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Background of Ukrainian Conflict #177565
02/27/2022 09:53 PM
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Our 30-Year Victory Dance on Top of Russia Planted the Seeds of War in Ukraine
We should have acted as magnanimous partners with the Russian people in a joint victory against Communist dictatorship. That is how the U.S. treated the people of Germany and Japan, after bitter fighting in World War II.

Image Credits: Will & Deni McIntyre / Getty.
By Jason Scott Jones | The Stream Friday, February 25, 2022

I was reading a book by Stream contributor Prof. Paul Kengor on Ronald Reagan and the Cold War, and I had a kind of epiphany.

Suddenly I understood why Russia’s troops are even now invading neighboring Ukraine.

Don’t worry, I will explain. But first a short history lesson.

Liberators or Conquerors?

When German soldiers marched into the Soviet Union in 1941, at first many greeted them as liberators from Stalin. Russians quickly learned better, of course. Hitler’s regime was built on radical Darwinism applied not to species but to races: He saw all Slavs as “subhumans,” fit only to serve Aryan masters as serfs and menial laborers.

The Nazi hierarchy specifically ordered the Wehrmacht to suspend the old rules of war. Make no distinctions between enemy soldiers and civilians. Take no account of the well-being of conquered territories, except insofar as it served the German war effort. Don’t worry if Russian POWs die of malnutrition, unless they’re needed for slave labor in factories. And organize killing units to wipe out local Jews and “commissars.”

Within months, Russians who might have welcomed another regime other than Stalin’s were forming partisan units to fight for him against the Germans. They sabotaged rail lines, murdered officers, poisoned wells, and forced the Nazis to commit many thousands of troops to subduing already conquered regions. A big part of Nazi defeat in Operation Barbarossa can be traced to their brutal policies.

No Partisans in West Germany


By contrast, when Americans and Britons stormed into Germany, no partisan units formed. Generally, Germans were relieved that Western forces, and not the Russians, were the ones moving in on them. This even though the Allies had bombed whole cities into rubble.

While Germans might still have been infected with Nazi ideas, they knew that Western soldiers had not come to wipe them out. Nor to subject them as slaves, or colonize their country. We said that we came to liberate even the German people from a totalitarian government. And our actions showed that we meant it.

Reagan Wanted to Liberate Russians, Not Crush Them

Likewise, Ronald Reagan in his speeches assured the world, including those listening in Russia, that his quarrel was with Communism — not Russians. He denounced the godless system which had starved and tortured Russians for seven long decades. But he never demonized Russians as a nation or a race. He didn’t speak of making the U.S. the single hegemon of a “unipolar” world. Nor did he show any sign of wishing a perpetual quarrel with Russia.

Reagan’s honest rhetoric, both in public and in private talks with Mikhail Gorbachev, doubtless played a role in the almost bloodless collapse of first the Soviet Empire, then the Soviet Union. Russians knew that they weren’t surrendering to America; they were just shaking off a deadly, toxic regime.

The Cold War: Too Profitable to End

Too bad that American policymakers didn’t get Ronald Reagan’s memo. Too many conservatives clung to a Cold War stance, pretending that Russia posed a permanent threat to Europe. Too many liberals weaponized human rights concerns as pretexts for advancing American power. Both factions of our foreign policy elite — the neocons and the globalists — agreed that the U.S. should treat the Soviet implosion as a power vacuum that we must fill.

Exploiting the erratic leadership of Boris Yeltsin, neoliberal economists like Harvard’s Jeffrey Sachs flew over to Russia — handing them economic schemes that let billionaire oligarchs steal most of the country’s wealth.

Military contractors poured money into lobbying efforts by old pals of the Bush family to extend NATO right up to the borders of Russia itself. George Kennan, the U.S. diplomat who invented the policy of “containment” of Communism, warned at the time that such expansion would be “the most fateful error of American policy in the post cold-war era.”

For my own part, as a graduate student at Hawaii Pacific University, working on my masters in military science and operational studies, I wrote in the school newspaper that NATO should be disbanded after the U.S.-led air attacks on civilians in Yugoslavia.

We Pounced to Fill a Power Vacuum

We should have acted as magnanimous partners with the Russian people in a joint victory against Communist dictatorship. That is how the U.S. treated the people of Germany and Japan, after bitter fighting in World War II. Instead, our elites essentially pounced on Eastern Europe, seeking to make it a part of the EU, NATO, and the American sphere of influence.

