Now, I am pretty used to Machiavellianism in politics, but damn if Blinken didn't raise the National bullshit-o-meter with this statement:
"Anthony Blinken says, "reject the right of one country to change the borders of another by force; to dictate to another the policies it pursues or the choices it makes, including with whom to associate; or to exert a sphere of influence that would subjugate sovereign neighbors to its will."
Thank you, Aaron, for another well-researched and informative article on the crisis in Ukraine. I wanted to highlight two important points that you made:
1. The immediate background came in the fall of 2013, when the US and its allies pressured Yanukovych to sign a European Union association agreement that would have curtailed its ties to Russia.
2. The agreement also contained a provision calling on Europe to adhere to the EU's "military and security" policies, "which meant in effect, without mentioning the alliance, NATO," as the late scholar Stephen F. Cohen argued.
In an attempt to resolve this impasse and perilous situation, it is important to note, per Professor Cohen, that Putin put forth a proposal for a EU-Ukraine-Russia trade agreement. Unfortunately, Putin's proposal for a tripartite trade agreement was shunned by the Western powers, making Ukraine choose between Russia and the West, thus contributing to the current powder keg.
this may be redundant, but Jimmy Dore just had Peter Lavelle on Re: Ukraine warmongering. Peter praised your recent intv w/ Richard Sakwa. Peter may be a good intv if you think he can add further context.
Note that the West doesn't have any really good options here. Sanctions are likely to be ineffective, both because the West needs Russian petroleum and because Russia has largely de-dollarized and sits on massive and growing cash and gold reserves. At the same time, Ukraine is a kakistocracy by any reasonable definition, and without constant infusions to the tune of billions of dollars both from the IMF and from gas transit revenues from Russia, it would be in more pathetic shape than it already is. (And no, don't blame the war. Ukraine was a kleptocracy long before 2014, although the leadership since that time has been more corrupt and thievish than even Ukraine pre-2014 was used to.)
And you had better hope that there are no good outcomes, for even if a NATO military action could be won on behalf of the Ukrainian nationalists (and every wargame going back at least ten years suggests that it can't), there is no such scenario that doesn't end in WWIII. So who here is ready to take a nuke on behalf of the Nazis of Lvov?
At the same time, even though he has no good cards to play, Biden cannot be seen to climb down. In part this is because America is a declining power and therefore it cannot let its vassals start to get ideas. But the real problem is the fundamentally Third World nature of contemporary United States politics.
If you have ever spent more than a few hours living in a Third World country and you were sort of paying attention during this time, you will note that politics in such a country is a zero-sum game. Anything that helps your opponents hurts you, and anything that helps you hurts your opponents. So even a policy that benefits the country as a whole must be bitterly be opposed, if your opponents are for it or it also benefits them. (War and the military seem to be the exception in the United States. Wars that in no way benefit the country enjoy unswerving bipartisan support, rising even to the status of sacred cows that must never be questioned. This is also a common feature of Third World polities.)
This means that if Biden calls for anything less than Total Victory, his opponents on Team R will pounce, calling for the fainting couch and rending their garments most piteously while wailing something about "appeasement", and insisting that Trump is the reincarnation of Winston Churchill who would have pushed The Button sooner and better.
It doesn't help that Team D was doing the same thing to Trump a year or so ago, pushing wackadoodle conspiracy theories that were contradicted by all available facts and just about everything that the Trump maladministration did. So for Team R, the opportunity to call the other guy an appeaser and weakling acting on behalf of foreign powers is especially sweet.
I disagree with Mate, here. He thinks the US is conducting diplomacy. That is wishful thinking. The US posture towards Russia has not changed in 100 years. The policy imo became operative after the creation of the federal reserve in 1913. We know bankers funded Lenin and sent him back to Russia to lead the Bolshevik revolution. The bankers have always played the long game. Their goal has never changed. This explains why the US refuses to treat Russia with respect. It's why the US will not do diplomacy with Putin. He has tried again and again and each tome they have spurned him. This hatred tells us there is something deep going on here. This explains why the real US policy is regime change. Bankers and their CIA storm troopers are standing behind Biden telling him what to do. They are the power now in the US -- not the president. The goal has never changed: remove Putin, replace him with a puppet, balkanize Russia, and get on with the immensely profitable enterprise of looting Siberia. The banksters always keep their eyes on the prize. Russia will cease to exist as a nation. The Russian people will disappear or remain as slave labor. This is the plan. Will it succeed? Or will it plunge us into nuclear war? No one can say. Pray for peace.
