Libya, Syria And Now Ukraine - Color Revolution By Force

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Re: Libya, Syria And Now Ukraine - Color Revolution By Force

Postby Sounder » Sun Nov 26, 2017 7:33 pm

Thanks chump, I wonder if the Ukrainian people know or will find out about Mikhail Saakashvili’s role in this coup. No doubt the news can be swamped out with off topic bullshit.

Georgian military officers who were recruited to carry out a “special mission” in Kiev by Mamuka Mamulashvili, a close aid of Mikhail Saakashvili’s former defense minister Bacho Akhalaia. They claim that on Jan 15, 2014 they landed in Kiev equipped with fake documents and were transfered to Maidan. Having received 1000 USD each one and being promised to be paid 5000 USD after the “job is done”, they were tasked to prepare sniper positions inside the buildings of Hotel Ukraine and Conservatory, dominant over the Maidan Square.
All these things will continue as long as coercion remains a central element of our mentality.
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Re: Libya, Syria And Now Ukraine - Color Revolution By Force

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Feb 03, 2018 9:25 am

Ukrainian politician under investigation for financing pro-Russian terrorists back in D.C. after meeting GOP leaders last September
Radical Party member Serhiy Rybalka is currently in the U.S. amid an ongoing counterintelligence investigation in Ukraine; he has been sanctioned by the Ukrainian government for his business dealings in Russia and Russian-occupied territories

By Erin Lankau and Scott Stedman
Separatist-supporting Ukrainian politician Serhiy Rybalka is back in the United States this week to meet with “politicians, government officials, representatives of NGOs and analytical centers,” according to a Facebook post from the Radical Party member on Tuesday. Rybalka is currently the subject of a counterintelligence investigation by the Secret Service of Ukraine (SBU) for his role in financing pro-Russian terrorists and conducting undisclosed business within the Russian Federation. These activities are violation of the economic blockade put in place by the Poroshenko government after the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014.
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In our previous reporting, it was uncovered that Rybalka had enlisted the U.S. lobbying services of GOP financier, NYGOP Finance Chair, and Great America PAC Chair Yuri Vanetik. In September 2017, Vanetik helped arrange meetings between Rybalka and key GOP leadership, including Representatives Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), Ed Royce (R-CA), Robert Pittenger (R-NC), and Senator Steve Daines (R-MT). In a new McClatchy article this week, NYGOP claims Vanetik is no longer affiliated with the state party and Great America PAC claims that he never sat on the board. It is unclear with whom Rybalka met during his most recent trip to Washington.
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Yuri Vanetik with Paul Manafort, February 7, 2017.
Vanetik registered as a foreign agent for these foreign lobbying activities later in October 2017 — a violation of FARA regulations which require advanced disclosure. A deeper investigation into Vanetik’s filing and background revealed gross inaccuracies in his FARA financial disclosures and still undisclosed lobbying activities for foreign clients. The DOJ was notified of these issues last month but does not appeared to have acted. The DOJ has not responded to a request for comment.
Last December, The Ministry of Economic Development and Trade of Ukraine imposed sanctions against Rybalka’s S. Group companies in Russia “for carrying out actions that could harm the interests of national economic security of Ukraine.” This January, SBU announced their plans to initiate additional economic sanctions. An SBU statement read, in part, that the sanctions were a response to “enterprises that operate in temporarily uncontrolled territories of Luhansk and Donetsk regions and the Crimea for initiation.”
Rybalka has also been under investigation by the General Prosecutor’s Office (GPU) for tax evasion and money laundering. These allegations relate to facilities his company set up inside Russia with Cyprus LLCs in order to bypass Ukrainian taxes. In a press conference in June, the Prosecutor General of Ukraine Yuriy Lutsenko said that the amount of money moved into these offshores is “about hundreds of millions.”
Rybalka updated his income disclosures in January to include receipt of almost half a million dollars in royalties for conducting business with “terrorist organizations” in Donetsk and Luhansk. Previously, Rybalka claimed that he had completely divested from his companies, leaving the operations and cash flow to his family members. He has not responded to multiple requests for comment.
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Serhiy Rybalka with Congressman Kevin McCarthy, September 2017.
Rybalka’s two business managers have been arrested for this alleged financial support of Russian terrorists and are currently on trial. As Rybalka is in the United States, the trial for his business leader began in a Kyiv court. Meanwhile, Rybalka continues to spend lavishly on real estate, expensive cars, and extravagant gifts for his girlfriend Anastasia Baiborodina. In December, he paid to have Baiborodina’s photos appear on electronic billboards in Time Square.
In a second Facebook post, Rybalka further detailed the purpose of his visit to the U.S. this week:
“Ukraine has a great need for military, technical and financial assistance from its international partners and primarily from the U.S. Most importantly, we require support of our systemic reforms. Ukraine needs to build strong government institutes, including anti-corruption ones. And we need essential economic reforms. This is what we discussed at all our meetings in Washington.”
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Among others, prominent members of the Anti-Terrorist Operation of Ukraine and a former general in the SBU have called for Rybalka to personally face criminal charges. Former deputy head of the SBU Victor Yagun stated “it’s a business in the blood, I would like to believe that society will not be aloof, and it is society’s pressure, public pressure, pressure through the media to give its result.” A veteran ATO member echoed those sentiments saying, “this should be a very severe punishment…This should be a criminal responsibility.”
https://medium.com/@Erinlank/ukrainian- ... c25b61a8fb
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
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Re: Libya, Syria And Now Ukraine - Color Revolution By Force

Postby chump » Sat Feb 03, 2018 11:47 am


https://www.globalresearch.ca/a-documen ... ne/5574843

A Documentary You’ll Likely Never See: “Ukraine on Fire” by Oliver Stone
By James DiEugenio
Global Research, February 14, 2017
Consortiumnews 13 February 2017
Region: Europe, Russia and FSU
Theme: Crimes against Humanity, History, US NATO War Agenda


It is not very often that a documentary film can set a new paradigm about a recent event, let alone, one that is still in progress. But the new film Ukraine on Fire has the potential to do so – assuming that many people get to see it.


Usually, documentaries — even good ones — repackage familiar information in a different aesthetic form. If that form is skillfully done, then the information can move us in a different way than just reading about it.


A good example of this would be Peter Davis’s powerful documentary about U.S. involvement in Vietnam, Hearts and Minds. By 1974, most Americans understood just how bad the Vietnam War was, but through the combination of sounds and images, which could only have been done through film, that documentary created a sensation, which removed the last obstacles to America leaving Indochina.


Ukraine on Fire has the same potential and could make a contribution that even goes beyond what the Davis film did because there was very little new information in Hearts and Minds. Especially for American and Western European audiences, Ukraine on Fire could be revelatory in that it offers a historical explanation for the deep divisions within Ukraine and presents information about the current crisis that challenges the mainstream media’s paradigm, which blames the conflict almost exclusively on Russia.


Key people in the film’s production are director Igor Lopatonok, editor Alex Chavez, and writer Vanessa Dean, whose screenplay contains a large amount of historical as well as current material exploring how Ukraine became such a cauldron of violence and hate. Oliver Stone served as executive producer and conducted some high-profile interviews with Russian President Vladimir Putin and ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.


The film begins with gripping images of the violence that ripped through the capital city of Kiev during both the 2004 Orange Revolution and the 2014 removal of Yanukovich. It then travels back in time to provide a perspective that has been missing from mainstream versions of these events and even in many alternative media renditions.


A Longtime Pawn


Historically, Ukraine has been treated as a pawn since the late Seventeenth Century. In 1918, Ukraine was made a German protectorate by the Treaty of Brest Litovsk. Ukraine was also a part of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 signed between Germany and Russia, but violated by Adolf Hitler when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941...


