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NATO: Russia funding anti-fracking groups

Russian intelligence agencies are covertly funding and working with European environmental groups to campaign against fracking and maintain EU dependence on Russian gas, the head of Nato has claimed.

Answering questions after a speech in London, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Nato secretary-general, said improving European energy security was of the “utmost importance” and accused Moscow of “blackmail” in its dealings with Europe.

“I have met allies who can report that Russia, as part of their sophisticated information and disinformation operations, engaged actively with so-called non-governmental organisations – environmental organisations working against shale gas – to maintain European dependence on imported Russian gas,” Mr Rasmussen, former Danish prime minister, told an audience at Chatham House, the international affairs think-tank.

Mr Rasmussen did not detail the nature of his suspicions about Russian involvement with environmental groups.

The 28-nation EU bloc depends on Russia for about a third of its oil and gas needs.

Shale gas enthusiasts want curb the EU’s high dependence on Russian imports.

A Nato official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the Financial Times that “some allies worry that Russia could try to obstruct possible projects on shale gas exploration in Europe in order to maintain Europe’s reliance on Russian gas.”

Royal Dutch Shell last year struck a production-sharing agreement to develop the Yuzuvska field, which spans 8,000 square kilometres in and around Donetsk.

Denis Pushilin, from the Donetsk People’s Republic organised rallies against shale gas exploration in Donetsk. In May, Mr Pushilin said the Donetsk People’s Republic had banned the extraction of shale gas in territory it controlled in eastern Ukraine.

Protests against fracking have been held in Bulgaria and Romania but green groups in both countries have angrily rejected charges that they are puppets and dismiss the idea of Russia’s influence as a conspiracy theory.

Romania’s president, Traian Basescu, suggested that Russia was playing a role in trying to thwart Chevron’s shale gas development near the village of Pungesti.

Environmentalists reject the charges and accuse the Romanian police of acting as a private security force for Chevron.

Demonstrators have vented their outrage about the danger that shale development would pose to drinking water and geological faults.

Source: FT

NATO acting out a deliberate charade in Europe

by Diana Johnstone.

NATO leaders are currently acting out a deliberate charade in Europe, designed to reconstruct an Iron Curtain between Russia and the West.

With astonishing unanimity, NATO leaders feign surprise at events they planned months in advance. Events that they deliberately triggered are being misrepresented as sudden, astonishing, unjustified “Russian aggression”. The United States and the European Union undertook an aggressive provocation in Ukraine that they knew would force Russia to react defensively, one way or another.

They could not be sure exactly how Russian president Vladimir Putin would react when he saw that the United States was manipulating political conflict in Ukraine to install a pro-Western government intent on joining NATO. This was not a mere matter of a “sphere of influence” in Russia’s “near abroad”, but a matter of life and death to the Russian Navy, as well as a grave national security threat on Russia’s border.

A trap was thereby set for Putin. He was damned if he did, and damned if he didn’t. He could under-react, and betray Russia’s basic national interests, allowing NATO to advance its hostile forces to an ideal attack position.

Or he could over-react, by sending Russian forces to invade Ukraine. The West was ready for this, prepared to scream that Putin was “the new Hitler”, poised to overrun poor, helpless Europe, which could only be saved (again) by the generous Americans.

In reality, the Russian defensive move was a very reasonable middle course. Thanks to the fact that the overwhelming majority of Crimeans felt Russian, having been Russian citizens until Khrushchev frivolously bestowed the territory on Ukraine in 1954, a peaceful democratic solution was found. Crimeans voted for their return to Russia in a referendum which was perfectly legal according to international law, although in violation of the Ukrainian constitution, which was by then in tatters having just been violated by the overthrow of the country’s duly elected president, Victor Yanukovych, facilitated by violent militias. The change of status of Crimea was achieved without bloodshed, by the ballot box.

Nevertheless, the cries of indignation from the West were every bit as hysterically hostile as if Putin had overreacted and subjected Ukraine to a U.S.-style bombing campaign, or invaded the country outright – which they may have expected him to do.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry led the chorus of self-righteous indignation, accusing Russia of the sort of thing his own government is in the habit of doing. “You just don’t invade another country on phony pretext in order to assert your interests. This is an act of aggression that is completely trumped up in terms of its pretext”, Kerry pontificated. “It’s really 19th century behavior in the 21st century”. Instead of laughing at this hypocrisy, U.S. media, politicians and punditry zealously took up the theme of Putin’s unacceptable expansionist aggression. The Europeans followed with a weak, obedient echo.

It Was All Planned at Yalta

In September 2013, one of Ukraine’s richest oligarchs, Viktor Pinchuk, paid for an elite strategic conference on Ukraine’s future that was held in the same Palace in Yalta, Crimea, where Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill met to decide the future of Europe in 1945. The Economist, one of the elite media reporting on what it called a “display of fierce diplomacy”, stated that: “The future of Ukraine, a country of 48m people, and of Europe was being decided in real time.” The participants included Bill and Hillary Clinton, former CIA head General David Petraeus, former U.S. Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers, former World Bank head Robert Zoellick, Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt, Shimon Peres, Tony Blair, Gerhard Schröder, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Mario Monti, Lithuanian president Dalia Grybauskaite, and Poland’s influential foreign minister Radek Sikorski. Both President Viktor Yanukovych, deposed five months later, and his recently elected successor Petro Poroshenko were present. Former U.S. energy secretary Bill Richardson was there to talk about the shale-gas revolution which the United States hopes to use to weaken Russia by substituting fracking for Russia’s natural gas reserves. The center of discussion was the “Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement” (DCFTA) between Ukraine and the European Union, and the prospect of Ukraine’s integration with the West. The general tone was euphoria over the prospect of breaking Ukraine’s ties with Russia in favor of the West.

Conspiracy against Russia? Not at all. Unlike Bilderberg, the proceedings were not secret. Facing a dozen or so American VIPs and a large sampling of the European political elite was a Putin adviser named Sergei Glazyev, who made Russia’s position perfectly clear.

Glazyev injected a note of political and economic realism into the conference. Forbes reported at the time on the “stark difference” between the Russian and Western views “not over the advisability of Ukraine’s integration with the EU but over its likely impact.” In contrast to Western euphoria, the Russian view was based on “very specific and pointed economic criticisms” about the Trade Agreement’s impact on Ukraine’s economy, noting that Ukraine was running an enormous foreign accounts deficit, funded with foreign borrowing, and that the resulting substantial increase in Western imports could only swell the deficit. Ukraine “will either default on its debts or require a sizable bailout”.

The Forbes reporter concluded that “the Russian position is far closer to the truth than the happy talk coming from Brussels and Kiev.”

As for the political impact, Glazyev pointed out that the Russian-speaking minority in Eastern Ukraine might move to split the country in protest against cutting ties with Russia, and that Russia would be legally entitled to support them, according to The Times of London.

