Courtesy of The Automatic Earth.
NPC Penn Oil Co., Massachusetts Avenue and North Capitol, Washington DC 1920
I can’t seem to get away from Ukraine and Iraq lately. Don’t know if I should apologize for that, but I certainly never had any intention of writing about politics. It’s just that it all seems to come together now, power games, waning energy resources and – the remnants of – hugely indebted societies. We’re taking our first baby steps on the downward ladder, so to speak, and we’re already having trouble keeping our balance. Where will this lead?
The US, UK and France are dropping supplies aimed at helping the Yazidi people on Mount Sinjar in western Iraq. Russia sends 280 trucks with supplies towards the Ukraine border, supplies aimed at helping the people in Luhansk (where people have had no power or water supply in at least 10 days) and Donetsk. The first set of supplies gets applauded, the second one is treated with allegations and suspicions (“fears of a full-scale Russian invasion disguised as humanitarian assistance”).
Russia says it may take a few days before the convoy reaches the border. There’s no full agreement with the Red Cross yet on the operation, something broadly explained as bad and terrifying, but if they wait until that agreement is in place, even more days go by without aid for the population. So why not do it this way?
A similar point is that the trucks have been painted white, also – but of course – ‘advertized’ as suspicious: “They’re really army trucks”! Excuse me, but where else would you find that many trucks on such short notice? And do you think it would be better for anyone involved if they were left in army colors?
As for Russia seeking to pull a Trojan horse, that would not seem very smart. They expect the trucks to be searched. And besides, if Russia would want to invade Ukraine, I think they would simply do it, or even simply already have done it. Who’s going to stop them? NATO? Ukraine is not a NATO country.
Isn’t it perhaps possible that everyone’s just running away with wave after wave of unfounded suspicions and allegations, while in reality Putin has no intention of invading Ukraine? That all he wants is to prevent a massacre? If “we” continue like this, we may force him to act. That would be very unfortunate, and it would all be on our shoulders, not Russia’s.
Russia was very uncomfortable with what happened in Kiev in February, when the elected president Yanukovych was toppled. Putin didn’t like the guy at all, but he was not going to topple him either. “We” did, though. And that was a direct threat to Russia’s only warm water ports, which is why he accepted Crimea’s request to join Russia, and its pipelines in Ukraine. The threat to those still exists. How or why should Russia not be uneasy about all this?
Victoria Nuland said the US had funded all sorts of ‘civil’ groups in Ukraine with $5 billion before February. The EU spent at least $600 million the same way. Of course he’s uneasy, even of he spent money himself as well.
I wrote yesterday on our Automatic Earth Facebook page:
Multiple parties are now talking about a humanitarian mission to Donetsk and Luhansk. Red Cross. At the same time, there’s constant talk about a fear that Russia will send troops to help the people there. (As if that would be terribly out of whack, to help people under siege who speak your language, from threats uttered by questionable forces. But that aside.)
Last week, NATO said 20,000 Russian troops were gathered at the border. Russia said a few days later that the exercise they had conducted had ended, and the troops were being withdrawn towards their homebase. Nobody in the west or Ukraine at the time denied that.
Then, just now, the Ukraine government says there are presently 45,000 Russian troops are at the border, with details about huge numbers of tanks, troops, artillery etc.
And in Holland someone from the military police told parliament this afternoon that the threat of a Russian invasion was the reason the recovery mission at the MH17 crash site was halted 5 days ago. That is, when that threat was, for all I know, a figment of somebody’s imagination. Another thing this guy said was that the threat of recovery workers being kidnapped had risen (that one was new to me).
Of course, no proof of anything was provided. But how real was either threat, ever? How real were NATO’s 20,000 numbers last week? Why are Ukraine’s numbers twice as high now? Is that because NATO can’t count? More importantly, where is the evidence? Are we now just squeezing anything that sounds somewhat credible out of this situation, because there simply is no more? And the folks at home still eat it up like candy anyway?
Why does anybody listen to, and take decisions based on, anything Ukraine says any longer? Is there even one thing the Kiev government has said since July 17 that’s not been found to be false? I can’t think of one single example.
