The PBS NewsHour invited on just about the worst person in the U.S. government to help Americans understand the crisis in Ukraine, writes Mike Madden.

By Mike MADDEN

U.S. Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland, who choreographed the 2014 coup that overthrew Ukraine’s democratically-elected government and set the current crisis in motion, was invited by PBS NewsHour on Dec. 7 to explain the standoff in Ukraine.

Typical of Western media, the story began with Russia’s involvement in eastern Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea, which took place in March 2014. The crisis actually began a week earlier with the violent overthrow of democratically-elected President Viktor Yanukovych on Feb. 22, 2014. While accusations flew of Russian aggression, invasion and annexation, there was not a word about the U.S. instigated coup or Nuland’s role in it.

For the sin of declining a Western aid package loaded with austerity measures, and accepting instead an unencumbered Russian package, Yanukovych became a target for U.S. regime change. Undersecretary Nuland’s role in the coup is essential to the story.

John McCain addressing crowd in Kiev, Dec. 15, 2013. (U.S. Senate/Office of Chris Murphy/Wikimedia Commons)

While Senators John McCain and Chris Murphy appeared on-stage in Kiev with far-right opposition leader Oleh Tyahnybok in support of the coup, Nuland and Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt passed out cookies to anti-government protesters in Maidan Square. This would be like Russian parliamentarians and diplomats coming to Washington to encourage protesters to overthrow the U.S. government.

Behind the scenes, in an intercepted phone call with Pyatt, Nuland can be heard plotting the make-up of a government to succeed that of Yanukovych. “Yats is the guy” she said, referring to Arseniy Yatsenyuk, America’s preferred leader for the Ukrainian people.

Her plan for the other two opposition leaders, Vitali Klitschko and Oleh Tyahnybok, was to keep them out, saying “I don’t think Klitsch should go into the government” and “What he [Yatsenyuk] needs is Klitsch and Tyahnybok on the outside.” As for Europe’s competing interests in the outcome of the affair, she infamously said “Fuck the EU.”

Nuland had told the U.S.-Ukrainian Foundation on Dec. 13, 2013, that Washington had spent $5 billion over a decade to support Ukraine’s “European aspirations,” in other words to pull it away from Russia.

To Nick Schifrin, the dutiful PBS reporter interviewing her, this episode was either not relevant, or an impolitic intrusion upon his esteemed guest. Or he was woefully uninformed.

While the United States was issuing stern warnings of restraint to Yanukovych, neo-Nazi tip-of-the-spear insurrectionists were stockpiling clubs, guns and Molotov cocktails in Maidan Square. With violence rapidly escalating, a deal was brokered between the government and the opposition on Feb. 21, 2014. Yanukovych agreed to immediate power sharing and early elections. In exchange, the opposition agreed to de-escalate the situation on the streets.

The opposition did not disarm as agreed. Smelling blood in the water, they went on the offensive again the next day. They overran security forces and ransacked government buildings. Snipers in opposition-occupied buildings shot police and protesters alike. Ultimately, over 100 people died, including more than a dozen police. Yanukovych and many of his Party of Regions allies fled for their lives. Ukraine’s democratically elected government fell on Feb. 22.

U.S.-backed, violent coup in Ukraine, 2014. (Wikipedia)

Neither Nuland nor Schifrin acknowledged this date, or any of the described events as contributing to the current crisis. It all fell outside their timeline.

“Yats” was sworn in as prime minister on Feb. 27, 2014. The U.S. now had its government in place. As violent as the coup had been, the real bloodbath was about to begin.

The Donbass region of eastern Ukraine, populated by a large number of ethnic Russians, did not recognize the coup government, whose first act was to outlaw the public use of the Russian language (which it later reversed). The Donbass immediately sought autonomy from Kiev. It saw the U.S.-installed regime as illegitimate and hostile to its interests and culture. In essence, it was defending a democratic election.

In April 2014, the Kiev regime launched “anti-terrorist” military operations against the breakaway provinces. Worse yet, it turned a blind eye to the real terrorists, neo-Nazi paramilitary squads like the Azov Battalion, that moved into the region. A bloody civil war was now underway, instigated by Kiev’s willingness to kill its own people in the Donbass. To date, the war has claimed 14,000 lives.

‘Invasion’

NATO and U.S. officials said regular units of the Russian military crossed a few kilometers into Ukrainian territory on August 2014, which Russia denied, when the separatist forces had been pushed eastward toward the Russian border and hundreds of civilians had been killed. On Aug. 25, 2014, 10 Russian paratroopers were captured 20 km inside the Ukrainian border.

Nuland called this “Russia’s invasion of eastern Ukraine.” The incursion would be more properly characterized as Russia exercising the liberal interventionists’ favorite Responsibility to Protect doctrine.

As happened in Georgia in 2008, a government militarily attacked its own people and Russia intervened to drive the military forces back and protect the local population. In that 2008 case, a European Union investigation determined that Georgia, not Russia, was the aggressor.

The U.S. had also claimed that Russia “invaded” Crimea in March 2014, when Russia already had troops stationed there under an agreement with Ukraine.  “You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pre-text,” said U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who voted in the Senate for what a real invasion looks like: the 2003 U.S. unprovoked attack on Iraq — on a completely trumped-up pretext.

July 7, 2016: U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, right, beside Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in Kyiv, following a bilateral meeting and news conference. (State Department)

Now there is incessant talk about another Russian invasion, though there was no word when the first one ended. Schifrin told PBS viewers that Russian military drills and a troop build-up today within in its own borders, signals that Russia is “ready for escalation,” though it is questionable how many troops there are where they are based.

Meanwhile, President Joe Biden’s vow to send more U.S. troops to NATO’s eastern allies; NATO exercises near Russia’s borders and the supply of $450 million in weaponry to Ukraine are presented as the proper order of things: neither threatening, aggressive nor escalatory.

Two key demands by Russian President Vladimir Putin, namely, that Ukraine never host U.S. missiles or join NATO, were dismissed by Nuland saying, “Those are decisions for Ukraine to make and for NATO to make, not for the Kremlin to make.”

Schifrin could have reminded Nuland that the United States promised Russia in 1991 that NATO would not expand east of the newly reunified East and West Germany, but he didn’t. He also could have asked her if stationing missiles on the island of Cuba in 1962 was a sovereign decision to be made by Cuba and the Soviet Union, but he did not.

By excising her outsized role, PBS allowed Nuland to blame the entire crisis today on Russia.

It is clearly not the job of establishment media to challenge powerful government figures in any meaningful way. Its job is to build enmity in its audience toward official state adversaries and to cast government actions in the best possible light. PBS NewsHour has demonstrated that it is very good at its job, indeed.