In short, while planning to incorporate Ukraine into the Western sphere, Western leaders were perfectly aware that this move would entail serious problems with Russian-speaking Ukrainians, and with Russia itself. Rather than seeking to work out a compromise, Western leaders decided to forge ahead and to blame Russia for whatever would go wrong. What went wrong first was that Yanukovych got cold feet faced with the economic collapse implied by the Trade Agreement with the European Union. He postponed signing, hoping for a better deal. Since none of this was explained clearly to the Ukrainian public, outraged protests ensued, which were rapidly exploited by the United States… against Russia.

Ukraine as Bridge…Or Achilles Heel

Ukraine, a term meaning borderland, is a country without clearly fixed historical borders that has been stretched too far to the East and too far to the West. The Soviet Union was responsible for this, but the Soviet Union no longer exists, and the result is a country without a unified identity and which emerges as a problem for itself and for its neighbors.

It was extended too far East, incorporating territory that might as well have been Russian, as part of a general policy to distinguish the USSR from the Tsarist empire, enlarging Ukraine at the expense of its Russian component and demonstrating that the Soviet Union was really a union among equal socialist republics. So long as the whole Soviet Union was run by the Communist leadership, these borders didn’t matter too much.

It was extended too far West at the end of World War II. The victorious Soviet Union extended Ukraine’s border to include Western regions, dominated by the city variously named Lviv, Lwow, Lemberg or Lvov, depending on whether it belonged to Lithuania, Poland, the Hapsburg Empire or the USSR, a region which was a hotbed of anti-Russian sentiments. This was no doubt conceived as a defensive move, to neutralize hostile elements, but it created the fundamentally divided nation that today constitutes the perfect troubled waters for hostile fishing.

The Forbes report cited above pointed out that: “For most of the past five years, Ukraine was basically playing a double game, telling the EU that it was interested in signing the DCFTA while telling the Russians that it was interested in joining the customs union.” Either Yanukovych could not make up his mind, or was trying to squeeze the best deal out of both sides, or was seeking the highest bidder. In any case, he was never “Moscow’s man”, and his downfall owes a lot no doubt to his own role in playing both ends against the middle. His was a dangerous game of pitting greater powers against each other.

It is safe to say that what was needed was something that so far seems totally lacking in Ukraine: a leadership that recognizes the divided nature of the country and works diplomatically to find a solution that satisfies both the local populations and their historic ties with the Catholic West and with Russia. In short, Ukraine could be a bridge between East and West – and this, incidentally, has been precisely the Russian position. The Russian position has not been to split Ukraine, much less to conquer it, but to facilitate the country’s role as bridge. This would involve a degree of federalism, of local government, which so far is entirely lacking in the country, with local governors selected not by election but by the central government in Kiev. A federal Ukraine could both develop relations with the EU and maintain its vital (and profitable) economic relations with Russia.

But this arrangement calls for Western readiness to cooperate with Russia. The United States has plainly vetoed this possibility, preferring to exploit the crisis to brand Russia “the enemy”.

Plan A and Plan B

U.S. policy, already evident at the September 2013 Yalta meeting, was carried out on the ground by Victoria Nuland, former advisor to Dick Cheney, deputy ambassador to NATO, spokeswoman for Hillary Clinton, wife of neocon theorist Robert Kagan. Her leading role in the Ukraine events proves that the neo-con influence in the State Department, established under Bush II, was retained by Obama, whose only visible contribution to foreign policy change has been the presence of a man of African descent in the presidency, calculated to impress the world with U.S. multicultural virtue. Like most other recent presidents, Obama is there as a temporary salesman for policies made and executed by others.

As Victoria Nuland boasted in Washington, since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States has spent five billion dollars to gain political influence in Ukraine (this is called “promoting democracy”). This investment is not “for oil”, or for any immediate economic advantage. The primary motives are geopolitical, because Ukraine is Russia’s Achilles’ heel, the territory with the greatest potential for causing trouble to Russia.

What called public attention to Victoria Nuland’s role in the Ukrainian crisis was her use of a naughty word, when she told the U.S. ambassador, “Fuck the EU”. But the fuss over her bad language veiled her bad intentions. The issue was who should take power away from the elected president Viktor Yanukovych. German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party has been promoting former boxer Vitaly Klitschko as its candidate. Nuland’s rude rebuff signified that the United States, not Germany or the EU, was to choose the next leader, and that was not Klitschko but “Yats”. And indeed it was Yats, Arseniy Yatsenyuk , a second-string US-sponsored technocrat known for his enthusiasm for IMF austerity policies and NATO membership, who got the job. This put a U.S. sponsored government, enforced in the streets by fascist militia with little electoral clout but plenty of armed meanness, in a position to manage the May 25 elections, from which the Russophone East was largely excluded.

Plan A for the Victoria Nuland putsch was probably to install, rapidly, a government in Kiev that would join NATO, thus formally setting the stage for the United States to take possession of Russia’s indispensable Black Sea naval base at Sebastopol in Crimea. Reincorporating Crimea into Russia was Putin’s necessary defensive move to prevent this.

But the Nuland gambit was in fact a win-win ploy. If Russia failed to defend itself, it risked losing its entire southern fleet – a total national disaster. On the other hand, if Russia reacted, as was most likely, the US thereby won a political victory that was perhaps its main objective. Putin’s totally defensive move is portrayed by the Western mainstream media, echoing political leaders, as unprovoked “Russian expansionism”, which the propaganda machine compares to Hitler grabbing Czechoslovakia and Poland.

Thus a blatant Western provocation, using Ukrainian political confusion against a fundamentally defensive Russia, has astonishingly succeeded in producing a total change in the artificial Zeitgeist produced by Western mass media. Suddenly, we are told that the “freedom-loving West” is faced with the threat of “aggressive Russian expansionism”. Some forty years ago, Soviet leaders gave away the store under the illusion that peaceful renunciation on their part could lead to a friendly partnership with the West, and especially with the United States. But those in the United States who never wanted to end the Cold War are having their revenge. Never mind “communism”; if, instead of advocating the dictatorship of the proletariat, Russia’s current leader is simply old-fashioned in certain ways, Western media can fabricate a monster out of that. The United States needs an enemy to save the world from.

The Protection Racket Returns

But first of all, the United States needs Russia as an enemy in order to “save Europe”, which is another way to say, in order to continue to dominate Europe. Washington policy-makers seemed to be worried that Obama’s swing to Asia and neglect of Europe might weaken U.S. control of its NATO allies. The May 25 European Parliament elections revealed a large measure of disaffection with the European Union. This disaffection, notably in France, is linked to a growing realization that the EU, far from being a potential alternative to the United States, is in reality a mechanism that locks European countries into U.S.-defined globalization, economic decline and U.S. foreign policy, wars and all.