Dutch military is right now telling a news program – not for the first time – about how respectful the rebels have treated everything on the crash site, the bodies, everything. But nobody hears it anymore. They’re all focused on the very first reports, 25 days ago, in the first hours/days, which said the rebels were monsters. Reports which all came from Kiev. It’s embarrassing and humiliating to see our western media, our politicians and our fellow citizens stoop to such levels.
But perhaps help is on its way, from sources that are likely even more unlikely than the cavalry. That is to say, the – right-wing – Daily Telegraph in Britain has started reporting on the dark sides of Ukraine’s government, and our attitude towards the country. Over the weekend, Christopher Booker wrote:
Fresh Evidence Of How The West Lured Ukraine Into Its Orbit
How odd it has been to read all those accounts of Europe sleepwalking into war in the summer of 1914, and how such madness must never happen again, against the background of the most misrepresented major story of 2014 – the gathering crisis between Russia and the West over Ukraine,
For months the West has been demonising President Putin, with figures such as the Prince of Wales and Hillary Clinton comparing him with Hitler, oblivious to the fact that what set this crisis in motion were those recklessly provocative moves to absorb Ukraine into the EU. There was never any way that this drive to suck the original cradle of Russian identity into the Brussels empire was not going to provoke Moscow to react – not least due to the prospect that its only warm-water ports, in Crimea, might soon be taken over by Nato.
And still scarcely reported here have been the billions of dollars and euros the West has been more or less secretively pouring into Ukraine to promote the cause: not just to prop up its bankrupt government and banking system, but to fund scores of bogus “pro-European” groups making up what the EU calls “civil society”.
… the European Commission told a journalist that, between 2004 and 2013, these groups had only been given €31 million [..] the true figure, shown on the commission’s own “Financial Transparency” website, was €496 million.
The 200 front organisations receiving this colossal sum have such names as “Center for European Co-operation” or the “Donetsk Regional Public Organisation with Hope for the Future”
One of my readers heard from a Ukrainian woman working in Britain that her husband back home earns €200 a month as an electrician, but is paid another €200 a month, from a German bank, to join demonstrations [..]
However dangerous this crisis becomes, it is the West which has brought it about; and our hysterical vilifying of Russia is more reminiscent of that fateful mood in the summer of 1914 than we should find it comfortable to contemplate.
Then yesterday, the same Telegraph published a very damning piece about the swastika brandishing units the Ukraine government uses against its fellow Ukrainians in the east:
The Neo-Nazi Brigade Fighting Pro-Russian Separatists
As Ukraine’s armed forces tighten the noose around pro-Russian separatists in the east of the country, the western-backed government in Kiev is throwing militia groups – some openly neo-Nazi – into the front of the battle. The Azov battalion has the most chilling reputation of all.
Kiev’s use of volunteer paramilitaries to stamp out the Russian-backed Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics”, proclaimed in eastern Ukraine in March, should send a shiver down Europe’s spine. Recently formed battalions such as Donbas, Dnipro and Azov, with several thousand men under their command, are officially under the control of the interior ministry but their financing is murky, their training inadequate and their ideology often alarming.
The Azov men use the neo-Nazi Wolfsangel (Wolf’s Hook) symbol on their banner and members of the battalion are openly white supremacists, or anti-Semites. [..] Two more militiamen died on Sunday fighting north of Donetsk. Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine’s president, called one of them a hero.
“The historic mission of our nation in this critical moment is to lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival,” [battalion’s commander Andriy Biletsky] wrote in a recent commentary. “A crusade against the Semite-led Untermenschen.”
Azov’s extremist profile and slick English–language pages on social media have even attracted foreign fighters. Mr Biletsky says he has men from Ireland, Italy, Greece and Scandinavia. At the base in Urzuf, Mikael Skillt, 37, a former sniper with the Swedish Army and National Guard, leads and trains a reconnaissance unit. Mr Skillt says he called himself a National Socialist as a young man and more recently he was active in the extreme right wing Party of the Swedes.
Ukraine’s government is unrepentant about using the neo-Nazis. “The most important thing is their spirit and their desire to make Ukraine free and independent,” said Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Arsen Avakov, the interior minister.