We would set the terms going forward, and guarantee the outcome. The Clinton administration convinced newly independent Ukraine to give up its nuclear weapons — the one thing that would have forever guaranteed its sovereignty. In return? We promised to police its integrity against Russia.

Our CIA Staged a Coup

Are we ready to fight a shooting war right now against Putin’s Russia to keep that promise? I hope not. That foolish promise both left Ukraine forever vulnerable, and kept our hooks in the country. So did our CIA’s involvement in the 2013 coup against the (pro-Russian) winner of Ukraine’s elections. There’s even audio of the U.S. ambassador mulling over whom we should pick as Ukraine’s president.

Would we, the United States, tolerate Vladimir Putin meddling this way in Mexico or Canada? How long would we leave such a regime in place?

What the Chinese People Believe Us?

What worries me more than the current Ukraine war is our future conflict with China. We insist that we object not to China as a nation, race or culture. We only object to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), with a long history of mass murder, that currently keeps Uyghur Muslims in concentration camps.

Should the Chinese people believe us, though? Our track record with how we treated post-Communist Russia suggests that they shouldn’t. When the CCP tells its people that our concerns over Taiwan, Hong Kong, or the Uyghurs aren’t sincere — that they’re “imperialist” evidence of “anti-China” sentiment … Chinese sadly have good reasons to believe it.

We Should Have Been Better Than That

Yes, it was enormously tempting to take ruthless advantage of the Soviet Union’s collapse, for short-term American interests. But part of American exceptionalism is that we should resist such selfish, Machiavellian behavior. If we want people to see America as a model and an ally in fighting for freedom, we can’t give in to such passions.

Russians didn’t collude with Donald Trump to win the 2016 election. But they did find him refreshing. He stopped peddling all the high-minded, idealistic rhetoric that had masked American power-mongering from 1991 onward. He spoke of America’s national interests and real security needs. The Russians were relieved at the end of hypocritical happy-talk. They refrained from aggressive actions, and responded to Trump’s firm policies.

And we see how Russia has responded to the chaos and weakness prevailing under The Secret Committee Formerly Known As Joe Biden. It has pounced, and there’s little we can do short of risking destruction.

How will China exploit the power vacuum in the White House? Let’s pray for the people of Taiwan.


"The time for war has not yet come, but it will come and that soon, and when it does come, my advice is to draw the sword and throw away the scabbard." Gen. T.J. Jackson, March 1861
Re: Background of Ukrainian Conflict [Re: ConSigCor] #177566
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How and why the U.S. Government Perpetrated the 2014 Coup in Ukraine

Published 4 years ago

on June 4, 2018

By Eric Zuesse

This will document that the ‘new Cold War’ between the U.S. and Russia did not start, as the Western myth has it, with Russia’s involvement in the breakaway of Crimea and Donbass from Ukraine, after Ukraine — next door to Russia — had suddenly turned rabidly hostile toward Russia in February 2014. Ukraine’s replacing its democratically elected neutralist Government in February 2014, by a rabidly anti-Russian Government, was a violent event, which produced many corpses. It’s presented in The West as having been a ‘revolution’ instead of a coup; but whatever it was, it certainly generated the ‘new Cold War’ (the economic sanctions and NATO buildup on Russia’s borders); and, to know whether it was a coup, or instead a revolution, is to know what actually started the ‘new Cold War’, and why. So, this is historically very important.

Incontrovertible proofs will be presented here not only that it was a coup, but that this coup was organized by the U.S. Government — that the U.S. Government initiated the ‘new Cold War’; Russia’s Government reacted to America’s aggression, which aims to place nuclear missiles in Ukraine, less than ten minutes flight-time from Moscow. During the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, America had reason to fear Soviet nuclear missiles 103 miles from America’s border. But, after America’s Ukrainian coup in 2014, Russia has reason to fear NATO nuclear missiles not just near, but on, Russia’s border. That would be catastrophic.