Ukraine is not the only entity that has been overextended. So has the EU. With 28 members of diverse language, culture, history and mentality, the EU is unable to agree on any foreign policy other than the one Washington imposes. The extension of the EU to former Eastern European satellites has totally broken whatever deep consensus might have been possible among the countries of the original Economic Community: France, Germany, Italy and the Benelux states. Poland and the Baltic States see EU membership as useful, but their hearts are in America – where many of their most influential leaders have been educated and trained. Washington is able to exploit the anti-communist, anti-Russian and even pro-Nazi nostalgia of northeastern Europe to raise the false cry of “the Russians are coming!” in order to obstruct the growing economic partnership between the old EU, notably Germany, and Russia.

Russia is no threat. But to vociferous Russophobes in the Baltic States, Western Ukraine and Poland, the very existence of Russia is a threat. Encouraged by the United States and NATO, this endemic hostility is the political basis for the new “iron curtain” meant to achieve the aim spelled out in 1997 by Zbigniew Brzezinski in The Grand Chessboard: keeping the Eurasian continent divided in order to perpetuate U.S. world hegemony. The old Cold War served that purpose, cementing U.S. military presence and political influence in Western Europe. A new Cold War can prevent U.S. influence from being diluted by good relations between Western Europe and Russia.

Obama has come to Europe ostentatiously promising to “protect” Europe by basing more troops in regions as close as possible to Russia, while at the same time ordering Russia to withdraw its own troops, on its own territory, still farther away from troubled Ukraine. This appears designed to humiliate Putin and deprive him of political support at home, at a time when protests are rising in Eastern Ukraine against the Russian leader for abandoning them to killers sent from Kiev.

To tighten the U.S. grip on Europe, the United States is using the artificial crisis to demand that its indebted allies spend more on “defense”, notably by purchasing U.S. weapons systems. Although the U.S. is still far from being able to meet Europe’s energy needs from the new U.S. fracking boom, this prospect is being hailed as a substitute for Russia’s natural gas sales – stigmatized as a “way of exercising political pressure”, something of which hypothetic U.S. energy sales are presumed to be innocent. Pressure is being brought against Bulgaria and even Serbia to block construction of the South Stream pipeline that would bring Russian gas into the Balkans and southern Europe.

From D-Day to Dooms Day

Today, June 6, the seventieth anniversary of the D-Day landing is being played in Normandy as a gigantic celebration of American domination, with Obama heading an all-star cast of European leaders. The last of the aged surviving soldiers and aviators present are like the ghosts of a more innocent age when the United States was only at the start of its new career as world master. They were real, but the rest is a charade. French television is awash with the tears of young villagers in Normandy who have been taught that the United States is some sort of Guardian Angel, which sent its boys to die on the shores of Normandy out of pure love for France. This idealized image of the past is implicitly projected on the future. In seventy years, the Cold War, a dominant propaganda narrative and above all Hollywood have convinced the French, and most of the West, that D-Day was the turning point that won World War II and saved Europe from Nazi Germany.

Vladimir Putin came to the celebration, and has been elaborately shunned by Obama, self-appointed arbiter of Virtue. The Russians are paying tribute to the D-Day operation which liberated France from Nazi occupation, but they – and historians – know what most of the West has forgotten: that the Wehrmacht was decisively defeated not by the Normandy landing, but by the Red Army. If the vast bulk of German forces had not been pinned down fighting a losing war on the Eastern front, nobody would celebrate D-Day as it is being celebrated today.

Putin is widely credited as being “the best chess player”, who won the first round of the Ukrainian crisis. He has no doubt done the best he could, faced with the crisis foisted on him. But the U.S. has whole ranks of pawns which Putin does not have. And this is not only a chess game, but chess combined with poker combined with Russian roulette. The United States is ready to take risks that the more prudent Russian leaders prefer to avoid… as long as possible.

Perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of the current charade is the servility of the “old” Europeans. Apparently abandoning all Europe’s accumulated wisdom, drawn from its wars and tragedies, and even oblivious to their own best interests, today’s European leaders seem ready to follow their American protectors to another D-Day … D for Doom.

Can the presence of a peace-seeking Russian leader in Normandy make a difference? All it would take would be for mass media to tell the truth, and for Europe to produce reasonably wise and courageous leaders, for the whole fake war machine to lose its luster, and for truth to begin to dawn. A peaceful Europe is still possible, but for how long?

Diana Johnstone is the author of Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO, and Western Delusions.

Source: Counterpunch

Marine Le Pen: EU indifferent to suffering in eastern Ukraine

The leader of the Front National party Marine Le Pen talks to Sophie Shevardnadze on RT.

SS: Obama said the security of America’s European allies is sacrosanct, promising to boost U.S. military deployments and exercises around Europe. Does Europe need this kind of support?

MP: To defend ourselves against whom? […] To defend ourselves against whom? Well, you know that we are for leaving NATO, for France leaving NATO, we have a Gaullian vision of what international politics must be like, we are for developing our relations with Russia, without breaking ties with the United States. We believe that France must maintain its relations with all of the world’s great nations, and we do not want to be imposed with a way of seeing things by anybody. We aspire to have the freedom to determine the quality and the level of our international relations. But… to defend ourselves against whom? When we asked this question to a French politician, his answer was “China”. It almost makes you laugh. We can clearly see that, as a matter of fact, this is an opportunity for the United States to carry out military integration, and maybe tomorrow, economic integration, to extend the scope of its influence. The free-trade agreement that the United States want to sign at any price is really just another way to tie the European Union, in a quasi-definitive way, to the United States. This is, once again, a loss of independence, not to mention the catastrophic consequences that this free-trade agreement would have for us in terms of agriculture, industry, defence, etc. So this is much more a geopolitical treaty than a purely commercial or economic treaty.

S: The G7 condemned Russia for the situation in Ukraine, vowed more sanctions…Why are Western leaders calling on Russia and President Putin to end the violence, and not the government in Kiev, the newly-elected president they’ve been meeting with?

MP: That’s a good question. Because we are at the culmination of a Cold War that has been fought against Russia by the United States, to which the European capitals have completely submitted on an international level. It’s as simple as that, and a shame as well. And I would like to seize this opportunity to express my compassion and my sadness and my disgust to see these civil victims in the East of Ukraine, who are dying surrounded by the general indifference of the European political world and media. It is a real scandal which is happening on our doorstep, and you are right to say that from the moment Ukraine has a legitimate government, it is the government which must take responsibility. But for this, we would need to demand that the Ukrainian government dismantle and disarm the reigning militia, which would most likely embarrass a number of people.

