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viktor yanukovych
Critics Call Blinken's Embrace of Ukrainian Attacks on Russia 'Deeply Ill-Advised'
"Russia has issued a credible threat to counter-escalate" in the event of the policy shift, noted one former Pentagon official. "Are we prepared for such escalation?"
May 23, 2024
Anti-war voices this week sounded the alarm over U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken's newfound embrace of letting Ukraine use weapons supplied by the United States to attack targets inside Russia—a policy critics say risks a catastrophic escalation between the world's two top nuclear powers.
So far, the Biden administration has strictly forbidden Ukrainian forces—who are defending their country from the invasion ordered by Russian President Vladimir Putin in February 2022—from attacking targets inside Russia with U.S.-supplied weapons. This is in keeping with President Joe Biden's stated objective of "trying to avoid World War III."
However, The New York Times' David Sanger reported Wednesday that "the consensus around that policy is fraying" amid "a vigorous debate inside the administration over relaxing the ban to allow the Ukrainians to hit missile and artillery launch sites just over the border in Russia."
Elbridge Colby, a former deputy assistant defense secretary during the Trump administration,
warned Wednesday on social media that "there is exceptional and ill-advised danger in this course," as "Russia has issued a credible threat to counter-escalate" in the event of the policy shift.
"Are we prepared for such escalation?" he asked.
Michael Young, a senior editor at the Carnegie Middle East Center,
said Wednesday that Blinken's "move toward persuading Biden to allow Ukraine to widen the war to Russian territory is just a crazy idea, and makes any eventual negotiation all but impossible."
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says forces and weapons amassed just across the Russian border have enabled Russia's recent territorial gains, including near Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city, which has come under
heavy Russian bombardment in recent days.
After what Sanger called a "sobering" visit by Blinken to the Ukrainian capital Kyiv last week, the secretary of state has been pushing for a change in the Biden administration's stance. According to Sanger, "the consensus around that policy" of restraint is unraveling. It is not quite clear yet how many senior Biden administration officials support the move to greenlight Ukrainian attacks on Russia with U.S. arms, but one highly controversial undersecretary of state who recently resigned is a vocal proponent of the policy.
That would be Victoria Nuland, a neoconservative who is reviled by anti-imperialists around the world for her hawkish history that includes playing a key role in the plot to overthrow the pro-Moscow government of then-Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych during the Euromaidan uprising a decade ago.
"They need to be able to stop these Russian attacks that are coming from bases inside Russia," Nuland
toldABC News on Sunday. "Those bases ought to be fair game... I think it's time for that because Russia has obviously escalated this war."
NULAND CALLS FOR STRIKES ON RUSSIA pic.twitter.com/9WxCDZrM6b
— The_Real_Fly (@The_Real_Fly) May 19, 2024
The Biden administration is also weighing whether to train Ukrainian forces inside Ukraine, as opposed to in Germany under current policy—a move that could put U.S. and NATO troops in the line of fire.
Ukrainian officials welcomed Blinken's shift.
"Blinken's statement, which he repeated twice, that Ukraine is the one to choose its targets, created hope that the United States had changed its position: Ukraine should make its own decisions on the territories where it uses certain Western weapons, especially American ones," Nataliia Halibarenko, who heads Ukraine's mission to NATO, toldUkrinform on Thursday.
"The decision that we have the right to use American weapons beyond Ukraine must be made sooner or later," she added. "It is a pity that we are wasting time searching for a solution that should not cause doubts. But we will continue to promote it at all levels."
The U.S. would not be the first country to allow Ukraine to use weapons it supplies for attacks inside Russia. The United Kingdom has sent Ukraine Storm Shadow long-range air-launched cruise missiles, and British Foreign Secretary David Cameron says Ukraine "absolutely has the right to strike back at Russia."
The debate within the Biden administration over Ukraine's use of U.S.-supplied arms comes amid Russian military drills involving tactical nuclear weapons, which Russia's Defense Ministry earlier this month claimed were ordered in response to "provocative statements and threats of certain Western officials."