US “colored revolution” coup is a tragedy and crime against beautiful people of Ukraine and Russia, Slavic people that share so much culture and history.
Crimea was part of Russia from 1783, when the Tsarist Empire annexed it a decade after defeating Ottoman forces in the Battle of Kozludzha, until 1954, when the Soviet government transferred Crimea from the Russian Soviet Federation of Socialist Republics (RSFSR) to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (UkrSSR). The transfer was announced in the Soviet press in late February 1954, eight days after the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet adopted a resolution authorizing the move on 19 February. The text of the resolution and some anodyne excerpts from the proceedings of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet meeting on 19 February were published along with the very brief announcement.[1] Nothing else about the transfer was disclosed at the time, and no further information was made available during the remainder of the Soviet era.
Not until 1992, just after the Soviet Union was dissolved, did additional material about this episode emerge. A historical-archival journal, Istoricheskii arkhiv (Historical Archive), which had been published in the USSR from 1955 until 1962, began appearing again in 1992 with transcriptions of declassified documents from the former Soviet archive.
That the transfer was justified solely by Crimea’s cultural and economic affinities with Ukraine is -- far-fetched. In the 1950s, the population of Crimea — approximately 1.1 million — was roughly 75 percent ethnic Russian and 25 percent Ukrainian. A sizable population of Tatars had lived in Crimea for centuries until May 1944, when they were deported en masse by the Stalinist regime to barren sites in Central Asia, where they were compelled to live for more than four decades and were prohibited from returning to their homeland. Stalin also forcibly deported smaller populations of Armenians, Bulgarians, and Greeks from Crimea, completing the ethnic cleansing of the peninsula. Hence, in 1954, Crimea was more “Russian” than it had been for centuries.
Crimea had originally been an “autonomous republic” (avtonomnaya respublika) in the RSFSR, but its status was changed to that of an “oblast’” (province) in the RSFSR in 1945, ostensibly because the forced removal of the Crimean Tatars had eliminated the need for autonomy. After the Crimean oblast was transferred to the UkSSR in 1954, it retained the status of an oblast’ within Soviet Ukraine for 37 years. In early 1991, after a referendum was held in the UkrSSR and a resolution was adopted a month later by the UkrSSR parliament, the status of Crimea was upgraded to that of an “autonomous republic.” Crimea retained that designation within Ukraine after the Soviet Union broke apart.
A tragic irony of the Crimean transfer is that an action of sixty years ago, taken by Moscow to strengthen its control over Ukraine, has come back to haunt Ukraine today.
Very strong piece. I particularly appreciate the hypocrisy of the US and other NATO members clinging to the false "principle" of any nation's right to join an alliance. I wonder if they would be so enthusiastic about any nation's right to join an alliance if and when Putin lands basing rights and/or positions forces in Cuba and Venezuela to mirror image the US/NATO behavior -- an option he has made clear he may choose. Watch as all this foolishness results in a DOD supplemental this year and a boost for next year. Whatever Biden requests, the Republicans will boost with the Dems pre-emptively capitulating.
Key players in the Russia-gate hoax and impeachment “entertainments” are now hyperventilating about “all but certain major war in Europe a la WW2” – repulsive ghouls Adam Schiff, colonel Alexander Windman (an extremist Ukrainian) and Fiona Hill (a rabid Cold War warrior on National Security Council). Same lying bastards who led the scam of the century concocted by the SAME lying team -- Obama-Biden-Hillary-Pelosi-Schumer-Schiff and the rest of DNC-CIA/FBI cabal.
Adam Schiff has been, for years, a leading recipient of huge “donations” by arm industry – his main source of funds. Remember when Raytheon in 2013 put on a Beyonce concert to promote Adam Schiff? This despicable -- that human excrement and serial liar is among leading Congress war-mongers and recipient of arm industry donations.
