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<h2 property="dc:title"> <big><big>The Silence of American Hawks
About Kiev’s Atrocities </big></big></h2>
<big><big> </big></big>
<div class="article-teaser">
<p><big><big>The regime has repeatedly carried out artillery and
air attacks on city centers, creating a humanitarian
catastrophe—which is all but ignored by the US
political-media establishment.</big></big></p>
<big><big>
</big></big></div>
<big><big> </big></big>
<div class="views-field-value byline"><big><big> <a
href="http://www.thenation.com/authors/stephen-f-cohen"><span
property="dc:creator">Stephen F. Cohen</span></a> </big></big></div>
<big><big></big></big><br>
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href="http://www.thenation.com/sites/default/files/ukraine_svoboda_img_2.jpg"
title="Ultra-Nationalist Party Rally" class="thickbox
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src="cid:part2.08000300.08030907@comcast.net"
alt="Ultra-Nationalist Party Rally"
title="Ultra-Nationalist Party Rally" class="imagecache
imagecache-main_node_view_image" height="400"
width="615"></a> </div>
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<p><big><big><em>Members of the Ukrainian ultra-nationalist
Svoboda Party rally in Kiev (Reuters/Maxim Zmeyev)</em></big></big></p>
<big><big> </big></big></div>
<big><big> </big></big></div>
<big><big>
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<big><big>
</big></big>
<p><big><big><em>Editor’s note:</em> <em>This article was updated
on July 7 and July 17.</em></big></big></p>
<big><big>
</big></big>
<p><big><big>For months, the US-backed regime in Kiev has been
committing atrocities against its own citizens in
southeastern Ukraine, regions heavily populated by
Russian-speaking Ukrainians and ethnic Russians. While
victimizing a growing number of innocent people, including
children, and degrading America’s reputation, these military
assaults on cities, captured on video, are generating
intense pressure in Russia on President Vladimir Putin to
“save our compatriots.” Both the atrocities and the pressure
on Putin have increased even more since July 1, when Kiev,
after a brief cease-fire, intensified its artillery and air
attacks on eastern cities defenseless against such weapons.</big></big></p>
<big><big>
</big></big>
<p><big><big>The reaction of the Obama administration—as well as
the new cold-war hawks in Congress and in the establishment
media—has been twofold: silence interrupted only by
occasional statements excusing and thus encouraging more
atrocities by Kiev. Very few Americans (notably, the scholar
Gordon Hahn) have protested this shameful complicity. We may
honorably disagree about the causes and resolution of the
Ukrainian crisis, the worst US-Russian confrontation in
decades, but not about deeds that have risen to the level of
war crimes.</big></big></p>
<big><big>
</big></big>
<p align="center"><big><big>* * *</big></big></p>
<big><big>
</big></big>
<p><big><big>In mid-April, the new Kiev government, predominantly
western Ukrainian in composition and outlook, declared an
“anti-terrorist operation” against a growing political
rebellion in the Southeast. At that time, the rebels were
mostly mimicking the initial Maidan protests in Kiev in
2013—demonstrating, issuing defiant proclamations, occupying
public buildings and erecting defensive barricades—before
Maidan turned ragingly violent and, in February, overthrew
Ukraine’s corrupt but legitimately elected president, Viktor
Yanukovych. (The entire Maidan episode, it will be recalled,
had Washington’s enthusiastic political, and perhaps more
tangible, support.) Indeed, the precedent for seizing
official buildings and demanding the allegiance of local
authorities had been set even earlier, in January, in
western Ukraine—by pro-Maidan, anti-Yanukovych protesters,
some declaring “independence” from his government. Reports
suggest that even now some cities in central and western
Ukraine, regions almost entirely ignored by international
media, are controlled by extreme nationalists, not Kiev.</big></big></p>
<big><big>
</big></big>
<p><big><big>Considering those preceding events, but above all the
country’s profound historical divisions, particularly
between its western and eastern regions—ethnic, linguistic,
religious, cultural, economic and political—the rebellion in
the southeast, centered in the industrial Donbass, was not
surprising. Nor were its protests against the
unconstitutional way (in effect, a coup) the new government
had come to power, the southeast’s sudden loss of effective
political representation in the capital and the real
prospect of official discrimination. But by declaring an
“anti-terrorist operation” against the new protesters, Kiev
signaled its intention to “destroy” them, not negotiate with
them.</big></big></p>