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“This time, it’s going to happen, they’ve amassed their forces like never before, if Biden wins they’re going to launch the big attack.” These apocalyptic words were uttered to me (in Russian) on the eve of the last presidential elections in the United States. The Russian Media both mainstream and alternative were sure that with the rise of Biden “it would finally happen”. “It” being a major offensive by Kiev’s forces backed either covertly or overtly by NATO. All of the “insider” types I know in the Donbass were willing to bet everything they had that an invasion was imminent. After all, it is the Democrats who have a visceral instinctive hatred of the Russians, whereas only half of the Republicans are just passively stuck in Cold War mode. But none of these dire prophecies came to pass with the “victory” of Biden over #45. The signal never came, Kiev never sent their men in, and WWIII (or a soul crushing defeat for the Russians if they were to blink and not respond) was avoided. It is in this most recent context and Biden’s bafflingly Trump-like foreign policy that we should look at the big visit of Victoria Nuland to Moscow.

The real big issue that never gets discussed in the Western-centric Mainstream Media is that Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland is a baffling choice to send to Moscow if the desired goal is to make better relations with the Russians. The U.S. government is huge, and even within America, let alone Russia, only a handful of political figures stand out enough in any particular way to give themselves serious notoriety. Meaning there are loads of seemingly anonymous human-suits that could have been sent to Moscow, or some “B-listers” that don’t particularly resonate with Russia in a negative way. But instead, they chose to pick Nuland, who although qualified and occupies a position that would justify such an assignment, is a symbol of the “evils” of the U.S. State Department within Russia’s sphere of influence.

Image: Nuland earning her infamy among Russian speakers.

Although many American and EU politicans flew out to show their support for the Liberal Neo-Nazi Maidan freakshow, it was Nuland with her symbolic cookies, that she passed out to protestors, that has granted her infamy within Russia for multiple generations. In both Russia and the West she also became notable for the “F#&! the EU” phone call in which she blatantly worked out the future political structure of the now fully colonized Ukraine.

Meaning, the United States consciously sent someone who is a living embodiment of Russophobic Soft Power to Moscow to somehow “improve” relations. Nuland represents the greatest failure of post-Communist Russia (losing the Ukraine without a shot being fired) and the depths the State Department is willing to go (promoting Neo-Nazis, Apartheid, and the murder of Russian speakers) to get the job done. This would be like sending Bill Clinton to negotiate in Serbia. In fact, in order to allow this meeting to happen, Nuland had to be removed off of Russia’s sanctions blacklist  to enter the country.

Could the State Department be that egotistical to not see that Nuland was a dubious choice? Or perhaps they wanted to send a message to Moscow that “we will break you” or something to that effect. In a way I can respect that type of assertion of pure dominance and it is refreshingly honest, but it also means that very little will change.

Image: For Russian speaking people the war in the Donbass is as serious as a heart attack.

Nuland and the Biden regime supposedly do not like the terms of the Minsk Agreement, because they essentially guarantee that there are now two entities on the territory of today’s Ukraine meaning Russia will get some of not a juicy piece of pork fat. However Russia would never back down from this position so there really is no room to negotiate even if they sent some less heinous individual to Russia’s capital.

The Undersecretary of State described her visit and negotiations with the usual meaningless pleasantries that one would expect. She said it was “productive” which in political double-speak means that nothing happened of any consequence. She also called it “frank” meaning that the Russians actually stuck to their guns about their view of events and said things she did not like.

The overall purpose of such a trip that could only have a negative impact due to Nuland’s reputation is again baffling. In the past the U.S. has employed the tactic of “offering an olive branch” to the other side only to then go forward and stab them in the back. Hillary Clinton’s big red “reset button” is a perfect example of this – publicly talk peace while preparing for war so they look open minded and on the side of what is right. This rotten olive branch strategy is not the case this time, the motivation is something other. There are few possible reasons:

1. Although the Ukraine is vastly cheaper than Afghanistan, perhaps holding European Zimbabwe above water is getting too tedious and pricey. The global grind down of the post Cold War American Empire seems to be happening and the hegemon has to tighten his belt. The Ukraine being on the periphery of U.S. interests and of vital importance to Russia may mean that it is on the chopping block for geopolitical reasons – too far, too Eastern, too corrupt, too expensive, too hazardous.
2. The Russian-speaking parts of the Ukraine’s territory would be a massive bargaining chip to get Moscow to sign off on pretty much anything. Perhaps sending this living symbol of the victory at the Maidan was used to sell the Russians on some sort of idea, the payment for which would be getting their lost territory back. What the Holy Land means for Israelis and Palestinians is what the Ukraine means for Russians.
3. Biden has jumped on Trump’s ego train and wants to quietly keep all scandals linking him and his son to Ukraine out of the spotlight. Some think that Kiev now puts a rotten taste in Biden’s mouth that he wants to wash out.
4. This was all just pure routine for Washington using the old Russian logic of “we pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us”. This is just an example of a very low effort autopilot rotten olive branch tactic described above. Sometimes negotiating can happen just to click a bureaucratic check box.

The actual meaning of these meetings will surely reveal itself in the next few months, but the key issue is that getting Biden into the White House, by hook or by crook, did not plant the seed for Armageddon in Ukraine. This was already evident during his first 100 days. And although nothing massive was put on the table by Nuland it would seem that passionate support for Kiev is not going to be a part of the next 4 years. It looks like we are most likely to see more messy and resultless negotiation rooted in the Minsk agreement’s terms over the next few years.

In 2014-2015, when a major western propaganda drive against Russia was in full swing, there were many studies by U.S. and European military forces and their various professional colleges about the situation in Ukraine, where a U.S.-sponsored uprising had resulted in the overthrow of president Yanukovych.

A main player in the coup was Victoria Nuland, the then U.S. assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs who is about to be appointed President Biden’s undersecretary of state for political affairs, which is a strong signal that the White House has no intention of relaxing its confrontational posture vis-a-vis Russia. In an open example of coup-supporting this official representative of the U.S. Administration, accompanied by the ambassador, handed out cookies to demonstrators in Kiev and expressed support for their cause. (Which makes you wonder what U.S. reaction would have been if the Russian ambassador in Washington had distributed goodies to members of the mob that stormed the Capitol building on January 6.)

As described by Ted Galen Carpenter of the Cato Institute, “the extent of the Obama administration’s meddling in Ukraine’s politics was breathtaking. Russian intelligence intercepted and leaked to the international media a Nuland telephone call in which she and U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt discussed in detail their preferences for specific personnel in a post‐Yanukovych government. The U.S.-favoured candidates included Arseniy Yatsenyuk, the man who became prime minister once Yanukovych was ousted from power. During the telephone call, Nuland stated enthusiastically that ‘Yats is the guy’ who would do the best job.” The whole thing was a sleazy charade.

What wasn’t farcical, however, was the intense study in the West of what Russia might or might not do in the face of this well-engineered overthrow of a democratically-elected national representative. (The fact that he was an unpleasant, self-promoting, dishonest blot is irrelevant : look at Trump and the leaders of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and some other U.S. allies.) Most of the western studies were carried out by military experts without any axes to grind. They were required to provide objective analyses of possible Russian action, and came overwhelmingly to the conclusion that while Moscow would indeed support citizens of Russian culture and persuasion who were (and are) resident in the far east of Ukraine, there was no question of an invasion. And the arguments, findings and conclusions were intriguing.