Schiff is now driving government’s domestic terrorism legislation !! In his free time this loathsome grifter wants to write a novel – of all things about Holocaust.
The entire Russia-gate lying team is back in FULL power -- we are now paying the price for not fully unmasking the brazen scam of the century. Of course, Trump and GOP lunatics were and remain VERY bad, however – however, DNC lying and warmongering team is INFINITELY more dangerous. They will likely try to prevent 2022 elections - as "illegal" - in order to stay in power.
Also remember – Biden was the governor of Ukraine under Obama – selecting and removing heads of industry and Ukraine’s puppet government after successful US coup there. The immense corruption of Biden family still needs to be investigated – Hunter’s Burisma was used to ‘wash” their dirty money. Thanks heavens that recent “colored revolution” coups in Belarus and Kazakhstan were not successful.
PS-1: WHO will be the first current or former Democrat Congresswoman/man or Senator to publicly acknowledge and confirm the brazen scam of the century – DNC’s + CIA/FBI security complex (St. Obama/Biden/Hillary/Pelosi/Schumer, Jammie Raskin, etc. + Brennan, Clapper, Hayden, etc.) Russia-gate hoax and subsequent conspiracies, including 1/6 “armed insurrection”?
War-monger vampires must be stopped. Military-industrial complex must be defunded – US main “products” and exports are now weapons, coups and immense and all-encompassing corruption. China is far more capitalist than the US, Russia has not been Communist for 30+ years, while the US is a corporate socialism (more polite term for fascism)
Please read slowly and carefully – an outstanding Brazilian politician
If anyone doubts that truth is the enemy in the Empire of Lies they can just check your CIA-Wikipedia bio and see how the OPCW whistleblowers reporting at Grayzone are treated. Censored science has a familiar ring to it, eh?
Being an old Vietnam veteran, it amazes me how little things have really changed for the court stenographers in the Fourth Estate. And nothing has changed in over a half-century. Think about that for a moment: in over half-a-century. It boggles the mind. Reporters, once again, are beating their little tin drums for war in Ukraine. So from the fall of Saigon to the fall of Kabul, as Yogi Berra said to reporters in the clubroom after losing - again - the second game in a double-header, "Boys, it's deja vu, all over again." But half-a-century of disastrous foreign policy debacles and humiliating military defeats for "the indispensable nation" that "stands taller and sees farther" than other nations. And yet nothing has changed? Who wins in these wars we have fought? The arms merchants. At Brown University at the Wilson Institute, there is a project called the Costs of War. Since the war in Afghanistan, the Pentagon has squandered $14 trillion, and one-third up to one-half goes to the corporations that profit from war. If you had $10,000 to invest in Raytheon, which manufactures the cruise missile, that investment would now be worth $77,000. My deepest fear in this Ukraine crisis is somehow we will be drawn into the war as the great European powers were into the First World War after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie Chotek in Sarjajevo on 28 June 1914. Remember the most fought over real estate in the 20th century was in Eurasia. And, well, it's deja vu, all over again. We're back in Eurasia. Biden and the elites, meaning the bipartisan war lobby and the media, are riding a tiger. But Biden is holding on for dear life by holding onto its tail having whipped up this war hysteria. It has become almost a mass war psychosis in this country the way civilians here are acting because the victims are whit this time and look and live like them. I hope and pray I'm wrong and must admit I'm being emotional. I know I suffer from catastrophic thinking having been traumatized my tour of duty in Vietnam as a medical corpsman. But things are getting very dicey.
The Ukraine crisis, sponsored by US hegemony and war profiteers
Great essay. Was there not a referendum in Crimea where 96% voted to rejoin Russia? So many say Russia re-took Crimea by force or some such BS.
Now, I am pretty used to Machiavellianism in politics, but damn if Blinken didn't raise the National bullshit-o-meter with this statement:
"Anthony Blinken says, "reject the right of one country to change the borders of another by force; to dictate to another the policies it pursues or the choices it makes, including with whom to associate; or to exert a sphere of influence that would subjugate sovereign neighbors to its will."
