NATO is a “defensive alliance.”
Currently, NATO has 31 member states, the most recent addition
being Finland, which joined in April. Its membership has more
than doubled since its 12 founding members (all European and North American
nations that had been part of the war against the Axis powers) signed its
founding Washington or the North Atlantic Treaty on April 4, 1949.
It is telling that one of these original members — Portugal —
remained under a fascist dictatorship at the time, known as Estado Novo (in
place from 1933 until 1974).
Article 10 of the treaty declares that NATO members — “by unanimous
agreement” — can “invite any other European state” to join the military
alliance. Based on that principle, NATO welcomed Greece and Turkey (1952), West
Germany (1955) and Spain (1982), expanding its membership at the time to
include 16 countries.
Doubling Down
The disintegration of the U.S.S.R. and communist states in Eastern
Europe — the purported threat that compelled the need for NATO to begin with —
did not put an end to the need for the alliance.
Instead, NATO’s increasing membership has doubled down on its
ambition to use its military power, through Article 5, to subdue anyone who
challenges the “Atlantic Alliance.”
Nino Morbedadze, Georgia, “Strolling Couple,” 2017.
The “Atlantic Alliance,” a phrase that is part of NATO’s name, was
part of a wider network of military treaties secured by the U.S. against the
U.S.S.R. and, after October 1949, against the People’s Republic of China.
This network included the Manila Pact of September 1954, which
created the Southeast Asian Treaty Organisation (SEATO), and the Baghdad Pact
of February 1955, which created the Central Treaty Organisation (CENTO).
Turkey and Pakistan signed a military agreement in April 1954, which brought them together
in an alliance against the U.S.S.R. and anchored this network through NATO’s
southernmost member (Turkey) and SEATO’s westernmost member (Pakistan).
The U.S. signed a military deal with each of the members of CENTO
and SEATO and ensured that it had a seat at the table in these structures.
Nehru’s Prescience
At the Asian-African Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, in April
1955, India’s Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru reacted strongly to the creation
of these military alliances, which exported tensions between the U.S. and the
U.S.S.R. across Asia.
The concept of NATO, he said, “has extended itself in two ways”: first, NATO
“has gone far away from the Atlantic and has reached other oceans and seas” and
second, “NATO today is one of the most powerful protectors of colonialism.”
As an example, Nehru pointed to Goa, which was still held by
fascist Portugal and whose grip had been validated by NATO members — an act,
Nehru said, of “gross impertinence.” This characterisation of NATO as a global
belligerent and defender of colonialism remains, with some modifications.
SEATO was disbanded in 1977, partly due to the defeat of the U.S.
in Vietnam, and CENTO was shuttered in 1979, precisely due to the Iranian
Revolution that year.
U.S. military strategy shifted its focus, from wielding these
kinds of pacts, to establishing a direct military presence with the founding of
U.S. Central Command in 1983 and the revitalisation of the U.S. Pacific Command
that same year.
The U.S. expanded the power of its own global military footprint
including its ability to strike anywhere on the planet due to its military
bases and armed flotillas (which were no longer restricted once the 1930 Second
London Naval Treaty expired in 1939).
Although NATO has always had global ambitions, the alliance was
given material reality through the U.S. military’s force projection and its
creation of new structures that further tied allied states into its orbit (with
programmes such as “Partnership for Peace,” set up in 1994, and concepts such
as “global NATO partner” and “non-NATO ally,” as exemplified by Japan and South
Korea).
In its 1991 “Strategic Concept,” NATO wrote that it would “contribute to global
stability and peace by providing forces for United Nations missions,” realised
with deadly force in Yugoslavia (1999), Afghanistan (2003) and Libya (2011).
By the Riga Summit (2006), NATO was confident that it operated “from Afghanistan to the
Balkans and from the Mediterranean Sea to Darfur.”
Nehru’s focus on colonialism might seem anachronistic now, but in
fact, NATO has become an instrument to blunt the global majority’s desire for
sovereignty and dignity, two key anti-colonial concepts. Any popular project
that exerts these two concepts finds itself at the end of a NATO weapons
system.
Post-Cold War NATO
The collapse of the U.S.S.R. and the Eastern European communist
state system transformed Europe’s reality.
NATO quickly ignored the “ironclad guarantees” offered by U.S. Secretary of State James Baker to
Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze in Moscow on Feb. 9, 1990 that
NATO’s “forces would not move eastward” of the German border.
Several states that bordered the NATO zone suffered greatly in the
immediate period of the fall of the Berlin Wall, with economies in the doldrums
as privatisation eclipsed the possibility for their populations to live with
dignity.
Many states in Eastern Europe, desperate to enter the European
Union that least promised access to the common market, understood that entry
into NATO was the price of admission.
In 1999, Czechia, Hungary and Poland joined NATO, followed in 2004
by the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania), Bulgaria, Romania,
Slovenia and Slovakia. Eager for investments and markets, by 2004 many of these
countries waltzed into the Atlantic Alliance of NATO and the EU.
NATO continued to expand, absorbing Albania and Croatia in 2009,
Montenegro in 2017 and North Macedonia in 2020.
However, the breakdown of some U.S. banks, the waning attraction
of the U.S. as the market of last resort, and the entry of the Atlantic world
into a relentless economic depression after 2007 changed the context.
No longer were Atlantic states reliable as investors or as
markets. After 2008, infrastructure investment in the EU declined by 75 percent due to reduced public
spending and the European Investment Bank warned that government investment would hit a
25-year low.
The New Enemy: China
[For the entire
article and its magnificent graphics, go to https://consortiumnews.com/2023/07/23/un-or-nato/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=e02df148-f5b5-4354-afb5-bc13944abbf1
The Impact of Ukraine
The war in Ukraine provided new life to the Atlantic Alliance,
driving several hesitant European countries — such as Sweden — into its ranks.
Yet, even amongst people living within NATO countries there are groups who
are sceptical of
the alliance’s aims, with the Vilnius summit marked by anti-NATO protests.
The Vilnius Summit Communiqué underlined Ukraine’s path into NATO
and sharpened NATO’s self-defined universalism. The communiqué declares, for instance, that China challenges “our
interests, security, and values,” with the word “our” claiming to represent not
only NATO countries but the entire international
order.
Slowly, NATO is positioning itself as a substitute for the U.N.,
suggesting that it — and not the actual international community — is the
arbiter and guardian of the world’s “interests, security, and values.”
This view is contested by the vast majority of the world’s
peoples, 7 billion of whom do not even reside in NATO’s member countries (whose
total population is less than one billion). Those billions wonder why it is
that NATO wants to supplant the United Nations.
Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist.
He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor
of LeftWord
Books and the director
of Tricontinental:
Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang
Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books,
including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from
Movements for Socialism and, with Noam Chomsky, The
Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and the Fragility of U.S. Power.
This article is from Tricontinental:
Institute for Social Research
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may
not reflect those of Consortium News. Tags: 2008 financial crisis Berlin Wall BRI Eduard Shevardnadze global military spending Goa Iranian Revolution Jawaharlal
Nehru NATO’s Partnership for Peace neo-colonialism Secretary of State James Baker Southeast Asian Treaty Organisation U.S. Central Command U.S. Pacific Command Vijay
Prashad Vilnius
Ivan Katchanovski. “Buried trial verdict confirms false-flag
Maidan massacre in Ukraine.” Canadian Dimension (February 20, 2024). Editor.
mronline.org (2-23-24).
Ukrainian-Canadian
political scientist and professor Ivan Katchanovski on the hidden origins of
the Russia-Ukraine war. Originally published: Canadian Dimension on February 20, 2024 by
Ivan Katchanovski (more by Canadian
Dimension) | (Posted Feb
22, 2024)
Inequality, Movements, Protest, State RepressionEurope, Russia, UkraineNewswire
A nearly
one-million-word verdict from Ukraine’s Maidan massacre trial has
recently confirmed that many Maidan activists were shot not by members of
Ukraine’s Berkut special police force or other law enforcement personnel but by
snipers in the far-right-controlled Hotel Ukraina and other Maidan-controlled
locations a decade ago today. The verdict, handed down on October 18, 2023,
states specifically that this hotel was controlled by Maidan activists and that
an armed, far-right-linked Maidan group was in the hotel and fired from it. It
also confirms that there was no Russian involvement in the massacre and that no
massacre orders were issued by then President Viktor Yanukovych or his
ministers. The verdict concludes that the Euromaidan was at the time of this
massacre not a peaceful protest but a “rebellion” that involved the killing of
Berkut and other police personnel.
This is an important
official acknowledgement, not only because the violence represented the most
significant case of mass murder, violent crime, and human rights violations in
independent Ukraine to that point, but also because of the subsequent conflicts
to which it has led or contributed. Notably, the massacre precipitated the
violent overthrow of Yanukovych and his government, who were falsely blamed for
carrying it out. It then spiralled into the Russian annexation of Crimea, the
subsequent civil war and Russian interventions in the Donbas, and the conflicts between Ukraine and Russia, and between
Russia and the Western powers, which Russia dramatically escalated with its
illegal invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022.
There has been,
however, a blackout of the verdict’s confirmation of the Maidan snipers in the
Ukrainian media and, with a few notable exceptions, the Western mainstream
media. Moreover. . . . MORE
[For readers who would like to know more about Maidan
and Ivan Katchanovski, here is an interview of the professor. Or skip to Lauria’s article on Odessa.]
NatylieBaldwin.
“The Maidan Massacre, Censorship &
Ukraine.”
Consortium
News, Vol. 28, No. 288 (Saturday,
October 21, 2023).
Natylie Baldwin
interviews Ivan Katchanovski, a Canadian-Ukrainian professor whose research
focuses on the Ukraine coup of 2014 and the killing that year of protesters in
Kiev. Read here...
[The following
lengthy off-the-cuff-interview, in contrast to an essay, possesses flaws sometimes
exhibited by the genre: argument by
accretion, repetition, undefined terms. Read
only if you want to become better acquainted with Katchanovski grappling with a
complicated and contested history.
–Dick]
[Here is Kathchanovski’s central claim regarding the
2014 coup:
Baldwin: How did your
investigation of the events surrounding the 2014 coup in Ukraine evolve and
what are your conclusions?
Katchanovski: I researched the Maidan massacre for almost 10 years.
I published a book chapter and two peer-reviewed journal articles on this
massacre. Another of my articles on this crucial massacre is in press following
very positive peer reviews by two experts. All these articles are open-access
thanks to crowdfunding, and can be freely viewed, downloaded, shared,
translated and republished.
My studies found that the Maidan massacre was a false-flag mass killing of
the protestors and the police in order to seize power in Ukraine. It was
conducted with the involvement of oligarchic and far-right elements of the
Maidan opposition using concealed groups of Maidan snipers in Maidan-controlled
buildings. The evidence shows this beyond any reasonable doubt.
MORE https://consortiumnews.com/2023/10/20/the-maidan-massacre-censorship-ukraine/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=3cb21063-3952-4697-925c-19b93cdedcb4 ]
Baldwin: Canadian-Ukrainian professor
Ivan Katchanovski’s investigation of the Maidan massacre in Kiev in
February 2014 found an organized mass killing of both protesters and
the police, with the goal of delegitimizing the Yanukovych government and its
forces and seizing power in Ukraine, as
he wrote for Consortium News in an in-depth article in 2019. (On
Wednesday three policemen were sentenced for the massacre, one was acquitted and
one was released for time served. The official investigation
ignored Katchanovski’s academic research.)