If America’s successful February 2014 overthrow and replacement of Ukraine’s democratically elected neutralist Government doesn’t soon produce a world-ending nuclear war (World War III), then there will be historical accounts of that overthrow, and the accounts are already increasingly trending and consolidating toward a historical consensus that it was a coup — that it was imposed by “somebody from the new coalition” — i.e., that the termination of the then-existing democratic (though like all its predecessors, corrupt) Ukrainian Government, wasn’t authentically a ‘revolution’ such as the U.S. Government has contended, and certainly wasn’t at all democratic, but was instead a coup (and a very bloody one, at that), and totally illegal (though backed by The West).

The purpose of the present article will be to focus attention on precisely whom the chief people are who were responsible for perpetrating this globally mega-dangerous (‘Cold-War’-igniting) coup — and thus for creating the world’s subsequent course increasingly toward global nuclear annihilation.

If there will be future history, then these are the individuals who will be in the docks for that history’s harshest and most damning judgments, even if there will be no legal proceedings brought against them. Who, then, are these people?

Clearly, Victoria Nuland, U.S. President Barack Obama’s central agent overseeing the coup, at least during the month of February 2014 when it climaxed, was crucial not only in overthrowing the existing Ukrainian Government, but in selecting and installing its rabidly anti-Russian replacement. The 27 January 2014 phone-conversation between her and America’s Ambassador in Ukraine, Jeffrey Pyatt was a particularly seminal event, and it was uploaded to youtube on 4 February 2014. I have discussed elsewhere that call and its significance. Nuland there and then abandoned the EU’s hope for a still democratic but less corrupt future government for Ukraine, and Nuland famously said, on that call “Fuck the EU,” and she instructed Pyatt to choose instead the rabidly anti-Russian, and far-right, Arseniy Yatsenyuk. This key event occurred 24 days before Ukraine’s President Victor Yanukovych was overthrown on February 20th, and 30 days before the new person to head Ukraine’s Government, Yatsenyuk, became officially appointed to rule the now clearly fascist country. He won that official designation on February 26th. However, this was only a formality: Obama’s agent had already chosen him, on January 27th.

The second landmark item of evidence that it had been a coup and nothing at all democratic or a ‘revolution’, was the 26 February 2014 phone-conversation between the EU’s Foreign Minister Catherine Ashton and her agent in Ukraine investigating whether the overthrow had been a revolution or instead a coup; he was Estonia’s Foreign Minister, Urmas Paet, and he told her that he found that it had been a coup, and that “somebody from the new coalition” had engineered it — but he didn’t know whom that “somebody” was. Both Ashton and Paet were shocked at this finding, but they proceeded immediately to ignore that matter, and to discuss only the prospects for Europe’s investors in Ukraine, to be able to get their money back — their obsession was Ukraine’s corruption. Ashton told Paet that she had herself told the Maidan demonstrators, “you need to find ways in which you can establish a process that will have anti-corruption at its heart.” So, though the EU was unhappy that this had been a coup, they were far more concerned to protect their investors. In any case, the EU clearly wasn’t behind Ukraine’s coup. Equally clearly, they didn’t much care whether it was a coup or instead what the U.S. Government said, a ‘revolution’.

The network behind this coup had actually started planning for the coup back in 2011. That’s when Eric Schmidt of Google, and Jared Cohen, also now of Google but still continuing though unofficially as U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s chief person tasked to plan ‘popular movements’ to overthrow both Yanukovych in Ukraine, and Assad in Syria.

Then, on 1 March 2013, the implementation of this plan started: the first “tech camp” to train far-right Ukrainians how to organize online the mass-demonstrations against Yanukovych, was held inside the U.S. Embassy in Kiev on that date, which was over nine months before the Maidan demonstrations to overthrow Ukraine’s democratically elected President started, on 20 November 2013.

The American scholar Gordon M. Hahn has specialized in studying the evidence regarding whom the actual snipers were who committed the murders, but he focuses only on domestic Ukrainian snipers and ignores the foreign ones, who had been hired by the U.S. regime indirectly through Georgian, Lithuanian and other anti-Russian CIA assets (such as via Mikheil Saakashvili, the ousted President of Georgia whom the U.S. regime subsequently selected to become the Governor of the Odessa region of Ukraine). Hahn’s 2018 book Ukraine Over the Edge states on pages 204-209:

“Yet another pro-Maidan sniper, Ivan Bubenchik, emerged to acknowledge that he shot and killed Berkut [the Government’s police who were protecting Government buildings] before any protesters were shot that day [February 20th]. In a print interview, Bubenchik previews his admission in Vladimir Tikhii’s documentary film, Brantsy, that he shot ahd killed two Berkut commanders in the early morning hours of February 20 on the Maidan. … Bubenchik claims that [on February 20] the Yanukovich regime started the fire in the Trade Union House — where his and many other EuroMaidan fighters lived during the revolt — prompting the Maidan’s next reaction. As noted above, however, pro-Maidan neofascists have revealed that the Right Sector started that fire. … Analysis of the snipers’ massacre shows that the Maidan protesters initiated almost all — at least six out of a possible eight — of the pivotal escalatory moments of violence and/or coercion. … The 30 November 2013 nighttime assault on the Maidan demonstrators is the only clear exception from a conclusive pattern of escalating revolutionary violence led by the Maidan’s relatively small but highly motivated and well-organized neofascist element.”

Although Hahn’s book barely cites the first and most detailed academic study of the climactic coup period of late February, Ivan Katchanovski’s poorly written “The ‘Snipers’ Massacre’ on the Maidan in Ukraine”, which was issued on 5 September 2015, Hahn’s is consistent with that: both works conclude that the available evidence, as Katchanovski puts it, shows that:

“The massacre was a false flag operation, which was rationally planned and carried out with a goal of the overthrow of the government and seizure of power. It [his investigation] found various evidence of the involvement of an alliance of the far right organizations, specifically the Right Sector and Svoboda, and oligarchic parties, such as Fatherland. Concealed shooters and spotters were located in at least 20 Maidan-controlled buildings or areas.”

Hahn downplays U.S. heading of the coup. But shortly before the coup, the CIA secretly trained in Poland the Right Sector founder/leader Dmitriy Yarosh (“Dmytro Jarosz”), who headed Ukraine’s snipers. So, even the Ukrainian ones were working for the U.S.

On 19 November 2017 was issued Gian Micalessin’s “The hidden truth about Ukraine – Part 1” & II Summarizing them here: Two Georgian snipers say Saakashvili hired them in Tblisi for a U.S.-backed operation. But they know only about the “Georgian Legion” part. They think it was patterned on Georgia’s Rose Revolution. They each got $1000 for the operation and flew to Kiev on 15 January and were promised $5000 on return. (9:00) “We had to provoke the ‘Berkut’ police so they would attack the people. By February 15th the situation [at the Maidan] was getting worse every day. Then the first shots were fired.” It was February 15 or 16. Mamunashvili [Saakashvili’s man] introduced them to “an American military guy, … Brian Christopher Boyenger” a former “sniper for the 101st Airborne Division” who “after Maidan he went to Donbass” to fight in the “Georgian Legion” but during the coup-climax, the far-right Andriy “Parubiy came very often,” and “Brian always accompanied him” and also instructing there was Vladimir Parasyuk, one of the leaders of the Maidan. The snipers were told not to aim but just to kill people randomly, to create chaos. There were also two Lithuanian snipers in the room. Some went down from the Ukraine Hotel to the second floor of the Conservatory Building, balcony. “They started to take out the guns and distributed them to each group.” “Then I heard shots from the next room” It lasted 15 minutes, then they were all ordered to escape.

On 13 February 2015 was telecast a German documentary, “Maidan Snipers. German TV expose. ARD Monitor. Eng Subs” in which one of the demonstrators said that many of the bullets were fired from buildings controlled by the demonstrators, but that “We were also shot at from the other direction.” However, at least before 21 February 2014, police (Berkut) were seized by demonstrators and at least the possibility exists that some of the Right Sector snipers were taking positions in and especially atop some of the government buildings so as to fire down into the crowd and seem to be firing from Yanukovych’s side. Gordon Hahn hasn’t been able to verify any firing in February 2014 by the Yanukovych government. Moreover: “they were the same snipers, killing people from both sides.”