SS: The elections in Ukraine were quick to be accepted by the major powers in the West – despite the civil war that’s going on in the country and the fact that there was no vote in the country’s rebellious East. At the same time, the elections in Syria, were branded illegitimate even before they were held. Why?

MP: Yes, but this has been happening for years! I mean, such and such decides who is on the good side and who is on the bad side. And this can change at any moment. The good guys of today will be the bad guys of tomorrow, and maybe the bad guys of today will become good tomorrow, if Washington decides that it is to their advantage to make them good. It is a shame, since there is a substantial amount of mistakes that have been made at an international level under Washington’s influence, especially in Syria. We were the only ones among the French political parties to oppose intervention in Syria, the first and only ones who, from the beginning, said that we were arming Islamic fundamentalists, who would, if they did win, implement a reign of terror like they did in Libya. This was, once again, because of us. We helped them come to power. This is the American method, the international American method: they defend their interests, or they think that they are defending them, since sometimes they make serious mistakes. What is terrible is that European countries no longer have a say in things. There are no more sovereign nations in Europe that can be the voice of reason for peaceful settlement of conflicts, the voice of balance between different interests of different nations.

SS: You’ve said the EU is responsible for the situation in Ukraine – did it ever know what it was getting into?

MP: By definition, it is not up to me to defend the competency of these bodies. To not know this would be tragic – such geopolitical ignorance seems astounding to me. Nevertheless, the result is there – the European Union did not play the role that it could have played, and it contributed to aggravating the situation. What is really a shame is that countries like France no longer have a diplomatic voice – because here is a conflict in which France, if it had kept a strong political voice, a balancing voice like the one I want it to recover, it could totally manage to overcome these difficulties. The diplomacy of the European Union is a catastrophe, and not only in Ukraine – each time the European Union participates on the global stage, it is usually either to create a problem or to aggravate it.

SS: A little while back there was talk about the new rising superpower – the European Union. These elections showed that the bloc is far from being a universally approved, superstate. Will Europe never unite now?

MP: Europe is not at stake; it is the European Union that is at stake. Europe exists, and it consists of nations whose wealth lies in their uniqueness, their sovereignty, their freedom, their democracy. So, I am for a Europe of nations – I wish that tomorrow we can constitute a Europe that could expand, but to countries that have preserved their sovereignty and that would work together on cooperative projects. This is what works, and this is what I want to implement, but in order to do this, we have to deconstruct this European Union.

Source: RT

Gazprom calls an European energy union foolish, irrational

The idea of a single European body that would be in charge of purchasing gas for the whole union is simply foolish and irrational, Gazprom Deputy Chairman Alexander Medvedev said, suggesting the Polish PM must’ve been out of his mind proposing it.

Speaking at the “Export and reliability of gas supplies to Europe” conference in Moscow, Gazprom Deputy CEO Aleksander Medvedev said that earlier calls by the Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk to create a type of EU Gas Union for centralization of purchases of gas in Europe is irrational.

“Mr. Tusk is a politician who did quite a lot for the development of our relations,” Medvedev said. “And suddenly, as they say, he just falls out of an oak tree and says: ‘Why don’t we introduce the purchase of gas based on the example of some kind of atomic agency, where Europe at some point purchased enriched uranium?’”

Even the EU Energy Commissioner Guenther Oettinger believes that Tusk’s approach has no economic rationale behind it, Medvedev added.

“Gas is a special essence,” he said. “And even Mr. Oettinger agreed that the idea is far from being economically rational. I can say a lot about why this idea is foolish,” Gazprom executive added.

In the Financial Times editorial dated April 21, Tusk called for measures to tackle Russia’s monopoly in gas supplies to EU.

“Europe should confront Russia’s monopolistic position with a single European body charged with buying its gas,” Tusk wrote, adding, “I therefore propose an energy union.”

Russia is set to provide roughly 30 percent of growing European natural-gas demand by 2020. Even by conservative estimates, Europe by 2025 will require an additional 170 billion cubic meters of gas, and by 2035, Medvedev said that figure might constitute 225 billion cubic meters, creating an urgency for the investors to address the growing European demand for Russian gas.

Medvedev said Gazprom is willing to expand its supplies to Europe, but the process is being hindered by European partners.

“The problem with OPAL is still not solved, which, of course, is very, very strange,” said Medvedev, noting that agreements have already been signed. Under EU regulations Gazprom is only allowed to use 50 percent of capacity of the pipelines connecting the Nord Stream pipeline with the pipeline grid in Middle and Western Europe. Yet despite this, the European partners have repeatedly postponed a decision on the allocation of the remaining 50 percent capacity load.

“Calling this a policy would be a compliment to the politicians. This politicking, I can openly say,” said Medvedev .

Gas giant’s executive said that the same is true for the ‘Yamal – Europe-2’ gas pipeline which will allow increasing transit capacities of gas to central Europe.

“There is no doubt that the project is economically efficient. But then again, based on some political issues, we have not moved forward. They do not know what they are doing. But we’ll find another way to provide for our needs. You can’t win love by force,” he told reporters.

As far as the EU calls for the South Stream project to be halted, Gazprom says it is ready for the worst case scenario and can complete the project without outside investment.

“If you ask me if I’m ready for the worst case scenario, I’d say ‘Yes, we are ready,” Medvedev told journalists in Moscow.

Medvedev also said that US efforts to stop Russian energy supplies to Europe to increase American market share in the region are “impossible.”

“We understand that the US, sitting high on a hill and independent of economic cooperation with us, is pushing Europe to take wild steps,” Medvedev said. “I think that logic of European business cooperation won’t allow dementia to set in. Russian export restrictions are impossible.”

Source: RT

Geert Wilders says EU responsible for mess in Ukraine

The EU is responsible for “the mess” in Ukraine, Geert Wilders, Holland’s Party for Freedom leader, told RT. Wilders wonders why the bloc has got involved in a country where half the population is against joining Europe.

Wilders, who was speaking exclusively on RT’s SophieCo, believes the EU should have kept out of the conflict and only made things worse by giving the country hopes of a pre-accession treaty to the union, when the people of Ukraine were not in unison about joining the organization.

“It was a very delicate balance in Ukraine with 50 percent looking eastwards, towards Russia, and 50 percent of the population looking westwards, towards the European Union. So I think it was very irresponsible what the EU did; they should have kept out of it,” Wilders said.

The leader of the right-wing Party for Freedom criticized politicians from Europe, the US and from his home country for appearing in Kiev and giving the impression that Ukraine had the complete support of the West while completely ignoring the fact that Ukraine remains a very complex situation.

“I believe Europe was more thinking about itself and expanding it and its territory than really thinking about the whole of Ukraine, let alone the stability in that region.”

