Russian -Ukrainian news - 06/23/2015

U.S. to pre-position tanks, artillery in Baltics, eastern Europe

MSN,

23 June, 2015

The United States will pre-position tanks, artillery and other military equipment in eastern and central Europe, U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced on Tuesday, moving to reassure NATO allies unnerved by Russian involvement in Ukraine.

Carter, during a trip to Tallinn, said the Baltic states - Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia -- 

as well as Bulgaria, Romania and Poland agreed to host elements of this heavy equipment. Some of the equipment would also be located in Germany.

The U.S. decision to stage heavy equipment closer to Russia's borders aims to speed deployment of rotating U.S. forces as NATO steps up exercises in Europe following Russia's annexation of Ukraine's Crimea region last year.

Neighboring NATO countries, especially the former Soviet Baltic states with their Russian minorities, fear Russia could foment trouble on their territories. Moscow denies any such intention.

Flanked by defense chiefs from the Baltic states, Carter quoted Obama during a visit to Estonia saying: "You lost your independence once before. With NATO, you will never lose it again."

"That’s because the United States and the rest of the NATO alliance are absolutely committed to defending the territorial integrity of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania," Carter said.

Under NATO's founding treaty, an attack on any member state would constitute an attack on all parties. Russia accuses the West of violating post-Cold War arrangements by extending NATO to Russia's frontiers, something the West denies

Estonian Defense Minister Sven Mikser welcomed the decision, on pre-positioning as did representatives from Latvia and Lithuania. Mikser said his nation was ready to host pre-positioned equipment and a rotational presence of U.S. forces.

"We have reasons to believe that Russia views the Baltic region as one of NATO's most vulnerable areas, a place where NATO's resolve and commitment could be tested," Mikser said.

CONDEMNATION IN MOSCOW

The United States had not formally disclosed where in Europe the equipment would be stored before Tuesday but news reports about military planning triggered an angry response from Moscow ahead of Carter's trip to Europe this week.

© REUTERS/Yuri Gripas U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter speaks at a news conference at the Pentagon in Washington

A Russian defense ministry official said stationing tanks and heavy weapons in NATO states on Russia's border would be the most aggressive U.S. act since the Cold War.

President Vladimir Putin, who denies any direct involvement in Ukraine and accuses the West of stirring tensions, announced Russia would add more than 40 intercontinental ballistic missiles to its nuclear arsenal this year.

Carter has condemned Putin's return to what he considers Cold War-style rhetoric.

A fact sheet provided by the U.S. military said the United States' pre-positioning would include about 250 tanks, Bradley infantry fighting vehicles and self-propelled howitzers.

The amount of equipment that would be temporarily stored in each country would be enough to supply either a company, so enough for about 150 soldiers, or a battalion, or about 750 soldiers. Much of it is already in Europe, officials say.

Carter said the equipment would move around as needed, to support exercises in Europe.

U.S. officials say Ukraine has illustrated the importance of being able to counter "hybrid warfare", the blend of unidentified troops, propaganda and economic pressure that the West says Russia has used there.

It also involves cyber warfare. Carter also announced plans on Tuesday to work with an Estonia-based NATO cyber center to help allies develop cyber defense strategies and critical infrastructure protection planning.

NATO vs Russia: ‘US tries to create enemy out of nothing’

The Ukrainian crisis is about Ukraine, but not about Central or Western Europe, says Jonathan Steele, Guardian international affairs columnist. But NATO needs to justify its existence and sell arms, that’s why a demonization of Russia is taking place.

On Monday, US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter claimed America will provide more aircraft, weapons and soldiers to NATO’s rapid reaction force in Europe. This is meant to help Europe face security threats including Russia. Earlier, the US announced plans to store battle tanks, combat vehicles and heavy weapons for as many as 5,000 troops in Eastern Europe.

Minsk accords must be implemented in full, including political parts – FM Lavrov

The Minsk agreements on Ukraine crisis reconciliation, which have no alternatives, must be fully implemented, including the political aspects outlining constitutional reforms, said Russian FM Sergey Lavrov after the Normandy Four group ministers’ meeting.

Європа – це Україна !

