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"Behind The Kiev Snipers It Was Somebody From The New Coalition" – A Stunning New Leak Released | Zero Hedge
The last time a leaked phone call out of Ukraine was released about a month ago ostensibly by the Russian NSA equivalent, one between US assistant sec state Victoria Nuland and the US envoy to the Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, it was revealed that the real puppet masters behind the Maidan movement, and the true instigators of the Ukraine “revolution” were none other than the “developed” world superpowers, lead by the US. Also revealed were tensions between the US and EU strategies on how to overthrow the current government, culminating with the infamous “Fuck the EU.” Needless to say the US, which implicitly confirmed the recording, was angry at Russia and accused it of using dirty tricks.
That’s ironic, because when it comes to “dirty tricks” what is about to be presented, blows the top off anything Russia may or has done to date.
Earlier today an even more shocking recording has been “leaked” this time one between the always concerned about human rights EU foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton and Estonian foreign minister Urmas Paet, in which it is revealed on tape that all those photos of horrifying deaths of Ukrainians by snipers during the last days of the Median stand off, were in fact caused not by Snipers controlled by Yanukovich, but that the snipers shot at both protesters and police in Kiev were allegedly hired by Maidan leaders!
Here is the key exchange, just after 8 minutes into the conversation :
Paet: “All the evidence shows that people who were killed by snipers from both sides, policemen and people from the streets, that they were the same snipers killing people from both sides. … Some photos that showed it is the same handwriting, the same type of bullets, and it is really disturbing that now the new coalition they don’t want to investigate what exactly happened. So there is now stronger and stronger understanding that behind the snipers, it was not Yanukovych, but it was somebody from the new coalition.”
Ashton: “I think we do want to investigate. I mean, I didn’t pick that up, that’s interesting. Gosh.”
Paet: “It already discreditates (sic) this new coalition.”
So first US orchestrates the Kiev overthrow, and now the new “leaders” of Ukraine are allegedly found to have fired against their own people – the same provocation they subsequently used to run Yanukovich out of the country and install a pro-Western puppet government. Of course, said pro-Western coalition has not been discreditated (sic) because Ms. Ashton has sternly refused to investigate, knowing quite well how horribly this would reflect on the new Ukraine “leadership” – a government which shot its own people to fabricate the pretext under which it rose to power.
Is it any wonder then that Russia has responded the way it has?
As for at least one of the affected parties, Estonia, it has just confirmed the authenticity of the recording, and the ministry of foreign affairs has organized a press conference to answer media questions today at 5 pm. From the Valisministeerium:
No. 84-E Foreign Minister Urmas Paet and EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton uploaded to the Internet today, a phone call is authentic.
Paet and Ashton conversation took place on 26 February, following Estonia’s Foreign Minister’s visit to Ukraine, and immediately after the end of the street violence.
Foreign Minister Paet communicate what he had said about the meetings held in Kiev last day and expressed concern about the situation.
“It is extremely regrettable that such an interception is occurring at all””said Paet., Including its call for today’s photos are not random,” he added.
Yes, it is truly regrettable that the people know the truth.
Full leaked recording below:
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Let’s You and Him Fight | KUNSTLER
Let’s You and Him Fight | KUNSTLER.
So, now we are threatening to start World War Three because Russia is trying to control the chaos in a failed state on its border — a state that our own government spooks provoked into failure? The last time I checked, there was a list of countries that the USA had sent troops, armed ships, and aircraft into recently, and for reasons similar to Russia’s in Crimea: the former Yugoslavia, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, none of them even anywhere close to American soil. I don’t remember Russia threatening confrontations with the USA over these adventures.
The phones at the White House and the congressional offices ought to be ringing off the hook with angry US citizens objecting to the posturing of our elected officials. There ought to be crowds with bobbing placards in Farragut Square reminding the occupant of 1400 Pennsylvania Avenue how ridiculous this makes us look.
The saber-rattlers at The New York Times were sounding like the promoters of a World Wrestling Federation stunt Monday morning when they said in a Page One story:
“The Russian occupation of Crimea has challenged Mr. Obama as has no other international crisis, and at its heart, the advice seemed to pose the same question: Is Mr. Obama tough enough to take on the former K.G.B. colonel in the Kremlin?”