Wilders admits he understands the gripes of those living in the east of the country, who were unhappy when the coup-appointed government took power in Kiev. “The best thing to do is to de-escalate by taking the Russian minority in eastern Ukraine seriously; give them rights and make them really feel as important as the other half of Ukraine,” the 50 year-old Eurosceptic continued.

The Dutch politician says Russia is also partly to blame and that retaining the territorial integrity of Ukraine is of the utmost importance.

“I’m not only blaming the EU, I’m blaming both Russia and the EU. But I have to be honest, the European Union made a terrible move in the beginning of November last year, and they at least partially started a lot of the troubles, and that analysis is shared by more parties in the EU for sure,” said the leader of the Party for Freedom.

The US and the EU recently introduced more economic sanctions against Russia as they believe the country is having a destabilizing effect on Ukraine. However, Wilders says this will help neither the Russians nor the EU and cannot have a “positive effect.”

Wilders has achieved success in his native Netherlands on a ticket of euro skepticism and is adamant that his country should leave the EU. “We can deal better economically when we are in charge of our country, again, when it comes to national sovereignty – so, yes, we would like to leave the EU and be stronger as a national country,” the Dutchman said.

Wilders cites the example of Switzerland, as a model that his country could follow, with the Alpine nation being one of the richest on the continent, despite never having joined the EU.

“We lost our identity; we lost our national sovereignty to the EU, an institution that really a lot of people in the West don’t like so much anymore. I have nothing against Europe, but I have a lot against the EU as an organization,” Wilders concluded.

Source: RT

Ukranian crime boss mayor shot in the back

The Jewish mayor of Kharkov was shot in the back raising fears that prominent public figures were being targeted for assassination.

While America and the European Union impose new sanctions on Russia, violence and turmoil continues unabated in eastern Ukraine.

The attempted murder of Gennady Kernes, the mayor of the country’s second-largest city has caused fear that the US invasion would plunge the country into more bloodshed. Last night Kernes was “fighting for his life”, said his spokesman, after emergency surgery.

Kernes, who has convictions for theft and fraud, was allegedly linked in the past to organised crime. He is also one of the most prominent Jews in the country; there has been rise in anti-semitism recently, but the mayor’s colleagues say he had not received any threats on religious grounds.

Kernes, a colourful character who regularly posted photographs of himself on social media was gunned down while he was out cycling, jogging, or swimming according to differing accounts of what took place. Valeriy Boyko, the director of Surgery institute in Kiev, where he was being treated, said the mayor “had suffered a very serious wound with a number of organs damaged”.

The 64-year-old billionaire businessman banned protests in Kharkov under an emergency order which had been put in place to “avoid the spread of infectious diseases”.

Officials said Kernes had made a public statement that he was being subjected to “political persecution”, adding that Arsen Avakov, Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine, was linked to threats against Kernes and the attack on him.

The two men have clashed in the past with Avakov accusing Kernes, to whom he lost the mayoral race in 2010, of organising gangs of thugs.

Ukraine is currently being looted by billionaires, but pickings might be slim.

Gunmen took over the police headquarters and municipal offices at Kosryantynivka on Monday, a city half way between Slovyansk and Donetsk, replacing the Ukrainian flag with those of the Peoples Republic of Donetsk and Russia.

Juliana Anatoliyevna, 40, standing outside the municipal building, wanted to stress: “We had been waiting for this to happen. We saw other places becoming free and we were kept waiting. We have had 22 years of Ukraine and all that has given us is misery, industries shutting down and unemployment. All we want now is a referendum, as soon as possible.”

Amid escalating tensions in Ukraine, the local population remains unclear who the army is ‘defending’.

A taxi driver confronted a military checkpoint in Ukraine’s eastern town of Slavyansk, asking the Interior Troops stationed there: “Who are you guarding against here?”

In response he received a confused answer from one of the soldiers: “We’ve been doing that since December, nobody really knows against whom.”

The taxi driver stood up to Ukrainian soldiers that had been demanding to see his identification, claiming that they are there “to prevent transportation of forbidden items to or out of Slavyansk,” as part of the “anti-terrorist operation.”

Ukrainian authorities have been pushing ahead with ‘anti-terrorist’ ops in the east of the country, which has been opposing the coup-appointed government in Kiev.

Just last week five anti-government protesters reportedly were killed and one injured in Slavyansk after Kiev authorities sent tanks and armored vehicles against the local population.

On Saturday, leaked satellite images revealed that Ukrainian tanks and armored vehicles have been stationed en masse around Slavyansk. A Russian defense source said that artillery and rocket systems have also been deployed to the area.

RIA Novosti published the satellite images showing the buildup of troops. The photos were dated April 24-25. The images appear to show part of military hardware used for the current Ukrainian troops’ objective of “isolating” Slavyansk.

Swede helps nationalists in Ukraine

Three weeks ago Mikael Skillt worked for a construction company in Stockholm, Sweden. Today, he is a volunteer in a nationalist organization in Kiev. In an interview with Fria Tider, Skillt tells the story of a Ukraine where the role of the police has been assumed by paramilitary Right-wing groups.

At the end of February, mere days after Ukraine’s president, Viktor Yanukovych, was overthrown, Mikael Skillt boarded a plane bound for Kiev. He left behind a relationship that had just ended, a terrace house in a Stockholm suburb and a well-paid job as a planner at a construction company.

The purpose of his trip was to volunteer for one of the nationalist organizations which, as a result of their central role in the Ukrainian revolution, have gone from being relatively marginal to controlling the streets of Kiev.

It was not an easy decision to make, Skillt said when Fria Tider spoke to him over Skype. His former employer, also a personal friend, was not happy when Skillt suddenly quit his job to go to Ukraine. Skillt said he went anyway because of a sense of solidarity with the Ukrainian nationalists. “Nationalists have died on the streets of Kiev,” he recounted. “And I was able to help them. That is more important than my personal well-being.”

Skillt is 37 years old and has been involved in various Swedish nationalist groups for more than a decade. Between 2002 and 2010 he was active in the National Socialist organization Svenska motståndsrörelsen (Swedish Resistance Movement). Today, he is a member of a small, nationalist political party, Svenskarnas parti (Party of the Swedes), but holds no official position within it. He says he is no longer a National Socialist and describes himself as an “ethnic nationalist.” “You are born Swedish,” he explained. “It’s not something you can become.”

After arriving in Ukraine, Skillt joined the organization C14, also known as Sich, which is closely affiliated with the nationalist party Svoboda. In an interview with the BBC, C14′s leader, Yevhen Karas, says that his organization has approximately 200 members and that its main objective is to sever all ties between Ukraine and Russia. Some have called him a Nazi, but he firmly denies that accusation. “I don’t think I’m a Nazi, I’m a Ukrainian nationalist,” Karas told the BBC. “The main confrontation is about that some ethnic groups have control of many business structures, some economical and political forces.”