...

‘Other Side of the Story’


If the film just got across this “other side of the story,” it would provide a valuable contribution since most of this information has been ignored or distorted by the West’s mainstream media, which simply blames the Ukraine crisis on Vladimir Putin. But in addition to the fine work by scenarist Vanessa Dean, the direction by Igor Lopatonok and the editing by Alexis Chavez are extraordinarily skillful and supple.


Screen shot of the fatal fire in Odessa, Ukraine, on May 2, 2014. (From RT video)


The 15-minute prologue, where the information about the Nazi collaboration by Bandera and Lebed is introduced, is an exceptional piece of filmmaking. It moves at a quick pace, utilizing rapid cutting and also split screens to depict photographs and statistics simultaneously. Lopatonok also uses interactive graphics throughout to transmit information in a visual and demonstrative manner.


Stone’s interviews with Putin and Yanukovych are also quite newsworthy, presenting a side of these demonized foreign leaders that has been absent in the propagandistic Western media.


Though about two hours long, the picture has a headlong tempo to it. If anything, it needed to slow down at points since such a large amount of information is being communicated. On the other hand, it’s a pleasure to watch a documentary that is so intelligently written, and yet so remarkably well made.


When the film ends, the enduring message is similar to those posed by the American interventions in Vietnam and Iraq. How could the State Department know so little about what it was about to unleash, given Ukraine’s deep historical divisions and the risk of an escalating conflict with nuclear-armed Russia?


In Vietnam, Americans knew little about the country’s decades-long struggle of the peasantry to be free from French and Japanese colonialism. Somehow, America was going to win their hearts and minds and create a Western-style “democracy” when many Vietnamese simply saw the extension of foreign imperialism.


In Iraq, President George W. Bush and his coterie of neocons was going to oust Saddam Hussein and create a Western-style democracy in the Middle East, except that Bush didn’t know the difference between Sunni and Shiite Moslems and how Iraq was likely to split over sectarian rivalries and screw up his expectations.


Similarly, the message of Ukraine on Fire is that short-sighted, ambitious and ideological officials – unchecked by their superiors – created something even worse than what existed. While high-level corruption persists today in Ukraine and may be even worse than before, the conditions of average Ukrainians have deteriorated.


And, the Ukraine conflict has reignited the Cold War by moving Western geopolitical forces onto Russia’s most sensitive frontier, which, as scholar Joshua Shifrinson has noted, violates a pledge made by Secretary of State James Baker in February 1990 as the Soviet Union peacefully accepted the collapse of its military influence in East Germany and eastern Europe. (Los Angeles Times, 5/30/ 2016)


This film also reminds us that what happened in Ukraine was a bipartisan effort. It was begun under George W. Bush and completed under Barack Obama. As Oliver Stone noted in the discussion that followed the film’s premiere in Los Angeles, the U.S. painfully needs some new leadership reminiscent of Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy, people who understand how America’s geopolitical ambitions must be tempered by on-the-ground realities and the broader needs of humanity to be freed from the dangers of all-out war.




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Re: Libya, Syria And Now Ukraine - Color Revolution By Force

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Apr 24, 2018 4:13 pm

An in-depth investigation of leaked documents reveals Ukrainian gangsters, their families and associates taking advantage of offshore secrecy and ineffective money laundering controls to buy luxurious property and works of art.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-t2dybqrh0
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They could still get him out of office.
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Don’t forget that.
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Re: Libya, Syria And Now Ukraine - Color Revolution By Force

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon May 07, 2018 10:43 am

seemslikeadream » Mon Sep 08, 2014 8:18 am wrote:
SEPTEMBER 08, 2014

Resumption of Cold War in Earnest
NATO, Spearhead of Western Fascism
by NORMAN POLLACK
The NATO summit in Wales is over. It marked the convergence of fundamental trends long in the making, the Ukraine crisis merely a way to flesh out the details and provide cover for a more ambitious Western geopolitical posture with respect to Russia and, ultimately, China, with US global hegemony its epicenter. America is on top of the earthquake, a world political-military order shaking down along fault lines (i.e., the decentralization of power) no longer susceptible to US unilateral dominance, supervision, and control. The Old World, which is to say, international relations frozen into place during the Cold War, without taking into account changes constantly taking place at the periphery, focused on Russia as America’s chief adversary, the Evil One, for which NATO was brought into being to oppose, surmount, and provide the ideological rationale for an inclusive anticommunism to legitimize further preparation for war against it. McCarthyism at home was the tip of the iceberg for the bipartisan outward thrust of American capitalism, Russia conjured up as the ever-present menace to its benevolent spread and as the object of xenophobic fear raising doubt of US survival. NATO was a convenience, also a preliminary step in the integration of the European economy the better for American commercial-financial penetration.

The Old World, from the US perspective of today, is obsolete, not to be cast off as an historical remnant, however, but integrated into the New World, in which Russia, remaining useful as ideological scarecrow and whipping boy, is made to serve as the domino-theory effect in reverse. No longer, e.g., if ISIS is not exterminated or suppressed in the Middle East, it will storm the beaches of Montauk Point or Key West, though that too is part of the American mindset, so trained are we like Pavlov’s dogs to respond to cues as programmed, but slowly realizing the possibilities of the doctrine and, over the last quarter-century, taking the initiative, we have applied it to the Other Side: if Russia falls, or practically speaking, becomes weakened, contained, finally, fragmented into separate parts, then comes China, and after China, an awakening Third World which may or may not be willing to play by the IMF-World Bank ground rules. From the 1980s on, one can taste America’s limitless, military-backed, paradigm of domination in world-terms of politics, economics, and ideology, exactly at the historical moment when it is no longer viable of realization.

The shift from Old to New World occurs precisely when American power, still obviously considerable, is being displaced with the rise of multiple power-sectors themselves on the ascendance while America is facing a steady decline through over-commitment to militarism (in the form of military appropriations, interventions, weaponry-and-nuclear modernization, waste and corruption in defense contracts, global system of bases, etc.), the market-fundamentalism orientation which has led to deregulation, capitalism run amuck, a tattered if not shattered social safety net, urban decay, rotting infrastructure, and much more, including wage stagnation and unemployment pointing to widespread class-differentiation that is oiled over through the institutional fostering of false consciousness. Quite a mouthful, yet indicative of what has been driving USG and political-economic-military elites: global showdown to restore American supremacy where in fact this is no longer possible.

***

Enter the NATO summit, Sept. 4-5, an air of tangible desperation, explicit recognition of a turning point, as though the future of the West was on trial (which may be true, at least as the US would like to define it), measures solemnly taken—a rapid-strike force on a permanent basis, the threat of further sanctions, a 28-nation reaffirmation of collective defense, even the pledge of member states’ eventually beefing up their defense spending—all overtly, pointedly directed to Russia. This, in the face of a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine that all parties, US and EU/NATO members, would like to scuttle, lest the intended confrontation with Russia go awry. My surmise: the agreement will not be allowed to stand. Too much rides on forcing Russia, as if in a scheme of entrapment, to counter the US-EU-NATO military movements to the Russian border, besides the strike force and missile deployments already in place, the new much-discussed at the meeting infrastructure for use by the strike force, and capable of expansion, in member countries adjacent to Russia; for, if response is made to these offensive developments, then NATO, with the Obama-Cameron-Rasmussen blessing, has the option to start a war, the consequences of which I leave to the imagination.begging slogans3

Unquestionably, this summit is historic. It marks a concrete escalation of purpose, ideology, planning, program. It also confirms the New World-American style. Leaders are more-or-less in agreement on a unified front with respect to Russia, but not necessarily what lies beyond—the “beyond” in this case a clearing the deck, first, willingly to accept America as the architect of world order, to which all members of NATO assent, and second, Obama’s and America’s going the extra mile, containing, isolating CHINA, using Russia both as dress rehearsal and neutralized so as not to come to China’s defense, and then, in counterrevolutionary fashion, define the permissible boundaries of modernization in Africa, Latin America, and, Japan excepted, the remainder of Asia, to which the NATO members have not fully assented (nor are likely to). Here, US hegemony slowly, objectively, shifts to the more pathetic stance and reality of hubris, one sort of the retribution already taking form being Islamic radicalism, but Third World social revolution cannot be entirely gainsaid.