So far as can be determined, none of these impartial assessments concluded that Russia would invade Ukraine, and the most interesting finding was that Russia could have done this without too much of a problem. It was calculated by at least two western professional institutions that Russian forces, once committed to invade Ukraine, could have taken over the country in about three weeks. The appraisal included examination of likely post-invasion developments and circumstances, and it was here that it became blindingly obvious that an invasion would be most unwise.

The analysts pointed out that once the invading forces completed their operations, there would be massive unrest in much of the country. They considered it certain that the internal security situation would become a crisis. So far as can be seen, there was no mention of U.S. involvement in this; it was postulated that the Ukrainian people would themselves rise up and fight against the conquerors and that although the victorious troops would be able to physically resist such actions, the adverse political, economic and international effects would far outweigh any benefits that might accrue from occupation.

It would be most surprising if comparable analyses had not been undertaken in Russia, and also strange if they had not reached the same conclusions, although perhaps there might have been different emphasis on which effects could be more undesirable than others. But no matter the details, the fact is that it would be most inadvisable and even disastrous for Russia to invade Ukraine and it has been obvious for many years that it wasn’t and isn’t going to do so. Naturally there is concern in Moscow about the continuing build-up of U.S.-Nato forces all along Russia’s borders, and about the increasingly aggressive military manoeuvres intended to provoke Russian reaction. Indeed President Putin gave fair warning about this in his address to the nation of 21 April when he said that the U.S.-Nato military grouping should not cross the red line because that would force Russia to retaliate in a robust fashion.

On April 13 the U.S. Director of National Intelligence published an unclassified version of the 2021 Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community. Russia figures prominently in one of the most remarkable public documents recently produced by the Washington administration.

According to U.S. Intelligence experts, Russia is going to “undermine U.S. influence, develop new international norms and partnerships, divide Western countries and weaken Western alliances, and demonstrate Russia’s ability to shape global events as a major player in a new multipolar international order.” This is regarded as shocking, and the threat from Russia is held to be enormous — although the DNI had to acknowledge that in spite of all Russia’s supposed muscle-flexing, the U.S. Intelligence Community assesses that there is “flat or even declining defence spending.”

The DNI paper doesn’t mention that in 2020 the U.S. spent 750 billion dollars on its military while Russia’s budget was $48 billion which is less than that of Britain or Germany or France, and it is fatuous — and deliberately tension-feeding — for the U.S. Intelligence Community to claim that “We expect Moscow’s military posture and behaviour — including military modernization, use of military force, and the integration of information warfare — to challenge the interests of the United States and its allies.”

In an inept and bumbling attempt to toe the Washington line, the head of foreign affairs for the European Union, Josep Borrell, declared on April 19 that over 150,000 Russian troops were “massed” at its border with Ukraine. He warned that it will only take “a spark” to set off a confrontation, and that “a spark can jump here or there”.

Certainly there were extensive military exercises being conducted within Russia’s sovereign territory (which had been notified internationally : there was no secret about these training manoeuvres), but it was rubbish to claim that there were 150,000 troops involved. Then, belatedly and quietly the figure of 150,000 became 100,000 — but the aim had been achieved and few in the West now believe there was anything other than a monster Russian threat that was repealed by the resolute stance of the U.S.-Nato military alliance, backed by the European Union and valiant Ukraine.

It has never been Russia’s intention to invade Ukraine, and this has been apparent to the objective analysts of Western professional military institutions. But it has been decided by Washington’s establishment that such a course of action can be sold as being a credible threat, because “We expect Moscow’s military posture and behaviour . . . to challenge the interests of the United States and its allies.”

The sparks are still flying while the U.S.-Nato war drums are being beaten, and it seems that the West, led by Washington, wants to keep pushing against Russia’s “red line”. It would be advisable to stop these sparks jumping, as Mr Borrell put it, or, as warned by President Putin, there might be vigorous reaction.

Like proverbial bad pennies, the neocon imperialists who plagued the Barack Obama administration have turned up in force in Joe Biden’s State Department. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has given more than winks and nods to the dastardly duo of Victoria Nuland, slated to become Blinken’s Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, the number three position at the State Department, and Samantha Power, nominated to become the Administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

Nuland and Power both have problematic spouses who do not fail to offer their imperialistic opinions regardless of the appearance of conflicts-of-interest. Nuland’s husband is the claptrappy neocon warmonger Robert Kagan, someone who has never failed to urge to prod the United States into wars that only benefit Israel. Power’s husband is the totally creepy Cass Sunstein, who served as Obama’s White House “information czar” and advocated government infiltration of non-governmental organizations and news media outlets to wage psychological warfare campaigns.

True to form, Blinken’s State Department has already come to the aid of Venezuela’s right-wing self-appointed “opposition leader” Juan Guaido, whose actual constituency is found in the wealthy gated communities of Venezuelan and Cuban expatriates in south Florida and not in the barrios of Caracas or Maracaibo.

Blinken and his team of old school yanqui imperialists have also criticized the constitutional and judicially-warranted detention of former interim president Jeanine Áñez, who became president in 2019 after the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) government of President Evo Morales was overthrown in a Central Intelligence Agency-inspired and -directed military coup. The far-right forces backing Áñez were roundly defeated in the October 2020 election that swept MAS and Morales’s chosen presidential candidate, Luis Arce, back into power. It seems that for Blinken and his ilk, a decisive victory in an election only applies to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, not to Arce and MAS in Bolivia.

It should be recalled that while Blinken was national security adviser to then-Vice President Biden in the Obama administration, every sort of deception and trickery was used by the CIA to depose Morales in Bolivia and President Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela. In fact, the Obama administration, with Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, claimed its first Latin American political victim when a CIA coup was launched against progressive President Manuel Zelaya of Honduras. Today, Honduras is ruled by a right-wing kleptocratic narco-president, Juan Orlando Hernández, whose brother, Tony Hernández, is currently serving life in federal prison in the United States for drug trafficking. For the likes of Blinken, Power, Nuland, and former Obama national security adviser Susan Rice, who currently serves as “domestic policy adviser” to Biden, suppression of progressive governments and support for right-wing dictators and autocrats have always been the preferred foreign policy, particularly for the Western Hemisphere. For example, while the Biden administration remains quiet on right-wing regimes in Central America that are responsible for the outflow of thousands of beleaguered Mayan Indians to the southern U.S. border with Mexico, it has announced that Trump era sanctions on 24 Nicaraguan government officials, including President Daniel Ortega’s wife and Nicaragua’s vice president, Rosario Murillo, as well as three of their sons – Laureano, Rafael, and Juan Carlos – will continue.

Biden’s Western Hemisphere foreign policy is not much different from that of Obama’s. Biden and Brazilian far-right, Adolf Hitler-loving, and Covid pandemic-denying President Jair Bolsonaro are said to have struck a deal on environmental protection of the Amazon Basin ahead of an April 22 global climate change virtual summit called by the White House. A coalition of 198 Brazilian NGOs, representing environmental, indigenous rights, and other groups, has appealed to Biden not to engage in any rain forest protection agreement with the untrustworthy Bolsonaro. The Brazilian president has repeatedly advocated the wholesale deforestation of the Amazon region. Meanwhile, while Biden urges Americans to maintain Covid public health measures, Bolsonaro continues to downplay the virus threat as Brazil’s overall death count approaches that of the United States.