Natalie Baldwin: Tell us about your Ukrainian background
and how you came to be an academic focused on the 2014 coup in Ukraine and the
subsequent war? . . . .
Katchanovski: I researched the civil war and Russian military
interventions in Donbas as soon as the separatist conflict in Donbas started
following the violent overthrow of the Yanukovych government by means of the
Maidan massacre and assassination attempts against Yanukovych.
Before the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, I warned
in my publications, media interviews and social media posts about a real
possibility of a war between Russia and Ukraine. I am researching this ongoing
war now. My books on the Russia-Ukraine war and its origins, on the Maidan
massacre, and on modern Ukraine are forthcoming from three major Western
academic presses.
Baldwin: How
did your investigation of the events surrounding the 2014 coup in Ukraine
evolve and what are your conclusions?
Katchanovski: I researched the Maidan massacre for almost 10 years. I published
a book chapter and two peer-reviewed journal articles on this massacre. Another
of my articles on this crucial massacre is in press following very positive
peer reviews by two experts. All these articles are open-access thanks to
crowdfunding, and can be freely viewed, downloaded, shared, translated and
republished.
My studies found that the Maidan massacre was a false-flag mass
killing of the protestors and the police in order to seize power in Ukraine. It
was conducted with the involvement of oligarchic and far-right elements of the
Maidan opposition using concealed groups of Maidan snipers in Maidan-controlled
buildings. The evidence shows this beyond any reasonable doubt.
[Related: The
Buried Maidan Massacre and Its Misrepresentation by the West]
Baldwin: It
sounds like your work on these events has been censored. Please explain
what challenges you’ve had in presenting and publishing your work and why you
think this has been happening.
Katchanovski:
My comprehensive article concerning the Maidan massacre was accepted for
publication with minor revisions by a major peer-reviewed journal but then the
decision was reversed in a clear case of political censorship. My appeal, with
a supporting letter by Jeffrey Sachs, was rejected. Now the same article has
been published as two separate articles in two other major peer-reviewed
journals.
In retaliation for my academic studies of the Maidan massacre, my
own house, land, and all property in Western Ukraine were seized by court
decisions, which were issued on the orders from the top, despite all the
documents and dozens of witness testimonies and in reversals of the decisions
by the same judges and courts which confirmed my ownership. My house and all my
property there have been damaged.
I faced ad hominem attacks, denunciations and defamation from a
few researchers, most of whom are linked to the Ukrainian far right and
obviously have vested interest in whitewashing the far right and denying their
involvement in the false flag mass killing of the Maidan protesters.
Ukrainian opposition leaders Oleh Tyahnybok, seated on van, with
Vitali Klitschko and Arseniy Yatsenyuk, addressing Euromaidan demonstrators,
Nov. 27, 2013. (Ivan Bandura, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0)
A far-right activist linked to Svoboda, which my studies show was
implicated in the Maidan massacre, was involved in the creation of several
dozens of identical blogs and social media sites calling me “falsifier of the
Maidan massacre.” It is telling that he used what he called “scientific
anti-Semitism” to justify the OUN-led pogrom of Jews in Nazi-occupied
Lviv.
A small group of Wikipedia editors resorted to similar defamation
and fraud in order to whitewash the far right and the far-right involvement in
the mass murder of the Maidan protesters and the police. They systematically
whitewash the contemporary far right in Ukraine and their historical
predecessors from the OUN and the UPA, and their Nazi collaboration and
involvement in mass murder of Jews, Poles, and Ukrainians, and smear and defame
many scholars of Ukraine.
They include editors who were identified by “Wikipedia’s
Intentional Distortion of the History of the Holocaust” article by the
University of Ottawa professor. Most of them are identified by various
publications and online sources as academics, who are not experts in Ukraine
but whitewash the far right and Maidan mass murders and smear scholars either
because of political agenda or even possibly for pay.
But my Maidan massacre studies were reported or cited,
overwhelmingly positively by over 100 Western scholars and experts. Such
leading scholars and experts as Richard Sakwa, (University of Kent), Professor
David Lane (Cambridge University), Jeffrey Sachs (Columbia University), Jack
Matlock (Duke University and the former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union),
Stephen F. Cohen (New York University), Anatol Lieven (Quincy Institute), and
many others in their peer-reviewed articles, books, and media publications
either accepted my research findings concerning the Maidan massacre or [have]
written favorably about my studies of this massacre.
Similarly, more than a hundred Western media outlets and over 50
Ukrainian media outlets positively reported or cited findings of my Maidan
massacre studies: They include major American, Austrian, Canadian, Danish,
Dutch, German, Greek, Italian, New Zealand, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swiss media
outlets such as The Nation, HuffingtonPost, CourthouseNews, Jacobin, Consortium
News, Counterpunch, The Grayzone, Truthout, and
Ukraina Moloda.
Their number is dozens of times higher than the few Western and
Ukrainian media which attacked or denounced my Maidan massacre studies by
resorting to outright fraud or the deliberate omission of overwhelming evidence
revealed by my studies and the Maidan massacre trial.
But the absolute majority of the Western media deliberately does
not report concerning findings of my studies of this massacre and various
overwhelming evidence that this was a false-flag operation with the far-right
involvement. . . .
Baldwin: You’ve talked periodically about investigations and
court proceedings in Ukraine regarding the events surrounding the Maidan and
the change of government that resulted from it. Can you tell us more about
those court proceedings and investigations – how are they set up and what are
they investigating? What are the most interesting revelations that have
come out of them and do you think there will be any meaningful accountability
for illegal and/or violent actions?
Ukrainian Internal Troops form a phalanx against protesters with
Berkut special police grouped behind them. (Amakuha, Wikimedia
Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)
Katchanovski: The Maidan massacre trial, which started in 2015, examined charges
against five members of Berkut [a special police unit] who are charged with the
massacre of the Maidan protesters on Feb. 20, 2014.
My recent peer-reviewed journal article and video appendixes show that the
absolute majority of wounded protesters testified at the trial and the
investigation that they were in fact shot by snipers from
Maidan-controlled buildings or areas or that they witnessed snipers
there.
Some 100 prosecution and defense witnesses and relatives of killed
protesters also testified about snipers in the Maidan-controlled buildings and
areas. This is consistent with testimonies by several hundred other witnesses
and confessions by 14 self-admitted members of Maidan sniper groups.
Statements by the far-right Svoboda Party, videos and numerous
witnesses show that the Hotel Ukraina and other buildings, which were locations
of snipers who massacred the protesters and the police, were controlled then by
the Maidan forces. My analysis of synchronized videos revealed Maidan snipers
in these buildings during the massacre.
Forensic medical examinations by government experts showed that
nearly all protesters were shot from the top, the back, and from the side
directions, which match these Maidan-controlled buildings.
Government forensic ballistic experts determined that many
protesters were killed or wounded from the Hotel Ukraina and other
Maidan-controlled buildings or areas. A forensic ballistic examination by
government experts with use of an automatic computer-based system found that
bullets extracted from killed protesters did not match bullets from the
Kalashnikov assault rifles of Berkut police. My analysis of synchronized videos
showed that the specific time and direction of shooting by Berkut policemen did
not coincide with the killing of specific protesters.
But the government investigation in Ukraine in a most blatant
cover-up simply denies that there were any snipers in these Maidan controlled
buildings in spite of the undeniable evidence. As part of such a cover-up, no
one was convicted or under arrest for the massacre of the protesters and the
police for almost 10 years after this massacre, which was one of the most
documented cases of mass killing in history.
Crucial evidence, such as security cameras recordings, bullets,
shields and helmets, “disappeared” or were destroyed. There is also tampering
with evidence, such as bullets and forensic ballistic examinations, whose
results were reversed without any explanation and contrary to videos, witnesses
and forensic medical examinations. There is no trial for the killing of the
police even though Maidan snipers, in particular, members of a far-right-linked
group, publicly confessed in Ukrainian and Western media interviews of killing
or shooting the police during the massacre. . . .MORE https://natyliesb.medium.com/the-maidan-massacre-censorship-ukraine-my-interview-with-ivan-katchanovski-40898a2c8237
Natylie Baldwin is the author of The View from Moscow:
Understanding Russia and U.S.-Russia Relations. Her writing has
appeared in various publications including The Grayzone, Antiwar.com,
Covert Action Magazine, RT, OpEd News, The Globe Post, The New York Journal of
Books and Dissident Voice. She blogs at natyliesbaldwin.com. Twitter: @natyliesb.
COUP,
ODESSA, DONETSK AND LUGANSK
Joe Lauria.
“US Victim of Own Propaganda in Ukraine War.” Consortium
News. August 29, 2023
https://consortiumnews.com/2023/08/29/us-victim-of-own-propaganda-in-ukraine-war/
[Article traces the
eruption of the Ukrainian civil war (2014-present); here is the chronology
extracted from the narrative by Dick, a chronology found in all of the
preceding anthologies.
Feb. 21, 2014,
US-backed coup ousted elected Pres. Yanukovich, sympathetic to Russia.
April 15, new (coup)
gov. attacked ethnic Russians in Donbass protest of coup.
May 2, protesters
of coup killed in Odessa (“Odessa Massacre”).
May 10, Eastern
provinces of Donetsk and Lugansk vote to be independent of Ukraine.
“This phase of the
[civil] war continued for eight years, killing thousands of people” before
Russia intervened on “Feb. 24, 2022.” ]
By Joe Lauria
Special to
Consortium News
The
whitewashing of the historical context for the war in Ukraine has resulted in a
profoundly embarrassing episode for the United States embassy in Prague.
An
Aug. 21 Tweet from the embassy with a message roughly translated from Czech to
mean “Aggression always comes from the Kremlin,” showed two photographs: the
first displayed Soviet tanks in the streets of Prague in 1968. The second showed fire burning in front of a
building and was marked “Odesa 2023.”
Twitter
users were quick to point out the embassy’s error. “The bottom photo is from
2014 Odessa Clashes where pro federalism (mostly pro Russian) got burned alive
in clash with Ukrainian nationalist(s) while police and fireman stood watching.
To this day no one was jailed,” wrote one commenter.
Someone
else wrote: “You vile people, twisting the history to whitewash the crimes of
the Ukrainian far-right against peaceful Ukrainians, and in fact using their
crimes with the diametrically opposite meaning!”
The
embassy got the message. “Thanks for the heads up and apologies for the
incorrect use of the graphic. We wanted to illustrate the ongoing Russian
aggression against Ukraine and we chose the wrong photo,” it wrote.
That
prompted another Twitter user to sarcastically respond: “You wanted to
illustrate the Ukrainian aggression against the Russian people and you chose
the right photo.”
The
embassy then deleted the Tweet. It never
acknowledged the event depicted in the bottom photo. That signifies either
ignorance of the event or intentional suppression of it. The massacre in Odessa
is a key point in understanding the cause of the war and has been buried by the
West, creating a propagandized narrative about Russia’s intervention.
May
2, 2014
Demonstrators
in Odessa on May 2, 2014 were protesting the violent overthrow two and a
half months earlier on Feb. 21, 2014 of the democratically-elected President
Viktor Yanukovych. U.S. involvement in the coup is revealed in a leaked
telephone conversation between Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland and
Geoffrey Pyatt, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine at the time.