Thank you, Aaron, for another well-researched and informative article on the crisis in Ukraine. I wanted to highlight two important points that you made:
1. The immediate background came in the fall of 2013, when the US and its allies pressured Yanukovych to sign a European Union association agreement that would have curtailed its ties to Russia.
2. The agreement also contained a provision calling on Europe to adhere to the EU's "military and security" policies, "which meant in effect, without mentioning the alliance, NATO," as the late scholar Stephen F. Cohen argued.
In an attempt to resolve this impasse and perilous situation, it is important to note, per Professor Cohen, that Putin put forth a proposal for a EU-Ukraine-Russia trade agreement. Unfortunately, Putin's proposal for a tripartite trade agreement was shunned by the Western powers, making Ukraine choose between Russia and the West, thus contributing to the current powder keg.
this may be redundant, but Jimmy Dore just had Peter Lavelle on Re: Ukraine warmongering. Peter praised your recent intv w/ Richard Sakwa. Peter may be a good intv if you think he can add further context.
Professor Adam Tooze is known as an informed, dispassionate and even-handed economist. Read his Substack below, for there is not a dull word in it.
https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-68-putins-challenge-to
Note that the West doesn't have any really good options here. Sanctions are likely to be ineffective, both because the West needs Russian petroleum and because Russia has largely de-dollarized and sits on massive and growing cash and gold reserves. At the same time, Ukraine is a kakistocracy by any reasonable definition, and without constant infusions to the tune of billions of dollars both from the IMF and from gas transit revenues from Russia, it would be in more pathetic shape than it already is. (And no, don't blame the war. Ukraine was a kleptocracy long before 2014, although the leadership since that time has been more corrupt and thievish than even Ukraine pre-2014 was used to.)
And you had better hope that there are no good outcomes, for even if a NATO military action could be won on behalf of the Ukrainian nationalists (and every wargame going back at least ten years suggests that it can't), there is no such scenario that doesn't end in WWIII. So who here is ready to take a nuke on behalf of the Nazis of Lvov?
At the same time, even though he has no good cards to play, Biden cannot be seen to climb down. In part this is because America is a declining power and therefore it cannot let its vassals start to get ideas. But the real problem is the fundamentally Third World nature of contemporary United States politics.
If you have ever spent more than a few hours living in a Third World country and you were sort of paying attention during this time, you will note that politics in such a country is a zero-sum game. Anything that helps your opponents hurts you, and anything that helps you hurts your opponents. So even a policy that benefits the country as a whole must be bitterly be opposed, if your opponents are for it or it also benefits them. (War and the military seem to be the exception in the United States. Wars that in no way benefit the country enjoy unswerving bipartisan support, rising even to the status of sacred cows that must never be questioned. This is also a common feature of Third World polities.)
This means that if Biden calls for anything less than Total Victory, his opponents on Team R will pounce, calling for the fainting couch and rending their garments most piteously while wailing something about "appeasement", and insisting that Trump is the reincarnation of Winston Churchill who would have pushed The Button sooner and better.
It doesn't help that Team D was doing the same thing to Trump a year or so ago, pushing wackadoodle conspiracy theories that were contradicted by all available facts and just about everything that the Trump maladministration did. So for Team R, the opportunity to call the other guy an appeaser and weakling acting on behalf of foreign powers is especially sweet.
I disagree with Mate, here. He thinks the US is conducting diplomacy. That is wishful thinking. The US posture towards Russia has not changed in 100 years. The policy imo became operative after the creation of the federal reserve in 1913. We know bankers funded Lenin and sent him back to Russia to lead the Bolshevik revolution. The bankers have always played the long game. Their goal has never changed. This explains why the US refuses to treat Russia with respect. It's why the US will not do diplomacy with Putin. He has tried again and again and each tome they have spurned him. This hatred tells us there is something deep going on here. This explains why the real US policy is regime change. Bankers and their CIA storm troopers are standing behind Biden telling him what to do. They are the power now in the US -- not the president. The goal has never changed: remove Putin, replace him with a puppet, balkanize Russia, and get on with the immensely profitable enterprise of looting Siberia. The banksters always keep their eyes on the prize. Russia will cease to exist as a nation. The Russian people will disappear or remain as slave labor. This is the plan. Will it succeed? Or will it plunge us into nuclear war? No one can say. Pray for peace.
