All posts tagged: ukraine

MH17: “New evidence”, same issues

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Nearly four years since the incident, and over two years since they last reported any progress, the MH17 Joint Investigative Team (JIT) have held a press conference. To underline their previous position – they still think Russia did it. The timing of this statement could be seen as very politically convenient for the NATO allies and the Kiev regime. The West would have you believe that the proximity to the World Cup is purely coincidental. Whilst those suggesting that this is a great cover for Ukraine’s renewed shelling of separatists regions in the Donbass will surely be dismissed as “apologists” or “cynics”. None of that is really the issue though. Whether they truly have “new evidence”, or whether this is just a rehash of discredited Bellingcat nonsense, is immaterial. If the politically convenient timing is a coincidence or a stunt does not matter. The most important point is that the JIT is fatally and irredeemably flawed. The JIT, made up of investigators from Australia, the Netherlands, Malaysia and Ukraine…but not Russia, has obvious credibility problems …

Crisis in Armenia: Is the Empire Attacking Russia from the South?

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by Tyler Durden, via ZeroHedge, April 23, 2018 Western-Backed Regime Change Looms As Armenia PM Resigns Following Mass Protests After 11 days of mass protests and violent clashes over the perceived power-grab following the outgoing Armenian President’s election to Prime Minister, Serzh Sargsyan has resigned and police have released opposition leader Nikol Pashinyan. “The people are against my rule,” Sargsyan, who took office as prime minister after serving as Armenia’s president for 10 years, said in a statement. “I am leaving my post.” As Bloomberg reports, the announcement came as demonstrators flooded the streets of the capital, Yerevan, for an 11th day on Monday demanding Sargysan’s resignation, and hours after police released opposition leader Nikol Pashinyan from overnight detention. Pashinyan’s arrest prompted the largest protest to date on Sunday, while scores of troops joined the anti-government movement on Monday for the first time. Sargsyan’s election as Prime Minister was largely perceived as a power grab because Sargsyan will largely retain the same powers that he held during his two terms in the Presidential capacity, and …

Reality Check: The Guardian Restarts Push for Regime Change in Russia

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The alleged poisoning of ex-MI6 agent Sergei Skripal has caused the Russophobic MSM to go into overdrive. Nowhere is the desperation with which the Skripal case has been seized more obvious than the Guardian. Luke Harding is spluttering incoherently about a weapons lab that might not even exist anymore. Simon Jenkins gamely takes up his position as the only rational person left at the Guardian, before being heckled in the comments and dismissed as a contrarian by Michael White on twitter. More and more the media are becoming a home for dangerous, aggressive, confrontational rhethoric that has no place in sensible, adult newspapers.

Mueller Indictments: truth v lies in“The Observer View”

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Today’s Observer View focuses on the Announcement by Robert Mueller that they are indicting 13 Russians and 3 Russian companies for “interfering” in the 2016 Presidential election. It is, unsurprisingly, full of misleading language, lies by omission and just straight up lies.

Olympic Games Make US Regime Paranoid and Unpredictable

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Despite all the efforts of a paranoid and unpredictable US regime, the Koreans are making peace not war during the 2018 Winter Olympics. The US is furious and pulling out all the stops to tarnish the Games, and it is trying to put South Korea back on the US colonial leash. South Korea’s democratically elected peace-president Moon Jae-in is showing signs that he is not an America poodle on a short leash.

VIDEO: “Rethinking Putin: A talk by Prof. Steven F Cohen”

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Prof. Stephen Cohen offers a rare, thoughtful and objective consideration of Vladimir Putin – not as a demon or a messiah – but as human being. Delivered on the annual Nation cruise, December 2, 2017, introduced by Nation Editor and Publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel.

NATO – the tool of European neo-fascism and Pope’s “blessed silence”

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by Prof. Arthur Noble, via InSerbia March 24, 1999 was a day of gross shame and ignominy in the historical annals of Britain and America. It was the day when the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation became the North American Terrorist Organisation. NATO, for the first time since its founding in 1949, launched a vicious, unprovoked and illegal attack against the sovereign nation of Yugoslavia, in a pre-planned act of aggression sponsored by US President Bill Clinton. The 78 days of NATO air strikes took place without the necessary UN Security Council authorisation. It is equally loathsome that Clinton’s violence against the Serbs, who were our gallant allies in the battle against Hitler and the Nazis in World War II, was aided and abetted by his subservient poodle, the then British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Photo: defense.gov At one stroke NATO overturned the fundamental purpose of its founding charter, which committed it to assuring the freedom of its constituent members by means of a purely defensive system of collective security against the threat of the then …

Former U.S. Defense Secretary Explains Why Nuclear Holocaust Is Now Likely – but still can’t help being economic with truth about causes