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The NYT's Dangerous and Orwellian View of Ukraine
Jun 23, 2015
In George Orwell's 1984, the leaders of Oceania presented "Two Minutes Hate" in which the image of an enemy was put on display and loyal Oceanianians expressed their rage, all the better to prepare them for the country's endless wars and their own surrender of freedom. And, now, in America, you have The New York Times.
Surely the Times is a bit more subtle than the powers-that-be in Orwell's Oceania, but the point is the same. The "paper of record" decides who our rotating foreign enemy is and depicts its leader as a demon corrupting whatever he touches. The rest of us aren't supposed to think for ourselves. We're just supposed to hate.
As the Times has degenerated from a relatively decent newspaper into a fount of neocon propaganda, its editors also have descended into the practice of simply inventing a narrative of events that serves an ideological purpose, its own version of "Two Minutes Hate." Like the leaders of Orwell's Oceania, the Times has become increasingly heavy-handed in its propaganda.
Excluding alternative explanations of events, even if supported by solid evidence, the Times arrogantly creates its own reality and tells us who to hate.
In assessing the Times's downward spiral into this unethical journalism, one could look back on its false reporting regarding Iraq, Iran, Syria or other Middle East hotspots. But now the Times is putting the lives of ourselves, our children and our grandchildren at risk with its reckless reporting on the Ukraine crisis - by setting up an unnecessary confrontation between nuclear-armed powers, the United States and Russia.
At the center of the Times' propaganda on Ukraine has been its uncritical - indeed its anti-journalistic - embrace of the Ukrainians coup-makers in late 2013 and early 2014 as they collaborated with neo-Nazi militias to violently overthrow elected President Viktor Yanukovych and hurl Ukraine into a bloody civil war.
Rather than display journalistic professionalism, the Times' propagandists ignored the evidence of a coup - including an intercepted phone call in which U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland and U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt discussed how to "mid-wife" the regime change and handpick the new leaders. "Yats is the guy," declared Nuland, referring to Arseniy Yatsenyuk who emerged as prime minister.
The Times even ignored a national security expert, Statfor founder George Friedman, when he termed the ouster of Ukraine's elected president "the most blatant coup in history." The Times just waved a magic wand and pronounced that there was no coup - and anyone who thought so must reside inside "the Russian propaganda bubble." [See Consortiumnews.com's "NYT Still Pretends No Coup in Ukraine."]
Perhaps even more egregiously, the Times has pretended that there were no neo-Nazi militias spearheading the Feb. 22, 2014 coup and then leading the bloody "anti-terrorist operation" against ethnic Russians in the south and east who resisted the coup. The Times explained all this bloodshed as simply "Russian aggression."
It didn't even matter when the U.S. House of Representatives - of all groups - unanimously acknowledged the neo-Nazi problem when it prohibited U.S. collaboration in military training of Ukrainian Nazis. The Times simply expunged the vote from its "official history" of the crisis. [See Consortiumnews.com's "US House Admits Nazi Role in Ukraine."]
Orwell's Putin
Yet, for an Orwellian "Two Minute Hate" to work properly, you need to have a villain whose face you can put on display. And, in the case of Ukraine - at least after Yanukovych was driven from the scene - that villain has been Russian President Vladimir Putin, who embodies all evil in the intense hatred sold to the American public.
So, when Putin presents a narrative of the Ukraine crisis, which notes the history of the U.S.-driven expansion of NATO up to Russia's borders and the evidence of the U.S.-directed Ukrainian coup, the Times editors must dismiss it all as "mythology," as they did in Monday's editorial regarding Putin's remarks to an international economic conference in St. Petersburg.
"President Vladimir Putin of Russia is not veering from the mythology he created to explain away the crisis over Ukraine," the Times' editors wrote. "It is one that wholly blames the West for provoking a new Cold War and insists that international sanctions have not grievously wounded his country's flagging economy."
