This page is not meant to be unbiased. These are articles generally explain the Russian position and the U.S. – NATO instigation. Articles (*) are anti-Putin but still informative. If you want the U.S. – NATO side concerning Ukraine watch the military-industrial-media complex mainstream news! Personally, I find mainstream news to be mostly distorted or false propaganda. Click on each article title for their full story. More stories pending in this ongoing post.
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2022-05-24 We Need a Real Debate About the Ukraine War
It’s time to challenge the orthodox view on the war in Ukraine. As Russia’s illegal and brutal assault enters its fourth month, the impact on Europe, the Global South and the world is already profound. We are witnessing the emergence of a new political/military world order. Climate action is being sidelined as reliance on fossil fuels increases; food scarcity and other resource demands are pushing prices upward and causing widespread global hunger; and the worldwide refugee crisis—with more international refugees and internally displaced people than at any time since the end of World War II—poses a massive challenge. Furthermore, the more protracted the war in Ukraine, the greater the risk of a nuclear accident or incident.
2022-02-26 MSNBC Needs a History Lesson: Imperial America is “Greatest Purveyor of Coups” on Earth
There doesn’t seem to be a single instance where the U.S. successfully prevented a military overthrow. But there are many examples where the U.S. supported it. For example, in Saigon in 1963, the CIA was behind a coup against its own client, Ngo Dinh Diem, who had been installed after the Eisenhower administration refused to abide by the 1954 Geneva Accords mandating free elections in 1956, two years after the intended temporary division of the country.
Of course, there are some examples where the U.S. condemned military coups—though few if any to my knowledge where they did anything to prevent them.
Although the U.S. did not prevent the February 1, 2021, military ouster of Myanmar’s elected government including civilians such as Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, Secretary of State Antony Blinken denounced the Rangoon goons.
That is, after the deed is done, Washington may withhold military and other types of aid, but frequently resumes providing the weaponry that feeds the insatiable military-industrial complex, as in the case of Egypt, where Egyptian army chief General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi forcibly overthrew the elected president on July 3, 2013.
The fact of the matter is that, far from “preventing” military coups, since 1945 the U.S.A. (you know, the Undemocratic States of America) has been the world’s worst perpetrator of armed overthrows of democratically elected, as well as other “inconvenient,” governments.
Reverend King may have accurately identified “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government,” in his 1967 “Beyond Vietnam” speech.
But one can also truthfully declare that Imperial America is “the greatest purveyor of coups” on Earth. When it comes to invading, bombing and attacking other countries, the U.S. holds the world record and is truly peerless, especially against lands that are not remotely border states, such as Iraq and Vietnam.
Meddling in the internal affairs of other countries, whether via putsches, “regime change,” drone warfare and other bombing, plus countless covert actions has become a national pastime, the distilled essence of “American exceptionalism” in the second half of the 20th century and into the 21st century.
With 750-plus military bases straddling the globe in 80 countries (whether they want the Yanks there or not), one-third of a million troops occupying Europe and currently amping up potential conflict there (where forever-expanding NATO outspends the Russian military 14 to 1), with its forward-basing policy plus intel operations, the U.S. is nonpareil as the world’s international intruder and busybody.
PARTIAL LIST OF 200-PLUS YEARS OF U.S.-SUPPORTED OVERTHROWS (see end of article)
2022-02-25 Chris Hedges: Russia, Ukraine and the Chronicle of a War Foretold
After the fall of the Soviet Union, there was a near-universal understanding among political leaders that NATO expansion would be a foolish provocation against Russia. How naive we were to think the military-industrial complex would allow such sanity to prevail.
The MIC set out almost immediately to recruit the former Communist Bloc countries into the European Union and NATO. Countries that joined NATO, which now include Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, Croatia, Montenegro, and North Macedonia were forced to reconfigure their militaries, often through hefty loans, to become compatible with NATO military hardware.
There would be no peace dividend. The expansion of NATO swiftly became a multi-billion-dollar bonanza for the corporations that had profited from the Cold War. (Poland, for example, just agreed to spend $ 6 billion on M1 Abrams tanks and other U.S. military equipment.) If Russia would not acquiesce to again being the enemy, then Russia would be pressured into becoming the enemy. And here we are. On the brink of another Cold War, one from which only the war industry will profit while, as W. H. Auden wrote, the little children die in the streets.
The consequences of pushing NATO up to the borders with Russia — there is now a NATO missile base in Poland 100 miles from the Russian border — were well known to policy makers. Yet they did it anyway. It made no geopolitical sense. But it made commercial sense. War, after all, is a business, a very lucrative one. It is why we spent two decades in Afghanistan although there was near universal consensus after a few years of fruitless fighting that we had waded into a quagmire we could never win.