On
May 2, football hooligans and far-right groups deliberately set fire to a labor
union building in Odessa where protestors against the coup had taken
refuge. As many as 48 people were
killed. Police did not intervene. Video footage shows at least one police
officer and others firing their guns into the building. The crowd is cheering
as many of the people trapped inside jumped to their deaths. Pleas at the time from the United Nations and
the European Union for Ukraine to investigate were ignored. Three Ukrainian
local government probes were stymied by the withholding of secret documents.
Click
on photo for video showing atack against pro-Russian protestors on May 2, 2014,
including policeman firing on them.
A
report on the incident from the European Council (EC) at the time makes clear
it did not conduct its own investigation but relied on local probes, especially
by the Verkhovna Rada’s Temporary Investigation Commission. The EC complains in its reports that it too
was barred from viewing classified information. The EC said the Ukrainian
government probes “failed to comply with the requirements of the European Human
Rights Convention.” Relying only on the
flawed local inquiries, the EC reports that pro-Russian, or pro-federalist,
protestors attacked a pro-unity march in the afternoon, prompting street
battles. Then:
“At
around 6.50 p.m. pro-federalists broke down the door [of the trade union
building] and brought inside various materials, including boxes containing
Molotov cocktails and the products needed to make them. Using wooden pallets
which had supported tents in the square, they blocked the entrances to the
building from the inside and erected barricades. When they arrived at the
square at around 7.20 p.m., the pro-unity protesters destroyed and set fire to
the tents of the Anti-Maidan camp. The remaining pro-federalism protesters
entered the Trade Union Building, from where they exchanged shots and Molotov
cocktails with their opponents outside. …
At
about 7.45 p.m. a fire broke out in the Trade Union Building. Forensic
examinations subsequently indicated that the fire had started in five places,
namely the lobby, on the staircases to the left and right of the building
between the ground and first floors, in a room on the first floor and on the
landing between the second and third floors.
Other
than the fire in the lobby, the fires could only have been started by the acts
of those inside the building. The forensic reports did not find any evidence to
suggest that the fire had been preplanned. The closed doors and the chimney
effect caused by the stairwell resulted in the fire’s rapid spread to the upper
floors and a fast and extreme rise in the temperature inside the building.”
The
local investigation thus blamed the anti-Maidan protestors for starting the
fire throughout the building. But this video, which shows events on that day
leading to the fire, depicts the main blaze in the lobby. It shows Right Sector
extremists lobbing Molotov cocktails into the building and a policeman firing
his gun at it.
It
does not show any cocktails thrown from the building. It doesn’t show clashes
earlier in the day, though one pro-unity protestor says they were attacked at
Cathedral Square and they’ve come to burn the anti-Maidan protestors in the
building for revenge.
The
Fallout
Eight days after the Odessa massacre, coup resisters in the
far eastern provinces of Donetsk and Lugansk, bordering on Russia, voted in a
referendum to become independent from Ukraine.
The
U.S.-backed coup government had launched a military attack two weeks earlier,
on April 15, 2014 against ethnic Russians in Donbass protesting against the
coup, including seizing government buildings, in defense of a democratic
election. This phase of the war continued for nearly eight years, killing
thousands of people before prompting Russian intervention in the civil war on
Feb. 24, 2022.
Russia
says it had proof that the Ukrainian military, which had amassed 60,000 of its
troops at the line of contact, was on the verge of an offensive to retake the
Donbass provinces. OSCE maps showed a dramatic increase of shelling from the
government side into the rebel areas in February last year.
Russia invaded Ukraine with the stated purpose of “de-Nazifying” and
“de-militarizing” Ukraine to protect Russian-speakers and the people of
Donbass. The events in Odessa on May 2, 2014 played a role. In a televised
address three days before the invasion, Russian President Vladimir Putin said:
“One
shudders at the memories of the terrible tragedy in Odessa, where peaceful
protesters were brutally murdered, burned alive in the House of Trade Unions.
The criminals who committed that atrocity have never been punished, and no one
is even looking for them. But we know their names and we will do everything to
punish them, find them and bring them to justice.”
Western Media Coverage
The New York Times buried the first
news of the massacre in a May 2, 2014 story, saying “dozens of people died in a
fire related to clashes that broke out between protesters holding a march for
Ukrainian unity and pro-Russian activists.”
The Times then published a video report that said dozens were killed
in a fire, “and others were shot dead when fighting between pro- and
anti-Russian groups broke out on the streets of Odessa.” The video narrator
says “crowds did their best to save lives.” It quotes Ukrainian police saying a
“pro-Kiev march was ambushed … petrol bombs were thrown” and gun battles
erupted on the streets.
The
late Robert Parry, who founded Consortium
News, reported on Aug. 10, 2014:
“The
brutality of these neo-Nazis surfaced again on May 2 when right-wing toughs in
Odessa attacked an encampment of ethnic Russian protesters driving them into a
trade union building which was then set on fire with Molotov cocktails. As the
building was engulfed in flames, some people who tried to flee were chased and
beaten, while those trapped inside heard the Ukrainian nationalists liken them
to black-and-red-striped potato beetles called Colorados, because those colors
are used in pro-Russian ribbons.
‘Burn,
Colorado, burn’ went the chant.
As
the fire worsened, those dying inside were serenaded with the taunting singing
of the Ukrainian national anthem. The building also was spray-painted with
Swastika-like symbols and graffiti reading ‘Galician SS,’ a reference to the
Ukrainian nationalist army that fought alongside the German Nazi SS in World
War II, killing Russians on the eastern front.”
Consequences of Suppressing Information [Neo-Nazis in
Ukraine]
Though
they were reported at the time, the
events of May 2, 2014 have virtually vanished from Western media. It was one of
the seminal events that led to Russia’s eventual intervention in the Ukrainian
civil war.
Similarly the role
Ukrainian neo-Nazis played in the 2014 coup and the 8-year war on Donbass — which had been
widely reported on at the time in Western mainstream media — disappeared,
erasing the context of Russia’s invasion. The December 2021 Russian offer of
treaties with the U.S. and NATO to avoid war was forgotten too. After Russian
intervention, a campaign was launched by so-called disinformation monitors to
try to suppress alternative media from reporting on these facts.
The
consequences of these efforts is clear. The
aggression of Kiev’s coup regime
against ethnic Russians in Ukraine, which
led to Russia’s intervention, has been airbrushed from history.
What’s left is a
cartoon version that says the conflict began, not in 2014, but in February
2022 when Putin woke up one morning and decided to invade Ukraine. There was no
other cause, according to this version, other than unprovoked, Russian
aggression against an innocent country.
Thus
the U.S. Embassy in Prague either deceptively used that photo, or more likely,
had no idea what happened in Odessa in 2014, as it has hardly been reported on
since, thinking that a prime example of Ukrainian aggression against ethnic
Russians was instead a photo showing Russian aggression against
Ukrainians.
This
is what happens when you believe your own propaganda.
Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of
Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and numerous other
newspapers, including The Montreal
Gazette, the London Daily Mail and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an
investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for
Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for
The New York Times. He is the author of two books, A Political Odyssey, with Sen. Mike Gravel, foreword by Daniel
Ellsberg; and How I Lost By Hillary
Clinton, foreword by Julian Assange. He can be reached at
joelauria@consortiumnews.com and followed on Twitter @unjoe
Minsk Agreements, Russia to Protect Donbass
Population, Ukrainian and Western Lying,
“Background
and elements of the war in Ukraine: Interview of Jacques Baud.” Originally published: Schweizer Standpunkt on May 30, 2023, Swiss Standpoint (more by Schweizer
Standpunkt) (Posted Jun 12,
2023).
History, Strategy, WarAmericas, Europe, Russia, Ukraine, United StatesInterview
On the occasion of a
trip to Strasbourg, Luxembourg and Brussels, two members of the editorial board
of “Swiss Standpoint” had the following conversation with the Swiss military
analyst Jacques Baud. He talks about the causes of the war, the current
situation of Ukrainian and Russian troops and the influence of the USA on
events in the region. In a second part, questions of international trade
relations and Switzerland’s loss of trust and credibility abroad are also
discussed. [I copy only the first part. –D]
Swiss
Standpoint: Mr Baud, how do you assess the current situation? Why are there no
negotiations?
Jacques
Baud: We are in a
strange phase. In the West, people think that Ukraine is winning and that is
why there is no reason to negotiate.
Recently, François Hollande, the former French
president, was lured into a phone trap by Russian pranksters posing as Petro Poroshenko.1 He confessed once more that the Minsk Agreements were nothing more than
an opportunity for Ukraine to prepare its armed forces, and he declared that
“as long as Ukraine wins, there is no reason to negotiate”. That is the general belief.
In
the West, the disinformation is so strong that people don’t even realise that
Ukraine cannot win. So why should we
negotiate if the Russians are in trouble, not the Ukrainians? On the Russian
side, the deliberate refusal of Western countries to implement the Minsk agreements has caused the loss of
all confidence in our sincerity.
Minsk Agreements
SS:
What happened to the Minsk agreements?
JB: Last year and early 2023, Petro
Poroshenko,2 Angela
Merkel,3 François
Hollande,4 and then Zelensky
himself,5 have all declared that they never
intended to implement the Minsk
Agreements. What does this mean for the Russians? After a first defeat on
the ground, the self-proclaimed Donbass republics signed an agreement with Kiev
in September 2014 (Minsk 1). Kiev
did not comply with the agreement. Just after a second defeat in Debaltsevo a
second agreement (Minsk 2) was
signed in February 2015. Germany and France were the guarantors of the
implementation of the agreement for Ukraine, Russia was the guarantor for the
republics of the Donbass. Further, since the Minsk 2 agreement had become the
Security Council Resolution 2202 (2015) the other members of the UN Security
Council (the U.S., UK and China) were also responsible for its implementation.
Since then, however, more than 10,000 Russian-speaking civilians have died in
the Donbass.
The Russians have made every effort to have these agreements implemented, as
they were meant to protect the Russian-speaking population. However, no Western
country has even tried to make Ukraine enforce them. Today, the Russians say
the West is not able to honour its own signature, how can they trust us?
SS:
What is the fighting situation in Ukraine? What are Russia’s goals?
JB: The common belief in the West is that
the conflict has run into a stalemate, for example in Bachmut. This comes from
the narrative saying that Russia wants to seize and occupy Ukraine. But this is
wrong. The goal clearly stated by the Russians is to eliminate the military
threat to the population of the Donbass. They achieved this goal a first
time by destroying the material capacities of Ukrainian forces in May/June
2022. Since then, Ukraine has been almost exclusively dependent on the West for
its armament. Because of this constant flow of equipment, the Russians have
understood that this is not enough and that they have to destroy their human
potential. This is exactly what is happening now.
On 18 October 2022,
the newly promoted Commander of the Joint Group of Forces in Ukraine, Sergey
Surovikin said it clearly: “We have a different strategy. […] We do not aim at
high rates of advance, we take care of every soldier and methodically ‘grind’ the advancing enemy.”6 He uses the term “meat grinder”. This
brings us back to the concepts of “demilitarization” and “denazification”
Vladimir Putin used on 24 February 2022. The Russians have remained with the
same objectives ever since. The “denazification” goal was achieved on 28 March
2022.