Blinken’s State Department has been relatively quiet on the Northern Triangle of Central America fascist troika of Presidents Orlando of Honduras, Alejandro Giammattei of Guatemala, and Nayib Bukele of El Salvador. Instead of pressuring these fascistas to democratize and stop their genocidal policies toward the indigenous peoples of their nations, Biden told Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador that he would pump $4 billion into supposed “assistance” to those countries to stop the flow of migrants. Biden is repeating the same old American gambits of the past. Any U.S. assistance to kleptocratic countries like those of the Northern Triangle has and will line the pockets of their corrupt leaders. Flush with U.S. aid cash, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador will be sure to grant contracts to greedy Israeli counter-insurgency contractors always at the ready to commit more human rights abuses against the workers, students, and indigenous peoples of Central America.

Biden is also in no hurry to reverse the freeze imposed by Donald Trump on U.S.-Cuban relations. Biden, whose policy toward Cuba represents a fossilized relic of the Cold War, intends to maintain Trump’s freeze on U.S. commercial, trade, and tourism relations with Cuba. Biden’s Homeland Security Secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, a Jewish Cuban-American expatriate, is expected to reach out to right-wing Cuban-Americans in south Florida in order to ensure Democratic Party inroads in the 2022 and 2024 U.S. elections. Therefore, even restoring the status quo ante established by Barack Obama is off-the-table for Biden, Blinken, and Mayorkas. The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the Cuban-American and ethically-challenged Democrat Bob Menendez, has stated there will be no normalization of pre-Trump relations with Cuba until his “regime change” whims are satisfied. Regurgitating typical right-wing Cuban-American drivel, Mayorkas has proclaimed after he was announced as the new Homeland Security Secretary, “I have been nominated to be the DHS Secretary and oversee the protection of all Americans and those who flee persecution in search of a better life for themselves and their loved ones.” The last part of that statement was directed toward the solidly Republican bloc of moneyed Cuban, Venezuelan, Nicaraguan, and Bolivian interests in south Florida.

While Blinken hurls his neocon invectives at Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Cuba, he remains silent on the repeated foot-dragging by embattled and highly unpopular right-wing Chilean President Sebastian Pinera on implementing a new Constitution to replace that put into place in 1973 by the fascist military dictator General Augusto Pinochet. The current Chilean Constitution is courtesy of Richard Nixon’s foreign policy “Svengali,” the duplicitous Henry Kissinger, an individual who obviously shares Blinken’s taste for “realpolitik” adventurism on a global scale.

While Blinken has weighed in on the domestic politics of Bolivia, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba, he has had no comment on the anti-constitutional moves by Colombian far-right authoritarian President Ivan Duque, the front man for that nation’s Medellin narcotics cartel. It would also come as no surprise if Blinken, Nuland, and Power have quietly buttressed the candidacy of right-wing banker, Guillermo Lasso, who is running against the progressive socialist candidate Andrés Arauz, the protegé of former president Rafael Correa. Blinken can be expected to question the results of the April 11 if Lasso cries fraud in the event of an Arauz victory. Conversely, Blinken will remain silent if Lasso wins and Arauz cries foul. That has always been the nature of U.S. Western Hemisphere policy, regardless of what party controls the White House.

Victoria Nuland, former foreign policy adviser to vice president Dick Cheney, should not be nominated for undersecretary of state [for political affairs], and if nominated should be rejected by the Senate.

Nuland played a key role in facilitating a coup in Ukraine that created a civil war costing 10,000 lives and displacing over a million people. She played a key role in arming Ukraine as well. She advocates radically increased military spending, NATO expansion, hostility toward Russia, and efforts to overthrow the Russian government.

The United States invested $5 billion in shaping Ukrainian politics, including overthrowing a democratically elected president who had refused to join NATO. Then-Assistant Secretary of State Nuland is on video talking about the U.S. investment and on audiotape planning to install Ukraine’s next leader, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who was subsequently installed.

The Maidan protests, at which Nuland handed out cookies to protesters, were violently escalated by neo-Nazis and by snipers who opened fire on police. When Poland, Germany, and France negotiated a deal for the Maidan demands and an early election, neo-Nazis instead attacked the government and took over. The U.S. State Department immediately recognized the coup government, and Arseniy Yatsenyuk was installed as Prime Minister.

Nuland has worked with the openly pro-Nazi Svoboda Party in Ukraine. She was long a leading proponent of arming Ukraine. She was also an advocate for removing from office the prosecutor general of Ukraine, whom then-Vice President Joe Biden pushed the president to remove.

Nuland wrote this past year that “The challenge for the United States in 2021 will be to lead the democracies of the world in crafting a more effective approach to Russia—one that builds on their strengths and puts stress on Putin where he is vulnerable, including among his own citizens.”

She added: “…Moscow should also see that Washington and its allies are taking concrete steps to shore up their security and raise the cost of Russian confrontation and militarization. That includes maintaining robust defense budgets, continuing to modernize U.S. and allied nuclear weapons systems, and deploying new conventional missiles and missile defenses, . . . establish permanent bases along NATO’s eastern border, and increase the pace and visibility of joint training exercises.”

The United States walked out of the ABM Treaty and later the INF Treaty, began putting missiles into Romania and Poland, expanded NATO to Russia’s border, facilitated a coup in Ukraine, began arming Ukraine, and started holding massive war rehearsal exercises in Eastern Europe. But to read Victoria Nuland’s account, Russia is simply an irrationally evil and aggressive force that must be countered by yet more military spending, bases, and hostility. Some U.S. military officials say this demonizing of Russia is all about weapons profits and bureaucratic power, no more fact-based than the Steele Dossier that was given to the FBI by Victoria Nuland.

SIGNED BY:
Alaska Peace Center
Center for Encounter and Active Non-Violence
CODEPINK
Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space
Greater Brunswick PeaceWorks
Jemez Peacemakers
Knowdrones.com
Maine Voices for Palestinian Rights
Nuclear Age Peace Foundation
Nukewatch
Peace Action Maine
PEACEWORKERS
Physicians for Social Responsibility – Kansas City
Progressive Democrats of America
Peace Fresno
Peace, Justice, Sustainability NOW!
The Resistance Center for Peace and Justice
RootsAction.org
Veterans For Peace Chapter 001
Veterans For Peace Chapter 63
Veterans For Peace Chapter 113
Veterans For Peace Chapter 115
Veterans For Peace Chapter 132
Wage Peace
World BEYOND War

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Have the Neocons jumped ship to the Democratic Party due to Donald Trump? The Neoconservatives despite their name started as liberals unhappy with Democrat foreign policy. Watch the video and read more in the article by Philip Giraldi.