On 1 February 2016 was posted to youtube a French documentary, “Ukraine — Masks of the Revolution” which shows, from a meeting at Davos, at 48:00, Victoria Nuland, the announcer trying to speak with her and saying to the audience, “The U.S. diplomat who came to support the Revolution, could she really ignore the existence of the paramilitaries?”; 48:50 Larry Summers at a meeting in Kiev during 10-12 September 2015 and then later at the “12th YES Annual Meeting”

saying, “Ukraine is an essential outpost of our fundamental military interests”; 49:25: Petraeus also shown there and the announcer says, “He also thinks that Ukraine is essential to block Putin.” Petraeus urges investment in Ukraine to block Russia; 51:00 McChrystal there also urges arming Ukraine; 51:50 Nuland is there and the announcer says: “The country that is most invested in Ukraine’s future is the U.S.” “She is the architect of America’s influence in Ukraine.” Nuland says there at the “YES” meeting, “We had a significant impact on the battlefield.” But the U.S. regime blames Russia for that war.

Whereas U.S. propaganda still treats the matter as if Russia is what threatens Ukraine, that’s not generally the case in the propaganda by other governments. Even UK propaganda now commonly acknowledges that a more overtly fascist (even nazi) takeover of Ukraine’s Government is what mainly threatens the people of Ukraine. The U.S. regime, and its massively deceived population, are being increasingly isolated internationally; and, so, the U.S. Government increasingly stands out as the world’s leader of fascism, and even as the leader of fascism’s racist form (which is nazism). But, still, what continues to be effectively prohibited throughout the U.S. and its vassal nations, is public acknowledgment that the U.S. Government perpetrated a coup in Ukraine that overthrew Ukraine’s Government in February 2014 and that replaced it with a nazi anti-Russian regime and thereby started the current ‘Cold War’, which is much hotter than the U.S. side acknowledges, or allows the public to know.

Gordon Hahn’s restriction of blame for the coup only to native Ukrainian nazis doesn’t fit the evidence, because there clearly is leadership of Ukraine’s nazis by the U.S. regime. Furthermore, the U.S. regime and its Ukrainian client-state are the only two nations at the U.N. who vote (and repeatedly) to back fascism, nazism and Holocaust-denial. The anti-Russia nazis took over America’s Government, which has taken over Ukraine’s. All of this goes back to the key U.S. decision, which was made on 24 February 1990.

first posted at strategic-culture.org


"The time for war has not yet come, but it will come and that soon, and when it does come, my advice is to draw the sword and throw away the scabbard." Gen. T.J. Jackson, March 1861
Re: Background of Ukrainian Conflict [Re: ConSigCor] #177574
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Stephen Cohen’s Misrepresentations about the 2014 Coup in Ukraine

Published 4 years ago

on May 22, 2018

By Eric Zuesse

The restoration of the Cold War now, between Russia and the United States, is based on frauds by the United States, as will be documented here; and one of the biggest responsibilities that historians have, is to state this publicly — to acknowledge it publicly and clearly — so that the necessary public pressure can finally come to be brought upon the U.S. Government, to acknowledge that it has been wrong about this matter, which is a matter increasingly threatening the entire planet with World War III, a nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia, the war that would end the world.

Most historians fail this fundamental professional obligation to truthfulness especially about important matters such as this, and don’t even acknowledge publicly that the overthrow in February 2014 of Ukraine’s democratically elected President was a “coup” instead of a ‘revolution’ (which the U.S. Government and its foreign allies call it), but even most of the historians who do call it a “coup” do not say that it was perpetrated by the U.S. Government upon, and greatly harmed, the people of Ukraine; and, so, their admission fails to apply any pressure at all upon the U.S. Government, to stop its constant lying about this.

Wars do not result merely from force of arms, but even more fundamentlly, they result from force of lies. In the present matter, those lies can have a world-ending consequence; so, at least the biggest of these lies need to be addressed in public, by historians.

Dr. Stephen C. Cohen, the prominent Russia-specialist now retired from Princeton and NYU, has said on at least two occasions, that the February 2014 overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych was a “coup.” Cohen has never said, like the founder and head of the ‘private CIA’ firm Stratfor, Dr. George Friedman, once admitted, that it was “the most blatant coup in history”, but he did call it some kind of “coup”; and yet he has persistently refused to call it a coup that started in and was perpetrated by the U.S. Government — started in the Obama Administration, long before the coup’s culmination-period, 20-26 February 2014, when the EU finally became shocked on February 26th to discover that it had been a coup. I don’t understand why Dr. Cohen constantly presents it in that false way — as something it wasn’t. The following note is therefore intended specifically to correct Dr. Cohen’s false account that it had started elsewhere than inside the Obama Administration:

On May 9th, at an event co-sponsored by Columbia University’s Harriman Institute and New York University’s Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia, Cohen stated (at 28:45 in the video) that it was “a coup, an unusual coup, it originated in the streets.”

