April 22, 2015

Wolf Pack vs. Bear

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Wolf Pack vs. Bear

Written by Anne Williamson

Friday April 17, 2015




Having now had a year's time to get better acquainted with their new Ukrainian friends and the neighborhood overall, Europeans are losing their taste for economic sanctions on Russia.

Contrary to American assurances, economic warfare against Russia meant to compel the return of Crimea to Ukraine hasn't worked. Nor did the Ukrainian military's campaign against the Donbas tame the Russian "aggression" mainstream media shouts about daily. All Europe has achieved to date is tens of billions in lost trade and Russia's abandonment of the South Stream pipeline.

The Russians were building South Stream to insure the – politely put – "integrity" of gas flows to Europe while in transit across Ukraine, and put an end to the country's 24-year racket of holding Russia's energy commerce with Europe hostage by virtue of having inherited a key segment of the Soviet pipeline network. The loss of jobs and transit revenues their participation in the construction and operation of South Stream promised was keenly felt in Hungary, Bulgaria, Serbia, Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina.  Austria, France, Italy, Cyprus, Luxembourg, the Czech Republic and Germany have all taken serious losses thanks to the trade sanctions as well.

Trade and employment losses coupled with some USD 40 billions more in IMF loans to Kiev, whose proceeds are most likely to be spent – at the US's insistence – on yet more war, and the growing misery of all the Ukrainian people are typical of the now familiar results of US-organized seditions abroad. However, those results are usually observed in militarily weak, third world nations the US chooses to undermine for whatever reasons, and certainly not on the continent their most loyal and most capable allies occupy.

Besides which, the whole cockamamie story the US has been pushing vis a vis Crimea is falling apart. The fact that one year on there are no Crimean protests and no "Back to Kiev!" grass root committees has undermined the entire premise of the sanctions. Even year long multiple polling by western agencies has shown that large majorities of Crimeans have no regrets concerning the 2014 reunification with their motherland of some 300 years.

In truth, the world owes a debt of gratitude to the Russians. While US State Department operatives busied themselves in Kiev with constructing an interim, post-coup government of fascist stooges and native oligarchs, the Russians' deft and lightening re-absorption of a willing Crimea took the meat right off the table. The American greenhorns in Kiev were left dumbfounded, and hopping mad.

With the Black Sea port of Sevastopol safely in Russian hands, and the country's immediate strategic interests secure, there was no need for war. Given time, the Russians know Ukraine as presently constituted will defeat Ukraine, and that not even a Himalaya of dollars and the sacrifices of several generations of Ukrainians will put the country back together again. Default will be Ukraine's only escape route.

But it is the antics of hyperbolic NATO operatives (Dragoon Ride, a Conga line of armored Stryker vehicles and troops rolling across Europe from the Baltics to central Europe in a "show of force,") the bloviating of chest-beating US generals (the only way "to turn the tide" is "to start killing Russians") and the dumb bellicosity of the US Congress for having authorized the export of lethal weaponry to Kiev that finally got the EU leadership looking sideways at one another. Just exactly what has the US gotten them into?

But it was the EU itself who bought, by bits and by pieces, into America's scheme. The events in Ukraine have left the European Union naked before her own members' populations, exposed as a highly-bureaucratized system of US vassalage so thoroughly in harness individual nations actually agreed to harm their own economies in pursuit of US policies. There's a reason for the EU's acquiescence: The EU and its leadership stands to gain should State Department neoconservatives deliver on their promises. The EU will get bigger and its artificial and suffocating institutions more deeply entrenched.

How so?

The only direction in which the EU can expand is to the East. Ukraine, Moldova, Transdniestr, Armenia and Georgia were all believed ripe for the taking, and each is or was being pursued with EU "association agreements," which subvert each country to EU dictates while holding the prize of EU membership in abeyance.

Absorbing such contrarily-organized lands is the work of decades. No matter. Their capture alone will enable the ECB to go on an immediate super-binge of vendor financing, which it is believed will conjure up jobs, export profits, and, the ECB (European Central Bank) hopes, a new round of euro-based credit expansion and piratization that will, in the fullness of time, strip the newly "associated" lands and their citizens of their savings and property. Once the fiat money-engineered boom begins to fade, the expectation is that ongoing economic warfare against Russia, directed and policed by the US, will at last bear fruit. Only a small shove and a slight push will be needed to topple and then shatter Russia into bite-sized pieces for the west's further consumption.