When asked which ethnic groups he was referring to, Karas clarified, “Russians and Jews. Some non-Ukrainian groups control a huge percent of the economic and political power. And of course, in this situation you have some tension with the Ukrainian people.”

According to Skillt, C14 has been in existence for quite some time. Prior to the revolution, C14 often intervened to protect tenants threatened by illegal eviction. “Ukrainian landlords, similar to so-called ‘slum lords’ in America, have often evicted tenants illegally in order to tear down an existing building and put up something newer and more profitable in its place. They often do that by bribing corrupt politicians. In many cases, C14 has occupied such buildings and chased away the police when they arrive to evict the tenants.”

When the protests against Yanukovych’s government began last autumn, C14 was one of the groups that fought the riot police, Berkut, as they tried to drive the protesters off the Maidan Square. “Most of the members of C14 have been very active in the Maidan riots. If you sit down and talk to these guys, I can give you ten names right off the bat of people who have lost a friend in the fighting. So, they’ve been on the front lines,” Skillt said. “I have never heard anyone here call himself a National Socialist. They fight for a Ukraine based on ethnic unity.”

Today, C14 is a force to be reckoned with. Together with the so-called Right Sector, C14 patrols the streets of Kiev, fights crime and guards public buildings. Skillt and several other Swedish volunteers participate in the patrols. “The police force still exists, but isn’t seen much,” he said. “Most of the police officers you see on the streets are only traffic police. Maintaining order is primarily being done by C14 and the Right Sector.”

The reason why there is a power vacuum that is currently being filled by these groups is that the special police force, Berkut, was disbanded following the overthrow of Yanukovych, and many officers of the regular police force were also sacked. “Corruption among the police has been massive and many have been dismissed,” Skillt explained. “Some have fled for their lives because they were guilty of corruption, or otherwise behaved like bastards. The officers that remain are pro-Ukrainian and not corrupt. But because of their low-life former comrades, people don’t have much confidence in them either.”

“Berkut was really disgusting,” he continued. “I have met some people who were arrested by them. They were tortured, sometimes even maimed. People had toes and fingers cut off. Some were doused in gasoline, while police officers stood next to them, smoking. Others had water poured over them and were then thrown out into -10 degrees C temperatures.”

The nationalist groups, rather than the police, enjoy a great deal of confidence among the public, Skillt told us. “They have acted in an exemplary manner, as far as the people are concerned. They have stood up to armed police officers, in many cases while unarmed, and at great risk to their own lives. This won the confidence of the people.”

When the Ukrainian parliament convened on March 17 to discuss the situation in Crimea, C14 and the Right Sector provided security. Skillt was part of the group that C14 sent to guard the parliament. A photo showed him wearing a uniform, a bulletproof vest, a ski mask and sunglasses. He carried a gun case on his back, but he didn’t want to tell us what it contained. “A fishing pole,” he said.

Other photographs from the parliament, however, show uniformed, masked men openly carrying automatic rifles. Skillt confirms that both C14 and the Right Sector possess firearms, even though guns are not part of their standard equipment. The ability to handle guns safely varies widely from person to person. “Some of the guys in the Right Sector are like monkeys with guns,” he said. “You put your life at risk just by being near them, when they’re armed. It’s pure slapstick, they have guns but handle them carelessly, as if they were wooden sticks. In C14, safety routines are much better. It’s almost up to the standard of the Swedish military.”

Skillt described C14 as a more professional and disciplined unit than the Right Sector. Before Skillt was approved for service in C14 his physical fitness and marksmanship were tested. Candidates are expected to be able to run five kilometers in under 25 minutes while wearing a full uniform, a bulletproof vest and carrying other personal equipment. “It’s not as easy as it sounds,” Skillt said. “Part of the course is a steep uphill slope. I made it in 24 minutes and a few seconds.”

The Right Sector was formed last autumn, when the protests began. It first functioned as an umbrella organization for various nationalist groups that wanted to stop the police from driving the protesters from their encampments on the Maidan in central Kiev. Its members range from soldiers with combat experience from Afghanistan and Chechnya, to students and soccer hooligans.

According to Skillt, the different groups within the Right Sector have now coalesced into one organization with a common leadership. Its leader, Dmytro Yarosh, has announced his candidacy in the upcoming presidential election in May. He opposes integration with the European Union, which he described as a “monster” that imposes “anti-Christian and anti-national laws” upon its members. In a widely-distributed promotional video, the Right Sector has claimed to fight against “totalitarian liberalism” and for the “rebirth of Europe.”

One incident from last week illustrates the influence of these paramilitary, Right-wing groups in post-revolutionary Ukraine. Skillt told us that he was one of approximately 20 activists from C14 who went to the office of the Ukrainian prison authorities in Kiev. The purpose of the visit was to secure the release of one of the organization’s members, who had been jailed for participating in the street-fighting with the police while Yanukovych was still in power.

“There were four guards there,” Skillt said. “They locked themselves in a sentry booth as soon as we got there. We told the head of the prison authority that if he wouldn’t come outside and talk to us, we would come inside and talk to him. He actually did come outside and, after a brief discussion, promised the C14 activists that he would do what was necessary to have their comrade released.”

Source: friatider.se

‘Another Cold War won’t happen’

Yet another Cold War will not come about and Western sanctions are not dreadful to Russia, Vyacheslav Nikonov, a member of the State Duma lower house of the Russian parliament, points out in an article published in Rossiyskaya Gazeta on Wednesday.

The article, which deals with Russia’s stance in the light of the situation in Ukraine and threats of sanctions from the West, has been published under the headline “A Brief Telegram: Don’t Overstrain Yourself”.

“Yet another Cold War will not happen, the times have changed. The West is not a zone of economic growth any longer. It is, rather, a zone of stagnation,” Nikonov writes in reply to the article of Michael McFaul, US former Ambassador to Moscow, published in The New York Times on Monday.

Nikonov writes that only some 30 years ago the West accounted for 80% of global GDP, whereas now they account perceptibly for less than a half. “The European Union (EU) is yet to grow for another decade to reach out again to the indicators of 2007. In a couple of years, China will become a major economy in the world, getting ahead of the United States,” the MP points out.

Touching upon possible sanctions against Russia, he maintains that in present-day conditions efforts to isolate Russia would fail. “Its isolation does not work at all, even within its closest circle G7 where far from all share the radicalism of (Barack) Obama and of his chief expert on Russia (Michael) McFaul. Exclusion of Russia from G8 only deprives the Group of the leftovers of its significance,” Nikonov is convinced.

He recalls that the EU is one-third dependent on Russia-supplied energy, whereas Russia consumes one-third of European imports. “Are the Western constituents prepared to find themselves in another deep crisis due to the expression of the will of people in Crimea? Obviously not,” Nikonov writes.