<big><big>
</big></big>
<p><big><big>On May 2, in this incendiary atmosphere, a horrific
event occurred in the southern city of Odessa, awakening
memories of Nazi German extermination squads in Ukraine and
other Soviet republics during World War II. An organized
pro-Kiev mob chased protesters into a building, set it on
fire and tried to block the exits. Some forty people,
perhaps more, perished in the flames or were murdered as
they fled the inferno. A still unknown number of other
victims were seriously injured.</big></big></p>
<big><big>
</big></big>
<p><big><big>Members of the infamous Right Sector, a far-right
paramilitary organization ideologically aligned with the
ultranationalist Svoboda party—itself a constituent part of
Kiev’s coalition government—led the mob. Both are frequently
characterized by knowledgeable observers as “neo-fascist”
movements. (Hateful ethnic chants by the mob were audible,
and swastika-like symbols were found on the scorched
building.) Kiev alleged that the victims had themselves
accidentally started the fire, but eyewitnesses, television
footage and social media videos told the true story, as they
have about subsequent atrocities.</big></big></p>
<big><big>
</big></big>
<p><big><big>Instead of interpreting the Odessa massacre as an
imperative for restraint, Kiev intensified its
“anti-terrorist operation.” Since May, the regime has sent a
growing number of armored personnel carriers, tanks,
artillery, helicopter gunships and warplanes to southeastern
cities, among them, Slovyansk (Slavyansk in Russian),
Mariupol, Krasnoarmeisk, Kramatorsk, Donetsk and Luhansk
(Lugansk in Russian). When its regular military units and
local police forces turned out to be less than effective,
willing or loyal, Kiev hastily mobilized Right Sector and
other radical nationalist militias responsible for much of
the violence at Maidan into a National Guard to accompany
regular detachments—partly to reinforce them, partly, it
seems, to enforce Kiev’s commands. Zealous, barely trained
and drawn mostly from central and western regions, Kiev’s
new recruits have escalated the ethnic warfare and killing
of innocent civilians. (Episodes described as “massacres”
soon also occurred in Mariupol and Kramatorsk.)</big></big></p>
<big><big>
</big></big>
<p><big><big>Initially, the “anti-terrorist” campaign was limited
primarily, though not only, to rebel checkpoints on the
outskirts of cities. Since May, however, Kiev has repeatedly
carried out artillery and air attacks on city centers that
have struck residential buildings, shopping malls, parks,
schools, kindergartens, hospitals, even orphanages. More and
more urban areas, neighboring towns and villages now look
and sound like war zones, with telltale rubble, destroyed
and pockmarked buildings, mangled vehicles, the dead and
wounded in streets, wailing mourners and crying children.
Conflicting information from Kiev, local resistance leaders
and Moscow, as well as Washington’s silence, make it
difficult to estimate the number of dead and wounded
noncombatants, but Kiev’s mid-July figure of about 2,000 is
almost certainly too low. The number continues to grow due
also to Kiev’s blockade of cities where essential medicines,
food, water, fuel and electricity are scarce, and where
wages and pensions are often no longer being paid. The
result is an emerging humanitarian catastrophe.</big></big></p>
<big><big>
</big></big>
<p><big><big>Another effect is clear. Kiev’s “anti-terrorist”
tactics have created a reign of terror in the targeted
cities. Panicked by shells and mortars exploding on the
ground, menacing helicopters and planes flying above and
fear of what may come next, families are seeking sanctuary
in basements and other darkened shelters. Even <em>The New
York Times</em>, which like the mainstream American media
generally has deleted the atrocities from its coverage,
described survivors in Slovyansk “as if living in the Middle
Ages.” Meanwhile, an ever-growing number of refugees,
disproportionately women and traumatized children, have been
desperately fleeing the carnage. In late June, the UN
estimated that as many as 110,000 Ukrainians had fled across
the border to Russia, where authorities said the actual
numbers were much larger, and about half that many to other
Ukrainian sanctuaries. By mid-July, roads and trains were
filled with refugees from newly besieged Luhansk and
Donetsk, a city of one million and already “a ghostly
shell.”</big></big></p>
<big><big>
</big></big>
<p><big><big>It is true, of course, that anti-Kiev rebels in these
regions are increasingly well-armed (though lacking the
government’s arsenal of heavy and airborne weapons),
organized and aggressive, no doubt with some Russian
assistance, whether officially sanctioned or not. But
calling themselves “self-defense” fighters is not wrong.
