[Peace-discuss] The Silence of American Hawks About Kiev’s Atrocities

[David Johnson via Peace-discuss]

    The Silence of American Hawks About Kiev’s Atrocities

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.

Stephen F. Cohen <http://www.thenation.com/authors/stephen-f-cohen>

Ultra-Nationalist Party Rally 
<http://www.thenation.com/sites/default/files/ukraine_svoboda_img_2.jpg>

/Members of the Ukrainian ultra-nationalist Svoboda Party rally in Kiev 
(Reuters/Maxim Zmeyev)/

/Editor’s note:/ /This article was updated on July 7 and July 17./

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.

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.

* * *

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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 /The New York Times/, 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.”

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.”

* * *

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 
/Wall Street Journal/ readers that these extremists are among Kiev’s 
“good guys.”)

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 LGBT 
<http://www.thenation.com/section/lgbt?lc=int_mb_1001> 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.

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 Pietro 
Shakarian <http://reconsideringrussia.org/>, 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.”

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.

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.

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.

* * *

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.

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.

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.)

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 /New Republic/ editors that the entire 
question was “laughable.”

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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?

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.

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 /Izvestia/, 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.”

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.”

Please support our journalism. Get a digital subscription for just 
$9.50! 
<https://subscribe.thenation.com/servlet/OrdersGateway?cds_mag_code=NAN&cds_page_id=122425&cds_response_key=I12SART1>

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.”

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 /The New 
York Times/, /The Washington Post/ 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.

Stephen F. Cohen <http://www.thenation.com/authors/stephen-f-cohen>

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.chambana.net/pipermail/peace-discuss/attachments/20140811/1910e6c2/attachment-0001.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: ukraine_svoboda_img_2.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 208225 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.chambana.net/pipermail/peace-discuss/attachments/20140811/1910e6c2/attachment-0001.jpg>