Are they out of their chicken-hawk minds over there? It sounds like a ploy out of the old Eric Berne playbook: Let’s You and Him Fight. What the USA and its European factotums ought to do is mind their own business and stop issuing idle threats. They set the scene for the Ukrainian melt-down by trying to tilt the government their way, financing a pro-Euroland revolt, only to see their sponsored proxy dissidents give way to a claque of armed neo-Nazis, whose first official act was to outlaw the use of the Russian language in a country with millions of long-established Russian-speakers. This is apart, of course, from the fact Ukraine had been until very recently a province of Russia’s former Soviet empire.
Secretary of State John Kerry — a haircut in search of a brain — is winging to Kiev tomorrow to pretend that the USA has a direct interest in what happens there. Since US behavior is so patently hypocritical, it raises the pretty basic question: what are our motives? I don’t think they amount to anything more than international grandstanding — based on the delusion that we have the power and the right to control everything on the planet, which is based, in turn, on our current mood of extreme insecurity as our own ongoing spate of bad choices sets the table for a banquet of consequences.
America can’t even manage its own affairs. We ignore our own gathering energy crisis, telling ourselves the fairy tale that shale oil will allow us to keep driving to WalMart forever. We paper over all of our financial degeneracy and wink at financial criminals. Our infrastructure is falling apart. We’re constructing an edifice of surveillance and social control that would make the late Dr. Joseph Goebbels turn green in his grave with envy while we squander our dwindling political capital on stupid gender confusion battles.
The Russians, on the other hand, have every right to protect their interests along their own border, to protect the persons and property of Russian-speaking Ukrainians who, not long ago, were citizens of a greater Russia, to discourage neo-Nazi activity in their back-yard, and most of all to try to stabilize a region that has little history and experience with independence. They also have to contend with the bankruptcy of Ukraine, which may be the principal cause of its current crack-up. Ukraine is deep in hock to Russia, but also to a network of Western banks, and it remains to be seen whether the failure of these linked obligations will lead to contagion throughout the global financial system. It only takes one additional falling snowflake to push a snow-field into criticality.
Welcome to the era of failed states. We’ve already seen plenty of action around the world and we’re going to see more as resource and capital scarcities drive down standards of living and lower the trust horizon. The world is not going in the direction that Tom Friedman and the globalists thought. Anything organized at the giant scale is now in trouble, nation-states in particular. The USA is not immune to this trend, whatever we imagine about ourselves for now.
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Let’s You and Him Fight | KUNSTLER
Let’s You and Him Fight | KUNSTLER.
So, now we are threatening to start World War Three because Russia is trying to control the chaos in a failed state on its border — a state that our own government spooks provoked into failure? The last time I checked, there was a list of countries that the USA had sent troops, armed ships, and aircraft into recently, and for reasons similar to Russia’s in Crimea: the former Yugoslavia, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, none of them even anywhere close to American soil. I don’t remember Russia threatening confrontations with the USA over these adventures.
The phones at the White House and the congressional offices ought to be ringing off the hook with angry US citizens objecting to the posturing of our elected officials. There ought to be crowds with bobbing placards in Farragut Square reminding the occupant of 1400 Pennsylvania Avenue how ridiculous this makes us look.
The saber-rattlers at The New York Times were sounding like the promoters of a World Wrestling Federation stunt Monday morning when they said in a Page One story:
“The Russian occupation of Crimea has challenged Mr. Obama as has no other international crisis, and at its heart, the advice seemed to pose the same question: Is Mr. Obama tough enough to take on the former K.G.B. colonel in the Kremlin?”
Are they out of their chicken-hawk minds over there? It sounds like a ploy out of the old Eric Berne playbook: Let’s You and Him Fight. What the USA and its European factotums ought to do is mind their own business and stop issuing idle threats. They set the scene for the Ukrainian melt-down by trying to tilt the government their way, financing a pro-Euroland revolt, only to see their sponsored proxy dissidents give way to a claque of armed neo-Nazis, whose first official act was to outlaw the use of the Russian language in a country with millions of long-established Russian-speakers. This is apart, of course, from the fact Ukraine had been until very recently a province of Russia’s former Soviet empire.
Secretary of State John Kerry — a haircut in search of a brain — is winging to Kiev tomorrow to pretend that the USA has a direct interest in what happens there. Since US behavior is so patently hypocritical, it raises the pretty basic question: what are our motives? I don’t think they amount to anything more than international grandstanding — based on the delusion that we have the power and the right to control everything on the planet, which is based, in turn, on our current mood of extreme insecurity as our own ongoing spate of bad choices sets the table for a banquet of consequences.