Donald Trump was much troubled during his 2016 and 2020 campaigns by so-called conservatives who rallied behind the #NeverTrump banner, presumably in opposition to his stated intention to end or at least diminish America’s role in wars in the Middle East and Asia. Those individuals are generally described as neoconservatives but the label is itself somewhat misleading and they might more properly be described as liberal warmongers as they are closer to the Democrats than the Republicans on most social issues and are now warming up even more as the new Joe Biden Administration prepares to take office.

To be sure, some neocons stuck with the Republicans, to include the highly controversial Elliott Abrams, who initially opposed Trump but is now the point man for dealing with both Venezuela and Iran. Abrams’ conversion reportedly took place when he realized that the new president genuinely embraced unrelenting hostility towards Iran as exemplified by the ending of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and the assassination of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad. John Bolton was also a neocon in the White House fold, though he is now a frenemy having been fired by the president and written a book.

Even though the NeverTrumper neocons did not succeed in blocking Donald Trump in 2016, they have been maintaining relevancy by slowly drifting back towards the Democratic Party, which is where they originated back in the 1970s in the office of the Senator from Boeing Henry “Scoop” Jackson. A number of them started their political careers there, to include leading neocon Richard Perle.

It would not be overstating the case to suggest that the neoconservative movement has now been born again, though the enemy is now the unreliable Trumpean-dominated Republican Party rather than Saddam Hussein or Ayatollah Khomeini. The transition has also been aided by a more aggressive shift among the Democrats themselves, with Russiagate and other “foreign interference” being blamed for the party’s failure in 2016. Given that mutual intense hostility to Trump, the doors to previously shunned liberal media outlets have now opened wide to the stream of foreign policy “experts” who want to “restore a sense of the heroic” to U.S. national security policy. Eliot A. Cohen and David Frum are favored contributors to the Atlantic while Bret Stephens and Bari Weiss were together at the New York Times prior to Weiss’s recent resignation. Jennifer Rubin, who wrote in 2016 that “It is time for some moral straight talk: Trump is evil incarnate,” is a frequent columnist for The Washington Post while both she and William Kristol appear regularly on MSNBC.

The unifying principle that ties many of the mostly Jewish neocons together is, of course, unconditional defense of Israel and everything it does, which leads them to support a policy of American global military dominance which they presume will inter alia serve as a security umbrella for the Jewish state. In the post-9/11 world, the neocon media’s leading publication The Weekly Standard virtually invented the concept of “Islamofascism” to justify endless war in the Middle East, a development that has killed millions of Muslims, destroyed at least three nations, and cost the U.S. taxpayer more than $5 trillion. The Israel connection has also resulted in neocon support for an aggressive policy against Russia due to its involvement in Syria and has led to repeated calls for the U.S. to attack Iran and destroy Hezbollah in Lebanon. In Eastern Europe, neocon ideologues have aggressively sought “democracy promotion,” which, not coincidentally, has also been a major Democratic Party foreign policy objective.

The neocons are involved in a number of foundations, the most prominent of which is the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), that are funded by Jewish billionaires. FDD is headed by Canadian Mark Dubowitz and it is reported that the group takes direction coming from officials in the Israeli Embassy in Washington. Other major neocon incubators are the American Enterprise Institute, which currently is the home of Paul Wolfowitz, and the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at John Hopkins University. The neocon opposition has been sniping against Trump over the past four years but has been biding its time and building new alliances, waiting for what it has perceived to be an inevitable regime change in Washington.

That change has now occurred and the surge of neocons to take up senior positions in the defense, intelligence and foreign policy agencies will soon take place. In my notes on the neocon revival, I have dubbed the brave new world that the neocons hope to create in Washington as the “Kaganate of Nulandia” after two of the more prominent neocon aspirants, Robert Kagan and Victoria Nuland.

Robert was one of the first neocons to get on the NeverTrump band wagon back in 2016 when he endorsed Hillary Clinton for president and spoke at a Washington fundraiser for her, complaining about the “isolationist” tendency in the Republican Party exemplified by Trump. His wife Victoria Nuland is perhaps better known. She was the driving force behind efforts to destabilize the Ukrainian government of President Viktor Yanukovych. Yanukovych, an admittedly corrupt autocrat, nevertheless became Prime Minister after a free election. Nuland, who was the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs at the State Department, provided open support to the Maidan Square demonstrators opposed to Yanukovych’s government, to include media friendly appearances passing out cookies on the square to encourage the protesters.

A Dick Cheney and Hillary Clinton protégé, Nuland openly sought regime change for Ukraine by brazenly supporting government opponents in spite of the fact that Washington and Kiev had ostensibly friendly relations. Her efforts were backed by a $5 billion budget, but she is perhaps most famous for her foul language when referring to the potential European role in managing the unrest that she and the National Endowment for Democracy had helped create. The replacement of the government in Kiev was only the prelude to a sharp break and escalating conflict with Moscow over Russia’s attempts to protect its own interests in Ukraine, most particularly in Crimea.

And, to be sure, beyond regime change in places like Ukraine, President Barack Obama was no slouch when it came to starting actual shooting wars in places like Libya and Syria while also killing people, including American citizens, using drones. Biden appears poised to inherit many former Obama White House senior officials, who would consider the eager-to-please neoconservatives a comfortable fit as fellow foot soldiers in the new administration. Foreign policy hawks expected to have senior positions in the Biden Administration include Antony Blinken, Nicholas Burns, Susan Rice, Valerie Jarrett, Samantha Power and, most important of all the hawkish Michele Flournoy, who has been cited as a possible secretary of defense. And don’t count Hillary Clinton out. Biden is reportedly getting his briefings on the Middle East from Dan Shapiro, former U.S. Ambassador to Israel, who now lives in the Jewish state and is reportedly working for an Israeli government supported think tank, the Institute for National Security Studies.

Nowhere in Biden’s possible foreign policy circle does one find anyone who is resistant to the idea of worldwide interventionism in support of claimed humanitarian objectives, even if it would lead to a new cold war with major competitor powers like Russia and China. In fact, Biden himself appears to embrace an extremely bellicose view on a proper relationship with both Moscow and Beijing “claiming that he is defending democracy against its enemies.” His language is unrelenting, so much so that it is Donald Trump who could plausibly be described as the peace candidate in the recently completed election, having said at the Republican National Convention in August “Joe Biden spent his entire career outsourcing their dreams and the dreams of American workers, offshoring their jobs, opening their borders and sending their sons and daughters to fight in endless foreign wars, wars that never ended.”

Joe LAURIA

Joe Biden should be named as an alleged perpetrator in a criminal investigation in Ukraine over the firing of former Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, a Ukrainian judge has ruled.

Shokin has alleged that Biden was illegally behind his dismissal in 2016 by threatening to withhold a $1 billion IMF loan to Ukraine if Shokin wasn’t dismissed.

Last month District Court Judge S. V. Vovk in Kiev ruled that police must list Biden as an alleged perpetrator of a crime against Shokin, according to a report on the website Just the News. The possible crime cited is “unlawful interference in Shokin’s work as Ukraine’s chief prosecutor,” the website said, according to an English translation of the investigative judge’s order obtained by the site.