So set upon this course is the US that the White House's recent offer of a slippery framework to Iran to conclude the Israeli-manufactured dispute over the country's nuclear enrichment program has the look of arbitrage, indicating there are limits to just how much havoc Washington can create and oversee abroad. Besides, Iran is currently useful in the conflict with the US-created ISIS. With sanctions lifted, the flood of Iranian oil and gas coming to market would further harm Russia's economic interests while supporting the building of new pipelines to Europe originating in the Middle East and North Africa (under indirect US control) and sparing any further need for US ally Saudi Arabia to continue pumping low-priced oil for which there is insufficient global demand.

As long as Angela Merkel keeps Germany on board, and Germany continues to fund the stagnant EU, the US's high-tech version of a medieval siege of the Kremlin can proceed.

With new multilateral treaties agreed under cover of tax and banking transparency (FATCA) now in place, the US is well on its way to being able to track in real time every currency unit on the planet that is emitted, earned, deposited, withdrawn, spent, invested, loaned, and borrowed by means of the banks, long seen as a US-engineered globalism's most effective police force. European governments' war on cash is meant to insure all commerce will flow through the banks and therefore be recorded. These new surveillance capabilities will be exploited to the maximum in the case of both Russia and hesitant Europeans for the purposes of blackmail, extortion, and control.

In a digital battlescape staffed by the west's soldiers of finance, winter will not save the Russians.

Another attack strategy the US is about to deploy, drawn not from history but from nature, is that of the wolf pack. Though NATO troops will bedevil Russia's borders, no western troops will actually set foot on Russian territory prior to the country's imminent collapse. That would be dangerous, but the more proxy wars and political upheavals the US can stir up along Russia's periphery while the motherland suffers and declines under the west's economic blockade, the better.

Necessary and experienced personnel are being appointed and NGOs beefed up in preparation for brewing new crises and rainbow revolutions along Russia's "soft, underbelly": the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave, which both Armenia and Azerbaijan claim, in Kyrgyzstan where the south and the north are alienated from one another, in Uzbekistan where control of the Fergana Valley is in dispute with Kyrgyzstan, and in Georgia, which hopes for the return of Ossetia and Abkhazia. Carrots and sticks will miraculously set many a fire.

Keeping those flames under control will seriously tax Russia's resources.

US objectives include busting up the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), whose members include Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia and Tajikistan, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), whose members include China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Russia, and the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), whose members – to date – include Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Russia.

However, there are problems with the above scenarios unfolding as planned.

US foreign policy assumes everyone on the planet wants to be an American, or – second best – a recipient of American interest and munificence, a notion which the state has successfully sold only to movie-mad foreign teenagers and naive Americans. Rather than being an advertisement for the benefits of American intervention, the Ukraine America is building might better serve as one for the beneficial avoidance of same through membership in the EAEU.

Russia is hardly new to the protection game. Armenia and Georgia, the first Christian nations on earth, soon found themselves unmoored in a sea of Islam. Each petitioned the Kremlin for inclusion into the empire. They wanted and needed the protection of the "Third Rome," and they got it. Today Armenia wisely continues to huddle close to Russia, eschewing the opportunity of becoming a battle station in any anti-Azeri US campaign, while a US-enamored Georgia still chafes at the protection the US provides their former proxy, the corrupt Saakashvili regime. Azerbaijan has but to look at Iran to see what misfortune the US is quite willing to hand round. Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan have the example of their war torn neighbor, US-occupied Afghanistan, to contemplate.

US foreign policy further assumes that targets will stand still and only stare into the blinding glare of America's oncoming headlights.

Russia's abrupt shut down of the South Stream gas pipeline's construction and the rapid replacement of European entry points and participants with a single exit point in Turkey from which Russian gas will flow to the rest of Europe through Greece along pipes it is now the EU's responsibility to finance and build has put paid to that assumption. It is not only Russia that has an exploitable "soft underbelly."

Despite the mainstream media's shameless dissemination of western governments' fatuous propaganda, and of what is sure to be an exploding supply of tit for tat, sufficient information is available to anyone who cares to look to determine who is destroying and who is trying to build, who is seeking peaceful co-operation and increasing trade and commerce between nations and who is demanding obedience to its diktat while waving a mailed fist.

To paraphrase Mae West, "Democracy has nothin' to do with it."