America can’t even manage its own affairs. We ignore our own gathering energy crisis, telling ourselves the fairy tale that shale oil will allow us to keep driving to WalMart forever. We paper over all of our financial degeneracy and wink at financial criminals. Our infrastructure is falling apart. We’re constructing an edifice of surveillance and social control that would make the late Dr. Joseph Goebbels turn green in his grave with envy while we squander our dwindling political capital on stupid gender confusion battles.
The Russians, on the other hand, have every right to protect their interests along their own border, to protect the persons and property of Russian-speaking Ukrainians who, not long ago, were citizens of a greater Russia, to discourage neo-Nazi activity in their back-yard, and most of all to try to stabilize a region that has little history and experience with independence. They also have to contend with the bankruptcy of Ukraine, which may be the principal cause of its current crack-up. Ukraine is deep in hock to Russia, but also to a network of Western banks, and it remains to be seen whether the failure of these linked obligations will lead to contagion throughout the global financial system. It only takes one additional falling snowflake to push a snow-field into criticality.
Welcome to the era of failed states. We’ve already seen plenty of action around the world and we’re going to see more as resource and capital scarcities drive down standards of living and lower the trust horizon. The world is not going in the direction that Tom Friedman and the globalists thought. Anything organized at the giant scale is now in trouble, nation-states in particular. The USA is not immune to this trend, whatever we imagine about ourselves for now.
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Memo to Obama: This Was Their Red Line! | David Stockman’s Contra Corner
Memo to Obama: This Was Their Red Line! | David Stockman’s Contra Corner.
by David Stockman • March 2, 2014
![Ethnolingusitic_map_of_ukraine[1]](https://i0.wp.com/davidstockmanscontracorner.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Ethnolingusitic_map_of_ukraine1-640x447.png)
In 1783 the Crimea was annexed by Catherine the Great, thereby satisfying the longstanding quest of the Russian Czars for a warm-water port. In fact, over the ages Sevastopol emerged as a great naval base at the strategic tip of the Crimean peninsula, where it became home to the mighty Black Sea Fleet of the Czars and then the commissars.
For the next 171 years Crimea was an integral part of Russia—a span that exceeds the 166 years that have elapsed since California was annexed by a similar thrust of “Manifest Destiny” on this continent, thereby providing, incidentally, the United States Navy with its own warm-water port in San Diego. While no foreign forces subsequently invaded the California coasts, it was most definitely not Ukrainian and Polish riffles, artillery and blood which famously annihilated The Charge Of The Light Brigade at the Crimean city of Balaclava in 1854; they were Russians defending the homeland.
And the portrait of the Russian ”hero” hanging in Putin’s office is that of Czar Nicholas I—who’s brutal 30-year reign brought the Russian Empire to its historical zenith, and who was revered in Russian hagiography as the defender of Crimea, even as he lost the 1850s war to the Ottomans and Europeans. Besides that, there is no evidence that Putin does historical apologies, anyway.
In fact, its their Red Line. When the enfeebled Franklin Roosevelt made port in the Crimean city of Yalta in February 1945 he did know he was in Soviet Russia. Maneuvering to cement his control of the Kremlin in the intrigue-ridden struggle for succession after Stalin’s death a few years later, Nikita Khrushchev allegedly spent 15 minutes reviewing his “gift” of Crimea to his subalterns in Kiev in honor of the decision by their ancestors 300 years earlier to accept the inevitable and become a vassal of Russia.
Self-evidently, during the long decades of the Cold War, the West did nothing to liberate the “captive nation” of the Ukraine—with or without the Crimean appendage bestowed upon it in 1954. Nor did it draw any red lines in the mid-1990′s when a financially desperate Ukraine rented back Sevastopol and the strategic redoubts of the Crimea to an equally pauperized Russia.
In short, in the era before we got our Pacific port in 1848 and in the 166-year interval since then, the security and safety of the American people have depended not one wit on the status of the Russian-speaking Crimea. Should the local population now choose fealty to the Grand Thief in Moscow over the ruffians and rabble who have seized Kiev, what’s to matter! Worse still, how long can America survive the screeching sanctimony and mindless meddling of Susan Rice and Samantha Power? Mr. President, send them back to geography class; don’t draw any new Red Lines. This one has been morphing for centuries among the quarreling tribes, peoples, potentates, Patriarchs and pretenders of a small region that is none of our damn business.