They did not begin the combat; their land is being invaded
and assaulted by a government whose political legitimacy is
arguably no greater than their own, two of their large
regions having voted overwhelmingly for autonomy referenda;
and, unlike actual terrorists, they have not committed acts
of war outside their own communities. The French adage
suggested by an American observer seems applicable: “This
animal is very dangerous. If attacked, it defends itself.”</big></big></p>
<big><big>
</big></big>
<p align="center"><big><big>* * *</big></big></p>
<big><big>
</big></big>
<p><big><big>Among the crucial questions rarely discussed in the
US political-media establishment: What is the role of the
“neo-fascist” factor in Kiev’s “anti-terrorist” ideology and
military operations? Putin’s position, at least until
recently—that the entire Ukrainian government is a
“neo-fascist junta”—is incorrect. Many members of the ruling
coalition and its parliamentary majority are aspiring
European-style democrats or moderate nationalists. This may
also be true of Ukraine’s newly elected president, the
oligarch Petro Poroshenko, though his increasingly extreme
words and deeds since being inaugurated on June 7—he has
called resisters in the bombarded cities “gangs of animals”
and vowed to take “hundreds of their lives for each life of
our servicemen”—collide with his conciliatory image drafted
by Washington and Brussels. Equally untrue, however, are
claims by Kiev’s American apologists, including some
academics and liberal intellectuals, that Ukraine’s
neo-fascists—or perhaps quasi-fascists—are merely agitated
nationalists, “garden-variety Euro-populists,” a
“distraction” or lack enough popular support to be
significant. (A Council on Foreign Relations specialist even
assured <em>Wall Street Journal</em> readers that these
extremists are among Kiev’s “good guys.”)</big></big></p>
<big><big>
</big></big>
<p><big><big>Independent Western scholars have documented the
fascist origins, contemporary ideology and declarative
symbols of Svoboda and its fellow-traveling Right Sector.
Both movements glorify Ukraine’s murderous Nazi
collaborators in World War II as inspirational ancestors.
Both, to quote Svoboda’s leader Oleh Tyahnybok, call for an
ethnically pure nation purged of the “Moscow-Jewish mafia”
and “other scum,” including homosexuals, feminists and
political leftists. (Not surprisingly, physical attacks on
Kiev’s <span class="mandelbrot_refrag"><a
class="mandelbrot_refrag"
href="http://www.thenation.com/section/lgbt?lc=int_mb_1001"
data-ls-seen="1">LGBT</a></span> community are
increasing, and on July 5 authoritieis in effect banned a
Gay Pride parade.) And both organizations hailed the Odessa
massacre. According to the website of Right Sector leader
Dmytro Yarosh, it was “another bright day in our national
history.” A Svoboda parliamentary deputy added, “Bravo,
Odessa…. Let the Devils burn in hell.” If more evidence is
needed, in December 2012, the European Parliament decried
Svoboda’s “racist, anti-Semitic and xenophobic views [that]
go against the EU’s fundamental values and principles.” In
2013, the World Jewish Congress denounced Svoboda as
“neo-Nazi.” Still worse, observers agree that Right Sector
is even more extremist.</big></big></p>
<big><big>
</big></big>
<p><big><big>Nor do electoral results tell the story. Tyahnybok
and Yarosh together received less than 2 percent of the May
presidential vote, but historians know that in traumatic
times, when, to recall Yeats, “the center cannot hold,”
small, determined movements can seize the moment, as did
Lenin’s Bolsheviks and Hitler’s Nazis. Indeed, Svoboda and
Right Sector already command power and influence far
exceeding their popular vote. “Moderates” in the US-backed
Kiev government, obliged to both movements for their
violence-driven ascent to power, and perhaps for their
personal safety, rewarded Svoboda and Right Sector with some
five to eight (depending on shifting affiliations) top
ministry positions, including ones overseeing national
security, military, prosecutorial and educational affairs.