Without acknowledging any Western guilt in the coup that overthrew the elected Ukrainian government in 2014, the Times' editors simply reveled in the harm that the Obama administration and the European Union have inflicted on Russia's economy for its support of the Yanukovych government and its continued backers in eastern and southern Ukraine.
For nearly a year and a half, the New York Times and other major U.S. news organizations have simply refused to acknowledge the reality of what happened in Ukraine. In the Western fantasy, the elected Yanukovych government simply disappeared and was replaced by a U.S.-backed regime that then treated any resistance to its rule as "terrorism." The new regime even dispatched neo-Nazi militias to kill ethnic Russians and other Ukrainians who resisted and thus were deemed "terrorists."
The upside-down narrative of what happened in Ukraine has become the conventional wisdom in Official Washington and has been imposed on America's European allies as well. According to The New York Times' Orwellian storyline, anyone who notes the reality of a U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine is engaging in "fantasy" and must be some kind of Putin pawn.
To the Times' editors, all the justice is on their side, even as Ukraine's new regime has deployed neo-Nazi militias to kill eastern Ukrainians who resisted the anti-Yanukovych coup. To the Times' editors, the only possible reason to object to Ukraine's new order is that the Russians must be bribing European dissidents to resist the U.S. version of events. The Times wrote:
"The Europeans are indeed divided over the extent to which Russia, with its huge oil and gas resources, should be isolated, but Mr. Putin's aggression so far has ensured their unity when it counts. In addition to extending existing sanctions, the allies have prepared a new round of sanctions that could be imposed if Russian-backed separatists seized more territory in Ukraine. ...
"Although Mr. Putin insisted on Friday that Russia had found the 'inner strength' to weather sanctions and a drop in oil prices, investment has slowed, capital has fled the country and the economy has been sliding into recession. Even the business forum was not all that it seemed: The heads of many Western companies stayed away for a second year."
An Orwellian World
In the up-is-down world that has become the New York Times' editorial page, the Western coup-making on Russia's border with the implicit threat of U.S. and NATO nuclear weapons within easy range of Moscow is transformed into a case of "Russian aggression." The Times' editors wrote: "One of the most alarming aspects of the crisis has been Mr. Putin's willingness to brandish nuclear weapons."
Though it would appear objectively that the United States was engaged in serious mischief-making on Russia's border, the Times editors flip it around to make Russian military maneuvers - inside Russia - a sign of aggression against the West.
"Given Mr. Putin's aggressive behavior, including pouring troops and weapons into Kaliningrad, a Russian city located between NATO members Lithuania and Poland, the allies have begun taking their own military steps. In recent months, NATO approved a rapid-reaction force in case an ally needs to be defended. It also pre-positioned some weapons in front-line countries, is rotating troops there and is conducting many more exercises. There are also plans to store battle tanks and other heavy weapons in several Baltic and Eastern European countries.
"If he is not careful, Mr. Putin may end up facing exactly what he has railed against -- a NATO more firmly parked on Russia's borders -- not because the alliance wanted to go in that direction, but because Russian behavior left it little choice. That is neither in Russia's interest, nor the West's."
There is something truly 1984-ish about reading that kind of propagandistic writing in The New York Times and other Western publications. But it has become the pattern, not the exception.
The Words of the 'Demon'
Though the Times and the rest of the Western media insist on demonizing Putin, we still should hear the Russian president's version of events, as simply a matter of journalistic fairness. Here is how Putin explained the situation to American TV talk show host Charlie Rose on June 19:
"Why did we arrive at the crisis in Ukraine? I am convinced that after the so-called bipolar system ceased to exist, after the Soviet Union was gone from the political map of the world, some of our partners in the West, including and primarily the United States, of course, were in a state of euphoria of sorts. Instead of developing good neighborly relations and partnerships, they began to develop the new geopolitical space that they thought was unoccupied. This, for instance, is what caused the North Atlantic bloc, NATO, to go east, along with many other developments.