If Obama succeeds (and those who come after operating, as likely, in the same vein), it will be seen that the NATO summit itself is an exercise in hubris. When the world seeks peace, the rapid-strike force, and its acknowledged character as the prototype for global application, including NATO involvement, hardly speaks to that yearning. The summit therefore is seemingly a last-ditch effort to preserve international tensions as the ratifying condition of Western supremacy. In the process, hopefully, as the US-EU-NATO would have it, there is sufficient push-back to reverse the flow of the falling-domino effect, ending in the pacification of all indigenous peoples, the US supreme all the while. Sanctions, the members recognized (although this didn’t stop them from approving further escalation), would not do the trick with Russia, so that explicit use of force, presupposing if not ground troops, then everything short (or long!) of that, would be needed, gave the outcome a sinister edge. Time then to look closer, mindful the Poroshenko-Putin agreement for a ceasefire occurred outside the context and framework of the meeting, rather than attempted and attended to as the main order of business, thus confirming participants’ hostility to an accord and revealing the wish that it fail—a wish easily translatable into ways and means of sabotaging it, including more direct punishment of Russia and regime change in Ukraine.

New York Times reporters Steven Erlanger, Julie Davis, and Stephen Castle summed up the results of the NATO meeting in their aptly titled article, “NATO Plans a Special Force to Reassure Eastern Europe and Deter Russia,” (Sept. 5), a frank avowal of deterrence, not candidly bruited about in these gatherings for a quarter-century, directed specifically to Russia—an accurate reading of what transpired. The reporters write: “The alliance said it would establish a rapid-reaction force with an essentially permanent presence in Eastern Europe and would enhance military cooperation with Ukraine.” The force, but also its contemplated permanence, marks a tangible step toward confrontation with Russia, at the same time that the Poroshenko-Putin ceasefire agreement stands in contradiction to the tenor of the meeting, so that to push forward, in disregard of the latter (except to pay it lip-service), Obama mouths the warning, “’actions have consequences,’” to reiterate that Russia is not out of the woods. He even suggests at the closing news conference that Putin had buckled because of “enhance[d] deterrence and coordinated sanctions… to agree to a tentative cease-fire in Ukraine” (reporters’ paraphrasing), when in fact Putin had drawn up his plan earlier and favored its provisions from the start. Obama did his best to cast doubt on the plan and Putin’s character, not mentioning that Poroshenko’s own plan, formulated in June, was practically identical to Putin’s. Given the supposed object of the meeting—peace in Ukraine, tough talk was needed to discredit its possibility, and hence, Anders Rasmussen, NATO’s secretary general, noted that the rapid-reaction force would be “’a continuous presence’” deterring Russian aggression, to which he added: “’Should you [Russia] even think of attacking one ally, you will be facing the whole alliance.’”

With words of encouragement like that, who needs Poroshenko-Putin—for peace will ring from every rooftop and church spire, in the spirit of US-EU-NATO brotherhood for Putin and Russia. Not quite, for agreement or no agreement, the Triumvirate plowed ahead without missing a step. Trust is everything; here it is totally lacking. (I am being charitable; it is not mistrust we find, but the intention to throw up roadblocks wherever possible so as not realize a condition of peace—much like the Israelis with respect to the Palestinian peace process. NATO wants, not an accommodation, but state of constant tension, in order to carry out its US defined-and-financed mission, the spearhead for achieving a dismantling of all rival power systems and independent sources of development. But first things first: Russia, its crippling.) If the goal is peace, timing works against it, deliberately so, because at the meeting it was decided “to go ahead with new sanctions on Russia” BEFORE the peace agreement was even given a chance, therefore a vote of no confidence handicapping it from the start, rather than waiting to see, as a good-will gesture to assist in its success. Merkel lent her voice to the procedure: “’Everything is in flux. [The reference is to presumed Russian aggression and withdrawal of Russian troops.] Therefore we should expect that these sanctions could indeed be put in force, but with the proviso that they can be suspended again if this process really takes place.” And she is the model of gentleness, Philip Hammond, British Foreign Secretary, calling for “immediately imposing the sanctions and then lifting them if the cease-fire held.”

Less noticed, Ukraine was occasion, at this meeting, for getting member nations to be more militarily involved. The writers again: “NATO also grappled with the unwillingness of most of its members to meet their commitments to spend an amount equivalent to 2 percent of their gross domestic product on defense, an issue on which the United States, which bears most of the alliance’s costs, has become increasingly outspoken.” The tie-in with Ukraine? Rasmussen states: “’Russia’s aggression against Ukraine is a wake-up call. [The crisis led NATO countries] to reconsider defense investment because it’s now obvious that we cannot take our security for granted.’” One suspects that if Ukraine falls (which is not Putin’s intent), Russian banners will fly over Oslo, London, and Washington. Time, then, for getting the dominoes to fall the other way, Moscow, Beijing, Brasilia, Havana, on down the road.
Next, Neil MacFarquhar’s article in The Times, “Ukraine Deal Imposes Truce Putin Devised,” (Sept. 6), presents the details of the peace plan, credits Putin’s authorship, yet—The Times will be The Times—has sufficient caveats to turn the whole thing sour. He begins: “After five months of intensifying combat that threatened to rip Ukraine apart and to reignite the Cold War, the Ukrainian government and separatist forces signed a cease-fire agreement on Friday [Sept. 5] that analysts considered highly tenuous in a country that remains a tinderbox.” Let’s ignore the analysts (usually unnamed, sympathetic to the administration) and come to the point, “that the main thrust of the plan was not just endorsed, but laid out,” by Putin—though like his colleagues, MacFarquhar sees Russian pressure motivating the acceptance of the plan: “The cease-fire was agreed to after a two-week rebel counteroffensive backed by Russian troops, armor and artillery that threatened to roll back most of the gains the Ukrainian military had made.” Force cowed Poroshenko into submission—the US-NYT party line, leaving Obama “’hopeful but, based on past experience, skeptical,’” sort of like launching a ship with a glass of tea, so far as encouragement goes, and particularly off-base and misleading because, as MacFarquhar points out, “The agreement resembles, almost verbatim, a proposal for a truce issued by President Petro O. Poroshenko in June.” In June, months before any counteroffensive—or claims of Russian interference.

The point is, the agreement is a good one, one US-EU-NATO leaders should by rights have applauded, if peace was their purpose. The reporter: “The 14-point peace plan includes some references to the cease-fire itself, some practical steps toward returning government control to the southeast Donbass region and some nods toward future political changes…. It includes amnesty for those who disarm and who did not commit serious crimes, and the exchange of all prisoners. Militias will be disbanded, and a 10-kilometer buffer zone—about six miles—will be established along the Russian-Ukrainian border. The area will be subject to joint patrols. The separatists have agreed to leave the administrative buildings they control and to allow broadcasts from Ukraine to resume on local television.” What’s not to like, Mr. Obama?