*2022-02-24Stop Pretending the Left Is on Putin’s Side
Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is based on obviously reactionary pretexts. The Left has nothing to do with his agenda — and should make no apologies for opposing a US military response. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is sickening. Vladimir Putin had this Monday claimed that the “Kiev regime” refused any resolution of the conflict in the Donbas except through “military means.” The Russian president now claims to resolve it with far more bloodshed, already spreading beyond the Donbas region and risking a wider conflagration.
As for the United States and UK, even if they do not send troops to Eastern Europe, we can expect a warlike atmosphere perhaps echoing that which followed 9/11, with smears against supposed “stooges of Putin,” and clampdowns on media really or simply alleged to be Moscow-linked. A key focus of left-wing politics will be resistance against the already encroaching policing of public discourse by social media giants and state McCarthyism. Another will be to defend the right of refugees from the war — and its likely fallout on the global food supply — to settle in Europe.
In recent weeks, media-political rhetoric in Western countries has been heavily directed at delegitimizing the Left and antiwar forces domestically. This also points to its unreality and impotence with regard to events in Ukraine. Liberal pundits often speak of Putin’s hirelings on the European far left and far right; yet no socialist parties are funded by Russian bankers and oligarchs in the manner of British Tories, Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National, or Italy’s Lega. Putin’s erratic conduct has surely embarrassed them; socialists never admired him to begin with.
Even compared to the Cold War era, the Left in most countries is far less politically and organizationally prepared to deal with the present crisis, never mind act effectively to stop it. But we can at least rely on certain core principles: an unrelenting rejection of the use of military force; a refusal to justify one set of generals by citing the crimes of another; and, above all, a defense of our own right to speak without fear or accusation of disloyalty.
2022-02-24 Everyone Loses in the Conflict Over Ukraine
When two scorpions are in a bottle, they both lose. This is the preventable danger that is growing daily, with no end game in sight between the two nuclear superpowers, led by dictator Vladimir Putin and de facto sole decider, Joe Biden.
Putin’s first argument is, Washington invented the model of aggressive, illegal invasions, and destruction of distant countries that never threatened U.S. security. Millions have died, been injured, and sickened in defenseless countries attacked by U.S. armed forces. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney killed over a million innocent Iraqis and devastated the country in so many ways that scholars called it a “sociocide.”
Putin’s second argument is that Russia is being threatened on its sensitive western border, which had been invaded twice by Germany and caused the loss of 50 million Russian lives. Soon after the Soviet Union collapsed, the West’s military alliance against Russia began moving east. Under Bill Clinton, NATO (The North Atlantic Treaty Organization) signed up Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic in 1999 leading to major arms sales by the U.S. giant munitions corporations.
More recently, Putin sees U.S. soldiers in these countries, ever closer U.S. missile launchers, U.S.-led joint naval exercises in the Baltic Sea, and intimations that Ukraine and Georgia could soon join NATO. (Imagine if the Russians were to have such a military presence around the U.S. borders.)
Even often hawkish New York Times columnists – Thomas Friedman and Bret Stephens made this point this week about the brazen U.S. history of military hypocrisy while tearing into Putin. Stephens brought up the Monroe Doctrine over the entire Western Hemisphere, in raising repeatedly the question, “Who are We?”
The chess game between Russia and the West has become more deadly with Putin’s military moves followed by immediate Western sanctions against some Russian banks and oligarchs close to Putin. Travel bans and freezing the completion of the second major natural gas pipeline from Russia to Germany are in place with promises of much more severe economic retaliation by Biden.
These sanctions can become a two-way street. Western Europe needs Russian oil and gas, Russian wheat, and essential Russian minerals such as lithium, cobalt, and nickel. Sanctions against Russia will soon boomerang in terms of higher oil and gas prices for Europeans and Americans, more inflation, worsening supply chains, and the dreaded “economic uncertainty” afflicting stock markets and consumer spending.
The corporate global economy gave us interdependence on other nations, instead of domestic self-reliance under the framework of corporate-managed free trade agreements.
So how many billions of dollars in costs and a weakened economy will Joe Biden tolerate as the price of anti-Putin sanctions that will blowback on the American people? How much suffering will he tolerate being inflicted on the long-suffering Russian people? What will be the impact on the civilian population of more severe sanctions? And who is he to talk as if he doesn’t have to be authorized by Congress to go further into this state of belligerence, short of sending soldiers, which he said he would not do?
Is Congress to be left as a cheerleader, washing its hands of its constitutional oversight and foreign policy duties? Also, watch Republicans and Democrats in Congress unify to whoop through more money for the bloated military budget, as pointed out by military analyst, Michael Klare. What energy will be left for Biden’s pending “Build Back Better” infrastructure, social safety net, and climate crisis legislation?