"I have been thinking a lot about why this is happening and eventually came to the conclusion that some of our partners [Putin's way of describing Americans] seem to have gotten the illusion that the world order that was created after World War II, with such a global center as the Soviet Union, does not exist anymore, that a vacuum of sorts has developed that needs to be filled quickly.
"I think such an approach is a mistake. This is how we got Iraq, and we know that even today there are people in the United States who think that mistakes were made in Iraq. Many admit that there were mistakes in Iraq, and nevertheless they repeat it all in Libya. Now they got to Ukraine. We did not bring about the crisis in Ukraine. There was no need to support, as I have said many times, the anti-state, anti-constitutional takeover that eventually led to a sharp resistance on the territory of Ukraine, to a civil war in fact.
"Where do we go from here?" Putin asked. "Today we primarily need to comply with all the agreements reached in Minsk, the capital of Belarus. ... At the same time, I would like to draw your attention and the attention of all our partners to the fact that we cannot do it unilaterally. We keep hearing the same thing, repeated like a mantra - that Russia should influence the southeast of Ukraine. We are. However, it is impossible to resolve the problem through our influence on the southeast alone.
"There has to be influence on the current official authorities in Kiev, which is something we cannot do. This is a road our Western partners have to take - those in Europe and America. Let us work together. ... We believe that to resolve the situation we need to implement the Minsk agreements, as I said. The elements of a political settlement are key here. There are several."
Putin continued: "The first one is constitutional reform, and the Minsk agreements say clearly: to provide autonomy or, as they say decentralization of power, let it be decentralization. This is quite clear, our European partners, France and Germany have spelled it out and we are quite satisfied with it, just as the representatives of Donbass [eastern Ukraine where ethnic Russians who had supported Yanukovych have declared independence] are. This is one component.
"The second thing that has to be done - the law passed earlier on the special status of these territories - Luhansk and Donetsk, the unrecognized republics, should be enacted. It was passed, but still not acted upon. This requires a resolution of the Supreme Rada - the Ukrainian Parliament - which is also covered in the Minsk agreements. Our friends in Kiev have formally complied with this decision, but simultaneously with the passing by the Rada of the resolution to enact the law they amended the law itself ... which practically renders the action null and void. This is a mere manipulation, and they have to move from manipulations to real action.
"The third thing is a law on amnesty. It is impossible to have a political dialogue with people who are threatened with criminal persecution. And finally, they need to pass a law on municipal elections on these territories and to have the elections themselves. All this is spelled out in the Minsk agreements, this is something I would like to draw your attention to, and all this should be done with the agreement of Donetsk and Luhansk.
"Unfortunately, we still see no direct dialogue, only some signs of it, but too much time has passed after the Minsk agreements were signed. I repeat, it is important now to have a direct dialogue between Luhansk, Donetsk and Kiev - this is missing."
Also missing is any objective and professional explanation of this crisis in the mainstream American press. Instead, The New York Times and other major U.S. news organizations have continued with their pattern of 1984-ish propaganda.
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As G1+6 Opens in Bavaria, Will 'Junior Members' Act Like Adults?
Jun 07, 2015
President Barack Obama arrives in Germany Sunday to meet with the leaders of Germany, France, Italy, the UK, Japan, and Canada at a resort in Bavaria for the "G-7 summit."
This particular genre of summit was formerly known as the "G-8." But that was before the U.S. succeeded in blaming Russia for the violent aftermath of the U.S./EU sponsored coup d'etat in Kiev on Feb. 22, 2014, and managed to get Russia disinvited last year.
Stakes Higher Than Usual
We shall have to wait until the two-day gathering in Bavaria is over to gauge the results. But the stakes are high and - for once - it is conceivable that the U.S. will suffer a significant setback in its continuing, if increasingly quixotic, effort to exploit recent violence in Ukraine to isolate Russia.
What the summit outcome is likely to show - figuratively speaking - is whether "G-7" should be more realistically labeled "G-1-plus-six." Number 1 being, what Obama continues to call the "only indispensable country in the world"; the "six" being those countries Russian President Vladimir Putin has labeled Washington's "junior partners."