And for good measure, the reporter continues: “For the future, the agreement says power will be decentralized and the Russian language protected…. The agreement says the executive in control of each region, the equivalent of a governor, will be appointed after consultations with each region. It also promises early elections and a job-creation program.” His parenthetical statement between sentences indicates what the southeast was facing and speaks volumes about its protest against Kiev (Russia not needing to play outside agitator): “An early, failed attempt by more extreme members of the Ukrainian Parliament to ban Russian as an official language was one element that spawned the uprising.” Coming from The Times, a solid-gold admission. Contrast the timing, NATO summit before and after, before, both Poroshenko and Putin engaged in the peace effort, after, a unified voice of social wreckage, with Ukraine’s own future irrelevant to the member states. Hence, “Mr. Poroshenko lauded the agreement in a statement posted on the presidential website, paying tribute in his announcement to the fact that Mr. Putin called for a cease-fire with a seven-point plan Wednesday [Sept. 3].” Conversely, the whole kit-and-caboodle on the other side: “A spectrum of politicians, civil society activists, diplomats and other analysts welcomed the proposal but expressed serious doubts that it could hold given the wide rift between Kiev and the restive eastern regions.” Welcomed, with a stiletto, given the expression of serious doubts. The NATO statements and actions speak for themselves, as in the case of the rapid-reaction force and military assistance to Ukraine.

My New York Times Comment on the MacFarquhar article, same date, follows:

Begin with the lead: “Ukraine Deal Imposes Truce Putin Devised.” Loaded: “Imposes.” as though unwarranted, one-sided, favorable to Russia and Putin. Cannot NYT get over its obsession of being anti-Putin, of treating Russia as reincarnation of Soviet Union, of regurgitating the Cold War scenario at the behest of the Obama administration? Where is journalistic independence? The article is all gloom-and-doom, a truce that will not hold, Obama and his “skepticism,” various “analysts” (the new category of choice to ensure anonymity and/or push a respectable State Dept. line) mouthing shopworn platitudes of doubt, and one more chance to question Putin’s motives and integrity.

Did anyone on the US-EU-NATO side offer a truce plan? I sensed Poroshenko was different from his neofascist colleagues–and apparently I am right. Yet the Western Triumvirate will do anything to disrupt peace. I fear for Poroshenko’s life–or at least his political future. From Obama’s perspective, joined by Cameron and Rasmussen, peace must NOT BE ALLOWED to break out. Eastern Europe must be in a state of disarray so that long-term destabilization will result in Russia’s isolation and dismemberment.

Witness the vitriol coming out of the NATO summit, and the coalition to attack ISIS, partly as distraction from not succeeding in the rupture of East-West relations, partly to affirm US leadership whatever the issue, so long as conflation of the two, identifying Russia and Putin with terrorism succeeds.

Finally, we have the wisdom of The Times editorial board, “A Cease-Fire in Ukraine,” (Sept. 6), which confirms, beyond the use of its intemperate language (revealing uncontrolled animosity,) the foregoing discussion about what I am terming, the spearhead of Western fascism, in this case, the predilection for global domination by means of force, ideological certitude, and our friend, a consuming hubris. Other elements of fascism, including the militarization of advanced capitalism, and the degree of consolidation within the political-economic structure (commercial-financial-industrial), need not be addressed here, their presence nonetheless present and relevant to the wider confrontation between the West and the current periphery. The editorial begins: “With pressures building on all sides, the adversaries in the war in Ukraine announced a cease-fire on Friday [Sept. 5]. Combat in the contested southeastern region that killed some 2,600 people in the past five months paused, perhaps for a while.” Not an encouraging start, nor admission that many of the 2,600 casualties were civilian deaths caused by Ukrainian shelling. Nor do we find other than the customary demonization of Putin: “It would be a mistake to assume that the agreement guarantees a quick and easy path to stability for Ukraine, and that is because [he] has shown himself to be a reckless and unpredictable provocateur in creating the worst conflict with the West since the Cold War.”

In effect, Stalin II. Then the canard about Russian/separatist military successes forcing Poroshenko (“in the last two weeks, Ukrainian forces suffered heavy setbacks, with the separatists opening a third front… around the port of Mariupol”) to come to terms. Even after citing provisions unexceptionable by any standard, e.g., “compliance overseen by international monitors,” the editorial opens both barrels of denunciation: “In his quest for control and regional power, Mr. Putin poses a serious threat to the international order by disregarding borders, violating agreements and pursuing an expansionist vision without regard to other states or even the effect that economic sanctions and diplomatic isolation could have on Russia.” Save for the last point, since the US sponsors and enforces sanctions and is rarely if ever on the receiving end, The Times editorial board might well be collectively looking in the mirror, or to be exact, presenting an analysis that applies not only to Obama but to American presidents, almost without exception, from Harry Truman on.

The NATO summit, however, was not a total washout. Obama came through splendidly at his Friday news conference, saying NATO would uphold Ukraine’s “’sovereignty, independence, territorial integrity and right to defend itself,’” and, on the military front, praise is further in order: “The 28 NATO members have promised to provide Ukraine with logistics assistance, training and help in organizing the military command structure and related forces. The United States and its allies are also debating going even further and supplying defensive weapons, including radar and anti-tank weapons.” Not that “Ukraine could ever prevail in a war with Russia. But the intent of the NATO summit decisions is to encourage a political solution by raising the cost of further military actions by the rebels and Mr. Putin.” What does “raising the cost” entail? And what kind of political solution (why not get behind the Poroshenko-Putin initiative?), and, given the costs, is a “political solution” even likely or possible?

The Times can’t be bothered by small points, it is important to bull ahead: “The Europeans, who too often hesitated during this crisis, on Friday showed more resolve by agreeing to stronger sanctions that affect Russia’s access to capital markets, defense, dual-use goods and sensitive technology.” Bullying ahead, they must cross the finish line: “Now they must carry them out and also fulfill a commitment to pay for the rapid reaction force and other promised defensive measures.” The Times doesn’t miss a thing. And as a good coach for the American military, the EU, NATO, the whole Free World (!), it closes: “If their pledges are hollow, the Ukraine crisis could get a lot worse.” War is peace; no, war is honor, the American Way, manliness in battle dress.

My New York Times Comment on the Editorial, same date, follows:

This editorial will come back to haunt The Times, as irresponsible, sensational, productive of war. “…perhaps for a while,” hopeful the cease-fire will collapse. “…Putin has shown himself to be a reckless and unpredictable provocateur in creating the worst conflict with the West since the Cold War.” Create the conflict? What of the coup? the Nuland evidence? the neofascist influence in Kiev? the US-EU-NATO design prior to the coup to advance forces into Eastern Europe to contain Russia? As for reckless, your own MacFarquhar concedes the PEACE plan was initiated by Putin, had the agreement of Poroshenko, and in all respects, including international peacekeepers, was reasonable, workable, intelligent, in contrast to Obama and the NATO summit in general ridiculing it and beefing up anti-Russian rhetoric and military plans: rapid-reaction force, infrastructure, both near Russia.
One would think Poroshenko a traitor, by NYT reasoning, for joining with Putin. If he is assassinated, one knows where to look, for peace in Eastern Europe is anathema to the West and US involvement in regime change (even in Ukraine) does not augur well for Poroshenko. NYT cites provisions of the plan, yet, menacing tone without specific criticisms. What is wrong with it? Why say, Putin “has consistently operated in a deceitful manner,” unless your purpose is to discredit it? And then berating the Europeans for not being more anti-Russian and militaristic. A black day.




Toler

Massive new @bellingcat report just published (full investigation to come later this week): we name the Russian officers who were responsible for the January 24, 2015 Mariupol attack, which killed 30+ civilians.
Happy inauguration, Putin!



Russian Officers and Militants Identified as Perpetrators of the January 2015 Mariupol Artillery Strike

May 7, 2018 By Bellingcat Investigation Team
Translations: Русский

The Bellingcat Investigation Team has determined conclusively that the artillery attack on the Ukrainian town of Mariupol on 24 January 2015, which resulted at least 30 civilian deaths and over 100 injuries, came from Russia-controlled territory. Bellingcat has also determined that the shelling operation was instructed, directed and supervised by Russian military commanders in active service with the Russian Ministry of Defense. Bellingcat has identified nine Russian officers, including one general, two colonels, and three lieutenant colonels, involved directly with the military operation.

Furthermore, Bellingcat has determined that two artillery batteries of Multiple Launch Rocket Systems (MLRS) were transported from Russia into Ukraine the day before the Mariupol operation. In the early morning of 24 January 2015, these batteries were deployed near the village of Bezimenne exclusively for the shelling of targets in and around Mariupol, after which they were repatriated back into Russia.

In the course of analyzing the events in the eve of and on 24 January 2015, Bellingcat has also identified two Russian generals involved with the selection and assignment of Russian artillery specialists to commanding roles in eastern Ukraine.

This investigation was made possible due to access to raw video and audio data that is being submitted by the Ukrainian government to the International Court of Justice as part of an ongoing legal case. This data was made available to a small group of international investigative media for the purposes of independent assessment. Bellingcat and its media partners analyzed a large volume of intercepted calls from and to participants in the armed conflict located in the area of Bezimenne at the time of shelling. Bellingcat conducted detailed cross-referencing of events, names and locations, as well as metadata from the calls, to open source data, including satellite photography data, social media posts, and voice samples from public statements of some of the identified persons. A detailed analysis permitted the identification of persons and military units, and the reconstruction of events leading up to the shelling of residential areas in Mariupol.

While previous reports, including the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission (SMM) to Ukraine report from 24 January 2015, have identified that shelling of Mariupol’s residential areas came from separatist-controlled territory, Bellingcat’s investigation is the first to fully detail and identify the role of active Russian military units, as well as the direct commanding role of active Russian army officers in this military operation.

Our full report identifying the nine Russian officers involved with the military operation that led to the deaths of 30 Ukrainian civilians in Mariupol will be published later this week. Today, we are revealing the names of these individuals, along with a sampling of the telephone conversations that led to their identification.

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The Russian officers who were in charge on high and lower levels of the MLRS batteries on the day of the shelling at Mariupol, or provided target instructions from another location in Eastern Ukraine, have been identified by Bellingcat as:

Major General Stepan Stepanovich Yaroshchuk

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Alexander Iozhefovich Tsapliuk, call sign ‘Gorets’

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Alexander Anatolevich Muratov

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Maksim Vladimirovich Vlasov, call sign ‘Yugra’

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Sergey Sergeyevich Yurchenko, call sign ‘Voronezh’

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Alexander Valeryevich Grunchev, call sign ‘Terek’

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The Russian officers who were in charge of selecting and sending artillery commanders and artillery equipment to Eastern Ukraine have been identified by Bellingcat as:

Colonel Oleg Leargievich Kuvshinov

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Major General Dmitry Nikolaevich Klimenko

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Colonel Sergey Ivanovich Lisai

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Video Player


The two Russian and Ukrainian militants in direct charge of the artillery units that shelled Mariupol have been identified by Bellingcat as:

Alexander Mikhailovich Evtody, call sign ‘Pepel’


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Grayr Manukovich Egiazaryan, call sign ‘Shram’

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Our full investigation, with biographical details on each of these men, our research process, and our analysis of the shelling attack itself, will be published later this week
https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and- ... ry-strike/
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They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Libya, Syria And Now Ukraine - Color Revolution By Force

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu May 10, 2018 11:03 pm

Russians behind the killing of 29 civilians in Ukraine identified

By Kevin G. Hall khall@mcclatchydc.comWashington

Footage shows 2015 aftermath of shelling of Mariupol, Ukraine allegedly by Russian missiles
The bombing of Mariupol, Ukraine, in January 2015 killed at least 29 civilians. The Ukrainian government is using drone footage to investigate the attack by alleged Russian missiles. Alexa Ard / McClatchy
A Russian major general now believed to be helping lead his country’s missile and artillery efforts in Syria was behind the indiscriminate shelling in January 2015 of a Ukrainian town that left at least 29 civilians dead.

Working off of raw video, cellphone intercepts and information gleaned from social media and military websites in Ukraine and Russia, a joint reporting team that includes U.K.-based Bellingcat and McClatchy has identified nine Russian officers — including Major Gen. Stepan Stepanovich Yaroschuk — thought to have been directly involved in the military operation that killed and injured scores of civilians.

The shells that rained down on Mariupol came from two Russian artillery batteries transported on the eve of the operation into Russian-controlled territory in Ukraine.

The shelling was part of Russia's hybrid military operation in Ukraine, combining military support to ethnic Russian separatists with direct incursions into breakaway border regions. The goal was to extend Russian control in a country that was flirting with closer ties to Western Europe.

Russia had seized Crimea in early 2014, and its aggressive posture in the area led to strained relations and U.S. and European financial sanctions. The relationship soured further, and diplomatic expulsions followed, after Russia was accused of meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko last year brought charges against Russia before the International Court of Justice in the Netherlands, and these Russian military men likely will be dragged into that case. Ukraine must present evidence by June 12.

The identification of the military leaders is key because even if Russia does not extradite them to face justice, their travel abroad will be curtailed because of their penetration into a sovereign nation.

Their legal plight is similar to that of the Russians identified by the reporting team in a story last year as part of the chain of command responsible for downing Malaysia Air Flight 17 on July 17, 2014, over eastern Ukraine. All 298 people on board were killed after the plane was struck by a surface-to-air missile.

In both events, Russia has publicly disavowed responsibility and blamed Ukrainian forces. Its embassy in Washington declined comment for this story.

Bellingcat and McClatchy analyzed a large volume of intercepted calls to and from participants in the Mariupol attack, which lasted from the night of Jan. 23 into the early evening of Jan. 24, 2015.

The Ukrainian foreign ministry shared the intercepts with the reporting team hoping that an independent investigation could be compared against the conclusions the government reached in preparing its detailed court filing.

Many of the Russian officers used code names, and their true identities were learned from clues in the intercepted calls that allowed Bellingcat and its Russian-speaking associates to trace calls back to locations in Russia. The effort involved cross-referencing events, names and locations.

It was aided by simple mistakes, like when the men stationed far from home took calls from wives who called them by their real names, or when the wives posted to social media photos of themselves next to vehicles registered to their military husbands.

Once the commanding Russian officers were identified by Bellingcat, McClatchy worked with the University of Colorado’s National Center for Media Forensics in Denver to compare voices on the intercepts to audio of the men found in videos or recordings posted on the internet. In several cases, the results were inconclusive and the team's identification process relied on other factors. But for two main players, the results indicated strong probabilities of a match.

Noisy, short recordings don't provide the best samples for audio analysis, and it is impossible to say with 100 percent certainty that any two speakers are the same. The Denver-based center uses complex algorithms and software to compute voice patterns and compare the voices in question against a broader sample of Russian-speaking voices to determine likelihood ratios.

(The full, longer Bellingcat report is available here.)