The district court had earlier ruled that there was sufficient evidence in Shokin’s criminal complaint to investigate Biden, but the police had withheld Biden’s name, listing him only as an unnamed American.

Shokin first alleged last year in a deposition that Biden had pressured then Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to fire Shokin because he was conducting an investigation into Burisma Holdings, the gas company on whose board Biden’s son Hunter was installed shortly after the fall of President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014.

Biden had been appointed the Obama administration’s point man on Ukraine, according to a recorded conversation between then Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and then U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffry Pyatt.  Nuland and Pyatt discussed how to “midwife” a new Ukrainian government before the democratically-elected Yanukovych was overthrown. Nuland said Biden would help “glue” it all together.

As booty from the U.S.-backed coup, the sitting vice president’s son, Hunter, within weeks got his seat on Burisma, in what can be seen as a transparently neocolonial maneuver to take over a country and install one’s own people. But Biden’s son wasn’t the only one.

A family friend of then Secretary of State John Kerry also joined Burisma’s board. U.S. agricultural giant Monsanto got a Ukrainian contract soon after the overthrow.  And the first, post-coup Ukrainian finance minister was an American citizen, a former State Department official, who was given Ukrainian citizenship the day before she took up the post. Shokin has alleged, in the same vein, that the U.S. was running the country’s prosecutors’ office.

Biden’s Public Admission

After Shokin, the prosecutor general at the time, began looking into possible corruption at Burisma, Biden openly admitted at a 2018 conference that as vice president he withheld a $1 billion IMF credit line to Ukraine until the government fired the prosecutor. As Biden says himself, it took only six hours for it to happen.

Biden says the U.S. sought Shokin’s ouster because he was corrupt. But Shokin is citing a letter from the U.S. State Department in summer 2015 that “praised his anti-corruption plan as Ukraine’s chief prosecutor,” according to  Just the News. Biden’s own words at the Council on Foreign Relations event would indicate Poroshenko’s reluctance to fire Shokin, who told the website he has evidence to show the government was satisfied with his work.

An attempt by President Donald Trump last year to get the new Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to investigate Biden while implying military aid could be withheld led ultimately to Trump’s impeachment in the U.S. House of Representatives. The Senate acquitted him.

News of Biden being ordered named in the criminal investigation came days after a member of the Ukrainian parliament released new audio recordings of Biden-Poroshenko conversations that show Biden dangling the IMF loan to get Shokin dismissed.  Zelensky said the recordings would be investigated by police as they may be “perceived, qualified as treason.” Poroshenko branded the leaked audio “fabricated” and a spokesman for Biden claimed to The Washington Post the tapes were “heavily edited … and it’s still a nothingburger that landed with a thud.”

 (Biden and Poroshenko in English begins at 6:15)

consortiumnews.com

The Kagan family, America’s neoconservative aristocracy, has reemerged having recovered from the letdown over not gaining its expected influence from the election of Hillary Clinton and from its loss of official power at the start of the Trump presidency.

Back pontificating on prominent op-ed pages, the Family Kagan now is pushing for an expanded U.S. military invasion of Syria and baiting Republicans for not joining more enthusiastically in the anti-Russian witch hunt over Moscow’s alleged help in electing Donald Trump.

In a Washington Post op-ed on March 7, Robert Kagan, a co-founder of the Project for the New American Century and a key architect of the Iraq War, jabbed at Republicans for serving as “Russia’s accomplices after the fact” by not investigating more aggressively.

Then, Frederick Kagan, director of the Critical Threats Project at the neocon American Enterprise Institute, and his wife, Kimberly Kagan, president of her own think tank, Institute for the Study of War, touted the idea of a bigger U.S. invasion of Syria in a Wall Street Journal op-ed on March 15.

Yet, as much standing as the Kagans retain in Official Washington’s world of think tanks and op-ed placements, they remain mostly outside the new Trump-era power centers looking in, although they seem to have detected a door being forced open.

Still, a year ago, their prospects looked much brighter. They could pick from a large field of neocon-oriented Republican presidential contenders or – like Robert Kagan – they could support the establishment Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, whose “liberal interventionism” matched closely with neoconservatism, differing only slightly in the rationalizations used for justifying wars and more wars.

There was also hope that a President Hillary Clinton would recognize how sympatico the liberal hawks and the neocons were by promoting Robert Kagan’s neocon wife, Victoria Nuland, from Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs to Secretary of State.

Then, there would have been a powerful momentum for both increasing the U.S. military intervention in Syria and escalating the New Cold War with Russia, putting “regime change” back on the agenda for those two countries. So, early last year, the possibilities seemed endless for the Family Kagan to flex their muscles and make lots of money.

A Family Business

As I noted two years ago in an article entitled “A Family Business of Perpetual War”: “Neoconservative pundit Robert Kagan and his wife, Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, run a remarkable family business: she has sparked a hot war in Ukraine and helped launch Cold War II with Russia and he steps in to demand that Congress jack up military spending so America can meet these new security threats.

“This extraordinary husband-and-wife duo makes quite a one-two punch for the Military-Industrial Complex, an inside-outside team that creates the need for more military spending, applies political pressure to ensure higher appropriations, and watches as thankful weapons manufacturers lavish grants on like-minded hawkish Washington think tanks.

“Not only does the broader community of neoconservatives stand to benefit but so do other members of the Kagan clan, including Robert’s brother Frederick at the American Enterprise Institute and his wife Kimberly, who runs her own shop called the Institute for the Study of War.”

But things didn’t quite turn out as the Kagans had drawn them up. The neocon Republicans stumbled through the GOP primaries losing out to Donald Trump and then – after Hillary Clinton muscled aside Sen. Bernie Sanders to claim the Democratic nomination – she fumbled away the general election to Trump.

After his surprising victory, Trump – for all his many shortcomings – recognized that the neocons were not his friends and mostly left them out in the cold. Nuland not only lost her politically appointed job as Assistant Secretary but resigned from the Foreign Service, too.

With Trump in the White House, Official Washington’s neocon-dominated foreign policy establishment was down but far from out. The neocons were tossed a lifeline by Democrats and liberals who detested Trump so much that they were happy to pick up Nuland’s fallen banner of the New Cold War with Russia. As part of a dubious scheme to drive Trump from office, Democrats and liberals hyped evidence-free allegations that Russia had colluded with Trump’s team to rig the U.S. election.

New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman spoke for many of this group when he compared Russia’s alleged “meddling” to Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor and Al Qaeda’s 9/11 terror attacks.

On MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” show, Friedman demanded that the Russia hacking allegations be treated as a casus belli: “That was a 9/11 scale event. They attacked the core of our democracy. That was a Pearl Harbor scale event.” Both Pearl Harbor and 9/11 led to wars.

So, with many liberals blinded by their hatred of Trump, the path was open for neocons to reassert themselves.

Baiting Republicans

Robert Kagan took to the high-profile op-ed page of The Washington Post to bait key Republicans, such as Rep. Devin Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee who was pictured above the Post article and its headline, “Running interference for Russia.”