Today, we can see in
the secret documents leaked recently what is left to Ukraine. For example, in
February 2022 the Ukrainians had about 850 T-64 battle tanks; today they have
only 43 available for their big counteroffensive. They certainly still have a
few in reserve somewhere, but the vast majority has been destroyed by the
Russians. So, the Russians have already achieved their “demilitarization” goal
twice, and it is likely that they will soon achieve it a third time. It is the
sad reality, although the exact opposite is said in the West.
SS: What do you know
about the numbers of war victims on both sides?
We have convinced
ourselves that the Russians have lost a large number of soldiers, and that
extending the war will quickly lead to instability in Russia. But here again,
the opposite is true. We assume that the Russians suffered between 100,000 and
200,000 fatalities. However, these figures are based on nothing. Nobody knows
the exact figures because neither the Ukrainians nor the Russians communicate
their losses.
However, there is a
Russian opposition media, Mediazona, which, together with the BBC, is making
educated guesses on the number of Russian fatalities based on the death notices
in the media. So, this is a pro-Western and certainly not Russian government-controlled
media, which probably tends to overestimate the number of Russian dead.
However, according to this source one can estimate that between 10,000 and
20,000 Russian soldiers died in combat, but certainly not 100,000. In the West,
we tend to rely exclusively on Ukrainian propaganda. On 31 December, the
100,000th Russian killed was celebrated in Kiev, and this was even beamed onto
the tallest building of the city. But on that very day, Mediazona’s figure was
at 10,000, which means 10 times less.
When other figures
were aired for Ukraine, for example when in November Ursula von der Leyen said
in a speech that more than hundred thousand of Ukrainians had died, the
Ukrainian government vehemently complained. And this statement was promptly
retracted. In fact, I think the figure was correct, and Von der Leyen most
probably saw it somewhere and didn’t make it up, but she was not supposed to
say that.
Propaganda as a basis for decision-making
SS:
Where do the Americans get their information from?
JB: The secret U.S. documents leaked in the
media in April give us valuable clues about how the West gets its information.
Regarding Ukrainian equipment, there is no mystery, as these figures are mostly
open. As to the Russian deployed potential, the U.S. and NATO have an intensive
air reconnaissance activity which provides them with a good overview of the
available forces.
But when it comes to
the troops’ locations in the field, for the tactical situation, for the losses
or the operations of the opposing forces, the West is almost blind. They have
obviously no intelligence capacity of their own. Their only source of information
is Ukraine. In other words, most of our decision-making is based on propaganda.
That, for me, is one of the most interesting aspects of this conflict. It is
said that the CIA is deeply involved in the conflict. This is true as far as
special sabotage and terrorist operations are concerned, but it is completely
wrong as far as analytical capabilities
are concerned.7
SS:
How do you go about your analysis?
JB: My approach is not about my opinions or
feelings. I want to paint the best possible picture based on what is available,
such as the number of deaths. It is about intelligence work. It’s about having
as factual a picture as possible. I try to work out of a blank sheet with as
little external influence as possible, regardless whether it comes from the
left or the right.
Take John J.
Mearsheimer for example, he writes interesting and true things. He says that
the Russians were lied to from the beginning, etc. That’s true. But then he has
his own ideas of the conflict. These do not correspond to the historical
reality of the conflict. I can agree with some of his conclusions, but not
necessarily with the path that leads to them, and this path is important for
resolving the conflict.
For me, it is not
about accusing or excusing anyone. It is about having the right picture to find
the right solution. And that’s why I agree that the Russians were lied to
since the 90s. That is the background of the conflict and adds to the current
situation, but it is not the reason why Russia intervened in Ukraine. This is
important.
Wars without aims are endless
It is a background
element, which makes communication more difficult. The main rationale for
the intervention is to protect the population in the Donbass. That’s
why Putin has so much support for protecting the Russian population there. This
is a key point.
When it comes to
negotiations, the Russians will certainly exploit their victory in the field to
achieve their political goals. That is clear, that is basically Carl von
Clausewitz’s theory. However, to achieve political goals, there are other
methods. This should have been achieved through the Minsk agreements.
That is why the Russians have insisted on this political solution. Since it
failed, they will use the conflict to achieve the goal differently. Hence this
logic, a typical Clausewitzian consideration that we in the West do not apply.
We have fought numerous wars for nothing, without any clear aims.
We, in the West have
no idea what we want to achieve with Ukraine. If we wanted happiness and
prosperity for the Ukrainians, we would have promoted the implementation of the
Minsk agreements. We did not do that—we pushed them to prepare for war. . . .
MORE [The Intermarium, a Polish Goal;
Visegrad Battle Group; Goals of Right-Wing Extremists in Ukraine; Dangerous
Dynamic of Wolfowitz Doctrine; etc.]
Jacques
Baud studied
international security and economics in Geneva. He is a colonel in the General
Staff of the Swiss Army and worked for the Swiss Strategic Intelligence
Service. For several years, he performed various functions on behalf of NATO in
Brussels and Ukraine. For UN peacekeeping, he was mainly deployed in African
countries. He is the author of numerous books and articles on intelligence,
asymmetric warfare, terrorism, and disinformation. His current analyses of the
Ukraine conflict, published in independent media, are well received in Europe
and beyond. [The interview suggests that Col. Baud possesses an astonishingly wide
and deep knowledge of European history ancient and current, upon which he bases
his opinions. –Dick]
MORE ON NATO: US RADICAL POST-COLD WAR EXPANSION
Benjamin
Schwarz and Christopher Layne. “Why Are
We in Ukraine?” Harper’s Magazine (June 2023).
. . . From the early
Nineties, when Washington first raised the idea of NATO expansion, until
2008, when the U.S. delegation at the NATO summit in Bucharest advocated
alliance membership for Ukraine and Georgia, U.S.-Russian exchanges were
monotonous. While Russians protested Washington’s NATO expansion plans,
American officials shrugged off those protests—or pointed to them as evidence
to justify still-further expansion. Washington’s message to Moscow could
not have been clearer or more disquieting: Normal diplomacy among great powers,
distinguished by the recognition and accommodation of clashing interests—the
approach that had defined the U.S.-Soviet rivalry during even the most intense
stretches of the Cold War—was obsolete. Russia was expected to acquiesce to a
new world order created and dominated by the United States.
The radical expansion of
NATO’s writ reflected the overweening aims that the end of the Cold War enabled
Washington to pursue. Historically, great
powers tend to focus pragmatically on reducing conflict among themselves. By
frankly recognizing the realities of power and acknowledging each other’s
interests, they can usually relate to one another on a businesslike basis. This
international give-and-take is bolstered by and helps engender a rough,
contextual understanding of what’s reasonable and legitimate—not in an abstract
or absolute sense but in a way that permits fierce business rivals to moderate
and accede to demands and to reach deals. By embracing what came to be called
its “unipolar moment,” Washington demonstrated—to Paris, Berlin, London,
New Delhi, and Beijing, no less than to Moscow—that it would no longer be bound
by the norms implicit in great power politics, norms that constrain the aims
pursued as much as the means employed. Those who determine U.S. foreign
policy hold that, as President George W. Bush declared in his second
inaugural address, “the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on
the success of liberty in other lands.” They maintain, as President Bill
Clinton averred in 1993, that the security of the United States demands a
“focus on relations within nations, on a nation’s form of governance, on its
economic structure.”
Whatever one thinks of
this doctrine, which prompted Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to dub
America “the indispensable nation”—and which Gorbachev said defined America’s
“dangerous winner’s mentality”—it lavishly expanded previously established
conceptions of security and national interest. In its crusading universalism,
it could be regarded by other states, with ample supporting evidence, as at
best recklessly meddlesome and at worst messianically interventionist.
Convinced that its national security depended on the domestic political and
economic arrangements of ostensibly sovereign states—and therefore defining as
a legitimate goal the alteration or eradication of those arrangements if they
were not in accord with its professed ideals and values—the post–Cold War
United States became a revolutionary force in world politics.
One early sign of this
fundamental change was Washington’s covert, overt, and (perhaps most important)
overtly covert interference in Russia’s affairs during the early and
mid-Nineties—a project of political, social, and economic engineering that
included funneling some $1.8 billion to political movements, organizations, and
individuals deemed ideologically compatible with U.S. interests and
culminated in American meddling in Russia’s 1996 presidential election. Of
course, great powers have always manipulated both their proxies and smaller
neighboring states. But by so baldly intervening in Russia’s internal affairs,
Washington signaled to Moscow that the sole superpower felt no obligation to
follow the norms of great power politics and, perhaps more galling, no longer
regarded Russia as a power with sensibilities that had to be considered.
Moscow’s alarm over the hegemonic role America had assigned
itself was intensified by what could fairly be characterized as the bellicose
utopianism demonstrated by Washington’s series of regime-change wars. In
1989, just as the U.S.-Soviet global rivalry was ending, the United States
assumed its self-appointed role as “the sole remaining superpower” by launching
its invasion of Panama. Moscow issued a statement criticizing the
invasion as a violation of “the sovereignty and honor of other nations,” but
neither Moscow nor any other great power took any explicit action to protest
the United States’ exercising its sway in its own strategic backyard.
Nonetheless, because no foreign power was using Panama as a foothold against
the United States—and thus Manuel Noriega’s regime posed no conceivable threat
to America’s security—the invasion neatly established the post–Cold War
ground rules: American force would be used, and international law
contravened, not only in pursuit of tangible national interests, but also in
order to depose governments that Washington deemed unsavory. America’s
regime-change war in Iraq—declared “illegal” by U.N. secretary general
Kofi Annan—and its wider ambitions to engender a democratic makeover in the
Middle East demonstrated the range and lethality of its globalizing impulse.
More immediately disquieting to Moscow, against the backdrop of NATO’s steady
eastward push, were the implications of the U.S.-led alliance’s regime-change
wars in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1999 and, twelve years
later, in Libya.
Although Washington
presented the U.S.-led NATO bombing of Yugoslavia as an intervention to
forestall human rights abuses in Kosovo, the reality was far murkier. American
policymakers presented Belgrade with an ultimatum that imposed conditions no
sovereign state could accept: relinquish sovereignty over the province of Kosovo
and allow free reign to NATO forces throughout Yugoslavia. (As a senior State
Department official reportedly said in an off-the-record briefing, “[We]
deliberately set the bar higher than the Serbs could accept.”) Washington then
intervened in a conflict between the brutal Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA)—a
force that had previously been denounced by the U.S. State Department as a
terrorist organization—and the military forces of the equally brutal regime of
Slobodan MiloÅ¡ević. The KLA’s vicious campaign—including the kidnapping and
execution of Yugoslav officials, police, and their families—provoked
Yugoslavia’s equally vicious response, including both murderous reprisals and
indiscriminate military actions against civilian populations suspected of
aiding the insurgents. Through a stenographic process in which “ethnic-Albanian
militants, humanitarian organizations, NATO and the news media fed off each
other to give genocide rumors credibility,” to quote a retrospective
investigation by the Wall Street Journal in 2001, this typical
insurgency was transformed into Washington’s righteous casus belli. (A similar
process would soon unfold in the run-up to the Gulf War.)
It was not lost on
Russia that Washington was bombing Belgrade in the name of universal
humanitarian principles while giving friends and allies such as Croatia and
Turkey a free pass for savage counterinsurgencies that included the usual war
crimes, human rights abuses, and forced removals of civilian populations.