The main question is whether Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande, who have witnessed, up-front-and-personal, the behavior of Washington's neocon policymakers and their Ukrainian tools, will summon the courage to act like adults.
Will the leaders of Germany and France continue to bend to the U.S. diktat? Or are they more likely, this time, to stand up on their own four feet and resist pressure from the U.S. and its UK lackey for continued punitive economic sanctions against Russia? Never mind the economic harm they do to Germany and France and other European countries.
Ukraine's Poroshenko No Stranger
Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande have had the chance personally to take the measure of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and his client relationship with the U.S. At a very different kind of summit on Feb. 11-12 in Belorussia, with only puppet Poroshenko reflecting U.S. objectives, they worked out with him and Putin the so-called "Minsk II" package agreement that included a ceasefire that has pretty much held - until just recently.
Merkel and Hollande are no political novices. And, if they know their history, they know what a Petain or a Quisling looks like. In any case, they cannot have failed to recognize what Poroshenko looks like, and how he continues to do the bidding of the neocons running U.S. policy on Ukraine, who remain hell-bent on demonizing Putin and ostracizing Russia - all with little heed to the economic and the longer-term security interests of "junior partners" like Germany and France.
The German and French leaders - and of course Putin - are acutely aware of which side would see advantage in the current, pre-summit uptick in violations of the ceasefire in southeastern Ukraine. It is a safe bet they see the increased fighting as a transparently convenient cudgel in Washington's toolkit for use in its transparent effort to isolate Russia by blaming it for the violations and convincing U.S. "junior partners" of the need for continued economic sanctions.
The Roots of the Trouble in Ukraine
Europeans have a giant economic stake in what happens at the "G1-plus-six" summit in Bavaria. The trouble is that European press coverage of Ukraine is almost as poor as the thin gruel served up in U.S. media.
Odd as it strikes me, having analyzed Soviet propaganda for decades, the fawning corporate media in the U.S. have recently proven to be at least as adept at spreading half-truth and lies. Would you believe President Putin's account of what went down in Kiev since early 2014 is far more factually based? Well, you ought to believe that, because it is.
Here are excerpts from an interview Putin gave on June 6 to the Italian newspaper Il Corriere della Sera:
"What sparked the [Ukraine] crisis? Former President Viktor Yanukovych said that he needed to think about signing Ukraine's Association Agreement with the EU, possibly make some changes and hold consultations with Russia, Ukraine's major trade and economic partner. In this connection and under this pretext riots broke out in Kiev. They were actively supported by both our European and American partners.
"Then a coup d'etat followed - a totally anti-constitutional act. ... The question is: what was the coup d'etat for? Why did they need to escalate the situation to a civil war? ... The result that we have - a coup d'etat, a civil war, hundreds of lives lost, a devastated economy and social sphere, a four-year $17.5 billion loan promised to Ukraine by the IMF and complete disintegration of economic ties with Russia...
"I would like to tell you and your readers one thing. Last year, on February 21, President Yanukovych and the Ukrainian opposition signed an agreement on how to proceed, how to organize political life in the country, and on the need to hold early elections.
"They should have worked to implement this agreement, especially since three European foreign ministers signed this agreement as guarantors of its implementation. If they were used merely for the sake of appearances ... they should have said [after the coup the next day], "You know, we did not agree to a coup d'etat, so we will not support you; you should go and hold elections instead."
Let Merkel and Hollande be reminded that German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier and French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, in addition to Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski mediated the Feb. 21, 2014 agreement and signed it as official witnesses. An envoy from Russian President Putin, Vladimir Lukin, was also involved but did not sign as witness.
There may be no such thing as a guilty conscience in high-stakes diplomacy. Still, what happened just one day before the coup in Kiev is a matter of record. Would it be too much to expect of Steinmeier and Fabius to remind their bosses of this shameless piece of failed diplomacy, before Merkel and Holland cave in once again to Washington's diktat before the beer begins flowing in Bavaria?
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