It is certainly an irony of history, wild and raw, that Vladimir Putin, a man who once described himself as "a pure and utterly successful product of a Soviet patriotic education," is today seen by an increasing number of alarmed citizens worldwide as liberty's if not civilization's best, if inadvertent and imperfect, hope. But those souls should have no illusions. Whatever the Russian president does, he will do for Russia's sake, not ours.

But if Russia cannot stand, we will all sink together into tyranny or eternity.

Reprinted with permission from LewRockwell.com.

April 20, 2015

Canada's Defense Minister Squirms Over Who, Exactly, Canadian Soldiers Are Training in Ukraine

Canada's Defense Minister Squirms Over Who, Exactly, Canadian Soldiers Are Training in Ukraine

Canada says will only be training formations Kiev recognizes as part of its armed forces - trouble is that includes far-right and neo-Nazi volunteer battalions

David Pugliese

(Ottawa Citizen)

13 hours ago | 1,076 11

 

Canadian in west Ukraine

 

This article originally appeared at Ottawa Citizen


The Canadian government is confident that troops from Petawawa won't end up instructing Neo Nazis and far right extremists when they begin their training mission in Ukraine this summer, but a former diplomat is warning it will be difficult to weed out such extremists as their militia units are now being integrated into Ukraine's regular forces.

Some members of Ukraine's most effective fighting units have openly acknowledged they are Nazi sympathizers or have expressed anti-Semitic or extreme right wing views.

The Canadian government has committed as many as 200 Canadian soldiers to train Ukraine's military, which has fought Ukrainian rebels who want to separate. The bulk of the first wave of Canadian troops, to arrive in Ukraine sometime in the summer, will come from the Petawawa Garrison in the Ottawa Valley.

There is now a ceasefire in place between the Ukraine military and the rebels but there are concerns it will not hold.

Defence Minister Jason Kenney acknowledged in a briefing Tuesday with journalists that the issue of how Canadians can avoid training extremist troops had been discussed among military staff.

"We're not going to be in the business of training ad hoc militias," he explained. "We will only be training units of the Ukrainian National Guard and army recognized by the government of Ukraine.

But former Canadian diplomat James Bissett says the Canadians could end up training members of the country's fascist groups as those troops are now being enrolled in Ukraine's regular forces. "These militias are being merged with Ukraine's military so we won't be able to determine who we are training," said Bissett, Canada's former ambassador to Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Albania. "These are unsavoury groups that Canadian soldiers should not be associated with."

Ukraine's defence ministry recently announced that Dmitri Yarosh, the head of the Right Sector party, will become an advisor to the country's military chief. Members of the Ukrainian Volunteer Corps, a militia created by the far right group, will be integrated into the regular military.

The Azov Battalion, associated with Ukraine's national guard, has also faced accusations of Neo-Nazi links.

The battalion has a symbol similar to the insignia used by some Nazi SS units. Although the unit has repeatedly denied such links, some of its members have voiced support for Nazi ideology or have made anti-Semitic statements.

Andrey Dyachenko, a spokesman for the Azov Battalion, told USA Today in March that only 10 to 20 percent of the unit are Nazis. Last year, members of the Azov Battalion were shown on German television wearing helmets with Nazi insignia.

The U.S. and Britain are also sending troops to train Ukrainian forces.

Canada has been a key supporter for Ukraine's government and has denounced Russian involvement in the ongoing crisis in the region.

Russia has annexed Crimea from Ukraine and has provided support to the separatist forces. Canada and NATO has accused Russia of sending troops and equipment to take part in the war but Russia denies that.

The Conservative government has provided more than $570 million worth of aid to Ukraine.

Some former Canadian diplomats, however, have suggested the government's position on Ukraine is aimed at winning votes from Ukrainian-Canadians in the upcoming federal election.

Some Ukrainians have dismissed concerns about fascist elements in the country's political system and military, labelling such claims as Russian propaganda.

European Jews, however, have voiced their concern about the presence of such groups and the rise of the Svoboda party led by Oleh Tyahnybok. Tyahnybok was among Ukrainian officials who last year greeted then Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird in Kyiv. Tyahnybok's party members were also on the front lines of protests that led to the overthrow of Ukraine's pro-Russian president last year.

Tyahnybok, who denies being anti-Semitic, co-signed an open letter to Ukraine's president in 2005 calling for a government investigation into "criminal activities of organized Jewry in Ukraine."

http://russia-insider.com/en/canadas-defense-minister-squirms-over-who-exactly-canadian-soldiers-are-training-ukraine/5857