How it unfolded

The siege on Mariupol began with a series of calls. A Russian colonel with the call sign Gorets, stationed in Ukrainian city of Donetsk, supervised the operation in the eastern border region with Russia. He received orders the morning of Jan. 23 to target sites in Mariupol and had to coordinate several artillery batteries.

The reporting team has identified Gorets as Alexander Iozhefovich Tsapliuk, 53, who was identified by Russian state media in June 2015, months after Mariupol’s shelling, as the new head of a military institute with specialized artillery training in Penza, almost 900 miles southeast of Moscow.

The website PenzaInform.ru described Tsapliuk at the time as a veteran of several Russian operations in “hotspots,” and said he received a special medal for “services to the fatherland.” The website for the military institute includes photos of Tsapliuk, who after Mariupol was promoted to the rank of major general.
Image
screencapture-tsapliuk.jpg
This undated photo from the Russian website PenzaInform.Ru shows Major Gen. Alexander Tsapliuk greeting an artillery cadet.
After comparing audio from publicly available videos of Tsapliuk with the intercepts of Gorets, the experts at the University of Colorado-Denver concluded that "it is 330 times more likely that the unknown speaker in the video is the known speaker Gorets than being another speaker."

The initial operation was to involve two Russian artillery batteries and a couple of local batteries that were part of the ethnic Russian separatist group known as the Donetsk People’s Republic, or DNR. The Ukrainian government has designated DNR a terrorist group.

The phone intercepts show that Russian military units 08275 and 23626, each with six missile launchers, were ordered to move into eastern Ukraine under cover of darkness on Jan. 23 via the Ukrainian town Kuznetsi, to return after the daylong assault ended. (Later, international inspection of craters in Mariupol would determine the missiles were fired from Russian Multiple Rocket Launcher Systems.)

The Russian military units were joined by a Russian-supplied separatist battery unit from Donetsk. The shelling was to begin at 7:30 am on Jan. 24, but one of the two Russian batteries got lost overnight and crossed into Ukraine late.

Two transport vehicles from the other battery collided, effectively knocking out two of its six missile launchers.

At 8 a.m. Russian commander Gorets (Tsapliuk) ordered the shelling to begin with just the local separatist unit and one partial Russian battery firing on the town. The second Russian unit began firing on the town around 10:30 am.

But the intercepted calls show that by 10 a.m., before the second Russian unit opened fired, there were already reports residential areas had been hit and that there were issues with coordinates provided. Video posted by residents on YouTube show the chaos, with charred bodies covered by blankets and apartment buildings on fire, even a nursery school with its windows blown out.

Yet the attack continued for hours.

About 2 p.m. the commander of the Southern Russian Military District, referred to in calls as Stepan Stepanovich and identified fully as Major Gen. Stepan Stepanovich Yaroschuk, called Gorets (Tsapliuk) and ordered a halt to the shelling due to the unexpected arrival of a monitoring team from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, a 57-country security organization. Later that day, the OSCE issued a statement saying the missiles came from separtist-held territory.

The Ukrainian Defense Ministry alleges that later in 2015 Yaroschuk was sent to Syria to help coordinate Russian and Syrian artillery attacks in support of strongman Bashar al-Assad in the protracted Syrian civil war. That could not be independently verified.
Image
screencapture-yaroschuk.jpg
This undated photo on a Russian defense ministry website shows Major Gen. Stepan Stepanovich Yaroschuk
Russian Ministry of Defense
The architect of the seige

At the time, Yaroschuk was artillery commander of the Southern Military District in Rostov, and officers in intercepts refer to him as the chief commander, or by the monikers The First and The Number One.

It’s likely that an Russian officer above Yaroschuk would also have been involved in the Mariupol siege. In one intercepted call, Gorets (Tsapliuk) tells another person that Stepan Stepanovich’s superiors are pressuring him for progress reports.

In another call, Gorets (Tsapliuk) complains that his opponents are having greater success.

“Whenever Ukrainian artillery fires, they always hit their target. Whenever DNR (separatists) artillery starts firing they can’t get closer than 300 meters,” he complains.

After receiving his orders from Yaroschuk to stand down, Gorets (Tsapliuk) can be heard on intercepts ordering that the mobile missile launchers be hidden in hangars and the equipment used to transport them, along with personnel, be hidden in surrounding forest until nightfall, when the battery units would head back into Russia.

Then, without explanation, the order was quickly reversed and battery units were told to return to positions and resume firing. Between 4 pm and 6 pm, the Russian battery units then crossed back into Russia where they were believed to have met in early evening with Yaroschuk.


Intercepted call between Russian officers discussing orders at end of Mariupol, Ukraine, shelling
This intercepted audio includes two Russian officers involved in the shelling of Mariupol, Ukraine, discussing orders to return back to Russia to meet the operation commander, identified as Stepan Stepanovich. The shelling occurred on Jan. 24, 2015. Ukrainian foreign ministry/Bellingcat

The other commander identified in part through audio analysis was Col. Sergey Ivanovich Lisai, the most senior ranking officer escorting the Russian battery units into and out of Ukraine. At the time Lisai was the artillery commander of Russia’s 36th Army in Russia’s Far East. The University of Colorado center’s analysis of Russian news videos featuring Lisai and the phone intercepts led to the conclusion of "that it is 30 times more likely that the unknown speaker is the known speaker Lisay than being another speaker."

Identifying the others

The intercepts show several other Russian officers involved in the planning and carrying out of the attack. The reporting team identified them through means other than audio analysis.

A Russian colonel who went by the call sign San Sanich was sometimes referred to in calls as Alexander Alexandraovich, but in one key call is referred to by his patronym, Alexander Anatolevich. The intercepts show San Sanich supervised the parallel shelling by separatists, and was actually Alexander Anatolevich Muratov. He was identified by an intercepted call from his wife, whose phone was traced back to a Russian medical officer whose husband was an artillery commander at the same base, Muratov.
Another lieutenant colonel, identified by the team as Maksim Vladimirovich Vlasov, went by the call sign Yugra and was sometimes referred as Maks. He was identified by intercepted birthday calls on Feb. 15, including one from a hockey coach in remote Chebarkul in Chelyabinsk Oblast. The phone number for Vlasov’s wife traced back to the same town, and social media profiles show Maks was stationed there, became a lieutenant colonel in 2012 and was a goalkeeper on a local hockey team.
A third Russian, identified as Lt. Col. Sergey Sergeyevich Yurchenko, was the man who used the call sign Voronezh and helped guide the Russian missiles fired at Mariupol. A March 2015 phone call to him from a woman using a Russian number led to discovery of her social media profile and evidence that she lived near the same base where Vlasov was normally stationed. A photograph of her standing next to two cars led the reporting team to pull the registration records on one of the cars, which belonged to her husband, Yurchenko.
Multiple intercepts reference a Colonel Klimenko, who made a birthday call to Gorets (Tsapliuk) on Jan. 16 and is addressed as Dmitry. He is now Major Gen. Dmitry Klimenko, but in February 2015 was a colonel in charge of artillery for the Eastern Military District in Khabarovsk.
Another call traces to a woman with the surname Gruncheva, allowing the team to identify first her and then her husband, Alexander Valeryevich Grunchev, an artillery officer in charge of an battery that shelled Mariupol. His call sign was Terek, and his wife is in photos with a car registered to him.
Intercepts show calls from an officer referred to as Oleg Leargievich. His surname is Kuvshinov, and he's identified in 2017 Russian military photographs as a major general.
Two of the individuals identified by McClatchy and its reporting partners seem to have faked their own deaths. Intercepts captured a call from a Russian mercenary using the alias Shram. He is Grayr Manukovich Egiazaryan. According to news sites in separatist territories, he was killed in fighting on Feb. 27, 2015. But he appears in YouTube videos dated October 2015 and one of his social media account remains active.

Then there's the man who went by the call sign Pepel. He was identified by a captured “spotter” for the Russian forces as Alexander Mikhailovich Evtody.

Media reports on Feb. 2, days after Mariupol, said he was killed on the battlefield.

The reporting team identified eight social-media profiles for Evtody, and he logged in to three of them between Feb. 2 and early April 2018.

Bellingcat set up an account on the Russian social media site VK, using a photo of Pepel’s former commander and a random name. Then the fake account sent a request to Evtody's VK account asking to be added to Evtody's contact list. Seeing the photo of his former commander, Evtody contacted the fake profile and provided his new phone number.

Bellingcat called the number and asked Evtody for an interview. He said he'd consider it, hung up and has been unreachable since.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation- ... 90044.html
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Re: Libya, Syria And Now Ukraine - Color Revolution By Force

Postby American Dream » Mon Nov 19, 2018 7:52 am

Sometimes dogmatic/authoritarian left positions and far right positions may veer closely together- I have to wonder why...


Salvage Perspectives #6: Evidence of Things Not Seen


Imperialism and the Camp of Campism

No better example of this intellectual impasse could be found than with regard to the US-led airstrikes on three sites in the spring of 2018, in response to a chemical attack. These strikes were according to James Mattis ‘a one-shot’ and indeed incurred no fatalities. Less so the 15,065 US strikes on Syria under the rubric of combating not Assad, but ISIS, which by July of this year have claimed at a minimum 6,259 lives, according to the tracking website Airwars: this is less than the destruction wrought by Russia’s aerial campaign to maintain its client regime in power, but hardly insignificant. As Salvagehas pointed out previously, the US is fighting a war in Syria, but not against Assad.

The use of chemical weapons by the latter, this time in the working-class periphery of Damascus, needs no special strategic logic, no invocations of ‘but who really benefits?’ to be parsed. This was, according to the Independent International Commission of Inquiry, a UN body, the 35th confirmed chemical attack. None of these have led, as claims of WMD in Iraq did, to a regime-change war, any more than did the use of Sarin gas on civilians in April 2017, for which the OPCW declared the ‘Syrian Arab Republic [i.e. the Assad regime]’ responsible. If these are false flags, who on earth would continue to wave them for so little success?

The fantasies by which Syria-truthers absolve their favoured Ba’athists and their international backers of responsibility for chemical massacres are of interest less in themselves than as an extreme symptom of the inability of the Anglophone Left tout courtto begin to grasp new conditions. Two previous historical periods of imperialism are implicitly invoked in their positions: the Cold War itself, seen as a battle between imperialist and anti-imperialist camps; and the unilateralism of Bush II, when it was common to speak of ‘Empire’ in the singular. Today’s campists seem just as unaware as are the neo-Atlantacists attacking Corbyn that the Soviet Union collapsed a generation ago. Neither Russia, nor the Assad regime, nor even China, can remotely plausibly be considered ‘workers’ states’, of even the most degenerate or deformed kind: they are perfectly formed oligarchic capitalist ones. The assertion that ‘the main enemy is at home’ cannot mean that there are no enemies abroad: for the slogan to work, it must be equally utterable in Aleppo and St Petersburg as it is in London or Washington. (It is discomfiting to suspect that were something like the October revolution to occur in Russia now, we could expect, and not only from the Right, dark whispers along the lines of ‘Who funded #sealedtrain?’)

Part of this confusion derives from the more recent of the two phases, that of liberal interventionism and the war on Iraq. Beneath the surface, the instances of Iraq and Syria are diametric opposites. There was a war for regime change in Iraq but not weapons of mass destruction: in Syria there are weapons of mass destruction but no war for regime change. The superficial comparison has reinvigorated a stream of Left geopolitical commentary that is in its telos identical to small-c conservatism, that prizes ‘stability’ above solidarity, and hence insists that ‘Assad has won in Syria’. There is truth to this claim, but only if one qualifies what one means by ‘won’, and indeed by ‘Assad’.

The military opposition to the regime has been wiped out, except for one enclave around Idlib. This victory, of sorts, took the best part of a decade against an ideologically incoherent, operationally divided, intermittently armed rebellion. It belongs not to Assad himself, but to his international backers, Russia and Iran, their militias and their airpower: surely this is obvious when rebel forces negotiate directly with Russia, and Russia, Iran and Turkey jointly attempt to decide what goes on in the country? Half the Syrian population has been displaced, and the regime is busy enacting laws to seize their property: does this really seem like a situation that will become ‘stable’?

This leads to another question, one urgent to pose but very difficult to answer. What, as the twenty-first century approaches its quarter-point, would a socialist foreign policy look like? What might be its boundaries under capitalism – a left social-democratic foreign policy? Is such a thing even conceivable?

One baseline aim might be to prevent inter-imperialist rivalries, such as those currently swirling around Syria, from reaching thermo-nuclear levels. Mattis was clearly aware of this danger, the largely symbolic US strikes targeted to avoid hitting Russian positions, but relying on such calculations to avoid apocalypse would be unwise in the extreme. It is necessary to restate proletarian internationalism as an attempt to preserve the world, as best one can, the better to inherit it.

Many efforts to forge foreign policies of the Left tend to reinforce quasi-campist misprisions: mustering entirely appropriate opposition, say, to British support for the Saudi war on Yemen, but seemingly unable to grasp that other states, such as Russia, China or Iran pursue just as ruthless a conception of their own interests; or advocating a muscular Cold War-style social democracy, apparently unaware that today even the US president is not an Atlantacist.

The choice of what to ‘support’ seems often based on whose ‘geopolitical necessity’ is considered legitimate, rather than on challenging the very notion of such necessity itself. The left demand to ‘support the Kurds’, for example, referring to the post-national liberationist formation in north-eastern Syria, seems unaware that this is already US policy: there are three US airbases and thousands of US troops in ‘Rojava’, aiding the PYD administration. The brutal Turkish invasion and occupation of Afrin, the westernmost canton of ‘Rojava’, which the US did not deign to oppose, shows the folly of banking on imperialist powers to protect any form of radical transformation.

What does confronting the main enemy at home look like when it is not the main one perpetrating massacres abroad? What, in other words, can the British Left say about Syria? Our main enemy has thus-far failed to commit to accepting by 2020 more than 23,000 of the 5 million external Syrian refugees, refuses to grant a flag to the only private rescue boat attempting to save refugee lives in the Mediterranean, and maintains one of the largest networks of immigration detention centres in Europe. We might start there. Ensuring that Assad and Russia’s propaganda-machines do not entirely erase the real history of the last decade in Syria, and that the Syrians in Britain are welcome in our campaigns in solidarity with them are likewise valuable, even if intangible, aims in themselves.


http://salvage.zone/in-print/salvage-pe ... -not-seen/
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Re: Libya, Syria And Now Ukraine - Color Revolution By Force

Postby Rory » Sun Nov 25, 2018 6:19 pm

Looks like things are heating up around the Black Sea today - Ukrainian vessels provoked a confrontation with russian coast guard which fired on their boats. Poroshenko is polling at 8% close to elections and is reportedly mulling martial law (and suspension of said elections), along with some very martial rhetoric towards russia from the Ukrainian folk - talk of "acts of war", and "unjustified aggression".