Vineyard of the Saker,

23 June, 2015

Did they expect us to treat them with any respect?
They can polish their medals and sharpen their
Smiles, and amuse themselves playing games for awhile.
Boom boom, bang bang, lie down you’re dead.

Roger Waters

The Maidanites had this great slogan “Україна – це Європа!” or “The Ukraine is Europe”.  It was short, emphatic and utterly meaningless – hence it’s appeal and success.  Predictably it took the Ukronazis less than a year to show the world that in terms of violence, corruption, social rights, human rights, social organization, culture etc. the Ukraine was much more akin to some failed African state than to any West European country and that it would be much more accurate to say “The Ukraine is Africa”.

The Ukraine is Africa!

Still, the original slogan “Україна – це Європа!” has a kernel of truth to it, especially if flipped around.

Європа – це Україна !

Think of it: what has the Ukainian civil war shown about Europe?

It has shown that the EU is a spineless and voiceless US colony with no foreign policy at all.  That EU officials are no less corrupt than the Ukrainian ones (and I am not even sure of which ones are cheaper to purchase!).  This crisis also also shown that the EU has absolutely no moral or civilizational values, that all the so-called “EU values” are just a thin veneer of respectability over a systematic use of double-standards.  For the life of me I cannot think of a single reason to call Poroshenko or Bokassa or Mobutu more corrupt or less principled than Merkel, Hollande or Cameron.

The New Europe?

European politicians are all lining up to defend the putative rights of homosexuals, but when bona fide Nazis use weapons of war against entire cities (including chemical munitions and ballistic missiles) the noble Europeans either look away, or provide the Nazis with more money, guns and mercenaries.

Numerous Russian politicians have reported that in their private conversations with European diplomats the latter have admitted many times that they fully understood Russia’s stance, but that they could not say so openly.  So they are *knowingly* supporting the wrong side.

Furthermore, it is becoming increasingly clear that the EU bureaucracy does not care in the least about what most Europeans think, not about Russia, not about the Ukraine, Greece or the EU expansion into Central Europe.  In fact, the comprador “elites” of the EU treat they own people with no less contempt  than they have for their supposed “principles”.  For years now the EU has adopted laws and regulations which were going categorically against both the objective interests and the will of the majority of Europeans and they are still doing so today.

While these were certainly not saints, there used to be politicians in Europe (de Gaulle, Mitterrand, Schmidt, or even Thatcher) who at least had their own views and who were not just the subservient puppets of the White House.   I submit that nowadays  EU leaders are no less US puppets than Poroshenko.

It is quite amazing for me to watch the very same Europeans who had the gall and arrogance to tell Russia that the future of the Ukraine was “none of your business” (that is quite literally what they said) also accept that the future of the Ukraine would be totally controlled by the United States.

Furthermore, just as their Ukrainian counterparts, EU politicians have apparently simply given up on any hope on getting any respect on the part of their own people: in Europe, just as in the Ukraine, the authority of the heads of state is based on their power whereas in Russia the power of Putin is based on his authority.

Finally, just as the Ukraine the southern parts of the country are prone to resistance and, when possible, revolt, so in the EU we see a “protest belt” in the south from Spain to Greece.

Of course, the EU is still immensely richer than the truly devastated Ukraine.  But the writing is on the wall: the Ukraine has become Africa and the EU has become the Ukraine.

The Saker

23.06.2015 Crisis News: Ukrainian Defense Ministry Aid Joins DPR Militias

Member of Kiev's top brass ‘defects’ to anti-govt forces, predicts more like him

A man claiming to be a Ukrainian major general and former assistant to the country's defense minister has announced he is now working with the forces of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic.

"I am Ukrainian Armed Forces Major General Aleksandr Kolomiyets. My latest posts are chief analyst of the Ukrainian armed forces, assistant to the Ukrainian defense minister," the man said at a news conference at the Donetsk news agency loyal to the self-proclaimed republic. Kolomiyets had also spent 19 years as the chief enlistment officer in the Donetsk region

Gorlovka residents are desperate under constant shelling, damning Kiev regime and its forces

Ukraine’s President Poroshenko Says Overthrow of Yanukovych Was a Coup

Eric Zuesse

Global Research.