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Memo to Obama: This Was Their Red Line! | David Stockman's Contra Corner
Memo to Obama: This Was Their Red Line! | David Stockman’s Contra Corner.
by David Stockman • March 2, 2014
In 1783 the Crimea was annexed by Catherine the Great, thereby satisfying the longstanding quest of the Russian Czars for a warm-water port. In fact, over the ages Sevastopol emerged as a great naval base at the strategic tip of the Crimean peninsula, where it became home to the mighty Black Sea Fleet of the Czars and then the commissars.
For the next 171 years Crimea was an integral part of Russia—a span that exceeds the 166 years that have elapsed since California was annexed by a similar thrust of “Manifest Destiny” on this continent, thereby providing, incidentally, the United States Navy with its own warm-water port in San Diego. While no foreign forces subsequently invaded the California coasts, it was most definitely not Ukrainian and Polish riffles, artillery and blood which famously annihilated The Charge Of The Light Brigade at the Crimean city of Balaclava in 1854; they were Russians defending the homeland.
And the portrait of the Russian ”hero” hanging in Putin’s office is that of Czar Nicholas I—who’s brutal 30-year reign brought the Russian Empire to its historical zenith, and who was revered in Russian hagiography as the defender of Crimea, even as he lost the 1850s war to the Ottomans and Europeans. Besides that, there is no evidence that Putin does historical apologies, anyway.
In fact, its their Red Line. When the enfeebled Franklin Roosevelt made port in the Crimean city of Yalta in February 1945 he did know he was in Soviet Russia. Maneuvering to cement his control of the Kremlin in the intrigue-ridden struggle for succession after Stalin’s death a few years later, Nikita Khrushchev allegedly spent 15 minutes reviewing his “gift” of Crimea to his subalterns in Kiev in honor of the decision by their ancestors 300 years earlier to accept the inevitable and become a vassal of Russia.
Self-evidently, during the long decades of the Cold War, the West did nothing to liberate the “captive nation” of the Ukraine—with or without the Crimean appendage bestowed upon it in 1954. Nor did it draw any red lines in the mid-1990′s when a financially desperate Ukraine rented back Sevastopol and the strategic redoubts of the Crimea to an equally pauperized Russia.
In short, in the era before we got our Pacific port in 1848 and in the 166-year interval since then, the security and safety of the American people have depended not one wit on the status of the Russian-speaking Crimea. Should the local population now choose fealty to the Grand Thief in Moscow over the ruffians and rabble who have seized Kiev, what’s to matter! Worse still, how long can America survive the screeching sanctimony and mindless meddling of Susan Rice and Samantha Power? Mr. President, send them back to geography class; don’t draw any new Red Lines. This one has been morphing for centuries among the quarreling tribes, peoples, potentates, Patriarchs and pretenders of a small region that is none of our damn business.
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Ukraine Tells Russia Invasion Means War as Putin Makes Plans – Bloomberg
Ukraine Tells Russia Invasion Means War as Putin Makes Plans – Bloomberg.
Heavily-armed troops displaying no identifying insignia and local pro-Russian militants stand guard outside a local… Read More
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Ukraine told Russia that a military invasion would be an act of war following a vote by lawmakers in Moscow to give President Vladimir Putin the right to send troops after pro-Russian forces seized control of Crimea.
Ukraine, which put its military on full combat alert, is also mobilizing the reserves, Andriy Parubiy, secretary of the National Security and Defense Council, said in a briefing today. He urged the U.S. and U.K. to defend the country’s territorial integrity. Putin told U.S. President Barack Obama that Russia may act if violence spreads to Russian-speaking regions, the Kremlin said in a statement.
In a 90-minute phone call, Obama “expressed his deep concern over Russia’s clear violation of Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity” and told Putin his country is violating international law by sending troops into Ukraine, according to a White House statement.
The U.S. and Canada are suspending preparations for a meeting of the Group of Eight industrial nations in Russia in June. The U.S. called on Russia to withdraw its forces to bases in Crimea, refrain from interfering elsewhere in Ukraine and conduct “direct engagement” with the country’s newly formed government.
Facing Default
Ethnic strife erupted in Ukraine’s Crimea region, where the majority of the population is Russian, after an uprising led to last week’s overthrow of President Viktor Yanukovych. The military movements risk destabilizing the country as its new government looks to the U.S. and Europe for a bailout to avoid default.
“The Ukrainian state will protect all citizens no matter in which region they live in and which language they speak or which church they attend,” acting Ukrainian President Oleksandr Turchynov said.