Meanwhile, in his view, efforts to turn Ukraine into a showcase of prosperity and democracy will fail.

“The EU is not in a position to help even its own members Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, etc. Will it be able to help Ukraine, too? No way! An Association Agreement will signify not only a loss of (Ukraine’s) ‘nezalezhnost’ (independence) but an economic collapse as well,” the MP believes.

He points out that Russia, by bringing Crimea back, “has overcome the paralysis of will, and political apathy”.
Nikonov believes that Russia will not allow drawing itself into confrontation, “which the US ex-Ambassador calls for”.

Source: ITAR-TASS

Spanish Concourt rules Catalonia referendum unconstitutional

Spain’s Constitutional Court has ruled that a referendum in Catalonia on independence from the rest of the country would violate the law, saying that regions within Spain “cannot unilaterally call a referendum on self-determination.”

According to a summary of the ruling, any “right to decide” their future by Catalans has to be in accordance with Spain’s 1978 constitution, which stipulates Spanish unity.

The Constitutional Court ruled “unconstitutional and null” a declaration by the regional parliament in Barcelona which claimed that Catalonia has the right of self-determination.

Kingdom of Spain Constitutional Court of Justice Building (AFP Photo / Dominique Faget)Kingdom of Spain Constitutional Court of Justice Building (AFP Photo / Dominique Faget)

The fate of the region rests on the power struggle between Catalan President Artur Mas who had promised a referendum on independence from Spain on November 9 and the Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy who insists that such a vote would be illegal.

“No one can unilaterally deprive the entire Spanish people of the right to decide on their future,” Rajoy told the national parliament last month insisting that the referendum “can’t take place.”

Rajoy remains certain that Catalonia cannot be compared to Scotland’s aspiration of succession from the UK, because the Spanish written constitution, unlike British, rules out such a move.

But in Catalonia, March’s public opinion poll showed that 59.6 percent of the population want independence from the rest of Spain and want their region to become a “new state of Europe.”

Catalonia, an autonomous community with a population of 7.5 million is responsible for around one-fifth of the country’s GDP and one-quarter of its taxes. Public sentiment believes that the region will be much better off financially if they secede from Madrid.

The situation is aggravated by the economic crisis, which is forcing the Spanish government to adopt painful austerity policies.

In January the Catalan Parliament voted to send a petition to the national legislature seeking the power to hold the vote. That initiative is still in the process. If successful the referendum in Catalonia will be a month after a similar vote in Scotland, which is slated for September 2014.

Source: RT

‘Night of the Long Knives’ in Ukraine

It can best be described as killing your friends once they become a burden.

An effort is underway to clean up the image of the junta now in control of Ukraine. Although Right Sector (Pravy Sektor) played an instrumental role in the coup, its radical nationalism continues to be an embarrassment for the new regime put in place by the IMF, the EU and the United States.

“Night of the Long Knives” refers to a series of political murders conducted by Hitler and the Nazis after they assumed power. In addition to opponents of the regime, the Nazis assassinated a number of paramilitary brownshirts who earlier specialized in fighting against paramilitary units of political parties opposed to the Nazis and intimidating Slavic and Romani citizens, union members and Jews.

It is also a popular theme in South Africa, where state security agents regularly bait conservative whites to “rise up” against black crime and the ongoing genocide against white farmers, hoping to draw renewed international sympathy for “mistreated and oppressed blacks”.

However, the South African government did deploy thousands of troops inside the country and added tons of fluoride to the water supply before they finally announced the death of Nelson Mandela last year, fearing indeed that blacks would go on an open killing spree against all whites, not only white farmers.

That would obviously not have supported the narrative that Anglo-Americans have fabricated about South Africa: where kindly, forgiving blacks are oppressed by cruel, destructive whites.

Similary, the Western narrative about “freeing Ukraine” was beginning to suffer from a stark reality infusion.

The corporate media has tried to underplay the violent character of the Ukranian organization, but Dmytro Yarosh, the leader of Right Sector, made this virtually impossible when he allegedly made an appeal to Chechen terrorist leader Doku Umarov to assist the ultra-nationalist group in its crusade against Russia. In addition to courting al-Qaeda affiliated terrorists, Right Sector is rabidly pro-American.

Numerous incidents of violence and intimidation by Right Sector have gone unreported in the West. “In the days since the US-backed coup, according to citizens in Ukraine I am in contact with, after the new regime dissolved the National Police, members of the Right Sector took over police functions in Kiev. Groups of young men, mainly members of Right Sector, have been patrolling the streets armed with baseball bats and weapons,” writes F. William Engdahl. “In some documented instances according to these reports from ordinary Ukrainians, they come in groups to homes of people identified as ‘pro-Russian’ and force them out of their homes or take their possessions, as they term it ‘privatization’ actions. The population lives in a state of terror they liken to the Stalin-era terror.”

It appears an effort to “clean up” its image and make it more palatable to the oligrachs moving in on Ukraine is now underway. On Tuesday it was reported that Oleksandr Muzychko, aka Sashko Biliy, Right Sector’s second in command, was shot dead in a cafe in Rivne in western Ukraine.

According to the BBC, Ukraine’s Deputy Interior Minister Vladimir Yevdokimov said Muzychko was shot dead after opening fire on police and Sokol special forces during a raid at the cafe. They planned to arrest him and other ultra-nationalists for criminal activity. Ukrainian authorities described Muzychko as a gang leader.

Ukrainian MP Oles Doniy, however, provided a different account. He said Muzychko was abducted while traveling in western Ukraine and executed. His body was later found with hands bound and a fatal bullet wound to the heart. A photo posted on Twitter seems to confirm this second account.

Transnistria seeks to join Russian Federation

NATO supreme commander in Europe, General Philip Breedlove, warned Russia against any attempt to “annex” Transnistria.

The Foreign Affairs Minister of the Transnistrian Moldovan Republic, the very glamorous Nina Shtanski, welcomed the outcome of Crimea’s referendum on self-determination and recalled that on 17 September 2006, in an analogous vote, 97.2% of Transnistrians had come out in favor of becoming part of the Russian Federation.

The President of Transnistria’s Parliament, Mikhail Burla, wrote to his Russian counterpart asking him to pass a law on the accession of Transnistria to the Russian Federation emulating, what has been done for Crimea.

The President of Moldova, Nicolae Timofti, asked the European Union to speed up the signing of an association agreement so as to have a lock on Transnistria’s legal attachment to his country.

The President of the Transnistrian Moldovan Republic, Yevgeny Shevchuk, went to Moscow to discuss the situation of his country’s Russian-speaking population following Kiev’s closure of the Ukrainian border.