President Yeltsin and Russian officials strenuously, if impotently, protested
the Washington-led war on a country with which Russia traditionally had close
political and cultural ties. Indeed, NATO and Russian troops nearly clashed at
the airport in Kosovo’s provincial capital. (The confrontation was only averted
when a British general defied the order of his superior, NATO supreme commander
U.S. general Wesley Clark, to deploy troops to block the arrival of
Russian paratroopers, telling him: “I’m not going to start World War III for
you.”) Ignoring Moscow, NATO waged its war against Yugoslavia without
U.N. sanction and destroyed civilian targets, killing some five hundred
non-combatants (actions that Washington considers violations of international
norms when conducted by other powers). The operation not only toppled a
sovereign government, but also forcibly altered a sovereign state’s borders
(again, actions that Washington considers violations of international norms
when conducted by other powers).
NATO similarly conducted
its war in Libya in the face of valid
Russian alarm. That war went beyond its defensive mandate—as Moscow
protested—when NATO transformed its mission from the ostensible protection of
civilians to the overthrow of Muammar Qaddafi’s regime. The escalation,
justified by a now-familiar process involving false and misleading stories
pedaled by armed rebels and other interested parties, produced years of violent
disorder in Libya and made it a haven for jihadis. Both wars were fought
against states that, however distasteful, posed no threat to any NATO member.
Their upshot was the recognition in both Moscow and Washington of NATO’s new
power, ambit, and purpose. The alliance had been transformed from a supposedly
mutual defense pact designed to repel an attack on its members into the
preeminent military instrument of American power in the post–Cold
War world. . . . MORE https://harpers.org/archive/2023/06/why-are-we-in-ukraine/
Western
Intelligence Services
Jeremy Kuzmarov. “Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky Came to Power in Carefully Planned Operation Coordinated by Western
Intelligence Services, Says Former U.S. Diplomat.” CovertAction
Magazine
Mronline.org (8-16-23).
Secret meeting with British MI6 Head Richard Moore points to the
likelihood that Zelensky Is a British Intelligence Agent...
NATO, MEDIA
Oleg Nesterenko. “The War in Ukraine: Towards
the Collapse of the West’s Reputation.” Donbass Insider (July 15, 2023). Editor. Mronnline.org (7-29 -23). (more by Donbass
Insider) Empire, Imperialism, Strategy, WarAmericas, Europe, Russia, Ukraine, United StatesNewswireNorth
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Russia-Ukraine War
After the bipolar
world that existed from the end of the Second World War until the implosion of
the Soviet Union in December 1991, the current conflict on the territory of
Ukraine is the point of gravity in the process of transition between two great
eras of contemporary history: the old—unipolar—that has lasted for the last 30
years and the new—multipolar—post-hegemonic, that came into being at the end
of February 2022.
Although I’m not much
of a follower of communist theories, I can’t help noticing that today’s events
are nothing more than a modern adaptation, a reflection in the mirror of the
old principle of revolutions expressed by Vladimir Lenin as long ago as 1913 in
his book The First May of the Revolutionary Proletariat: the lower
classes no longer want to live in the old way, while the upper classes can no
longer govern in the old way. In other words, the impossibility for the ruling
class to maintain its domination in an unchanged form. Today, the ‘upper
classes’ are the Western world revolving around the United States of America
and the ‘lower classes’—the rest of humanity.
Once again, history
teaches the “elites” nothing and eras are replaced in the same way as a century
ago: with violence.
The rhetoric about the
defence of freedom, democracy and the noble, and therefore Western, values that
Ukraine represents and defends are nothing more than the “Atlanticist”
narratives developed via the propaganda apparatus of the mainstream
media, in order to justify to the pre-formatted electoral masses the
controversial initiatives undertaken by the representatives of the current
power of the Americano-centric collective Western bloc. Narratives far removed
from the tragic Ukrainian reality of power. . . .MORE click on title
PART II: THE WAR
Destruction of Nord Stream Pipelines, Roles of Biden and Scholz ,
Consequences
Seymour Hersh. “Harold
Pinter had it right.”
ScheerPost (8-13-2023).
Editor.
mronline.org (8-16-23). Lessons in Western
self-sabotage from the Ukraine War.
By Seymour M. Hersh (Posted Aug 15, 2023)
Originally published: ScheerPost on August 13, 2023 (more
by ScheerPost)
Empire, Imperialism, Strategy, WarAmericas, Europe, Germany, Russia, Ukraine, United StatesReflections
of FidelHarold
Pinter, Nord Stream pipelines, North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), President Joe Biden, President
Vladimir Putin, Russia-Ukraine War, Ukraine
President Volodymyr Zelensky
This piece is
from Seymour
Hersh’s Substack.
. . .There were two
sets of pipelines, both partially financed by Russian oligarchs who were
beholden to President Vladimir Putin. Nord Stream 1 went into operation in
2011, and within ten years Russia was providing Germany more than half of its
overall energy needs, with most of the inexpensive gas targeted for industrial
use. Nord Stream 2 was completed by the summer of 2021, but never brought into
use. By February 2022, at the start of the war, Scholz halted the pipeline’s
certification process. Nord Stream 2 was loaded with gas meant for delivery to
Germany, but its huge payload was blocked on arrival by Scholz, obviously at
the request of the Biden administration.
Last September 26, the
two pipelines were destroyed by underwater bombs. It was not known at the time
who was responsible for the sabotage, amid the usual Western accusations
against Russia and Russian denials. In February, I published a detailed account of the White House’s role in the attack,
including an assertion that a major goal of Biden’s was to prevent Scholz from
reversing his decision to stop the flow of Russian gas to Germany. My account
was denied by the White House and as of today no government has accepted
responsibility.
Germany muddled
through last year’s preternaturally warm winter, as the government provided
generous energy subsidies for homes and businesses. But since then, the lack of
Russian gas has been the major factor in rising energy costs that have led
to a slowdown in the German economy, the fourth largest in the world. The
economic crunch resulted in a rise of political opposition to the political
coalition Scholz leads. Another divisive issue is the steady rise in
immigration applications from the Middle East and Africa and the more than one
million Ukrainians who have fled to Germany since the war in Ukraine began.
Polling in Germany has
consistently shown enormous discontent with the economic crisis it faces. One
survey analyzed by Bloomberg last month found that only 39 percent of German
voters believe the country will be a leading industrial nation in the next decade.
The dispatch specifically cited internal political infighting over the nation’s
home and business heating subsidy policies but did not mention a major cause of
the crisis—Biden’s decision to destroy the Nord Stream pipelines. . . . (To read the entire articles click on title.)
Last October, Lisa
Hänel, reporting for Deutche Welle, a state-owned
television network, pointed to one immediate social cost of the lack of Russian
gas for the German middle class: regional German welfare workers told her that
“more people are worried that they can no longer cope with rising prices and
energy costs.” Discussing the impact of the lack of cheap Russian gas on those
in the lower and middle income scales, which includes 18 million people in
Germany who are struggling to stay warm and well fed, she wrote that they
“could be hit hard by inflation and the energy crisis.”
Adam Button, a
Canadian economic analyst who writes for ForexLive.com, published an essay last
month under the title “The
pillars of Germany’s economy are crumbling. Three reasons for worry.” His three reasons: industrial production is
declining; deficits are increasing; and energy costs are rising. Auto production and exports “are at the heart
of the German economy,” Button writes. “Their machines,” he writes,
have powered Europe
and been a worthy competitor to the U.S. and Japan. But there is a new rival:
China. The burgeoning automotive manufacturing sector in China is coming for
everyone but Germany’s export-sensitive model may be most at risk from China’s EVs.
At best, it’s a formidable wave of competition that hurts margins and weakens
Germany. At worst, it hollows Germany’s key high-wage industry.
The supply of cheap
energy, which Nord Stream I produced, comes into play in Button’s analysis:
Germany’s economic
model is exporting manufactured goods, with China as a target market.
Competition from China is already a major obstacle but it’s compounded by
rising energy costs. Germany survived the winter of 2023 better than I expected
but that was with heavy subsidies and good weather. That’s not a formula for
the long term and aside from pie-in-the-sky hydrogen talk, I don’t see a way
for Germany to get away from expensive imported LNG [liquefied natural gas].
Last week German
economy minister Robert Habeck offered up a harsh truth. He said Germany
faces five difficult years of deindustrialization from high energy prices. He
called for more subsidies for energy as a bridge to around 2030 when he
estimates that green energy will take over.
The problem for that is budgetary. Eurozone countries are bound to
deficits of less than 3%. Germany is currently running at 4.25%, up from 2.6% a
year ago. Finance ministry estimates see the deficit falling to 0.75% in 2026
but that assumes that all energy subsidies are ended. Therein lies the rub:
Either they cut the subsidies and lose industry or subsidize and break deficit
rules.
For years, Germany was
the policeman of the deficit system and periphery countries may wish to give it
back some of its own medicine and the German public is also famously austere.
The problem is that even if high subsidies stay in place, German industry is
under heavy pressure. If anything, the subsidies need to be stepped up. . . .
There is a window for
large subsidies but the government must decide if that fiscal ammunition should
be spent on subsidizing industry, the green transition or some combination of
both. Ideally, the taps would be fully opened but I fear that old instincts
around spending will win out, dooming Germany’s economy.
The loss of
inexpensive Russian gas has also affected the German multinational chemical
producer BASF, which employs more than 50,000 people in its home country. The
company has announced a series of cutbacks since the pipelines were demolished.
Thousands of workers have been laid off, and the firm shut down one of its
major facilities. An industry news account of its cutbacks explain that
the war in Ukraine “has sharply reduced natural gas supplies in Europe and
boosted BASF’s energy bill on the continent by $2.9 billion in 2022.”
Button’s article, like
of all those reviewed for this report, did not mention the main cause of the
reduced supply of natural gas. Nor did it say that it was the destruction of
the pipelines that forced BASF to make a change in its plans for a $11 billion
investment in a state-of-the-art complex that it hailed as the gold standard
for sustainable production. The project will be built in China.
“We are increasingly
worried about our home market,” chief executive Martin Brudermüller explained
to shareholders last April. “Profitability is no longer anywhere near where it
should be.” He added that the firm lost close to $143 million in Germany last
year, after many decades of constant profit.
Pinter, who died in 2008, would have relished the irony of the Biden
administration, in its attempt to protect its political and economic investment
in the Ukrainian war effort against Russia, may have given China, another
nemesis of the White House, a helping hand.
The author wishes to
thank Mohamed Elmaazi of London for his superb research.
Harold PinterNord Stream pipelinesNorth
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)President Joe BidenPresident
Vladimir PutinRussia-Ukraine
WarUkraine
President Volodymyr Zelensky [End Hersh]
“A Scott Ritter
Investigation: “Agent Zelensky (Part 1).”
Scott Ritter. Mronline.org (8-10-23). Video of Zelensky’s campaign to become President of
Ukraine. Click on title. (This is audio.)
By Scott Ritter (Posted Aug
09, 2023). Originally
published: Scott Ritter Extra on July 13, 2023.
Empire, Inequality, Strategy, WarEurope, UkraineNewswireUkraine President Volodymyr Zelensky
About Scott Ritter
Scott Ritter is a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer who
served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the
Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm and in Iraq overseeing the
disarmament of WMD. His most recent book is Disarmament in the Time of
Perestroika, published by
Clarity Press.