Mark Galeotti, an expert on Russian and Ukrainian security affairs at New York University: “The danger is that this is part of the building up of a toxic legacy for when the war ends,” he said.[..] “And what do you do when the war is over and you get veterans from Azov swaggering down your high street, and in your own lives?”
You sure you want those guys representing your side, paid by your tax dollars?
Today, Irish journalist and playwright Bryan MacDonald summarizes this development:
UK Media Approaching ‘Mea Culpa’ Moment On Russia
Russia has been suffering from vilification and falsity in much of the Western mainstream press since the US and EU ignited a needless civil war in Ukraine. I’ve already covered in a previous dispatch how the UK media managed to charge, try and sentence President Putin within hours of the appalling MH17 disaster – “Putin’s missile” as the internationally little-known court of ‘The Sun’ in London adjudicated. Never mind that there was no evidence. In fact, nearly a month on and there’s still not a shred of proof connecting the rebels to the tragedy – much less the Kremlin. [..]
When the media gets it wrong, they usually wait a few years (or even decades) before issuing the ‘mea culpa’, but it seems the UK media this week is beginning to realize that it backed the wrong horse in Ukraine and is in early apology mode. Let’s be very clear here – the three newspapers which form UK political opinion on external affairs are the The Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph and The (Sunday and daily) Times. The Sun plays a huge role domestically, but not on extraneous matters as the red-top doesn’t prioritize foreign coverage.
This weekend, The Telegraph (which is effectively the ruling Tory party’s in-house journal) admitted that the EU paid protestors at the Maidan rallies. This clashes with a previously widely-held UK media viewpoint that Russia was paying protestors on the other side of Ukraine’s divide. I have to admit, I sputtered into my cornflakes when I first read it but I can clearly see where this new stance is headed. The ‘mea culpa’ is beginning to form a head of steam in double-quick time. [..]
Amid all this lunacy, there is also the re-emergence of aged ‘Cold Warriors’ who last had a day in the sun when the Soviet Union was coughing its dying breaths. After years of being ignored, they are back in (temporary) vogue and determined to make their voices heard, no matter how humungous a time-warp they are stuck in. Indeed, 86-year-old Zbigniew Brzezinski, last seen arming the mujahedeen in Afghanistan in the 1980′s, has re-appeared like a scarier version of The Simpson’s Mr Burns. His Afghan policy was so successful that it created Al Qaeda so what could possibly go wrong by following his advice on Russia?
Below them, there is a younger generation of ‘Russia experts’ who largely chose Russian or Slavic topics in their academic years, and have been lifelong non-entities as the region became a fringe topic in a West obsessed with problems in the Islamic world. As a consequence of an abrupt (probably fleeting) interest in Ukraine, they have been brought in from the ether and are determined to milk the moment they’ve spent their adult lives building up to. Previously niche authors, published on obscure websites, suddenly find themselves called on to write big-time magazine cover stories demonizing Putin to fit the new ‘bogeyman’ narrative and they are delirious with the acclaim.
Others who, until recently, could not command the attention of a few drunks at a Washington or London bar for their Russian rantings are overcome with joy at being invited on CNN/Sky News/NBC etc. to discuss their favorite topic. Basically, they are all partying like it is 1989. [..] However, last orders at their little shindig seems to be approaching as Western popular media edges towards its ‘mea culpa moment’ and editors realize that backing the wrong horse, no matter how generous the odds, has only ever made the punters poorer.
And I don’t even get around to the western escapades in the desert today, where in Baghdad Shi’ite private armies may be called upon to battle each other in the name of the constitution, or just power, and where “we” think we have some sort of right to once again interfere, due to past successes. Tell me: would you think this is how Rome built its empire, or how it lost it?
The other day, I said it might be good if you write to your Congressperson or MP and ask for the proof that their views and policies are based on. Our good friend Euan Mearns – of Oil Drum fame – in Aberdeen has taken up the challenge, and written to no-one less than a UK Secretary of State. This can be you blueprint, copy and paste, and send it off. I’m very curious to see what responses the mailman will deliver:
