OMNI

UKRAINE WAR ANTHOLOGY #32, May 5, 2024

Compiled by Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace, Justice, and Ecology

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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 toprotect 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 byWashington’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 Milošević. 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...

READ MORE →

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.

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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.

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."

https://www.politico.com/newsletters/national-security-daily/2023/08/17/mccarthys-new-headache-pro-ukraine-republicans-00111678?fbclid=IwAR1eC08AyNPeqUMHh66PHqJr84myn9tet0GfgfSSU7vv8MsNHVsdisaY-g4