Eyewitness Report on
Ukraine War
Daniel Kovalik. “Russia, Donbass and the Reality
of Conflict in Ukraine.” Mronline.org
(8-13-23).
Originally published: CovertAction Magazine on August 10, 2023 (more by CovertAction Magazine).
WarAmericas, Europe, Russia, Ukraine, United StatesNewswireNorth
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), President
Vladimir Putin, Russia-Ukraine War, Ukraine
President Volodymyr Zelensky
. . .I became a
witness to a number of Ukrainians, some of them entire families, trying to
cross the border and to immigrate to Russia. Indeed, the only other type of
passport (besides my U.S. passport) I saw amongst those held over for
questioning and processing was the blue Ukrainian passport. This is evidence of
an inconvenient fact to the Western narrative of the war that portrays Russia
as an invader of Ukraine. In fact, many Ukrainians have an affinity for Russia
and have voluntarily chosen to live there over the years.
Between 2014—the real
start of the war when the Ukrainian government began attacking its own people
in the Donbas—and the beginning of Russia’s intervention in February 2022,
around one
million Ukrainians had already immigrated to Russia. The fact that Ukrainians were going to live in Russia was
reported in the mainstream press back then, with the BBC writing in September 2014 about some of the
refugees while noting that “[s]eparatists in the eastern regions of Donetsk and
Luhansk declared independence after Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine.
Since the violence erupted,
some 2,600 people have been killed and thousands more wounded. The city of
Luhansk has been under siege by government forces for the past month and is
without proper supplies of food and water.” The number of dead in this war
would grow to 14,000 by February 2022, again before Russia’s
Special Military Operation (SMO) had even begun.
Around 1.3
million additional Ukrainians have immigrated to Russia since February 2022, making Russia the
largest recipient of Ukrainian refugees in the world since the beginning of the
SMO. . . .MORE click on title
We arrived in Donetsk
City, a small but lovely town along the Kalmius River, without incident. Our
first stop was at the Leningrad Volunteers warehouse to unload some of the aid
we had brought and to meet some of the local volunteers. Almost all of these
volunteers are life-long residents of Donetsk, and nearly all of them wore
military fatigues and have been fighting the Ukrainian forces as part of the
Donetsk militia for years, many since the beginning of the conflict in 2014.
Members of the Donetsk
militia escort Ukrainian prisoners of war in the Donbas. The militias have been
fighting the Ukrainian Army, backed by the U.S., since the war really started
in 2014. [Source: medium.com]
This is something I cannot
impress upon the reader enough. While we are often told that these fighters in
the Donbas are Russians or “Russian proxies,” this is simply not true. The
lion’s share of fighters are locals of varying ages, some quite old, who have
been fighting for their homes, families and survival since 2014.
While there have been
Russian and international volunteers who have supported these forces—just as
there were international volunteers who went to support the Republicans in
Spain in the 1930s—they are mostly local.
Of course, this
changed in February 2022 when Russia began the SMO. Nonetheless, the locals of
Donetsk continue to fight, now alongside the Russian forces.
The lie of “Russian
proxies” fighting in the Donbas after 2014 is actually one of the smaller ones
of the Western mainstream press, for the claim at least acknowledges that there
has been such fighting. Of course, the mainstream media have tried to convince
us that there was never such fighting at all and that the Russian SMO beginning
in February 2022 was completely “unprovoked.” This is the big lie that has been
peddled in order to gain the consent of the Western populations to support
Ukraine militarily.
What is also ignored
is the fact that this war was escalating greatly before the beginning of the
SMO and this escalation indeed provoked it. Thus, according to the Organization
for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), a 57-member organization including
many Western countries, including the United States, there were about 2,000
cease-fire violations in the Donbas just in the weekend before the SMO began on
February 24, 2022.
In a rare moment of
candor, Reuters reported on February 19, 2022, “Almost 2,000
ceasefire violations were registered in eastern Ukraine by monitors for the
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe on Saturday, a diplomatic
source told Reuters on Sunday. Ukrainian government and separatist forces have
been fighting in eastern Ukraine since 2014.”
Jacques Baud, a Swiss intelligence and security consultant
and former NATO military analyst, further
explains the
precipitating events of the SMO:
“[A]s early as
February 16, Joe Biden knew that the Ukrainians had begun shelling the civilian
population of Donbass, putting Vladimir Putin in front of a difficult choice:
to help Donbass militarily and create an international problem, or to stand by
and watch the Russian-speaking people of Donbass being crushed.
…This is what he
explained in his speech on February 21.
On that day, he agreed
to the request of the Duma and recognized the independence of the two Donbass
Republics and, at the same time, he signed friendship and assistance treaties
with them. The Ukrainian artillery
bombardment of the Donbass population continued, and, on 23 February, the
two Republics asked for military assistance from Russia. On 24 February,
Vladimir Putin invoked Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, which
provides for mutual military assistance in the framework of a defensive alliance.
In order to make the
Russian intervention totally illegal in the eyes of the public we deliberately
hid the fact that the war actually started on February 16. The Ukrainian army
was preparing to attack the Donbass as early as 2021, as some Russian and European
intelligence services were well aware. Jurists will judge.”
Of course, none of this was
news to the people I met in Donetsk, for they had been living this reality for
years. MORE https://mronline.org/2023/08/12/russia-donbass-and-the-reality-of-conflict-in-ukraine/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=russia-donbass-and-the-reality-of-conflict-in-ukraine&mc_cid=83c0f98480&mc_eid=ab2f7bf95e
During my stay in
Donetsk, I twice had dinner with Anastasia, my interpreter during my
first trip to the Donbas in November. Anastasia teaches at the University of
Donetsk. She has been traveling around Russia, including to the far east,
telling of what has been happening in the Donbas since 2014 because many in
Russia themselves do not fully understand what has been going on. She told me
that as she was recounting her story, she found herself reliving her trauma
from nine years of war and feeling overwhelmed.
Anastasia’s parents
and 13-year-old brother live near the front lines in the Donetsk Republic, and
she worries greatly about them. Anastasia is glad that Russia has intervened in
the conflict, and she indeed corrected me when I once referred to the Russian
SMO as an “invasion,” telling me that Russia did not invade. Rather, they
were invited and welcomed in. That does seem to be the prevailing view in
Donetsk as far as I can tell.
When I asked Olga whether she
agreed with some Western peace groups, such as the Stop the War Coalition in
the UK, that Russia should pull its troops out of the Donbas, she disagreed,
saying that she hates to think what would happen to the people of the Donbas if
they did.
I think that this is something the people of the West need to
come to grips with; that the government of Ukraine has done great violence
against its own people in the Donbas, and that the people of the Donbas had
every right to choose to leave Ukraine and join Russia. If Westerners
understood this reality, they would think twice about “standing with” and
continuing to arm Ukraine. [End Kovalik]
https://mronline.org/2023/08/12/russia-donbass-and-the-reality-of-conflict-in-ukraine/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=russia-donbass-and-the-reality-of-conflict-in-ukraine&mc_cid=83c0f98480&mc_eid=ab2f7bf95e
NATO, Poland, Belarus, Russia
M. K. Bhadrakumar. “Glimpses of an Endgame in
Ukraine.” Indian Punchline (July 25, 2023). Mronline.org (7-27-23). More by Indian
Punchline. |
Imperialism, State Repression, Strategy, WarAmericas, Belarus, Europe, Russia, Ukraine, United StatesNewswireNorth
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Russia-Ukraine War
. . .The Russian
objectives of “demilitarisation” and “de-Nazification” of Ukraine wore a
surreal look. The western narrative that the war is between Russia and Ukraine,
where central issue is the Westphalian principle of national sovereignty, wore
thin progressively leaving a void.
There is a realisation
today that the war is actually between Russia and NATO and that Ukraine had
ceased to be a sovereign country since 2014 when the CIA and sister
western agencies–Germany, the UK, France, Sweden, etc.—installed a puppet
regime in Kiev.
The fog of war is
lifting and the battle lines are becoming visible. At an authoritative level, a
candid discussion is beginning as regards the endgame.
Certainly, Russian
President Vladimir Putin’s videoconference with the permanent members of the
Security Council in Moscow last Friday and his meeting with Belarus President
Belarus Alexander Lukashenko in St. Petersburg on Sunday become the defining
moment. The two transcripts
stand back-to-back and need to be read together. (here and here)
There is no question
that the two events were carefully choreographed by the Kremlin officials and
intended to convey multiple messages. Russia exudes confidence that it has
achieved dominance on the battle front–having thrashed the Ukrainian military
and Kiev’s “counteroffensive” moving into the rear view mirror. But Moscow
anticipates that the Biden administration may be having an even bigger war plan
in mind.
At the Security
council meeting, Putin “de-classified” the intelligence reports reaching
Moscow from various sources indicative of moves to insert into Western Ukraine
a Polish expeditionary force. Putin called it “a well-organised, equipped
regular military unit to be used for operations” in Western Ukraine “for the
subsequent occupation of these territories.”
Indeed, there is a
long history of Polish revanchism. Putin, himself a keen student of
history, talked at some length about it. He sounded stoical that if the Kiev authorities
were to acquiesce with this Polish-American plan, “as traitors usually do,
that’s their business. We will not interfere.”
But, Putin added, “Belarus
is part of the Union State, and launching an aggression against Belarus would
mean launching an aggression against the Russian Federation. We will respond to
that with all the resources available to us.” Putin warned that what is afoot
“is an extremely dangerous game, and the authors of such plans should think
about the consequences.”
On Sunday, at the
meeting with Putin in St. Petersburg, Lukashenko picked up the thread of
discussion. He briefed Putin about new Polish deployments close to Belarus
border–just 40 kms from Brest–and other preparations under way–the opening of a
repair shop for Leopard tanks in Poland, activation of an airfield in Rzeszow
on Ukrainian border (about 100 kms from Lvov) for use of Americans transferring
weaponry, mercenaries, etc. MORE click
on title
An
Offshoot of the War: SANCTIONS v. Russia and World Food Supply
VijayPrashad. “World Hunger & War in Ukraine. “ Consortium News (7-24-23). Orig. published in PeoplesDispatch.
As Western sanctions
increased against Russia, the feasibility of the Black Sea Grain Initiative
began to diminish, writes. Read here...
AFRICA, BIDEN ADMINISTRATION, COMMENTARY, COVID-19, ECONOMY, EUROPEAN UNION, HUMAN RIGHTS, INCOME INEQUALITY, INTERNATIONAL, MILITARISM, RUSSIA, U.S., UKRAINE, UNITED NATIONS
On Monday, Dmitry Peskov, the spokesperson for Russia’s President
Vladimir Putin, announced, “The Black Sea agreements are no longer in effect.”
This was a blunt statement to suspend the Black Sea Grain
Initiative that emerged out of intense negotiations in the hours after
Russian forces entered Ukraine in February 2022. The Initiative went
into effect on July 22, 2022, after Russian and Ukrainian officials signed it in Istanbul in the presence of the United Nations
Secretary-General António Guterres and Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Guterres called the Initiative a “beacon of hope” for two reasons. First, it
is remarkable to have an agreement of this kind between belligerents in an
ongoing war. Second, Russia and Ukraine are major producers of wheat, barley, maize, rapeseed and rapeseed oil,
sunflower seeds and sunflower oil, as well as nitrogen, potassic and phosphorus
fertilizer, accounting for 12 percent of calories traded.