Tensions in the mostly Russian-speaking Crimea have worsened since gunmen took control of the regional legislature this week and installed a pro-Kremlin premier, Sergey Aksenov.
Ukraine asked the European Union, the U.S. and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to consider “all means’ for the defense of its territorial integrity, the Interfax news service reported, citing Foreign Minister Andriy Deshchystya.
The United Nations Security Council held an emergency session to discuss the events in Ukraine. Following a request from Poland, NATO’s North Atlantic Council will meet today for consultations on a potential threat to its security.
‘Act of Aggression’
In a statement to the Security Council, Ukrainian Ambassador to the UN Yuriy Sergeyev called on the international community ‘‘to do everything possible” to stop a Russian “act of aggression,” saying the number of Russian soldiers in Crimea is increasing “every hour.”
Russian UN Ambassador Vitaly Churkin said “cooler heads should prevail” and the West must stop spurring the conflict by encouraging protesters.
U.S. Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power called for observers and told the session that Russia approving the use of force is “dangerous and destabilizing.”
Canada is recalling its ambassador to Moscow, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said in a statement. Japanese Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida said his country is concerned about the situation and urged all parties to exercise restraint.
‘Back Off’
“People right around the world will be thinking right now: hands off the Ukraine,” Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said today, according to an e-mailed transcript of an interview on Channel 10’s “The Bolt Report.” “This is not the kind of action of a friend and neighbor and really, Russia should back off.”
Crimea was given to Ukraine by Russia in 1954 by then-Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. Ethnic Russians comprise 59 percent of Crimea’s population of about 2 million people, with 24 percent Ukrainian and 12 percent Tatar, according to 2001 census data. Russians make up 17 percent of Ukraine’s entire population of 45 million people.
Heeding a request by Putin to protect ethnic Russians, lawmakers in Moscow yesterday voted unanimously to allow him to send troops to its neighbor after unidentified troops seized facilities in Ukraine’s southern Crimea region.
‘Naked Aggression’
Ukraine is diverting funds for the military, Yatsenyuk said. Putin had no reason to request the use of force against Ukraine as Russians aren’t under threat, Turchynov said.
Turchynov earlier accused Russia of “naked aggression.” Ukraine’s defense minister said yesterday that Russia has sent 6,000 more soldiers into Crimea in the past 24 hours, while Crimean Premier Sergey Aksenov, who asked Russia for help, said Russian troops were guarding key buildings there, Interfax news service reported.
“The situation is under control,” Aksenov, who had asked for aid from Russia and was voted as leader in a closed-door session after gunmen took control of the legislature this week, was quoted as saying by Interfax. “Cooperation has been established with the Black Sea Fleet on guarding crucial facilities.”
A U.S. official described events over the past days as an orchestrated series of steps intended to make Russian military intervention in Crimea appear legitimate. The official requested anonymity to discuss classified intelligence matters.
‘Tyranny and Violence’
Putin has not yet made a decision on when to send troops, his spokesman Dmitry Peskov said by phone. Ukraine’s government said efforts to speak with Russia’s Foreign Ministry were ignored.
The vote by Russian lawmakers followed an appeal by the council of Russia’s State Duma to protect Russians in Crimea from “tyranny and violence,” RIA Novosti reported, citing SpeakerSergei Naryshkin.
Lawmakers also said Russia should no longer abide by a 1994 agreement under which Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in exchange for a guarantee from the U.S., U.K. and Russia to protect its independence and territorial integrity.
Russia’s Foreign Ministry said gunmen “sent by Kiev” tried to seize Crimea’s Interior Ministry. An unidentified group of masked men also took over the trade union building in Crimea’s capital, Simferopol.
Gunmen earlier surrounded Crimea’s main airport in the capital, while more than 10 trucks carrying Russian servicemen encircled the Kirov military airfield, Interfax reported, citing an unidentified person in the Ukrainian military.
Pro-Russian protesters yesterday stormed the chamber of the regional government in Kharkiv, a city in Ukraine’s northeast, and ejected government supporters in clashes where both sides threw stones and wielded sticks, the Unian news service reported yesterday.
Moscow’s Orbit
Russia has alarmed Western leaders with moves in Crimea to thwart any push by Ukraine’s democratic movement to draw the nation toward the European Union and out of Moscow’s orbit.
The turmoil comes as Ukraine’s new government tries to shore up an economy in need of aid. Ukraine needs $15 billion in the next 2 1/2 years from the International Monetary Fund, and securing a deal at the start of April would be the best scenario, Finance Minister Oleksandr Shlapak said in Kiev yesterday.