Why Did Russia Give Away Crimea Sixty Years Ago?
https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/why-did-russia-give-away-crimea-sixty-years-ago
US “colored revolution” coup is a tragedy and crime against beautiful people of Ukraine and Russia, Slavic people that share so much culture and history.
Crimea was part of Russia from 1783, when the Tsarist Empire annexed it a decade after defeating Ottoman forces in the Battle of Kozludzha, until 1954, when the Soviet government transferred Crimea from the Russian Soviet Federation of Socialist Republics (RSFSR) to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (UkrSSR). The transfer was announced in the Soviet press in late February 1954, eight days after the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet adopted a resolution authorizing the move on 19 February. The text of the resolution and some anodyne excerpts from the proceedings of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet meeting on 19 February were published along with the very brief announcement.[1] Nothing else about the transfer was disclosed at the time, and no further information was made available during the remainder of the Soviet era.
Not until 1992, just after the Soviet Union was dissolved, did additional material about this episode emerge. A historical-archival journal, Istoricheskii arkhiv (Historical Archive), which had been published in the USSR from 1955 until 1962, began appearing again in 1992 with transcriptions of declassified documents from the former Soviet archive.
That the transfer was justified solely by Crimea’s cultural and economic affinities with Ukraine is -- far-fetched. In the 1950s, the population of Crimea — approximately 1.1 million — was roughly 75 percent ethnic Russian and 25 percent Ukrainian. A sizable population of Tatars had lived in Crimea for centuries until May 1944, when they were deported en masse by the Stalinist regime to barren sites in Central Asia, where they were compelled to live for more than four decades and were prohibited from returning to their homeland. Stalin also forcibly deported smaller populations of Armenians, Bulgarians, and Greeks from Crimea, completing the ethnic cleansing of the peninsula. Hence, in 1954, Crimea was more “Russian” than it had been for centuries.
Crimea had originally been an “autonomous republic” (avtonomnaya respublika) in the RSFSR, but its status was changed to that of an “oblast’” (province) in the RSFSR in 1945, ostensibly because the forced removal of the Crimean Tatars had eliminated the need for autonomy. After the Crimean oblast was transferred to the UkSSR in 1954, it retained the status of an oblast’ within Soviet Ukraine for 37 years. In early 1991, after a referendum was held in the UkrSSR and a resolution was adopted a month later by the UkrSSR parliament, the status of Crimea was upgraded to that of an “autonomous republic.” Crimea retained that designation within Ukraine after the Soviet Union broke apart.
A tragic irony of the Crimean transfer is that an action of sixty years ago, taken by Moscow to strengthen its control over Ukraine, has come back to haunt Ukraine today.
Very strong piece. I particularly appreciate the hypocrisy of the US and other NATO members clinging to the false "principle" of any nation's right to join an alliance. I wonder if they would be so enthusiastic about any nation's right to join an alliance if and when Putin lands basing rights and/or positions forces in Cuba and Venezuela to mirror image the US/NATO behavior -- an option he has made clear he may choose. Watch as all this foolishness results in a DOD supplemental this year and a boost for next year. Whatever Biden requests, the Republicans will boost with the Dems pre-emptively capitulating.
Key players in the Russia-gate hoax and impeachment “entertainments” are now hyperventilating about “all but certain major war in Europe a la WW2” – repulsive ghouls Adam Schiff, colonel Alexander Windman (an extremist Ukrainian) and Fiona Hill (a rabid Cold War warrior on National Security Council). Same lying bastards who led the scam of the century concocted by the SAME lying team -- Obama-Biden-Hillary-Pelosi-Schumer-Schiff and the rest of DNC-CIA/FBI cabal.
Adam Schiff has been, for years, a leading recipient of huge “donations” by arm industry – his main source of funds. Remember when Raytheon in 2013 put on a Beyonce concert to promote Adam Schiff? This despicable -- that human excrement and serial liar is among leading Congress war-mongers and recipient of arm industry donations.
http://politicalpartytime.org/party/36073/
Schiff is now driving government’s domestic terrorism legislation !! In his free time this loathsome grifter wants to write a novel – of all things about Holocaust.