Moldova declared its independence on 19 August 1990. Just as, at the time of the USSR, Crimea was administratively attached to Ukraine, Transnistria was attached to Moldova, from which it declared independence one week later, on 1 September. However, Moldova was admitted to the UN, but not Transnistria, which has existed for 24 years as an unrecognized state. In June 1992, NATO tried unsuccessfully to resolve this issue through force, killing more than a thousand people, but had to back off due to the resistance of the population. Since then, the country’s security has been provided by a contingent of Russian peacekeepers.

Source: Voltairenet

China warns West against escalation in Crimea

China’s top envoy to Germany has warned the West against punishing Russia with sanctions for its intervention in Ukraine, saying such measures could lead to a dangerous chain reaction that would be difficult to control.

In an interview with Reuters days before the European Union is threatening to impose its first sanctions on Russia since the Cold War, ambassador Shi Mingde issued the strongest warning against such measures by any top Chinese official to date.

“We don’t see any point in sanctions,” Shi said. “Sanctions could lead to retaliatory action, and that would trigger a spiral with unforeseeable consequences. We don’t want this.”

The interview was conducted on Wednesday, the same day that the EU agreed a framework for sanctions that would slap travel bans and asset freezes on people and companies accused by Brussels of violating the territorial integrity of Ukraine.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, has taken the side of the putschists supported by the United States, and warned that unless Russia accepts the idea of a “contact group” to resolve the crisis diplomatically, Russia risked “massive” political and economic damage if it did not change course in the coming days.

Source: Reuters

The Failure Of German Leadership – Merkel Whores For Washington

Washington, enabled by its compliant but stupid NATO puppets, is pushing the Ukrainian situation closer to war.

German Chancellor Merkel has failed her country, Europe, and world peace. Germany is the strength of the EU and NATO. Had Merkel said “No” to sanctions on Russia, that would have been the end of the crisis that Washington is brewing, a crisis unlikely to be ended short of war.

But Merkel has signed away the sovereignty of the German nation and assigned the fate of Germany to a province in the American Empire. Thus has Merkel and the weak German leadership consigned the world to war. Already blamed for World War 1 and World War 2, now Germany will be blamed for World War 3.

Washington’s mismanaged Ukrainian coup has cost Washington Crimea, which Washington wanted most of all in order to deprive Russia of its warm water naval base on the Black Sea. In addition, the mismanaged overthrow of an elected government in Ukraine is threatening to also lose the Russian cities of eastern Ukraine. Like Crimea, eastern Ukraine consists of former Russian areas that Khrushchev stuck into Ukraine in the 1950s.

In what is clearly a fruitless and pointless effort to get Crimea back, Washington is demanding that Russia interfere in Crimea and prevent Crimea from seceding from Ukraine. If the Russian government refuses to follow Washington’s orders, Washington has announced that it will inflict “damaging sanctions” on Russia. Initially, EU countries expressed an unwillingness to go along with Washington, but with bribes and threats, Washington has conquered Merkel and has its European puppets lined up following orders.

Washington understands that economic sanctions are a far less threat to Russia than the loss of its Black Sea naval base. Washington also understands that Putin cannot possibly abandon the millions of Russians in eastern and southern Ukraine to the mercy of the anti-Russian and unelected government imposed by Washington in Kiev. As Washington knows that its threat of sanctions is empty, why did Washington make it?

The answer is in order to drive the crisis to war. Washington’s neoconservative nazis have been agitating for war with Russia for a long time. They want to remove one of the three remaining restraints (Russia, China, Iran) on Washington’s world hegemony. Washington wants to break up the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) before these countries form a separate currency bloc and avoid the use of the US dollar.

Russia will respond in kind to Washington’s sanctions. European peoples and Western banks and corporations will suffer losses. It would be at least two or three years before Washington has in place means of delivering US natural gas achieved by fracking and contamination of US water supplies to Europe to take the place of Russia’s cutoff of energy to Europe.

The Western presstitute media will dramatize the Russian response to sanctions and demonize Russia, while ignoring who started the fight, thereby helping Washington prepare Americans for war. As neither side can afford to lose the war, nuclear weapons will be used. There will be no winners.

All of this is perfectly clear, just as was the obvious conclusion of the march of events leading up to World War 1. Now, like then, the people who see the outcome are powerless to stop it. Delusion rules. Arrogance and hubris overflow. Statements and actions become ever more reckless, and then there is hell to pay.

Americans and Europeans, if they had any awareness at all, would be in the streets violently protesting the coming war toward which the insane criminals in Washington are driving the world.

Instead, the German chancellor, the French president, the British prime minister and the Western presstitute media continue to lie: It was legitimate for the West to steal Kosovo from Serbia and to steal the Ukrainian government, but it is not legitimate for the Russian population of Crimea to exercise self-determination and return to Russia. Washington and its EU puppets even have the audacity to declare falsely, after overthrowing an elected government in Ukraine and installing an unelected one, that Crimean self-determination violates the Ukrainian constitution, which no longer exists because Washington destroyed it.

The criminally insane government in Washington has pushed the Russian bear into a corner. The bear is not going to surrender.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. His latest books are, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and How America Was Lost.

Ukrainian putschists can’t send army to Crimea

Ukraine’s acting president said the country could not use its army alone to stop Crimea from seceding, the latest sign that Crimean independence may be imminent.

Oleksandr Turchynov’s comments came after the Crimean parliament voted for independence ahead of a Sunday referendum on joining Russia, while Washington and Moscow engaged in one of the fiercest clashes since the Cold War.

The interim leader of Ukraine’s putschists said intervening in the Black Sea peninsula, where Crimeans have seized de facto control, would leave Ukraine exposed on its eastern border, close to Russia.

“We cannot launch a military operation in Crimea, as we would expose the eastern border and Ukraine would not be protected,” Turchynov told AFP.

Willy Wimmer, former vice president of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and state secretary at the German Defense Ministry, said the Black Sea territory might end up under US domination.

The veteran German politician warned more than a decade ago that NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia was actually part of a US expansion plan.

Until the mid-90s however, all major powers agreed in international law, and in cooperation. But in the middle of the 90s, the US changed tack. They clearly no longer feel bound by international law.

The war in Yugoslavia was only the beginning, and since then, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, have shown that the US would rather rely on military power.

Wimmer said the current government in the Ukraine is not legitimate. “I think it was a putsch, a coup d’état, what happened in Kiev. And what we heard in the news before, the OSCE and other international bodies are doing what they can to create a legal framework for a government which is not legal at all.”

Wimmer said the US puppets in Ukraine are co-operating with Nazi groups, a punishable offence in Germany and other European countries. Many ban all elements associated with Nazism, including Nazi symbols. The coup in Ukraine have left many Europeans fearful of what the US might plan next.

At a political rally in Bavaria this week the main speaker addressed the audience with an appeal not to forget the friendship with the Russian people.