Disruption of supply from Russia and Ukraine, it was felt by a
range of international organizations, would have a catastrophic impact on world
food markets and on hunger.
As Western — largely U.S., U.K. and European — sanctions increased against Russia, the
feasibility of the deal began to diminish. It was suspended several times
during the past year. In March, Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Maria
Zakharova, responding to the sanctions against Russian agriculture, said, “[The main] parameters provided for in the [grain] deal do not
work.” [To read the entire article, mainly about the
financialization of food, go to https://consortiumnews.com/2023/07/21/world-hunger-war-in-ukraine/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=e02df148-f5b5-4354-afb5-bc13944abbf1 ]
“Yossi Alpher: Ukraine, NATO: the ‘Israel
Model’?” via salsalabs.org. July 17, 2023.
Transmitted by Americans for Peace Now .
Q. Last week, NATO postponed Ukrainian
membership yet again. President Biden instead offered the ‘Israel model’ for
Ukraine. What is this? Is it good for Israel? Would it be good for Ukraine?
A. Biden last week offered to provide Ukraine “the security we
provide for Israel.” I do not recall previous US presidential use of the term
‘Israel model’. Israel certainly does not refer to its strategic link with the
US this way. Biden is presumably referring to a decades-long relationship under
which the United States provides Israel with the weaponry it needs to maintain
military superiority against its enemies--a designation increasingly reserved
for Iran and its proxies. . . .
Q. So is this a workable model for Ukraine
today?
A. Not if you ask the Ukrainians. They sought to join NATO--indeed,
believe they were promised membership--before their current war with Russia.
Note, too, that some 30 years ago, following the collapse of the Soviet Union,
Ukraine agreed to give up nuclear weapons on its territory in return for Western
security guarantees. Understandably, Kiev feels betrayed.
Today, Ukraine is told that as a country at
war with Russia, with part of its territory occupied, bringing it into NATO
would mean war between Russia and the US and Europe. In other words, this would
start World War III.
It is too late to deter Russia from attacking Ukraine. Hence
Kiev is being asked to accept an ‘Israel model’ or something like it. Ukrainian
President Zelensky reportedly agrees that Ukraine cannot formally join NATO as
long as the current war with Russia is ‘hot’.
Yossi Alpher is an independent security analyst. He is the
former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv
University, a former senior official with the Mossad, and a former IDF
intelligence officer. Views and positions expressed here are those of the
writer, and do not necessarily represent APN's views and policy positions.
PART III:
NEGOTIATION, CEASEFIRE, PEACE
ACTIVE
PEACE MOVEMENT: CEASEFIRE, NEGOTIATE, PEACE
“The North American peace movement at an inflection point.”
Roger Harris. Mronline.org
(4-21-24).
By Roger Harris (Posted Apr 19, 2024)
Originally published: Dissident Voice on April 17, 2024 (more
by Dissident
Voice).
Imperialism, Movements, Strategy, WarAmericas, Asia, China, Europe, Middle East, Russia, Ukraine, United StatesNewswireAlex Saab, Anti-War, Jewish
Voice for Peace (JVP), North
American peace movement, North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Occupy, Ukraine
Solidarity Network (USN), United
National Antiwar Coalition’s (UNAC)
The North American
peace movement is contesting ongoing U.S. wars in Ukraine and Palestine and
preparations for war with China. Out of the fog of these wars, a clear
anti-imperialist focus is emerging. Giving peace a chance has never been more
plainly understood as opposition to what Martin Luther King, Jr., referred to
as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world: my own government.”
The following ad was published on May 16, 2023 as a full page New York Times ad by the
Eisenhower Media Network, comprised of several former high ranking U.S.
military officials and experts.
The U.S. Should Be a Force
for Peace in the World
The Russia-Ukraine War
has been an unmitigated disaster. Hundreds of thousands have been killed or
wounded. Millions have been displaced. Environmental and economic destruction
have been incalculable. Future devastation could be exponentially greater as nuclear
powers creep ever closer toward open war.
We deplore the
violence, war crimes, indiscriminate missile strikes, terrorism, and other
atrocities that are part of this war. The solution to this shocking violence is
not more weapons or more war, with their guarantee of further death and
destruction.
As Americans and
national security experts, we urge President Biden and Congress to use their
full power to end the Russia-Ukraine War speedily through diplomacy, especially
given the grave dangers of military escalation that could spiral out of
control.
Sixty years ago,
President John F. Kennedy made an observation that is crucial for our survival
today. “Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must
avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating
retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would
be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy–or of a collective death-wish
for the world.”
The immediate cause of
this disastrous war in Ukraine is Russia’s invasion. Yet the plans and actions
to expand NATO to Russia’s borders served to provoke Russian fears. And Russian
leaders made this point for 30 years. A failure of diplomacy led to war. Now
diplomacy is urgently needed to end the Russia-Ukraine War before it destroys
Ukraine and endangers humanity.
The
Potential for Peace
Russia’s current
geopolitical anxiety is informed by memories of invasion from Charles XII,
Napoleon, the Kaiser and Hitler. U.S. troops were among an Allied invasion
force that intervened unsuccessfully against the winning side in Russia’s
post-World War I civil war. Russia sees NATO enlargement and presence on its
borders as a direct threat; the U.S. and NATO see only prudent preparedness. In
diplomacy, one must attempt to see with strategic empathy, seeking to
understand one’s adversaries. This is not weakness: it is wisdom.
We reject the idea that
diplomats, seeking peace, must choose sides, in this case either Russia or
Ukraine. In favoring diplomacy we choose the side of sanity. Of humanity. Of
peace.
We consider President
Biden’s promise to back Ukraine “as long as it takes” to be a license
to pursue ill-defined and ultimately unachievable goals. It could prove as
catastrophic as President Putin’s decision last year to launch his criminal
invasion and occupation. We cannot and will not endorse the strategy of
fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian.
We advocate for a
meaningful and genuine commitment to diplomacy, specifically an immediate
ceasefire and negotiations without any disqualifying or prohibitive
preconditions. Deliberate provocations delivered the
Russia-Ukraine War. In the same manner, deliberate diplomacy can end it.
U.S.
Actions and Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine
As the Soviet Union
collapsed and the Cold War ended, U.S. and Western European leaders assured Soviet and then
Russian leaders that NATO would not expand toward
Russia’s borders. “There would be no extension of…NATO one inch
to the east,” U.S.
Secretary of State James Baker told Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on February
9, 1990. Similar assurances from other U.S. leaders as well as from British,
German and French leaders throughout the 1990s confirm
this.
Since 2007, Russia has
repeatedly warned that NATO’s armed forces on Russian borders were intolerable
– just as Russian forces in Mexico or Canada would be intolerable to the U.S.
now, or as Soviet missiles in Cuba were in 1962. Russia further singled out
NATO expansion into Ukraine as especially provocative.
The
Russia-Ukraine War has been an unmitigated disaster. Hundreds of thousands have
been killed or wounded. Millions have been displaced. Environmental and
economic destruction have been incalculable. Future devastation could be
exponentially greater as nuclear powers creep ever closer toward open war.
We
deplore the violence, war crimes, indiscriminate missile strikes, terrorism,
and other atrocities that are part of this war. The solution to this shocking
violence is not more weapons or more war, with their guarantee of further death
and destruction.
As
Americans and national security experts, we urge President Biden and Congress
to use their full power to end the Russia-Ukraine War speedily through
diplomacy, especially given the grave dangers of military escalation that could
spiral out of control.
Sixty
years ago, President John F. Kennedy made an observation that is crucial for
our survival today. “Above all, while defending our own vital interests,
nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a
choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of
course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our
policy–or of a collective death-wish for the world.”
The
immediate cause of this disastrous war in Ukraine is Russia’s invasion. Yet the
plans and actions to expand NATO to Russia’s borders served to provoke Russian
fears. And Russian leaders made this point for 30 years. A failure of diplomacy
led to war. Now diplomacy is urgently needed to end the Russia-Ukraine War
before it destroys Ukraine and endangers humanity.
The Potential for Peace
Russia’s
current geopolitical anxiety is informed by memories of invasion from Charles
XII, Napoleon, the Kaiser and Hitler. U.S. troops were among an Allied invasion
force that intervened unsuccessfully against the winning side in Russia’s
post-World War I civil war. Russia sees NATO enlargement and presence on its
borders as a direct threat; the U.S. and NATO see only prudent preparedness. In
diplomacy, one must attempt to see with strategic empathy, seeking to
understand one’s adversaries. This is not weakness: it is wisdom.
We
reject the idea that diplomats, seeking peace, must choose sides, in this case
either Russia or Ukraine. In favoring diplomacy we choose the side of sanity.
Of humanity. Of peace.
We
consider President Biden’s promise to back Ukraine “as
long as it takes” to be a license to pursue
ill-defined and ultimately unachievable goals. It could prove as catastrophic
as President Putin’s decision last year to launch his criminal invasion and
occupation. We cannot and will not endorse the strategy of fighting Russia to
the last Ukrainian.
We
advocate for a meaningful and genuine commitment to diplomacy, specifically an
immediate ceasefire and negotiations without any disqualifying or prohibitive
preconditions. Deliberate provocations delivered the
Russia-Ukraine War. In the same manner, deliberate diplomacy can end it.
U.S. Actions and Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine
As
the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War ended, U.S. and Western European
leaders assured Soviet and then
Russian leaders that NATO would
not expand
toward Russia’s borders. “There
would be no extension of…NATO one inch to the east,” U.S. Secretary of
State James Baker told Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on February 9, 1990.
Similar assurances from other U.S. leaders as well as from British, German and
French leaders throughout the 1990s confirm
this.
Since
2007, Russia has repeatedly warned that NATO’s armed forces on Russian borders
were intolerable – just as Russian forces in Mexico or Canada would be
intolerable to the U.S. now, or as Soviet missiles in Cuba were in 1962. Russia
further singled out NATO expansion into Ukraine as especially provocative.
Seeing the War Through Russia’s Eyes
Our
attempt at understanding the Russian perspective on their war does not endorse
the invasion and occupation, nor does it imply the Russians had no other option
but this war.
Yet,
just as Russia had other options, so too did the U.S. and NATO leading up to
this moment.
The
Russians made their red lines clear. In Georgia and Syria, they proved they
would use force to defend those lines. In 2014, their immediate seizure of
Crimea and their support of Donbas separatists demonstrated they were serious
in their commitment to defending their interests. Why this was not understood
by U.S. and NATO leadership is unclear; incompetence, arrogance, cynicism, or a
treacherous mixture of all three are likely contributing factors.
Again, even as the Cold
War ended, U.S. diplomats, generals and politicians were warning of the dangers of
expanding NATO to Russia’s borders and of maliciously interfering in Russia’s
sphere of influence. Former Cabinet officials Robert Gates and William Perry
issued these warnings, as did venerated diplomats George Kennan, Jack Matlock
and Henry Kissinger. In 1997, fifty senior U.S. foreign policy experts wrote an
open letter to President Bill Clinton advising him not to expand NATO, calling
it “a
policy error of historic proportions.” President Clinton
chose to ignore these warnings.