Still more, according to the research of <a data-ls-seen="1"
href="http://reconsideringrussia.org/">Pietro Shakarian</a>,
a remarkable young graduate student at the University of
Michigan, Svoboda was given five governorships, covering
about 20 percent of the country. And this does not take into
account the role of Right Sector in the “anti-terrorist
operation.”</big></big></p>
<big><big>
</big></big>
<p><big><big>Nor does it consider the political mainstreaming of
fascism’s dehumanizing ethos. In December 2012, a Svoboda
parliamentary leader anathematized the Ukrainian-born
American actress Mila Kunis as “a dirty kike.” Since 2013,
pro-Kiev mobs and militias have routinely denigrated ethnic
Russians as insects (“Colorado beetles,” whose colors
resemble a sacred Russia ornament). On May 9, at the annual
commemoration of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany, the
governor of one region praised Hitler for his “slogan of
liberating the people” in occupied Ukraine. More recently,
the US-picked prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, referred to
resisters in the Southeast as “subhumans.” His defense
minister proposed putting them in “filtration camps,”
pending deportation, and raising fears of ethnic cleansing.
Yulia Tymoshenko—a former prime minister, titular head of
Yatsenyuk’s party and runner-up in the May presidential
election—was overheard wishing she could “exterminate them
all [Ukrainian Russians] with atomic weapons.”
“Sterilization” is among the less apocalyptic official
musings on the pursuit of a purified Ukraine.</big></big></p>
<big><big>
</big></big>
<p><big><big>Confronted with such facts, Kiev’s American
apologists have conjured up another rationalization. Any
neo-fascists in Ukraine, they assure us, are far less
dangerous than Putinism’s “clear aspects of fascism.” The
allegation is unworthy of serious analysis: however
authoritarian Putin may be, there is nothing authentically
fascist in his rulership, policies, state ideology or
personal conduct.</big></big></p>
<big><big>
</big></big>
<p><big><big>Indeed, equating Putin with Hitler, as eminent
Americans from Hillary Clinton and Zbigniew Brzezinski to
George Will have done, is another example of how our new
cold warriors are recklessly damaging US national security
in vital areas where Putin’s cooperation is essential.
Looking ahead, would-be presidents who make such remarks can
hardly expect to be greeted by an open-minded Putin, whose
brother died and father was wounded in the Soviet-Nazi war.
Moreover, tens of millions of today’s Russians whose family
members were killed by actual fascists in that war will
regard this defamation of their popular president as
sacrilege, as they do the atrocities committed by Kiev.</big></big></p>
<big><big>
</big></big>
<p align="center"><big><big>* * *</big></big></p>
<big><big>
</big></big>
<p><big><big>And yet, the Obama administration reacts with
silence, and worse. Historians will decide what the US
government and the “democracy promotion” organizations it
funds were doing in Ukraine during the preceding twenty
years, but much of Washington’s role in the current crisis
has been deeply complicit. As the Maidan mass protest
against President Yanukovych developed last
November-December, Senator John McCain, the high-level State
Department policymaker Victoria Nuland and a crew of other
US politicians and officials arrived to stand with its
leaders, Svoboda’s Tyahnybok in the forefront, and declare,
“America is with you!” Nuland was then caught on tape
plotting with the American ambassador, Geoffrey Pyatt, to
oust Yanukovych’s government and replace him with Yatsenyuk,
who soon became, and remains, prime minister.</big></big></p>
<big><big>
</big></big>
<p><big><big>Meanwhile, President Obama personally warned
Yanukovych “not to resort to violence,” as did, repeatedly,
Secretary of State John Kerry. But when violent street riots
deposed Yanukovych—only hours after a European-brokered,
White House–backed compromise that would have left him as
president of a reconciliation government until new elections
this December, possibly averting the subsequent
bloodshed—the administration made a fateful decision. It
eagerly embraced the outcome. Obama personally legitimized
the coup as a “constitutional process,” inviting Yatsenyuk
to the White House. The United States has been at least
tacitly complicit in what followed, from Putin’s hesitant
decision in March to annex Crimea and the rebellion in
southeastern Ukraine, to the ongoing civil war and Kiev’s
innocent victims.</big></big></p>
<big><big>
</big></big>
<p><big><big>How intimately involved US officials have been in
Kiev’s “anti-terrorist operation” is not known, but
certainly the administration has not been discreet. Before
and after the military campaign began in earnest, Kerry, CIA
director John Brennan and Vice President Joseph Biden
(twice) visited Kiev, followed, it is reported, by a
continuing flow of “senior US defense officials,” military
equipment and financial assistance to the bankrupt Kiev
government. Indeed, American “advisers” are now “embedded”
in the Ukrainian Defense Ministry. Despite this essential
support, the White House has not compelled Kiev to
investigate either the Odessa massacre or the fateful sniper
killings of scores of Maidan protesters and policemen on
February 18–20, which precipitated Yanukovych’s ouster. (The
snipers were initially said to be Yanukovych’s, but evidence
later appeared pointing to opposition extremists, possibly
Right Sector. Unlike Washington, the Council of Europe has
been pressuring Kiev to investigate both events.)</big></big></p>
<big><big>
</big></big>
<p><big><big>As atrocities and humanitarian disaster grow in
Ukraine, both Obama and Kerry have all but vanished as
statesmen. Except for periodic banalities asserting the
virtuous intentions of Washington and Kiev and alleging
Putin’s responsibility for the violence, they have left
specific responses to lesser US officials. Not surprisingly,
all have told the same Manichean story, from the White House
to Foggy Bottom. The State Department’s neocon missionary
Nuland, who spent several days at Maidan, for example,
assured a congressional committee that she had no evidence
of fascist-like elements playing any role there. Ambassador
Pyatt, who earlier voiced the same opinion about the Odessa
massacre, was even more dismissive, telling obliging <em>New
Republic</em> editors that the entire question was
“laughable.”</big></big></p>
<big><big>
</big></big>
<p><big><big>Still more shameful, no American official at any
level appears to have issued a meaningful statement of
sympathy for civilian victims of the Kiev government, not
even those in Odessa. Instead, the administration has been
unswervingly indifferent, tacitly endorsing Kiev’s
preposterous claims that its innocent bombing victims were
killed by Russian or “separatist” forces, as it did again on
July 15, when at least eleven people died in an apartment
building. When asked again and again if her superiors had
“any concerns” about the casualties of Kiev’s military
campaign, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki has
repeatedly answered “no.” Even worse, the German, French and
Russian foreign ministers having urged Poroshenko to extend
the ceasefire, his decision instead to intensify Kiev’s
military campaign was clearly taken with the encouragement
or support of the Obama administration.</big></big></p>
<big><big>
</big></big>
<p><big><big>Indeed, at the UN Security Council on May 2, US
Ambassador Samantha Power, referring explicitly to the
“counterterrorism initiative” and suspending her revered
“Responsibility to Protect” doctrine, gave Kiev’s leaders a
US license to kill. Lauding their “remarkable, almost
unimaginable, restraint,” as Obama himself did after Odessa,
she continued, “Their response is reasonable, it is
proportional, and frankly it is what any one of our
countries would have done.” (Since then, the administration
has blocked Moscow’s appeal for a UN humanitarian corridor
between southeastern Ukraine and Russia.)</big></big></p>
<big><big>
</big></big>
<p><big><big>Contrary to the incessant administration and media
demonizing of Putin and his “agents” in Ukraine, the
“anti-terrorist operation” can be ended only where it
began—in Washington and Kiev. Leaving aside how much power
the new president actually has in Kiev (or over Right Sector
militias in the field), Poroshenko’s “peace plan” and June
21 cease-fire may have seemed such an opportunity, except
for their two core conditions: fighters in the southeast
first had to “lay down their arms,” and he alone would
decide with whom to negotiate peace. The terms seemed more
akin to conditions of surrender, and were probably the real
reason Poroshenko unilaterally ended the cease-fire on July
1 and intensified Kiev’s assault on eastern cities,
initially on the smaller towns of Slovyansk and Kramatorsk,
which their defenders abandoned—to prevent more civilian
casualities, they said—on July 5–6.</big></big></p>
<big><big>
</big></big>
<p><big><big>The Obama administration continues to make the
situation worse. Despite opposition by several NATO allies
and even American corporate heads, the president and his
secretary of state, who has spoken throughout this crisis
more like a secretary of war than the nation’s top diplomat,
have constantly threatened Russia with harsher economic
sanctions unless Putin meets one condition or another, most
of them improbable. On June 26, Kerry even demanded
(“literally”) that the Russian president “in the next few
hours…help disarm” resisters in the Southeast, as though
they are not motivated by any of Ukraine’s indigenous
conflicts but are merely Putin’s private militias. On July
16, Obama imposed more U.S. sanctions, which will be
politically difficult to remove and thus will serve only to
deepen and prolong the New Cold War. And the tragic
shoot-down of a Malaysian airliner over Ukraine, on July 17,
makes everything even more perilous.</big></big></p>
<big><big>
</big></big>
<p><big><big> </big></big></p>
<big><big>
</big></big>
<p><big><big>In fact, from the onset of the crisis, the
administration’s actual goal has been unclear, and not only
to Moscow. Is it a negotiated compromise, which would have
to include a Ukraine with a significantly federalized or
decentralized state free to maintain longstanding economic
relations with Russia and banned from NATO membership? Is it
to bring the entire country exclusively into the West,
including into NATO? Is it a long-simmering vendetta against
Putin for all the things he purportedly has and has not done
over the years? (Some behavior of Obama and Kerry, seemingly
intended to demean and humiliate Putin, suggest an element
of this.) Or is it to provoke Russia into a war with the
United States and NATO in Ukraine?</big></big></p>
<big><big>
</big></big>
<p><big><big>Inadvertent or not, the latter outcome remains all
too possible. After Russia annexed—or “reunified”
with—Crimea in March, Putin, not Kiev or Washington, has
demonstrated “remarkable restraint.” But events are making
it increasingly difficult for him to do so. Almost daily,
Russian state media, particularly television, have featured
vivid accounts of Kiev’s military assaults on Ukraine’s
eastern cities. The result has been, both in elite and
public opinion, widespread indignation and mounting
perplexity, even anger, over Putin’s failure to intervene
militarily.</big></big></p>
<big><big>
</big></big>
<p><big><big>We may discount the following indictment by an
influential ideologist of Russia’s own ultra-nationalists,
who have close ties with Ukraine’s “self-defense”
commanders: “Putin betrays not just the People’s Republic of
Donetsk and the People’s Republic of Lugansk but himself,
Russia and all of us.” Do not, however, underestimate the
significance of an article in the mainstream pro-Kremlin
newspaper <em>Izvestia</em>, which asked, while charging the
leadership with “ignoring the cries for help,” “Is Russia
abandoning the Donbass?” If so, the author warned, the
result will be “Russia’s worst nightmare” and relegate it to
“the position of a vanquished country.”</big></big></p>
<big><big>
</big></big>
<p><big><big>Just as significant were similar exhortations by
Gennady Zyuganov, leader of Russia’s Communist Party, the
second-largest in the country and in parliament. The party
also has substantial influence in the military-security
elite and even in the Kremlin. Thus, one of Putin’s own
aides publicly urged him to send fighter planes to impose a
“no-fly zone”—an American-led UN action in Qaddafi’s Libya
that has not been forgotten or forgiven by the Kremlin—and
destroy Kiev’s approaching aircraft and land forces. If that
happens, US and NATO forces, now being built up in Eastern
Europe, might well also intervene, creating a Cuban missile
crisis–like confrontation. As a former Russian foreign
minister admired in the West reminds us, there are “hawks on
both sides.”</big></big></p>
<big><big>
</big></big>
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<big><big>
</big></big>
<p><big><big>More recently, Kiev’s stepped-up assaults on eastern
Ukrainian citizens, the fall of Slovyansk and other small
shattered cities, and the repeated shelling of Russia’s own
bordering territory, which killed a resident on July 13,
have fueled more outrage in Putin’s own establishment over
his military inaction. The dean of Moscow State University’s
School of Television, a semi-official position, even
suggested that the Kremlin was part of “a strange conspiracy
of silence” with Western governments to conceal the number
of Kiev’s innocent victims. He warned that “those who permit
murderers to win…automatically have the blood of peaceful
citizens on their hands.” And the state’s leading television
news network demanded that the Kremlin take immediate
military action, repeating the call for a “no-fly zone.”</big></big></p>
<big><big>
</big></big>
<p><big><big>Little of this is even noted in the United States. In
a democratic political system, the establishment media are
expected to pierce the official fog of war. In the Ukrainian
crisis, however, mainstream American newspapers and
television have been almost as slanted and elliptical as
White House and State Department statements, obscuring the
atrocities, if reporting them at all, and generally relying
on information from Washington and Kiev. Why, for example,
have <em>The New York Times</em>, <em>The Washington Post</em> and
major television networks not reported regularly from
eastern Ukraine’s war-ravaged cities, instead of from Moscow
and Kiev? Most Americans are thereby being shamed,
unknowingly, by the Obama administration’s role. Those who
do know but remain silent—in the government, media, think
tanks, and universities—share its complicity.</big></big></p>
<big><big>
</big></big></div>
<big><big> </big></big>
<div class="views-field-value byline"><big><big> <a
href="http://www.thenation.com/authors/stephen-f-cohen"><span
property="dc:creator">Stephen F. Cohen</span></a></big></big>
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