In recent weeks, the State Department said it recognizes Russia’s legitimate security concerns but not its expansionism. Well, what is wrong with a ceasefire followed by support for a treaty “guaranteeing neutrality for Ukraine, similar to the enforced neutrality for Austria since the Cold War’s early years,” as Nation publisher and Russia specialist Katrina vanden Heuvel urged. (See: Katrina vanden Heuvel’s Washington Post article and her recent Nation piece).
2022-02-24 Putin’s InvasionDe-escalation and negotiation are the only way out of this crisis
War is a tragedy, a crime, and a defeat. The Nation condemns the decision of Russian President Vladimir Putin to abandon the path of diplomacy by attacking and undertaking “special military operations” in Ukraine. These actions violate international law and fuel a dangerous escalation of violence.
We urge all parties to immediately cease hostilities, de-escalate, and seek a diplomatic solution to mitigate the risk of full-scale war and an unthinkable direct conflict between the world’s two largest nuclear powers.
This magazine has warned repeatedly that the extension of NATO to Russia’s borders would inevitably produce a fierce reaction. We have criticized NATO’s wholesale rejection of Russia’s security proposals. We decry the arrogance that leads US officials to assert that we have the right to do what we wish across the world, even in areas, like Ukraine, that are far more important to others than they are to us.
NATO expansion provided the context for this crisis—a fact often ignored by our media. There is rank irrationality and irresponsibility in offering future NATO membership to Ukraine—when successive US presidents and our NATO allies have demonstrated that they do not have the slightest intention of fighting to defend Ukraine. Instead, Putin’s demand that Ukraine remain outside of NATO—essentially that the status quo be codified—was scorned as violating NATO’s “principle” of admitting anyone it wanted.
One immediate result was to encourage parallel irresponsibility in Ukraine. President Volodymyr Zelensky promised voters when he ran for Ukraine’s presidency in 2019 that he would pursue a path to peace and end the war in the Donbas. Upon taking office, however, his government refused to implement the provisions of the 2015 Minsk Protocols—signed by Russia, Ukraine, France, Germany, and the EU—that essentially would have guaranteed Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity in exchange for Ukrainian neutrality.
2022-02-23 Why the Russian Federation Recognized the Independence Movements in the Donbas
This was the genesis of the crisis. For U.S. policymakers it did not matter that the coup government was made up of literal neo-Nazis and extremist white supremacists and antisemitic ultra-nationalists from the neo-Nazi Svoboda party — the National Socialist Party of Ukraine.
Nor was there any concern that one of the former commanders of the Azov Battalion, a violent right-wing gang that was merged into the Ukrainian National Guard and is now being trained by the British, said that Ukraine’s mission is to “lead in a final crusade … against the Semite-led Untermenschen” (sub-humans).
No concern because aligning with rightist elements in order to advance the economic and geostrategic interests of the U.S. state and capitalist class behind the backs of the U.S. public is nothing new. That is why it is so ironic, or perhaps contradictory, that while Democratic Party activists are mobilized to struggle against the far-right in the U.S., Biden’s Ukrainian policies are affirming once again that the neoliberal right does not mind aligning with naked fascism to advance the imperial interests of capital.
From rightist Islamic forces to right-wing apartheid state of Israel, to anti-democratic monarchs of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), there is usually never a state too odious for the U.S. to deal with as long as there was the possibility of a buck to be made.
2018 Ukraine on Fire: The Real Story – Full Documentary by Oliver Stone (Original English version)
Ukraine, the ‘borderlands’ between Russia and ‘civilized’ Europe is on fire. For centuries, it has been at the center of a tug-of-war between powers seeking to control its rich lands and Russia’s access to the Mediterranean.
The Maidan Massacre in early 2014 triggered a bloody uprising that ousted president Viktor Yanukovych, spurred Crimeans to secede and join Russia, and sparked a civil war in Eastern Ukraine.
Russia was portrayed by Western media as the perpetrator, and has been sanctioned and widely condemned as such. But was Russia responsible for what happened?
Ukraine on Fire provides a historical perspective for the deep divisions in the region which led to the 2004 Orange Revolution, the 2014 uprisings, and the violent overthrow of democratically-elected Yanukovych.
Covered by Western media as a ‘popular revolution’, it was in fact a coup d’état scripted and staged by ultra-nationalist groups and the US State Department.
Investigative journalist Robert Parry reveals how US-funded political NGOs and media companies have emerged since the 1980s, replacing the CIA in promoting America’s geopolitical agenda abroad.
Executive producer Oliver Stone gained unprecedented access to the inside story through his on-camera interviews with former President Viktor Yanukovych and Minister of Internal Affairs Vitaliy Zakharchenko, who explain how the US Ambassador and factions in Washington actively plotted for regime change.
And, in his first meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Stone solicits Putin’s take on the significance of Crimea, NATO and the US’s history of interference in elections and regime change in the region.
Now, at last, the full exposé is available in the West. Though, of course, everyone is encouraged to purchase a copy to support Stone’s important work.
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