Most
important to our understanding of the hubris and Machiavellian calculation in
U.S. decision-making surrounding the Russia-Ukraine War is the dismissal of the
warnings issued by Williams Burns, the current director of the Central
Intelligence Agency. In a cable to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in 2008,
while serving as Ambassador to Russia, Burns wrote of NATO expansion
and Ukrainian membership:
“Ukraine and Georgia’s NATO aspirations not
only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious concerns about the
consequences for stability in the region. Not only does Russia perceive
encirclement, and efforts to undermine Russia’s influence in the region, but it
also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously
affect Russian security interests. Experts tell us that Russia is particularly
worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of
the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split,
involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would
have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to
face.”
Why
did the U.S. persist in expanding NATO despite such warnings? Profit from
weapons sales was a major factor. Facing opposition to NATO expansion, a group
of neoconservatives and top executives of U.S. weapons manufacturers formed the U.S.
Committee to Expand NATO. Between 1996 and 1998, the largest arms
manufacturers spent $51 million ($94
million today) on lobbying and millions more on campaign contributions. With
this largesse, NATO expansion quickly became a done deal, after which U.S.
weapons manufacturers sold billions of
dollars of weapons to the new NATO members.
So
far, the U.S. has sent $30 billion worth
of military gear and weapons to Ukraine, with total aid to Ukraine exceeding
$100 billion. War, it’s been said, is a racket, one that is highly profitable
for a select few.
NATO
expansion, in sum, is a key feature of a militarized U.S. foreign policy
characterized by unilateralism featuring regime change and preemptive wars.
Failed wars, most recently in Iraq and Afghanistan, have produced slaughter and
further confrontation, a harsh reality of America’s own making. The
Russia-Ukraine War has opened a new arena of confrontation and slaughter. This
reality is not entirely of our own making, yet it may well be our undoing,
unless we dedicate ourselves to forging a diplomatic settlement that stops the
killing and defuses tensions.
Let’s
make America a force for peace in the world.
SIGNERS
Dennis
Fritz,
Director, Eisenhower Media Network; Command Chief Master Sergeant, US Air Force
(retired)
Matthew Hoh, Associate Director, Eisenhower Media
Network; Former Marine Corps officer, and State and Defense official.
William J. Astore, Lieutenant Colonel, US Air Force
(retired)
Karen Kwiatkowski, Lieutenant Colonel, US Air Force
(retired)
Dennis Laich, Major General, US Army (retired)
Jack Matlock, U.S. Ambassador to the U.S.S.R., 1987-91;
author of Reagan and Gorbachev: How the Cold War Ended
Todd E. Pierce, Major, Judge Advocate, U.S. Army
(retired)
Coleen Rowley, Special Agent, FBI (retired)
Jeffrey Sachs, University Professor at Columbia
University
Christian Sorensen, Former Arabic linguist, US Air
Force
Chuck Spinney, Retired Engineer/Analyst, Office of
Secretary of Defense
Winslow Wheeler, National security adviser to four
Republican and Democratic US
Lawrence B. Wilkerson, Colonel, US Army (retired)
Ann Wright, Colonel, US Army (retired) and former US
diplomat
TIMELINE
1990
– U.S. assures Russia that NATO will not expand towards its border “…there
would be no extension of…NATO one inch to the east,” says US Secretary of
State James Baker.
1996
– U.S. weapons manufacturers form the Committee to Expand NATO, spending over $51 million
lobbying Congress.
1997
– 50 foreign policy experts including former senators, retired military
officers and diplomats sign an open letter stating NATO expansion to be “a
policy error of historic proportions.”
1999
– NATO admits Hungary, Poland
and the Czech Republic to NATO. U.S. and NATO bomb Russia’s ally,
Serbia.
2001
– U.S. unilaterally withdraws from the
Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
2004
– Seven more Eastern European nations join NATO. NATO troops are now directly
on Russia’s border.
2004
– Russia’s parliament passed a resolution
denouncing NATO’s expansion. Putin responded by saying that Russia would “build
our defense and security policy correspondingly.”
2008
– NATO leaders announced plans to bring
Ukraine and Georgia, also on Russia’s borders, into NATO.
2009
– U.S. announced plans to put
missile systems into Poland and Romania.
2014
– Legally
elected Ukrainian
president, Viktor Yanukovych, fled violence to Moscow. Russia views ouster as a
coup by U.S. and NATO nations.
2016
– U.S. begins troop buildup in
Europe.
2019
– U.S. unilaterally withdraws from Intermediate
Nuclear Forces Treaty.
2020
– U.S. unilaterally withdraws from Open Skies
Treaty.
2021
– Russia submits negotiation
proposals while sending more forces to the border with Ukraine. U.S. and NATO
officials reject the Russian
proposals immediately.
Feb
24, 2022 – Russia invades Ukraine, starting
the Russia-Ukraine War.
This
ad reflects the views of the signers. Paid for by Eisenhower Media Network, a
project of People Power Initiatives.
Read
more at
www.EisenhowerMediaNetwork.org
Gerry
Condon. “Why Veterans Are Calling For Peace In Ukraine.” Veterans
for Peace. Popular Resistance. 10-6-23. In
Ukraine right now, we have a stalemated war of attrition, whereas Caitlin
Johnstone writes, “soldiers are being killed and maimed in a battle for
inches. At least tens of thousands have died in this war with
hundreds of thousands wounded, all for those teeny, tiny little blips on the
map. Ukraine is now freckled with more landmines than anywhere else on
earth, which experts say will take decades to clear. This giant deathtrap
is exacerbated by the cluster munitions that are covering the land
with greater and greater frequency, which will go on to detonate and kill civilians
(mostly children) for years to come. -more-
“INTERVIEW OF Jeffrey Sachs:
Stop the War, Make Peace.” https://youtu.be/wxq4zYGJZbQ
“Jeffrey Sachs Interview - A
Large-scale Destruction is Currently Unfolding.”
John Mearsheimer.
YouTube video. “Why
is Ukraine the West's Fault?” “Causes
and Consequences of Ukraine War, and What Should Be Done.”
Ukraine the West's Fault? Featuring John Mearsheimer
Abel Tomlinson: Three Essays from
2023
Abel
Tomlinson. Satire of Senator Blumenthal
(D): “Ukraine War is a Great Bargain!”
8-31-23
Democrat
Senator Blumenthal & others tell us the Ukraine war is actually a Great
investment. Its a great bargain! It may
kill hundreds of thousands of Russians & Ukrainians, but no Americans are
being killed...yayyy! We are risking
nuclear extinction, but it only costs a few hundred billion, a small price to
pay for our "right" to put our nuclear weapons on anyones doorstep
(the real cause of the war).
“To
my fellow Americans let me just say - you're getting your money’s worth in
Ukraine. The Russian military has been degraded by one half. It's been reduced
in strength by 50% without a single loss of an American serviceman with less
than 3% of our military budget. That is quite a bargain in military terms.”
-
Democrat Senator Blumenthal
Video: https://twitter.com/AbelNTomlinson/status/1696993677267120547?t=Ve4pM0ozRNgnZ-8UU11C7Q&s=19
Abel Tomlinson. “Negotiate Ukraine Peace Now.” AUGUST 28, 2023.
As the U.S. proxy war
with Russia in Ukraine grinds on, and Joe Biden demands billions more for war,
we must ask when will this end? How much more blood and treasure will be
spilled for a lost cause? All signs indicate the much-hyped
Ukraine counteroffensive has failed. Even pro-war
mainstream media and some pro-war
politicians are admitting so, and some are starting to understand the war is
unwinnable. But wasted blood and treasure are nothing compared to the
threat of nuclear war.
As
far too many have forgotten, war with Russia and China could quickly become a
nuclear war that could cause extinction of our species. Even Ronald Reagan, a
flaming peacenik compared to current warmongering Democrats and
Republicans, said
“a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” It seems like half the country has
collective amnesia as to what the acronym M.A.D. means.
Part
of this induced amnesia is caused by politicians and mainstream media
misleading the public, yet again, about the causes of the Ukraine war.
This makes it harder for people to understand that peace negotiations are the
logical answer. One of the primary mainstream lies is that the war was
“unprovoked,” but a mountain of evidence proves otherwise, the U.S. absolutely
provoked the war, despite massive warnings against doing so.
There
are many credible experts telling the truth on this subject, such as Professor
Jeffrey Sachs, Professor
John Mearsheimer, U.S.
military officials of The Eisenhower Network,
former NATO official Jacques Baud, award-winning journalist Robert Parry, and many more. Award-winning
filmmaker Oliver
Stone’s documentary Ukraine on Fire is also a massive eye-opener. Award-winning
journalist Joe Lauria details here the reasons
the U.S. wanted the war with Russia. Also here here, here,
and here are some good books on the subject as well.
These
sources tell the story of how the war really started with the 2014
U.S.-sponsored coup, well recorded
in a leaked U.S. State Department phone call. This coup led to the 9 year old civil
war between ultranationalist Ukrainians in West Ukraine and ethnic Russian
Ukrainians in the East. This war killed 14,000 people before 2022.
Millions of Ukrainians opposed the violently installed coup government
that began passing discriminatory laws against the large ethnic Russian
minority. Shortly after the coup, Professor Mearsheimer prophetically
stated that the U.S.
was “leading Ukraine down the Primrose Path,” encouraging Ukraine to pursue a
suicidal confrontation with Russia, and the result is “Ukraine will get
wrecked.”
Additionally,
these sources tell the story of how USA promised not to expand NATO military
forces eastward to Russian borders. This promise is published
in the National Security Archive of George Washington University. Starting with Bill Clinton, the U.S.
broke that promise repeatedly, despite numerous warnings not to from Western
experts and the Russian government. A litany of top strategic thinkers
warned that NATO
expansion would cause serious conflict with Russia, especially expansion to Ukraine, including
George Kennan, Jack Matlock, Henry Kissinger, Stephen Cohen, John Mearsheimer
and many more.
At
issue is not just NATO military bases and war games on Russian borders, but the
movement of NATO’s nuclear weapons closer and closer to Moscow. The situation
is very similar to the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the Soviets put missiles near
our borders; Americans were not having it and we nearly entered nuclear war.
Peace negotiations solved that crisis and peace negotiations are the only sane
way to solve the Ukraine crisis.
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Bits of good news on Ukraine War: The levee of
pro-war support appears to be springing more and more leaks as mainstream media, & even pro-war US politicians are increasingly admitting the much-hyped counteroffensive is
failing & Ukraine is facing an unwinnable war, which it always was. As
Professor Mearsheimer prophetically stated in 2015, The USA
"led Ukraine down the Primrose Path" after the 2014 coup, encouraging them to take
on a suicidal confrontation with Russia & the result is "Ukraine will
get wrecked. The sooner this reality is understood, the sooner the war will
end, and Ukrainians & Russians will stop the mutual slaughter & the
threat of nuclear war *with Russia* will subside.”
"Rep. ANDY HARRIS (R-Md.),
co-chair of the Congressional Ukraine Caucus...told a town hall audience that
Kyiv’s counteroffensive has “failed” and cast doubt on victory in the war: “I’m
not sure it’s winnable anymore.” Asked
afterward if he’d support more aid for Ukraine, he replied: “If there is
humanitarian monies, nonmilitary monies, or military monies without an
inspector general, I’m not supporting it.” The House Freedom Caucus member, who
has defied his colleagues’ calls to stop backing Ukraine, now says the U.S. should
push Ukrainian President VOLODYMYR ZELENSKYY to sign a peace deal."
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