It did not originate in the streets. It originated in offices, specifically in U.S. Government offices, and assisted by other entities, including private entities, which worked closely with the U.S. Government, in order to plan it, and to carry it out.

I thus asked him, on May 17th, via email,

You think it originated in the streets, in November 2013 — really, it didn’t originate on 1 March 2013 when the U.S. Embassy started its CIA-run training-sessions for organizing the Maidan demonstrations? It didn’t originate in, or at least by, June 2011, when Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen visited Julian Assange at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, in order to deceive him into revealing the tricks he’d use to organize such a mass-movement (the public cover behind which the coup would be perpetrated) — fooled him into thinking that they were on his side, the pro-democracy side — certainly not on the side of coups and other “regime-change” operations? As I pointed out in that just-linked-to article, “Only in retrospect did Assange come to recognize that, as he headlined in October 2014, “Google Is Not What It Seems”. That’s when he noted, “Jared Cohen could be wryly named Google’s ‘director of regime change’.” He recognized too late, that they were manipulating him, using him, to help in overthrowing both Assad and Yanukovych — to help in their and Obama’s fascism.

Dr. Cohen replied,

“Obama’s fascism”? Do you even know what it is?

I answered,

Ask these people what “Obama’s fascism” is. They experienced it, through his agents — the people he installed to run their country (and Obama never criticized those stooges for doing his dirty-work, not even for doing it in such a blatantly “fascist” way).

Cohen didn’t reply, though perhaps he will, some day. If he will, then I shall welcome his response, because, if I am wrong, then I want to know in what way I am wrong; and if I am right, then not only is Dr. Cohen wrong, but our entire U.S. foreign-policy Establishment is wrong and has been lying pervasively about how the “restored Cold War” happened. Did Putin seize Crimea? Or, instead, did Obama seize Ukraine (via this coup)?

Like I, Professor Cohen — according to his own testimony, and mine — voted for Obama, both in 2008 and in 2012. I would do it again, against Hillary Clinton and John McCain, and against Mitt Romney, because those opponents of his, were even more fascist than Obama turned out to be; but this is the type of electoral choice that remains to the people, in today’s American ‘democracy’. That’s what it is: choices between ‘public’ representatives such as that.

Until the United States Government, and American academics such as Professor Cohen, publicly acknowledge the reality, that Obama lies, and that Trump lies, to allege that Russia ‘seized’ Crimea and that America didn’t seize Ukraine in a prior coup, a coup which has even been publicly admitted by some of the coup’s own actual participants — a coup that shortly thereafter was followed by an ethnic-cleansing campaign to get rid of enough people who had voted for the democratically elected Ukrainian President whom Obama overthrew, an ethnic-cleansing so as to stave off a subsequent electoral victory in Ukraine for restoration of a neutralist Ukrainian Government similar to the Government that was overthrown — as long as they instead hide the fact, that this was an American coup, against Ukraine, in order to grab Ukraine on Russia’s very doorstep, so as to make it a NATO member — there can be no constructive settlement of the ‘new Cold War’, because the fact is: it’s a war that the U.S. has been secretly waging against Russia, ever since at least 24 February 1990.

The termination of this war between the U.S. and Russia cannot be achieved by continuing the lies about what is behind it. This has been a decades-long war to eliminate Russia’s friends and allies, to turn the European ones into NATO members, to surround Russia with our missiles and nukes being positioned just five minutes’ striking-time from Moscow, and then to issue an ultimatum for Russia’s surrender, so as to achieve the world’s first global and all-encompassing Empire.

Continued lies just cannot do the job that the entire world needs to be done: the U.S. (the most dangerous country in the world) must terminate its obsession to expand its empire to an all-encompassing scope, and must cease-and-desist its continuing war against the sovereign nation of Russia, and against all other nations that have continued to resist America’s all-grasping aristocracy’s reach for the ultimate Empire.

The Big Lie today is that “Putin stole Crimea” not “Obama stole Ukraine.” The Big Truth today is that Obama stole Ukraine, not Putin stole Crimea.