The entire Russia-gate lying team is back in FULL power -- we are now paying the price for not fully unmasking the brazen scam of the century. Of course, Trump and GOP lunatics were and remain VERY bad, however – however, DNC lying and warmongering team is INFINITELY more dangerous. They will likely try to prevent 2022 elections - as "illegal" - in order to stay in power.
Also remember – Biden was the governor of Ukraine under Obama – selecting and removing heads of industry and Ukraine’s puppet government after successful US coup there. The immense corruption of Biden family still needs to be investigated – Hunter’s Burisma was used to ‘wash” their dirty money. Thanks heavens that recent “colored revolution” coups in Belarus and Kazakhstan were not successful.
Aaron your Friday interview with Tucker on Tucker-Tonight was OUTSTANDING -- THANK YOU.
https://covertactionmagazine.com/2022/01/27/is-lockheed-martin-dictating-politicos-war-propaganda-articles-in-secret-hell-no-theyre-doing-it-right-out-in-the-open/
Is Lockheed Martin Dictating Politico’s War Propaganda Articles in Secret?
Hell No–They’re Doing it Right Out in the Open
Thank you for true news
PS-1: WHO will be the first current or former Democrat Congresswoman/man or Senator to publicly acknowledge and confirm the brazen scam of the century – DNC’s + CIA/FBI security complex (St. Obama/Biden/Hillary/Pelosi/Schumer, Jammie Raskin, etc. + Brennan, Clapper, Hayden, etc.) Russia-gate hoax and subsequent conspiracies, including 1/6 “armed insurrection”?
War-monger vampires must be stopped. Military-industrial complex must be defunded – US main “products” and exports are now weapons, coups and immense and all-encompassing corruption. China is far more capitalist than the US, Russia has not been Communist for 30+ years, while the US is a corporate socialism (more polite term for fascism)
Please read slowly and carefully – an outstanding Brazilian politician
Inequality versus Woke BS
https://youtu.be/21i4l9T62HY
If anyone doubts that truth is the enemy in the Empire of Lies they can just check your CIA-Wikipedia bio and see how the OPCW whistleblowers reporting at Grayzone are treated. Censored science has a familiar ring to it, eh?
https://thegrayzone.com/tag/opcw-whistleblowers/
Missing Taibbi...However, You are doing great on Useful Idiots.
Being an old Vietnam veteran, it amazes me how little things have really changed for the court stenographers in the Fourth Estate. And nothing has changed in over a half-century. Think about that for a moment: in over half-a-century. It boggles the mind. Reporters, once again, are beating their little tin drums for war in Ukraine. So from the fall of Saigon to the fall of Kabul, as Yogi Berra said to reporters in the clubroom after losing - again - the second game in a double-header, "Boys, it's deja vu, all over again." But half-a-century of disastrous foreign policy debacles and humiliating military defeats for "the indispensable nation" that "stands taller and sees farther" than other nations. And yet nothing has changed? Who wins in these wars we have fought? The arms merchants. At Brown University at the Wilson Institute, there is a project called the Costs of War. Since the war in Afghanistan, the Pentagon has squandered $14 trillion, and one-third up to one-half goes to the corporations that profit from war. If you had $10,000 to invest in Raytheon, which manufactures the cruise missile, that investment would now be worth $77,000. My deepest fear in this Ukraine crisis is somehow we will be drawn into the war as the great European powers were into the First World War after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie Chotek in Sarjajevo on 28 June 1914. Remember the most fought over real estate in the 20th century was in Eurasia. And, well, it's deja vu, all over again. We're back in Eurasia. Biden and the elites, meaning the bipartisan war lobby and the media, are riding a tiger. But Biden is holding on for dear life by holding onto its tail having whipped up this war hysteria. It has become almost a mass war psychosis in this country the way civilians here are acting because the victims are whit this time and look and live like them. I hope and pray I'm wrong and must admit I'm being emotional. I know I suffer from catastrophic thinking having been traumatized my tour of duty in Vietnam as a medical corpsman. But things are getting very dicey.