23 March, 2015

Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko requests the supreme court of Ukraine to declare that his predecessor, Viktor Yanukovych, was overthrown by an illegal operation; in other words, that the post-Yanukovych government, including Poroshenko’s own Presidency, came into power from a coup, not from something democratic, not from any authentic constitutional process at all.

In a remarkable document, which is not posted at the English version of the website of the Constitutional Court of Ukraine, but which is widely reported outside the United States, including Russia, Poroshenko, in Ukrainian (not in English), has petitioned the Constitutional Court of Ukraine (as it is being widely quoted in English):

“I ask the court to acknowledge that the law ‘on the removal of the presidential title from Viktor Yanukovych’ as unconstitutional.”

I had previously reported, and here will excerpt, Poroshenko’s having himself admitted prior to 26 February 2014, to the EU’s investigator, and right after the February 22nd overthrow of Yanukovych, that the overthrow was a coup, and that it was even a false-flag operation, in which the snipers, who were dressed as if they were Ukrainian Security Bureau troops, were actually not, and that, as the EU’s investigator put his finding to the EU’s chief of foreign affairs Catherine Ashton [and with my explanatory annotations here]:

“the same oligarch [Poroshenko — and so when he became President he already knew this] told that well, all the evidence shows that the people who were killed by snipers, from both sides, among policemen and people from the streets, [this will shock Ashton, who had just said that Yanukovych had masterminded the killings] that they were the same snipers, killing people from both sides [so, Poroshenko himself knows that his regime is based on a false-flag U.S.-controlled coup d’etat against his predecessor]. … Behind the snipers, it was not Yanukovych, but it was somebody from the new coalition.”

This was when Ashton first learned that the myth that Yanukovych had been overthrown as a result of public outrage at his having rejected the EU’s offer of membership to Ukraine was just a hoax. (Actually, the planning for this coup was already under way in the U.S. Embassy by at least early 2013, well prior to Yanukovych’s EU decision. Furthermore, the Ukrainian public’s approval of the government peaked right after Yanukovych announced his rejection of the EU’s offer, but then the U.S.-engineered“Maidan” riots caused that approval to plunge.)

If the Court grants Poroshenko’s petition, then the appointment of Arseniy Yatsenyuk by the U.S. State Department’s Victoria Nuland on 4 February 2014, which was confirmed by the Ukrainian parliament (or Rada) at the end of the coup on February 26th, and the other appointments which were made, including that of Oleksandr Turchynov to fill in for Yanukovych as caretaker President until one of the junta’s chosen candidates would be ‘elected’ on May 25th of 2014, which ‘election’ Poroshenko won — all of this was illegal.

However, this illegality had already been known. It was already explained in detail on 28 February 2014, that, “Yanukovych’s removal was unconstitutional.” That’s for lawyers; but, now, finally, Ukraine’s Constitutional Court is faced with the shocking predicament of Ukraine’s own President, who won his post as a result of this coup, requesting them to “acknowledge” that it was a coup, much as the founder of the “private CIA” firm Stratfor had even called it, “the most blatant coup in history.” (It was that because the authentic video and other evidence of its having been a Washington job was so massive.)

Also in the news now is that Dmitriy Yarosh‘s Right Sector — the same group that Washington had hired for the coup and for the ethnic cleansing campaign in Ukraine’s former Donbass region — have announced that they will assemble in Kiev on July 3rd to overthrow Petroshenko unless he restarts right now the war against Donbass. The people whom Washington paid to oust Yanukovych are planning to do the same to Poroshenko. There is a struggle inside the Obama Administration about how far they can successfully go with their Ukrainian nazis not formally leading the country.

Washington is having a hard time keeping in line the Ukrainian nazis upon whom Washington’s plan for Ukraine has been based. Ukraine’s nazis are thirsting for Russian blood, and want to slake their thirst faster than the Obama Administration is willing to go along with. Washington’s previous “F—k the EU!” hasn’t worked as well as they had hoped. There is thus increasingly bad blood between the Obama Administration and the Ukrainian enforcers upon whom Obama has been relying.

Basically, Poroshenko now is torn between the EU, on one side, and Ukraine’s well-armed nazis, on the other; and, thus far, the ultimate decider, U.S. President Obama, who has needed cooperation both from Ukraine’s nazis and from the EU, in order for his Ukrainian gambit against Russia to work, is on the fence between those two sides. John Kerry sides with the EU; Victoria Nuland sides with the nazis. But Obama himself hasn’t yet played his hand.