If Dr. Cohen has any objections to the factuality of any of the allegations that I have made here, or to any of the documentation that I have linked to as the sources for these allegations, then I publicly welcome him to state what those objections are. Otherwise, I shall continue to take strong exception to Dr. Cohen’s account of these matters.


"The time for war has not yet come, but it will come and that soon, and when it does come, my advice is to draw the sword and throw away the scabbard." Gen. T.J. Jackson, March 1861
Re: Background of Ukrainian Conflict [Re: ConSigCor] #177579
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The 'Adults In Charge' Have Bumbled Us Into A New Cold War

by Tyler Durden
Monday, Feb 28, 2022 - 05:00 PM

Authored by Jim Daws via American Thinker (emphasis ours),

During Thursday's speech announcing ever greater sanctions on Russia, Joe Biden claimed, "The Russian military has begun a brutal assault on the people of Ukraine, without provocation, without justification, without necessity." This was a Western chauvinist point of view that does not take into account Russia's security concerns and historic grievances since the Soviet Union's defeat in the Cold War.

There is another reading of history — one from a Russian chauvinist point of view — that Western governments and media turn a blind eye to, and that has inevitably led to the current conflict and the specter of a much wider one.

Putin recounted an event during his extensive pre-invasion speech on February 21. In 2000, when he first became president of Russia, he had proposed to then–U.S. president Bill Clinton that Russia join NATO and be integrated into Europe. Russia was an economic basket case after decades of ruinous communist rule and its military a shell of its former greatness. It was an opportunity for America to seize on its Cold War victory, similar to how we had capitalized on our victories over Germany and Japan after World War II.

We can speculate as to why this opportunity was squandered, but I suspect that Europe's leaders feared competing economically with a newly liberated Russia and that America's defense industry was reluctant to lose a geostrategic foe that had justified decades of huge military budgets.

What is not in question is that the U.S., Great Britain, Germany, and France had, in 1991, promised Russia that NATO would not encroach on Russia if Russia withdrew its troops from Eastern Europe. That promise was broken just eight years later, when Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic were granted NATO membership. Five years after that, seven more countries in Eastern Europe were allowed to join and four more since then, including that military powerhouse, North Macedonia.

In 1999, NATO engaged in an air war against Serbia, a Slavic nation, like Russia, that had been part of the USSR under Yugoslavia. This was widely seen as a grand gesture by then-president Bill Clinton and secretary of state Madeleine Albright to show how NATO was even willing to bomb Christians in order to protect Muslims. Today, many of the same Democrats and neocons you see decrying the violation of Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity were vocal cheerleaders for the partition of Kosovo, over bitter Serbian and Russian objections.

The ethnically Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army then proceeded to ethnically cleanse Serbian Christians from their ancestral homeland, while NATO stood idly by.

The roots of this current conflict go back, most recently, to 2014, when Barack Obama's State Department sponsored a coup that toppled a duly elected Russia-friendly government in Kyiv and installed one that opposed Russia. Obama funded that so-called color revolution to the tune of $6 billion, and the notoriously corrupt nation became a feeding frenzy for the families and cronies of U.S. politicians, including the Biden family. Joe Biden was in charge of Ukraine policy at the time, and his crack-addled son was dispatched as the Biden family bag man.

Later that same year, assistant secretary of state Victoria Nuland, who had managed the coup in Ukraine, testified before a congressional committee that Obama and his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, had also spent $20 billion on a similar effort at regime change inside Russia itself.


So Vladimir Putin might be forgiven for believing that the Western powers, in their refusal to forswear NATO expansion into Ukraine — the historic approach for invasions — don't have Russia's best interest at heart.

The bitter harvest of this history is the current invasion of Ukraine and an emerging second Cold War in which the U.S. and Europe may hold far fewer advantages than the first one.

On the eve of this winter's "Genocide" Olympics in Beijing, Putin and China's Xi Jinping signed an alliance pledging to cooperate economically and militarily, stating that in this new global era, "Friendship between their states has no limits."

In China, Russia now has an ally with an unlimited appetite for its fossil fuel and agricultural products. In Russia, China now has a growing market for its cheap labor manufacturing output. Alone, each nation has more degreed engineers than the U.S. and will be positioned to share advanced military, space, and industrial technology — much of it stolen from the U.S. This relationship will be largely beyond the reach of the Western sanctions Biden announced.

