US green light for war in Ukraine

US top diplomat John Kerry has announced his refusal to meet with separatist leaders in eastern Ukraine. In the context of fraught peace talks between the warring sides, that’s an American green light for more ethnic cleansing of the pro-Russian population carried out by the neo-Nazi Kiev regime.

Kerry’s snub to the people of east Ukraine, who are fighting heroically for their political autonomy from the Western-sponsored Kiev junta, is Washington code for the following: these pro-Russian people in the east are not equal to the Kiev regime; their rights and aspirations for independence can therefore be dismissed with contempt.

That official Washington attitude only reinforces the hate-filled bigotry of the Kiev regime, which views the ethnic Russian population in the eastern regions as detritus to be trampled on and discarded.

The US puppet-president in Kiev, Petro Poroshenko, may be calling for an immediate “ceasefire” as of today. But that is only a cynical maneuver to stop the pro-Russian rebels from gaining the military upper hand against the Western-backed regime and to give the latter some breathing space to regroup and continue its criminal offensive.

Since the CIA-installed Kiev regime launched its military offensive on the eastern regions last April nearly 5,000 people have been killed, more than 10,000 injured and over one million turned into refugees.

Most of the victims have been civilians. This carnage would not have happened if it were not for the crucial support afforded to the Kiev junta by Washington and its European minions. Billions of dollars of Western taxpayers’ money have been handed out in financial and military aid to prop up the Kiev cabal even as it is proceeding to commit mass murder.

Kiev’s Orwellian-named “anti-terror operation” was launched days after CIA director John Brennan made a secret visit to the Ukrainian capital in mid-April last year, when he held behind-closed-door meetings with the junta’s leadership. The fact of his visit only leaked out by chance, otherwise it would not have been known of. Brennan’s clandestine meeting strongly suggests the Kiev onslaught against eastern Ukraine was US-inspired and is being coordinated from Washington.

The subsequent slaughter in the eastern Donbas regions has been met mostly with a criminal silence from Washington and Brussels, and in the Western corporate media. That silence is tantamount to complicity in the crimes against humanity committed by the Kiev regime forces.
 

Distortion of reality

Perversely and audaciously, the West has distorted the reality of what is really going on in Ukraine, and has sought to blame the violence on the pro-Russian separatists (the victims) and on Moscow. No mention of the illegal coup against an elected government last February, no mention of patent Nazi glorification by the new regime, no mention of who actually launched military operations in April, no mention of the thousands of civilians, including families and children, killed in indiscriminate shelling with cluster bombs and Grad rockets fired by the Western-backed regime.

The massacre in the southern port city of Mariupol on January 24 is classic. Some 30 civilians were killed and over 100 injured when several Grad rockets were fired into a civilian area. Typically, the Kiev regime, Washington, Brussels, NATO and the Western media rushed to blame the “Russian-backed rebels.” Only later did it emerge that the rockets were actually fired from army positions outside the city held by the Western-backed Kiev regime.

All the West articulates is the unproven and tedious narrative of Russia “annexing” Crimea and Russian troops covertly aiding the separatists. NATO and Western governments claim that there are 9,000 Russian troops in east Ukraine, which Moscow has consistently denied. Whatever help is coming from Russia is in the form of humanitarian aid convoys and diplomatic support for the self-declared Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics. Some Russian citizens have gone to fight as volunteers in solidarity with people whom they share centuries of kinship with. So what?

No satellite images are presented as proof for Western claims of a Russian invasion; strangely, there are no dead Russian soldiers being recovered or military prisoners paraded. Just Western assertions stacked up on more teetering assertions. This irrational, tenuous logic by Western elites and their dutiful media has led to economic sanctions being ratcheted up on Russia and a rapid deterioration in East-West relations that threaten to ignite an all-out global war.

Everything about this crisis smacks of inequality. Washington and its European allies can level wild, unsupported allegations and sanctions; while Russia and the rest of the world have to stoically bear the consequences; the West can install an illegal neo-Nazi regime that openly avows anti-Russian hatred; while the people of Crimea and the east Ukrainian regions are debarred from expressing their legitimate opposition to the unlawful Western interference in the internal affairs of their country; and when Russia offers diplomatic support to the ethnic Russian people in Ukraine who are being massacred by the Western-backed Kiev regime, then that is “proof” of Russian “subversion.”

Vladimir Putin’s government, unlike Washington, has made every effort at brokering a peaceful settlement of the Ukraine conflict, going back to the Geneva accord last April and up to the ceasefire first announced in the Belarus capital, Minsk, in early September. Moscow has rightly emphasized the need for the Kiev regime to respect the wishes of the ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine, from being able to use their own native Russian language, to being able to form autonomous republics. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

With outrageous arrogance, the Kiev regime, which forcibly seized power unconstitutionally, refuses to acknowledge the rights of the ethnic Russian population. The latest peace talks in Minsk at the weekend broke up acrimoniously, with the separatists accusing the Kiev delegation of behaving “dictatorially.”

The Kiev regime is comprised of self-styled neo-Nazis who adulate the crimes of the Third Reich and its collaborationist Ukrainian death squads during World War II when millions of ethnic Russians were exterminated. Today, Kiev’s so-called prime minster Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who was handpicked for the job by the US State Department, refers to the ethnic Russian population in his country’s eastern regions as “sub-humans” and “terrorists.”

Kiev’s military forces are composed of paramilitary National Guard units which openly wear Nazi insignia dedicated to the mass murder of Russian people. Last week, the Pentagon announced that it was sending military trainers to Ukraine in the coming weeks to support these same National Guard units, which have been shelling civilian centres in Donetsk and Lugansk indiscriminately over the past 10 months.

So, when John Kerry says he is not willing to meet with the separatist leaders of Donetsk and Lugansk he is reinforcing the mentality of inequality that is fuelling the conflict in Ukraine. Of course, that is consistent with Washington’s own supremacist thinking that it is the “exceptional nation” superior to everyone else on the planet. It is also consistent with the underlying fact that Washington does not really want peace in Ukraine; it wants a proxy war on Russia’s borders for its grand scheme of harassing Russia and eventually trying to precipitate regime-change in Moscow.

FC/HSN

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