It wasn’t clear what tools the U.S. and its allies have to deter Russia from escalating the situation.
“There could be trade or financial sanctions on Russia,” said Daniel Serwer, senior fellow at the Center for Transatlantic Relations at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington. “The problem is no one wants to go back to a Cold War.”
Russian Goal
A full invasion of Ukraine could risk interrupting deliveries of Russian gas to other European nations and further destabilizing a country that’s already on the brink of default and elected a new government only this week. Gazprom yesterday reiterated that Ukraine owes $1.55 billion for supplies of Russian gas, RIA said, citing company officials.
Putin’s goal may instead be to ensure Russia’s military dominance of the region survives through its hold on the deep-water Black Sea port of Sevastopol, which it received in a leasing deal with Ukraine until 2042. The threat of military force may set the stage for a referendum slated for March 30 in Crimea over whether the region should have more independence from Kiev, said Ruslan Pukhov, director of the Moscow-based Center of Analysis of Strategies and Technologies.
“What the Russian army is doing now is guaranteeing the impossibility for Kiev to use force in Crimea and to ensure that the referendum will be passed,” Pukhov said by phone yesterday. “Putin’s goal is to have Crimea with as wide rights of autonomy as possible and become de facto Russia’s unofficial protectorate. The plan is to keep the Black Sea fleet forever.”
To contact the reporters on this story: Daryna Krasnolutska in Kiev atdkrasnolutsk@bloomberg.net; Volodymyr Verbyany in Simferopol, Ukraine atvverbyany1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Balazs Penz at bpenz@bloomberg.net; John Walcott at jwalcott9@bloomberg.net Alaa Shahine, Andrew J. Barden
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Ukraine’s Acting President Puts All Armed Forces On Full Combat Alert | Zero Hedge
Ukraine’s Acting President Puts All Armed Forces On Full Combat Alert | Zero Hedge.
In a stunning 24 hours, it now appears that Russia and the Ukraine are one formal announcement away from a state of war. From moments ago, as reported by Bloomberg:
- UKRAINE ACTING PRESIDENT PUTS ALL FORCES ON FULL COMBAT ALERT
And this, as reported by the NYT, virtually assures the escalation to a hot war, as some provocation, somewhere will certainly take place: “a Ukrainian military official in Crimea said Ukrainian soldiers had been told to “open fire” if they came under attack by Russia troops or others.”
From Reuters:
Ukraine put its armed forces on full combat alert on Saturday and warned Russia that any military intervention in the country would lead to war.
After a more than three-hour meeting with security and defence chiefs, Acting President Oleksander Turchinov said there was no justification for what he called Russian aggression against his country.
Standing beside Turchinov, Prime Minister Arseny Yatseniuk said he had urged Russia to return its troops to base in the Crimea region during a phone call with Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev and called for talks.
“Military intervention would be the beginning of war and the end of any relations between Ukraine and Russia,” Yatseniuk told reporters.
Finally, this:
- Ukraine protects all Ukrainians, acting President Oleksandr Turchynov says in Kiev briefing.
- Ukraine Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk: “diverting funds for military”
- Turchynov: untrue that Russians are under threat
- Turchynov: no reason for Putin request
- Turchynov calls for national unity
- Yatsenyuk says to take all measures to ensure peace
- Yatsenyuk: no reason for Russia to intervene in Ukraine
Too late.
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Ukraine's Acting President Puts All Armed Forces On Full Combat Alert | Zero Hedge
Ukraine’s Acting President Puts All Armed Forces On Full Combat Alert | Zero Hedge.
In a stunning 24 hours, it now appears that Russia and the Ukraine are one formal announcement away from a state of war. From moments ago, as reported by Bloomberg:
- UKRAINE ACTING PRESIDENT PUTS ALL FORCES ON FULL COMBAT ALERT
And this, as reported by the NYT, virtually assures the escalation to a hot war, as some provocation, somewhere will certainly take place: “a Ukrainian military official in Crimea said Ukrainian soldiers had been told to “open fire” if they came under attack by Russia troops or others.”
From Reuters:
Ukraine put its armed forces on full combat alert on Saturday and warned Russia that any military intervention in the country would lead to war.
After a more than three-hour meeting with security and defence chiefs, Acting President Oleksander Turchinov said there was no justification for what he called Russian aggression against his country.
Standing beside Turchinov, Prime Minister Arseny Yatseniuk said he had urged Russia to return its troops to base in the Crimea region during a phone call with Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev and called for talks.
“Military intervention would be the beginning of war and the end of any relations between Ukraine and Russia,” Yatseniuk told reporters.
Finally, this:
- Ukraine protects all Ukrainians, acting President Oleksandr Turchynov says in Kiev briefing.
- Ukraine Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk: “diverting funds for military”
- Turchynov: untrue that Russians are under threat
- Turchynov: no reason for Putin request
- Turchynov calls for national unity
- Yatsenyuk says to take all measures to ensure peace
- Yatsenyuk: no reason for Russia to intervene in Ukraine
Too late.
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Savagery for All | KUNSTLER
A glance through the annals of history tells us that the Golden Age of Ukraine occurred just as western Europe was emerging from its long, dark, post-Roman coma around the 10th and 11thcenturies, A.D. After that, it was a kind of polo field for sundry sweeping hordes of mounted hell-bringers: Tatars, Turks, Cossacks, Bulgars, Napoleon’s grand army. In modern times, its population was divided between allegiance to Russia or to the Germanic states of the west. The Russian soviet regime treated it very badly. As many Ukrainians starved to death under Stalin’s “terror famine” of 1932-1933 as Jews and others were killed later in Hitler’s death camps. Stalin went on to try and totally erase Ukraine’s ethnic identity.
The Nazis wanted to go even further: to erase the Slavic population altogether so that the great fertile “breadbasket” of Ukraine could provide lebensraum for German colonizers. Stalin foolishly signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler in 1939 — had he not read Mein Kampf? Less than two years later, Germany turned around and invaded Russia, using Ukraine as doormat and mud-room for a horrific struggle that left Kiev, the capital city of Ukraine, a virtual ashtray, and 28,000 villages destroyed.
Culture, as we know, is resilient. But given that history, one wonders what the current disposition of all these historical tides portends. The few thousand Americans not completely distracted by tweeting the content of their breakfasts or shooting naked selfies or texting behind the wheel — yea, even the gallant minority not mentally colonized by the slave-masters of Silicon Valley — must wonder what the heck happened in the streets of Kiev last week. Or, as Sir Mick Jagger famously said at the deadly Altamont Speedway festival, “Who’s fighting, and what for?” By the way, don’t count the editors of The New York Times among the aforementioned gallant minority of digital idiocy resisters. Today’s front page contained this rich nugget:
KIEV, Ukraine — Ukraine’s acting interior minister issued a warrant on Monday for the arrest of former President Viktor F. Yanukovych, accusing him of mass killing of civilian protesters in demonstrations last week…. Arsen Avakov, the acting official, made the announcement on his official Facebook page Monday.
Perhaps there’s a trend in this: all government information around the world will henceforth be transmitted by Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg will come to lead a New World Order of universal friendship. Remind me to send a friend request to Arsen Avakov and de-friend Victor F. Yanukovych.
I suppose the geopolitical bottom-line in all this is that the Ukrainians must feel more comfortable tilting toward a de-Nazified Germany than submitting to the attentions of a de-sovietized Russia. Both would-be patrons are dangling money before a rather cash-strapped Ukraine, which is faced by bond interest payouts that it can’t possibly come up with, not to mention some scratch to just keep the streetcars running. (Forgive me for pointing out that Ukraine at least has streetcars, unlike the USA, which just has cars on streets.)
Given the International Monetary Fund’s record as the West’s official loan shark, would a Ukraine government be wise to turn there for a handout? Meanwhile, is everybody pretending that the Ukraine is not crisscrossed by a great web of natural gas pipelines? And is it not obvious that the gas flows in one direction: from Russia to Europe. So, how exactly would it benefit western Europe if Ukraine got more cuddly with them? Russia could still shut down the gas valve at the source? If the Europeans had any common sense, you’d think they would just butt out of this struggle and quit dangling money and offers of friendship to a nation whose greatest potential is to be a perpetual battleground in yet another unnecessary dreadful conflict.
Let’s hope the American government is just grandstanding in the background because we have less business in this feud than in the doings of Middle Earth. National Security Advisor Susan Rice was flogging ultimatums around on “Meet the Press” yesterday — some blather about right of the Ukrainian people “to fulfill their aspirations and be democratic and be part of Europe, which they choose to be.”
If anything, the uprising in Kiev last week should remind us that Europe’s history is long and deep in bloodshed and that one particular Ukrainian politician who employs snipers to shoot through the hearts of his adversaries is not the only person or party across that broad region capable of reawakening the hell-bringers. There are quite a few other countries over there that could disintegrate politically in the months ahead, nations faced with insurmountable financial and economic troubles. The USA has enough problems of its own. Maybe it should tweet a message to itself.
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Savagery for All | KUNSTLER
A glance through the annals of history tells us that the Golden Age of Ukraine occurred just as western Europe was emerging from its long, dark, post-Roman coma around the 10th and 11thcenturies, A.D. After that, it was a kind of polo field for sundry sweeping hordes of mounted hell-bringers: Tatars, Turks, Cossacks, Bulgars, Napoleon’s grand army. In modern times, its population was divided between allegiance to Russia or to the Germanic states of the west. The Russian soviet regime treated it very badly. As many Ukrainians starved to death under Stalin’s “terror famine” of 1932-1933 as Jews and others were killed later in Hitler’s death camps. Stalin went on to try and totally erase Ukraine’s ethnic identity.
The Nazis wanted to go even further: to erase the Slavic population altogether so that the great fertile “breadbasket” of Ukraine could provide lebensraum for German colonizers. Stalin foolishly signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler in 1939 — had he not read Mein Kampf? Less than two years later, Germany turned around and invaded Russia, using Ukraine as doormat and mud-room for a horrific struggle that left Kiev, the capital city of Ukraine, a virtual ashtray, and 28,000 villages destroyed.
Culture, as we know, is resilient. But given that history, one wonders what the current disposition of all these historical tides portends. The few thousand Americans not completely distracted by tweeting the content of their breakfasts or shooting naked selfies or texting behind the wheel — yea, even the gallant minority not mentally colonized by the slave-masters of Silicon Valley — must wonder what the heck happened in the streets of Kiev last week. Or, as Sir Mick Jagger famously said at the deadly Altamont Speedway festival, “Who’s fighting, and what for?” By the way, don’t count the editors of The New York Times among the aforementioned gallant minority of digital idiocy resisters. Today’s front page contained this rich nugget:
KIEV, Ukraine — Ukraine’s acting interior minister issued a warrant on Monday for the arrest of former President Viktor F. Yanukovych, accusing him of mass killing of civilian protesters in demonstrations last week…. Arsen Avakov, the acting official, made the announcement on his official Facebook page Monday.
Perhaps there’s a trend in this: all government information around the world will henceforth be transmitted by Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg will come to lead a New World Order of universal friendship. Remind me to send a friend request to Arsen Avakov and de-friend Victor F. Yanukovych.
I suppose the geopolitical bottom-line in all this is that the Ukrainians must feel more comfortable tilting toward a de-Nazified Germany than submitting to the attentions of a de-sovietized Russia. Both would-be patrons are dangling money before a rather cash-strapped Ukraine, which is faced by bond interest payouts that it can’t possibly come up with, not to mention some scratch to just keep the streetcars running. (Forgive me for pointing out that Ukraine at least has streetcars, unlike the USA, which just has cars on streets.)
Given the International Monetary Fund’s record as the West’s official loan shark, would a Ukraine government be wise to turn there for a handout? Meanwhile, is everybody pretending that the Ukraine is not crisscrossed by a great web of natural gas pipelines? And is it not obvious that the gas flows in one direction: from Russia to Europe. So, how exactly would it benefit western Europe if Ukraine got more cuddly with them? Russia could still shut down the gas valve at the source? If the Europeans had any common sense, you’d think they would just butt out of this struggle and quit dangling money and offers of friendship to a nation whose greatest potential is to be a perpetual battleground in yet another unnecessary dreadful conflict.
Let’s hope the American government is just grandstanding in the background because we have less business in this feud than in the doings of Middle Earth. National Security Advisor Susan Rice was flogging ultimatums around on “Meet the Press” yesterday — some blather about right of the Ukrainian people “to fulfill their aspirations and be democratic and be part of Europe, which they choose to be.”
If anything, the uprising in Kiev last week should remind us that Europe’s history is long and deep in bloodshed and that one particular Ukrainian politician who employs snipers to shoot through the hearts of his adversaries is not the only person or party across that broad region capable of reawakening the hell-bringers. There are quite a few other countries over there that could disintegrate politically in the months ahead, nations faced with insurmountable financial and economic troubles. The USA has enough problems of its own. Maybe it should tweet a message to itself.
Olduvaiblog: Musings on the coming collapse 