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity, and of  Feudalism, Fascism, Libertarianism and Economics. 

Yatsenyuk to Washington: Please Buy Ukraine!

” One dollar? I’ll take it!”  Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk is asking the U.S. to please join its privatization efforts this year as the struggling nation looks to raise capital as it reforms its economy. (Photo by Carsten Koall/Getty Images)

Ukraine PM is asking the US to please buy up state assets Kiev is selling in its new sweeping privatisation drive

German intelligence warns NATO about Ukraine's pursuit of nuclear weapons

1. Research reactors 2. Sources of ionized radiation 3. Special plants 4. Nuclear Power Station blocks 

The German intelligence service expressed concern about the plans of Kiev to resume research on nuclear weapons development

Ron Paul Warns Seizure Of Russian Assets Will Hasten Dollar Demise

While much of the world focused last week on whether or not the Federal Reserve was going to raise interest rates, or whether the Greek debt crisis would bring Europe to a crisis, the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague awarded a $50 billion judgment to shareholders of the former oil company Yukos in their case against the Russian government. The governments of Belgium and France moved immediately to freeze Russian state assets in their countries, naturally provoking the anger of the Russian government.

The timing of these actions is quite curious, coming as the Greek crisis in the EU seems to be reaching a tipping point and Greece, having perhaps abandoned the possibility of rapprochement with Europe, has been making overtures to Russia to help bail it out of its mess. And with the IMF's recent statement pledging its full and unconditional support to Ukraine, it has become even more clear that the IMF and other major multilateral institutions are not blindly technical organizations, but rather are totally subservient lackeys to the foreign policy agenda emanating from Washington. Toe the DC party line and the internationalists will bail you out regardless of how badly you mess up, but if you even think about talking to Russia you will face serious consequences.

The United States government is desperately trying to cling to the notion of a unipolar world, with the United States at its center dictating foreign affairs and monetary policy while its client states dutifully carry out instructions. But the world order is not unipolar, and the existence of Russia and China is a stark reminder of that. For decades, the United States has benefited as the creator and defender of the world's reserve currency, the dollar. This has enabled Americans to live beyond their means as foreign goods are imported to the US while increasingly-worthless dollars are sent abroad. But is it any wonder after 70-plus years of a depreciating dollar that the rest of the world is rebelling against this massive transfer of wealth?

The Europeans tried to form their own competitor to the dollar, and the resulting euro is collapsing around them as you read this. But the European Union was never considered much of a threat by the United States, existing as it does within Washington's orbit. Russia and China, on the other hand, pose a far more credible threat to the dollar, as they have both the means and the motivation to form a gold-backed alternative monetary system to compete against the dollar. 

That is what the US government fears, and that is why President Obama and his Western allies are risking a cataclysmic war by goading Russia with these politically-motivated asset seizures. Having run out of carrots, the US is resorting to the stick.

The US government knows that Russia will not blithely accept Washington's dictates, yet it still reacts like a petulant child flying into a tantrum whenever Russia dares to exert its sovereignty. The existence of a country that won't kowtow to Washington's demands is an unforgivable sin, to be punished with economic sanctions, attempting to freeze Russia out of world financial markets; veiled threats to strip Russia's hosting of the 2018 World Cup; and now the seizure of Russian state assets.

Thus far the Russian response has been incredibly restrained, but that may not last forever. Continued economic pressure from the West may very well necessitate a Sino-Russian monetary arrangement that will eventually dethrone the dollar. The end result of this needless bullying by the United States will hasten the one thing Washington fears the most: a world monetary system in which the US has no say and the dollar is relegated to playing second fiddle.

Putin addresses SPIEF 2015: 'Russia is open for the world' (FULL SPEECH)

Greenwald: Putin's 'Trolls' Are No Match for UK's Internet Manipulation Program 

NSA files published by Greenwald expose unit within British intelligence that plants stories, sets up bogus sites and plants comments on the Internet in a far more systematic way than anything the Russians are accused of.

A typical day in Russia, or the UK?