SmartSelect_20181125-143723_Twitter.jpg
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Re: Libya, Syria And Now Ukraine - Color Revolution By Force

Postby Rory » Sun Nov 25, 2018 9:44 pm

SmartSelect_20181125-173927_Twitter.jpg


Just the ever so helpful thinktank de jour proposing war with russia, off the back of a cynical electoral ploy instigated by a deeply unpopular, corrupt banderastan oligarch

Sea of Azov is (apparently) less than 10 meters deep on average. Would be entertaining to see the US fleet navigate it, at least
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Re: Libya, Syria And Now Ukraine - Color Revolution By Force

Postby JackRiddler » Sun Nov 25, 2018 10:11 pm

There are no indications that Poroshenko will be running.

CORRECTION: According to this possibly un-updated Wikipedia page.

Ukrainian Presidential Election, 2019
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian ... tion,_2019

If he wants to cling to office, a coup is a better idea, but I heard he's been busy with transfering all of his assets abroad. Hard to ever tell just what is in these people's heads. How does he think this ends?
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Re: Libya, Syria And Now Ukraine - Color Revolution By Force

Postby Rory » Sun Nov 25, 2018 10:22 pm

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Re: Libya, Syria And Now Ukraine - Color Revolution By Force

Postby JackRiddler » Mon Nov 26, 2018 5:41 pm

Okay, Poroshenko is seeking re-"election." Whodathunk it, Wikipedia's not always reliable.
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Re: Libya, Syria And Now Ukraine - Color Revolution By Force

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Nov 27, 2018 2:59 pm

Russia-Ukraine Tensions Escalate, Ukraine Declares Martial Law
Lucian KimNovember 27, 20185:01 AM ET

After a clash with Russia off the coast of Crimea, Ukraine declared martial law in areas that border Russia. On Sunday, Russia seized three Ukrainian vessels and 23 crew members.
https://www.npr.org/2018/11/27/67109038 ... artial-law




Ukraine-Russia sea clash: Captured sailors shown on Russia TV
Andriy DrachGetty Images
One of the three men, Andriy Drach, was described as a Ukrainian security service employee
Statements by three captured Ukrainians have been released by Russia's security service after Russian ships fired on and seized three Ukrainian boats off the coast of Russian-annexed Crimea.

One of the men, Volodymyr Lisovyi, said he was aware of the "provocative nature" of the Ukrainian action.

Ukraine's navy commander said the men had been forced to lie under duress.

Meanwhile, a Crimean court ordered that 12 of the 24 Ukrainians seized on Sunday be detained for 60 days.

The court is expected to issue rulings for the remaining servicemen on Wednesday.

Western nations have condemned Russia's use of force, four years after it seized Ukraine's southern Crimean peninsula.

Why this crisis is fraught with risk

The flare-up is the first outright clash between Ukraine and Russian forces for years, although pro-Russian separatists and Russian "volunteers" have been fighting Ukraine's army in two eastern regions.

Stakes are high in Ukraine-Russia sea clash
Crimea: Who controls its territorial waters?

Why tensions between Russia and Ukraine are so high
Tensions escalated when Russia opened a bridge this year between Russia and Crimea over the Kerch Strait, which leads into the Sea of Azov. Ukraine has two big ports on the northern shore of the Azov sea, and a 2003 treaty allows both countries free access to its waters.

Russia has accused the two Ukrainian gunboats and a tug of violating Russian territorial waters as they sailed through the Kerch Strait. But Ukraine says the incidents happened in areas that are free to shipping.

Why Ukraine is imposing martial law

On Monday night, Ukraine's parliament responded by backing President Petro Poroshenko's decision to impose martial law for a 30-day period from 26 November in 10 border regions.

Map showing areas under Ukrainian martial law from 28 November
Presentational white space
Mr Poroshenko warned the threat of a Russian land invasion was "extremely serious".

Five of the 10 regions border Russia while two are adjacent to Moldova's breakaway Trans-Dniester region, where Russian troops are stationed. The other three regions border the Black Sea or Sea of Azov close to Crimea.

Damaged Ukrainian gunboat Berdyansk in CrimeaUkrainian Navy
The Ukrainian navy has published photos of its ships that were damaged by Russian fire
Since April 2014, Ukraine's army has been fighting pro-Russian separatists in two eastern regions of Ukraine bordering Russia, Luhansk and Donetsk.

The move to martial law is unprecedented in Ukraine, and gives military authorities the right to ban protests and strikes. Mobilisation of civilians for military service is possible but not inevitable.

Russia-Ukraine sea clash in 300 words
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Eastern Ukraine: A new, bloody chapter
What the sailors said

The Ukrainian sailors were captured by Russia on Sunday and at least three were wounded.

Late on Monday night, the FSB security service released videos of three of the men:

Volodymyr Lisovyi on Russian TVRossiya 24
Volodymyr Lisovyi was one of three men who gave statements described as "under duress" by the head of Ukraine's navy
Andriy Drach said on camera he was on the Nikopol gunboat with an order to sail from Odessa to Mariupol. "We were warned by the border service of the Russian Federation that we were violating Russian law. They had repeatedly asked us to leave the territorial waters of the Russian Federation," he said.
Serhiy Tsybizov said he was also on the Nikopol
Volodymyr Lisovyi said he was commander of a military unit and was part of a naval task force. "I deliberately ignored requests via ultra-short-wave band," adding that there were small arms on board as well as machine-guns.
The head of the Ukrainian navy, Ihor Voronchenko, told Ukrainian TV that the three men had given false statements under duress.

"I know those sailors from Nikopol. They have always been honest professionals in their jobs, and what they say now is not true," he said.

The head of Ukraine's SBU security service, Vasyl Hrytsak, confirmed Russian reports that members of the service were on board the boats, but added that it was a "routine counter-intelligence mission" of a type that the Russian navy carried out regularly too.

How the West has reacted

Several countries have condemned Russia's actions on Monday, and the UN Security Council failed to agree a Russian-proposed agenda, and instead discussed a Ukrainian proposal on the issue.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the seizure of Ukrainian ships was a "dangerous escalation and a violation of international law". President Donald Trump said: "We do not like what's happening, either way we don't like what's happening and hopefully they'll get straight."

Map of route of Ukrainian boats off Crimea on 25 November
Presentational white space
The UK condemned Russia's "destabilising behaviour in the region and its ongoing violation of Ukrainian territorial sovereignty".

Taking a call from German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Russian President Vladimir Putin argued that the Ukrainians had "deliberately ignored the rules of peaceful passage in the territorial sea of the Russian Federation", the Kremlin said.

Mrs Merkel had "stressed the need for de-escalation and dialogue", her spokesman said.https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-46356111
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Libya, Syria And Now Ukraine - Color Revolution By Force

Postby Rory » Tue Nov 27, 2018 3:07 pm

http://www.stalkerzone.org/america-prep ... 34LrTtPtY8

The South Ukrainian nuclear power plant, the only one in Ukraine whose reactor core is completely loaded with the fuel assemblies of Westinghouse, is preparing to increase the capacity of the third power unit,.

This was reported by the Information and Public Relations Department of the nuclear power plant.

“The South Ukrainian nuclear power plant is preparing to increase the capacity of the third power unit. It is designed as a pilot within the work on increasing the capacity to 107%. Such a choice, first and foremost, is connected to the use of fuel from Westinghouse company,” it is said in the statement.


Nazis, martial law, nuclear reactors running at 107% during a heating/energy crisis..
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Re: Libya, Syria And Now Ukraine - Color Revolution By Force

Postby Rory » Tue Nov 27, 2018 3:10 pm

SmartSelect_20181127-110910_Twitter.jpg


SmartSelect_20181127-110926_Twitter.jpg
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