Kagan wrote: “It would have been impossible to imagine a year ago that the Republican Party’s leaders would be effectively serving as enablers of Russian interference in this country’s political system. Yet, astonishingly, that is the role the Republican Party is playing.”

Kagan then reprised Official Washington’s groupthink that accepted without skepticism the claims from President Obama’s outgoing intelligence chiefs that Russia had “hacked” Democratic emails and released them via WikiLeaks to embarrass the Clinton campaign.

Though Obama’s intelligence officials offered no verifiable evidence to support the claims – and WikiLeaks denied getting the two batches of emails from the Russians – the allegations were widely accepted across Official Washington as grounds for discrediting Trump and possibly seeking his removal from office.

Ignoring the political conflict of interest for Obama’s appointees, Kagan judged that “given the significance of this particular finding [about Russian meddling], the evidence must be compelling” and justified “a serious, wide-ranging and open investigation.”

But Kagan also must have recognized the potential for the neocons to claw their way back to power behind the smokescreen of a New Cold War with Russia.

He declared: “The most important question concerns Russia’s ability to manipulate U.S. elections. That is not a political issue. It is a national security issue. If the Russian government did interfere in the United States’ electoral processes last year, then it has the capacity to do so in every election going forward. This is a powerful and dangerous weapon, more than warships or tanks or bombers.

“Neither Russia nor any potential adversary has the power to damage the U.S. political system with weapons of war. But by creating doubts about the validity, integrity and reliability of U.S. elections, it can shake that system to its foundations.”

A Different Reality

As alarmist as Kagan’s op-ed was, the reality was far different. Even if the Russians did hack the Democratic emails and somehow slipped the information to WikiLeaks – an unsubstantiated and disputed contention – those two rounds of email disclosures were not that significant to the election’s outcome.

Hillary Clinton blamed her surprise defeat on FBI Director James Comey briefly reopening the investigation into her use of a private email server while serving as Secretary of State.

Further, by all accounts, the WikiLeaks-released emails were real and revealed wrongdoing by leading Democrats, such as the Democratic National Committee’s tilting of the primaries against Sen. Bernie Sanders and in favor of Clinton. The emails of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta disclosed the contents of Clinton’s paid speeches to Wall Street, which she was trying to hide from voters, as well as some pay-to-play features of the Clinton Foundation.

In other words, the WikiLeaks’ releases helped inform American voters about abuses to the U.S. democratic process. The emails were not “disinformation” or “fake news.” They were real news.

A similar disclosure occurred both before the election and this week when someone leaked details about Trump’s tax returns, which are protected by law. However, except for the Trump camp, almost no one thought that this illegal act of releasing a citizen’s tax returns was somehow a threat to American democracy.

The general feeling was that Americans have a right to know such details about someone seeking the White House. I agree, but doesn’t it equally follow that we had a right to know about the DNC abusing its power to grease the skids for Clinton’s nomination, about the contents of Clinton’s speeches to Wall Street bankers, and about foreign governments seeking pay-to-play influence by contributing to the Clinton Foundation?

Yet, because Obama’s political appointees in the U.S. intelligence community “assess” that Russia was the source of the WikiLeaks emails, the assault on U.S. democracy is a reason for World War III.

More Loose Talk

But Kagan was not satisfied with unsubstantiated accusations regarding Russia undermining U.S. democracy. He asserted as “fact” – although again without presenting evidence – that Russia is “interfering in the coming elections in France and Germany, and it has already interfered in Italy’s recent referendum and in numerous other elections across Europe. Russia is deploying this weapon against as many democracies as it can to sap public confidence in democratic institutions.”

There’s been a lot of handwringing in Official Washington and across the Mainstream Media about the “post-truth” era, but these supposed avatars for truth are as guilty as anyone, acting as if constantly repeating a fact-free claim is the same as proving it.

But it’s clear what Kagan and other neocons have in mind, an escalation of hostilities with Russia and a substantial increase in spending on U.S. military hardware and on Western propaganda to “counter” what is deemed “Russian propaganda.”

Kagan recognizes that he already has many key Democrats and liberals on his side. So he is taking aim at Republicans to force them to join in the full-throated Russia-bashing, writing:

“But it is the Republicans who are covering up. The party’s current leader, the president, questions the intelligence community’s findings, motives and integrity. Republican leaders in Congress have opposed the creation of any special investigating committee, either inside or outside Congress. They have insisted that inquiries be conducted by the two intelligence committees.

“Yet the Republican chairman of the committee in the House has indicated that he sees no great urgency to the investigation and has even questioned the seriousness and validity of the accusations. The Republican chairman of the committee in the Senate has approached the task grudgingly.

“The result is that the investigations seem destined to move slowly, produce little information and provide even less to the public. It is hard not to conclude that this is precisely the intent of the Republican Party’s leadership, both in the White House and Congress. …

“When Republicans stand in the way of thorough, open and immediate investigations, they become Russia’s accomplices after the fact.”

Lying with the Neocons

Many Democrats and liberals may find it encouraging that a leading neocon who helped pave the road to war in Iraq is now by their side in running down Republicans for not enthusiastically joining the latest Russian witch hunt. But they also might pause to ask themselves how they let their hatred of Trump get them into an alliance with the neocons.

On Wednesday in The Wall Street Journal, Robert Kagan’s brother Frederick and his wife Kimberly dropped the other shoe, laying out the neocons’ long-held dream of a full-scale U.S. invasion of Syria, a project that was put on hold in 2004 because of U.S. military reversals in Iraq.

But the neocons have long lusted for “regime change” in Syria and were not satisfied with Obama’s arming of anti-government rebels and the limited infiltration of U.S. Special Forces into northern Syria to assist in the retaking of the Islamic State’s “capital” of Raqqa.

In the Journal op-ed, Frederick and Kimberly Kagan call for opening a new military front in southeastern Syria:

“American military forces will be necessary. But the U.S. can recruit new Sunni Arab partners by fighting alongside them in their land. The goal in the beginning must be against ISIS because it controls the last areas in Syria where the U.S. can reasonably hope to find Sunni allies not yet under the influence of al Qaeda. But the aim after evicting ISIS must be to raise a Sunni Arab army that can ultimately defeat al Qaeda and help negotiate a settlement of the war.

“The U.S. will have to pressure the Assad regime, Iran and Russia to end the conflict on terms that the Sunni Arabs will accept. That will be easier to do with the independence and leverage of a secure base inside Syria. … President Trump should break through the flawed logic and poor planning that he inherited from his predecessor. He can transform this struggle, but only by transforming America’s approach to it.”

A New Scheme on Syria

In other words, the neocons are back to their clever word games and their strategic maneuverings to entice the U.S. military into a “regime change” project in Syria.

The neocons thought they had almost pulled off that goal by pinning a mysterious sarin gas attack outside Damascus on Aug. 21, 2013, on the Syrian government and mousetrapping Obama into launching a major U.S. air assault on the Syrian military.

But Russian President Vladimir Putin stepped in to arrange for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to surrender all his chemical weapons even as Assad continued to deny any role in the sarin attack.