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by Eric Zuesse The Stanford mathematician William J. Perry was a strategic nuclear advisor to U.S. President John Fitzgerald Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, and then he became U.S. Secretary of Defense under President Bill Clinton. He stated in a speech on November 28th at the National Cathedral in Washington DC, that “inexplicably to me, we’re recreating the geopolitical hostility of the Cold War, and we’re rebuilding the nuclear dangers,” and he went so far as to make clear why “I believe that the likelihood of some sort of a nuclear catastrophe today is actually greater than it was during the Cold War.” Since no transcript of Perry’s very important speech is yet available to the public, I’ve created my own transcript, though summarizing, or sometimes editing-out, extraneous courtesies and verbal slip-ups and corrections of himself (which self-corrections appear to have been due to difficulties he had reading from his typed text). This edited version of the speech he delivered on November 28th thus includes everything that’s of general public interest in …

More ‘Fake News,’ Alas, From the New York Times

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From The American Conservative via Information Clearing House Disregarding President Trump’s insistent claim that the establishment press propagates “fake news” requires a constant effort—especially when a prestigious outlet like the New York Times allows itself to be used for blatantly fraudulent purposes. I cherish the First Amendment. Mark me down as favoring journalism that is loud, lively, and confrontational. When members of the media snooze—falling for fictitious claims about Saddam’s WMD program or Gaddafi’s genocidal intentions, for example—we all lose. So the recent decision by Times editors to publish an op-ed regarding Paul Manafort’s involvement in Ukraine is disturbing. That the Times is keen to bring down Donald Trump is no doubt the case. Yet if efforts to do so entail grotesque distortions of U.S. policy before Trump, then we are courting real trouble. Put simply, ousting Trump should not come at the cost of whitewashing the follies that contributed to Trump’s rise in the first place. The offending Times op-ed, the handiwork of Evelyn N. Farkas, appears under the title “With Manafort, It Really …

The “European Values” think-tank and their list of “Useful Idiots”

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Just when you think that the Russo-phobic hysteria of the Western world couldn’t possibly make itself any more ridiculous…something like this comes along. This is the europeanvalues.net list of “useful idiots”. The list is very long, over 2300 names, because it contains the name of every person to ever appear on either Sputnik or RT. Hosts or guests, hostile or friendly, it doesn’t matter. If you’re on the list, you are a useful idiot.

MH17 Inquiry – Series 2, Episode 1. “What if it was a BUK?”

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This is the first part in the second season of videos and articles covering the downing of MH17, produced by the MH17 Inquiry. The first season is available here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5 and Part 6. Series 1 covered and disputed the major “findings” of both the MH 17 official inquiries and those of the “citizen journalist” groups. Beginning with in-depth investigations into the sightings of a BUK convoy in Zugres, that mysterious Elderberry bush, BBC coverage, sightings of a MIG fighter and ending with the enigmatic “To Whose Benefit?” Not being a group to sit on their laurels, nor on a cosy armchair like a Bellingcat … the MH 17 Inquiry authors have begun production of series 2, continuing their tradition of investigating on location, where the evidence is. The opening episode begins with a recap of the MH17 disaster, asking which countries have ever “accidentally” shot down a commercial passenger jet and how is it possible that such disasters happened? The inquiry travels to Tuusula in Finland, …

Russian TV Says U.S. Breaks Peace Treaty

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Eric Zuesse Headlining “‘More US troops at our borders’ – Russian Defense Ministry”, Russian Television (whose U.S. broadcasts the U.S. Government is considering to ban) reported, on Friday, October 13th, that “On Thursday, the U.S. announced the presence of a second [U.S.] regiment in the already very tense Baltic region, and Poland, and that’s a move which Moscow claims violates that fundamental peace treaty signed between Russia and NATO.” This report was referring to the NATO Founding Act, which had been signed in 1997 after Russian President Boris Yeltsin learned that the verbal promise which the agents of America’s President George H.W. Bush had made to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 that NATO would not move “one inch to the east”, was soon going to be broken, and that Hungary, Czech Republic, and Poland would be the first former Warsaw Pact nations to be added to NATO. Yeltsin was furious to learn of this, and so there were negotiations; and, this time around, Russia got the West’s signatures upon what was to be the …

Mexican Standoff Goes Nuclear

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Apart from the criminally insane, (John McCain, Lindsey Graham et al.) nobody wants war, particularly nuclear war. Unfortunately, however, war happens, sometimes by accident sometimes by design. The present standoff between the US/NATO and Russia and China is a case in point. The United States ever present hegemonic ambitions are hardly secret and have been displayed in their most virulent and openly aggressive forms since the collapse of the USSR.