As in the previous Cold War, we can expect satellite client states to be deployed to destabilize, threaten, and terrorize the Western nations and our allies. Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, and others will bleed our military, resources, and attention.

By pushing Russia into the arms of an ascendant communist China, the West, and the so-called "adults" who are back in charge, have made a geostrategic blunder of historic proportions.

The truly tragic part is, it did not have to be this way.

* * *

Jim Daws is a recovering talk radio host at jim@jimdaws.com.


"The time for war has not yet come, but it will come and that soon, and when it does come, my advice is to draw the sword and throw away the scabbard." Gen. T.J. Jackson, March 1861
Re: Background of Ukrainian Conflict [Re: ConSigCor] #177583
03/01/2022 12:30 AM
03/01/2022 12:30 AM
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It All Comes Back to NATO
One does not need to approve of Russia’s military actions to analyze its stated motivation: NATO membership for Ukraine was a red line it was not willing to see crossed.


By Ron Paul | Infowars.com Monday, February 28, 2022

When the Bush Administration announced in 2008 that Ukraine and Georgia would be eligible for NATO membership, I knew it was a terrible idea. Nearly two decades after the end of both the Warsaw Pact and the Cold War, expanding NATO made no sense. NATO itself made no sense.

Explaining my “no” vote on a bill to endorse the expansion, I said at the time:

NATO is an organization whose purpose ended with the end of its Warsaw Pact adversary… This current round of NATO expansion is a political reward to governments in Georgia and Ukraine that came to power as a result of US-supported revolutions, the so-called Orange Revolution and Rose Revolution.

Providing US military guarantees to Ukraine and Georgia can only further strain our military. This NATO expansion may well involve the US military in conflicts unrelated to our national interest…

Unfortunately, as we have seen this past week, my fears have come true. One does not need to approve of Russia’s military actions to analyze its stated motivation: NATO membership for Ukraine was a red line it was not willing to see crossed. As we find ourselves at risk of a terrible escalation, we should remind ourselves that it didn’t have to happen this way. There was no advantage to the United States to expand and threaten to expand NATO to Russia’s doorstep. There is no way to argue that we are any safer for it.

NATO itself was a huge mistake.

When in 1949 the US Senate initially voted on the NATO treaty, Sen. Roberg Taft – known as “Mr. Republican” – gave an excellent speech on why he voted against creating NATO.

Explaining his “no” vote, Taft said:

… the treaty is a part of a much larger program by which we arm all these nations against Russia… A joint military program has already been made… It thus becomes an offensive and defensive military alliance against Russia. I believe our foreign policy should be aimed primarily at security and peace, and I believe such an alliance is more likely to produce war than peace.

Taft continued:

If we undertake to arm all the nations around Russia…and Russia sees itself ringed about gradually by so-called defensive arms from Norway and Denmark to Turkey and Greece, it may form a different opinion. It may decide that the arming of western Europe, regardless of its present purpose, looks to an attack upon Russia. Its view may be unreasonable, and I think it is. But from the Russian standpoint it may not seem unreasonable. They may well decide that if war is the certain result, that war might better occur now rather than after the arming of Europe is completed…

How right he was.

NATO went off the rails long before 2008, however. The North Atlantic Treaty was signed on April 4, 1949 and by the start of the Korean War just over a year later, NATO was very much involved in the military operation of the war in Asia, not Europe!

NATO’s purpose was stated to “guarantee the safety and freedom of its members by political and military means.” It is a job not well done!

I believe as strongly today as I did back in my 2008 House Floor speech that, “NATO should be disbanded, not expanded.” In the meantime, expansion should be off the table. The risks do not outweigh the benefits!

This article first appeared at RonPaulInstitute.org.


"The time for war has not yet come, but it will come and that soon, and when it does come, my advice is to draw the sword and throw away the scabbard." Gen. T.J. Jackson, March 1861
Re: Background of Ukrainian Conflict [Re: ConSigCor] #177604
03/02/2022 12:22 AM
03/02/2022 12:22 AM
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Take time to read all of this.

The Real Backdrop Nobody Will Discuss


https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/international-news/russia/the-real-backdrop-nobody-will-discuss/



"The time for war has not yet come, but it will come and that soon, and when it does come, my advice is to draw the sword and throw away the scabbard." Gen. T.J. Jackson, March 1861

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