Putin’s interference in thwarting the neocons’ dream of a Syrian “regime change” war moved Putin to the top of their enemies’ list. Soon key neocons, such as National Endowment for Democracy president Carl Gershman, were taking aim at Ukraine, which Gershman deemed “the biggest prize” and a steppingstone toward eventually ousting Putin in Moscow.

It fell to Assistant Secretary Victoria “Toria” Nuland to oversee the “regime change” in Ukraine. She was caught on an unsecured phone line in late January or early February 2014 discussing with U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt how “to glue” or “to midwife” a change in Ukraine’s elected government of President Viktor Yanukovych.

Several weeks later, neo-Nazi and ultranationalist street fighters spearheaded a violent assault on government buildings forcing Yanukovych and other officials to flee for their lives, with the U.S. government quickly hailing the coup regime as “legitimate.”

But the Ukraine putsch led to the secession of Crimea and a bloody civil war in eastern Ukraine with ethnic Russians, events that the State Department and the mainstream Western media deemed “Russian aggression” or a “Russian invasion.”

So, by the last years of the Obama administration, the stage was set for the neocons and the Family Kagan to lead the next stage of the strategy of cornering Russia and instituting a “regime change” in Syria.

All that was needed was for Hillary Clinton to be elected president. But these best-laid plans surprisingly went astray. Despite his overall unfitness for the presidency, Trump defeated Clinton, a bitter disappointment for the neocons and their liberal interventionist sidekicks.

Yet, the so-called “#Resistance” to Trump’s presidency and President Obama’s unprecedented use of his intelligence agencies to paint Trump as a Russian “Manchurian candidate” gave new hope to the neocons and their agenda.

It has taken them a few months to reorganize and regroup but they now see hope in pressuring Trump so hard regarding Russia that he will have little choice but to buy into their belligerent schemes.

As often is the case, the Family Kagan has charted the course of action – batter Republicans into joining the all-out Russia-bashing and then persuade a softened Trump to launch a full-scale invasion of Syria. In this endeavor, the Kagans have Democrats and liberals as the foot soldiers.

consortiumnews.com

Let’s call him Mykola Duratskii, a fictional character. His explanations were so distant from the realities which I know that I kept quiet and simply listened to the end. «Pointless to argue», I thought to myself (laughing), «but I need to make a record of his delusional, preposterous narrative».

«Well, you know», he said, «Ukraine finally got its independence in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed… that rotten, oppressive Russian entity, which kept us down for so long». Hmm, I thought to myself, «wasn’t there a referendum in the USSR on 17 March 1991?» And the results of the referendum were negative, right?

Well, no, as it turned out, 113 512 812 voters (or 78%) voted in favour of preservation of the Soviet Union. The voter participation rate represented 80% of the electorate excepting a few republics, the Baltics, for example, where local authorities attempted to obstruct the vote. Not in the Ukraine, however, the vote there was 70.2% in favour of preservation of the Union.

If there was such strong popular support for the USSR, why did it collapse so suddenly? Only nine months after the referendum, Boris Yeltsin, Leonid Kravchuk and Stanislav Shushkevich signed the Belavezha Accords putting an end to the USSR. Everything fell apart almost overnight. If Mikhail Gorbachev had not so weakened the authority of the Soviet state, he would have ordered the arrest of Yeltsin and his colleagues, but of course he had reduced himself to a helpless, smiling dummy who called the US President George H W Bush to say good-bye. As for the Ukraine, it became independent, really for the first time, apart from a few months in 1918-1919. Moreover, because of various administrative changes during the Soviet period large Russian territories including the Crimea, went to the Ukraine instead of remaining with the new Russian Federation.

Seeds of trouble were thus planted for later propagation. And you know the United States. Its leaders gloated over the disappearance of the USSR. «We won», they declared, «now, we’ll do as we like». Of course they did, fishing in troubled waters everywhere, wanting to make sure there would be no revival of a strong, independent Russian state. This US plan seemed to work brilliantly with Yeltsin, who played the role of court jester in Washington. President Bill Clinton, treated him like an amusing drunk, and helped him to put down political opposition with tanks in 1993 and with large sacks of dollars in 1996 to buy his «re-election». Clinton could not save Yeltsin however who resigned in late 1999.

Meanwhile in the Ukraine the same kind of rotten government prevailed along with corruption on a scale quite possibly even greater than in Russia under Yeltsin. Our Ukrainian narrator, Mykola Duratskii, takes up the story with the first «colour revolution» in Kiev, and the election of Viktor Yushchenko as president. Everyone knows, though Duratskii never mentioned it, that the United States engineered the «revolution» in Kiev as well as another in Tbilisi the previous year. These actions were richly funded and organised by the US government through consultants, pollsters, diplomats, spooks and non-governmental organisations. Yushchenko proved to be a flop for Washington, however, and he lost the following elections to Viktor Yanukovich.

«Pro-Russian», Duratskii spat out, about Yanukovich. In fact, the poor fellow was trying to manoeuvre between Moscow and the European Union (EU) to obtain better access to European economic and financial markets, while maintaining a free trade agreement with the Russian Federation, the Ukraine’s most important market.

Russia has various duties and controls governing trade with the EU and Moscow could not allow these regulations to be undermined by an EU back door through the Ukraine. And yes, you may have guessed it, Duratskii never mentioned any of these problems in his long indictment of Russia. His line was that it was just a nasty bully trying to prevent the woe begotten Ukraine from leaving the Russian orbit. He failed to mention that the first Russian state was established in Kiev in the 9th century and that ties of kinship, culture, religion, history and economics have bound together these two geographic areas for more than a millennium.

Duratskii of course was not in the least bothered by the omissions in his story of the good Ukraine and the bad Russia. It turned out that Yanukovich was not much better or more popular than Yushchenko. He got into trouble when he realised that the economic agreement which he had negotiated with the EU was one-sided and would lead in effect to the de-industrialisation and the transformation of the Ukraine into an EU colony. Ukrainians would become sellers of sunflower seeds to western Europe. No independence there.

Large security issues were also involved; NATO wanted to expand into the Ukraine, thus buckling its encirclement of Russia. Putin intervened in December 2013, offering a $15 billion loan to the Ukraine – a bribe said Duratskii – to help Yanukovich get out of the fix he had made for himself by playing both ends against the middle in Moscow and Brussels. One can’t blame Yanukovich for trying to obtain advantages from both the EU and the Russian Federation, but the former wasn’t going to let him do it.

According to Duratskii, the so-called Maidan revolution was the result of Yanukovich trying to back out of the EU deal. And once again our fictional Ukrainian interlocutor leaves out essential details, the most important being US involvement in a new colour revolution to bring down the Yanukovich government. President Obama’s infamous deputy Secretary of State, Victoria Nuland, passed out sandwiches and cookies to hooligans wreaking havoc in Kiev.

But more than that, and she boasted of it, the US government distributed $5 billion to subsidise «democratic skills and institutions» in the Ukraine. This is Orwellian language which really meant $5 billion to overthrow the elected Kiev government. «Democracy» always serves the United States as a convenient cover for aggression.

(to be continued)