Terror Incognita: ‘Demistifying’ the Fog of War

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by Sean Stinson, August 28, 2017 “The Muslim terrorist apparatus was created by US intelligence as a political weapon” – National security adviser to the Carter administration, Zbigniew Brzezinski “The truth is, there is no Islamic army or terrorist group called Al-Qaeda, and any informed intelligence officer knows this. But, there is a propaganda campaign to make the public believe in the presence of an intensified entity representing the ‘devil’ only in order to drive TV watchers to accept a unified international leadership for a war against terrorism. The country behind this propaganda is the United States.” – Former British Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” – H.L. Mencken Corporate propaganda is flying so thick and fast lately it’s dizzying just keeping up with it. For regular readers of the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Guardian, Vladimir Putin is the new Fuhrer of American …

The Nations that Accept Nazism Today

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Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org The U.S. Government leads a global operation to make racist fascism ‘respectable’ again. On 21 November 2014, in a vote at the United Nations on a Resolution opposing a resurgence of the racist-fascist ideology (opposing the ideology that’s commonly called “nazism”) which Resolution was titled “Combating glorification of Nazism, neo-nazism and other practices that contribute to contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia, and related intolerance”, 115 nations voted “Yes” to pass the Resolution, 3 voted “No” to reject it, and 55 voted “Abstain,” meaning they didn’t want to express a view on the resolution. An additional 19 didn’t vote at all on it (decided to absent themselves from that roll-call, for whatever reason — basically, not even saying whether they were neutral on it by voting “Abstain” — just said nothing at all on it). The document that they were voting on had been posted complete on 17 November 2014, and is still posted in its entirety here. As can be seen there, it had been proposed by …

The Battle of Charlottesville?

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by Jon Jeter, August 14, 2017 Mothafuckas just gonna have to be mad at me, I don’t give a fuck. This right here be some bullshit. Is Trump a neo-fascist?  By any critical measure, indeed he is. But for the life of me, I cannot come up with a single definition of fascism that would NOT also include Obama.  I suppose that if we stick to Cobb’s narrow prescriptions of “Nazism” it’s true that we have never before seen a feebler response as Trump’s inaction this weekend, sort of like it’s true that Michael Jordan and John Paxson once combined to score 71 points in a single game. But for those of us who are NOT sophists and understand Nazism as Germany’s particular expression of fascism, we recognize that there is a seamless continuity between Bush, Clinton, Baby Bush, Obama and the White House’s current occupant. Was Obama’s failure to prosecute a single police officer for the murders of black and brown people that occurred on his watch some kind of testament to liberal democracy? …

Russia: a target, not a superpower

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by Sara Flounders, via Workers.org The corporate media’s constant use of Cold War terminology to describe the meeting of the U.S. and Russian presidents as a meeting of the “two superpowers” masks the present relationship of forces. U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir V. Putin met at the Group of 20 summit on July 7 in Hamburg, Germany. Old preconceptions and terms must be challenged in order to have an accurate view of the present international situation. Russia today, as a capitalist country, is not even a fifth-rate economic power. The Russian economy is smaller than the economy of Brazil, south Korea or Canada. According to World Bank and International Monetary Fund measurements, Russia now ranks 12th globally in its gross domestic product. This measurement is the market value of goods and services. Today’s Russian Federation is a vastly different state — socially, politically, economically and militarily — from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics of even 27 years ago. It is important to understand what Russia is today in order to understand …

The Destructiveness of America’s Alliances

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byEric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org Alliances between nations are military. Without being military, they would be nothing. Trade agreements don’t require any alliances at all. World War I wouldn’t have occurred if there had not been alliances — it was built upon alliances. It was not built on trade agreements. It wasn’t even built on trading-blocs. In fact, as the WTO (World Trade Organization) has said: In the two decades prior to World War I, a number of tariff wars broke out, usually provoked by the establishment of a new, more protectionist tariff, or in the course of renegotiation of bilateral treaties.17 After the expiry of a treaty, tariffs were often raised temporarily as a means of improving negotiating leverage. … Despite the widespread increase of protectionist measures before World War I in continental Europe, the United States19, Argentina and other countries, world trade continued to expand rapidly. It goes on to observe: Even though the contention that trade and peace dovetail is still very present today,119 it is not uncontested on theoretical and …

Our media are not fit for purpose

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by Philip Roddis This morning, just after eight, BBC Radio 4’s John Humphrys interviewed an American ‘expert’ – didn’t catch the name – on the first meeting, today, of Trump and Putin. In the time between my reaching for the bread bin, and two slices of the moderately browned popping from the toaster, said expert had presented as incontestable truth – no need to back up such a claim – Russia’s ‘aggression’ as against America’s ‘caution’. People buy this crap, you know, if only subliminally. Why? Because the west, anglo saxon west in particular, long ago traded independence of foreign policy for favoured status in Washington, so framing the boundaries for mainstream discourse on global affairs. And because, thanks to English as world lingua franca, most of us grew up on a cultural diet of the US as force for good: the orientalist corollary being the inscrutable asiatic; untrustworthy and capable of unspeakable acts. (Nowadays no one says such things out loud of course. An age that’s given rise to so many new and useful …

The Economic Motive for America’s Current Wars

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Russia has long been the chief seller of energy — mainly gas and oil — in the world’s largest energy-market: the EU, or Europe. This means that U.S.-based energy companies, such as Exxon and Halliburton, aren’t the ones who dominate in supplying oil, gas, pipelines, and other energy-supplying needs, to the consumers and businesses in the world’s largest energy-market: Europe.