[Peace-discuss] [Peace] Ukrainegate

[Ricky Baldwin]

Thanks, really.  That was quick.  I don't mean to tie up everybody answering my quibbles, especially because, again, I wouldn't put it past them.  But I was aware that the Administration jumped in there at the end - some might say eagerly - to "broker" or "midwife" the "transition" ...  I had read the Global Research piece, and Boyle's suggestion that US backing "may" already be underway in the midst of the fray.  I hadn't seen Robert Parry's article, or read Wikipedia's account (I had avoided that one, but I appreciate your suggestion to read it, since it was more informative than I had anticipated).
These still don't really argue that the US was behind it from the start, do they?  I mean, aside from the hints and signals US officials often send (and sometimes later turn away from, to be honest, leaving people who seem to be following such 'orders' high and dry), how do we know they were actually funding/training the goons?  
To be clear, I'm satisfied that the Obama team was happy about the coup, that it was a coup, and that it was led or co-led by fascists, at least in the traditional fascist coalitionist style - and as Wikipedia et al have made clear that USG officials were there to "help" seal the deal. Yes.  Maybe I should have said all that from the start.
What I thought you might have already dug up in your research was evidence of the "funding and training" of the coup by the US under Obama.  If you do have something like that, there's obviously no urgency now, but it would seem a good time to look back at it in light of recent attention in the area and Biden's unfortunate candidacy.  
Thanks for your time, either way.  I know I'm mostly an absent presence these days, but I do appreciate the work you guys are carrying on, and I read up when I can.  (And I appreciate being called "well informed," although I feel less so these days.)




Sent from Yahoo Mail on Android 
 
  On Mon, Nov 25, 2019 at 7:50 AM, David Johnson<davidjohnson1451 at comcast.net> wrote:   Consortiumnews
Volume 25, Number 328–Monday, November 25, 2019

Human Rights, Lost History, Media, Obama Administration, Right Wing
Ukraine’s ‘Dr. Strangelove’ Reality
May 5, 2014 

Exclusive: The horrendous fire in Odessa, killing dozens of ethnic Russians protesting against the U.S.-backed coup regime in Kiev, has lurched the country closer to full-scale civil war and disrupted the American media’s efforts to deny the existence of pro-regime neo-Nazis, Robert Parry reports.

By Robert Parry

As much as the coup regime in Ukraine and its supporters want to project an image of Western moderation, there is a “Dr. Strangelove” element that can’t stop the Nazism from popping up from time to time, like when the Peter Sellers character in the classic movie can’t keep his right arm from making a “Heil Hitler” salute.

This brutal Nazism surfaced again on Friday when right-wing toughs in Odessa attacked an encampment of ethnic Russian protesters driving them into a trade union building which was then set on fire with Molotov cocktails. As the building was engulfed in flames, some people who tried to flee were chased and beaten, while those trapped inside heard the Ukrainian nationalists liken them to black-and-red-striped potato beetles called Colorados, because those colors are used in pro-Russian ribbons.
Peter Sellers playing Dr. Strangelove as he struggles to control his right arm from making a Nazi salute.

Peter Sellers playing Dr. Strangelove as he struggles to control his right arm from making a Nazi salute.

“Burn, Colorado, burn” went the chant.

As the fire worsened, those dying inside were serenaded with the taunting singing of the Ukrainian national anthem. The building also was spray-painted with Swastika-like symbols and graffiti reading “Galician SS,” a reference to the Ukrainian nationalist army that fought alongside the German Nazi SS in World War II, killing Russians on the eastern front.

The death by fire of dozens of people in Odessa recalled a World War II incident in 1944 when elements of a Galician SS police regiment took part in the massacre of the Polish village of Huta Pieniacka, which had been a refuge for Jews and was protected by Russian and Polish partisans. Attacked by a mixed force of Ukrainian police and German soldiers on Feb. 28, hundreds of townspeople were massacred, including many locked in barns that were set ablaze.

The legacy of World War II especially the bitter fight between Ukrainian nationalists from the west and ethnic Russians from the east seven decades ago is never far from the surface in Ukrainian politics. One of the heroes celebrated during the Maidan protests in Kiev was Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, whose name was honored in many banners including one on a podium where Sen. John McCain voiced support for the uprising to oust elected President Viktor Yanukovych, whose political base was in eastern Ukraine.

During World War II, Bandera headed the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists-B, a radical paramilitary movement that sought to transform Ukraine into a racially pure state. OUN-B took part in the expulsion and extermination of thousands of Jews and Poles.

Though most of the Maidan protesters in 2013-14 appeared motivated by anger over political corruption and by a desire to join the European Union, neo-Nazis made up a significant number. These storm troopers from the Right Sektor and Svoboda party decked out some of the occupied government buildings with Nazi insignias and even a Confederate battle flag, the universal symbol of white supremacy.

Then, as the protests turned violent from Feb. 20-22, the neo-Nazis surged to the forefront. Their well-trained militias, organized in 100-man brigades called “the hundreds,” led the final assaults against police and forced Yanukovych and many of his officials to flee for their lives.

In the days after the coup, as the neo-Nazi militias effectively controlled the government, European and U.S. diplomats scrambled to help the shaken parliament put together the semblance of a respectable regime, although four ministries, including national security, were awarded to the right-wing extremists in recognition of their crucial role in ousting Yanukovych.

Seeing No Nazis

Since February, virtually the entire U.S. news media has cooperated in the effort to play down the neo-Nazi role, dismissing any mention of this inconvenient truth as “Russian propaganda.” Stories in the U.S. media delicately step around the neo-Nazi reality by keeping out relevant context, such as the background of national security chief Andriy Parubiy, who founded the Social-National Party of Ukraine in 1991, blending radical Ukrainian nationalism with neo-Nazi symbols. Parubiy was commandant of the Maidan’s “self-defense forces.”

When the neo-Nazi factor is mentioned in the mainstream U.S. press, it is usually to dismiss it as nonsense, such as an April 20 column by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof who visited his ancestral home, the western Ukrainian town of Karapchiv, and portrayed its residents as the true voice of the Ukrainian people.

“To understand why Ukrainians are risking war with Russia to try to pluck themselves from Moscow’s grip, I came to this village where my father grew up,” he wrote. “Even here in the village, Ukrainians watch Russian television and loathe the propaganda portraying them as neo-Nazi thugs rampaging against Russian speakers.

“‘If you listen to them, we all carry assault rifles; we’re all beating people,’ Ilya Moskal, a history teacher, said contemptuously.”

In an April 17 column from Kiev, Kristof wrote that what the Ukrainians want is weapons from the West so they can to go “bear-hunting,” i.e. killing Russians. “People seem to feel a bit disappointed that the United States and Europe haven’t been more supportive, and they are humiliated that their own acting government hasn’t done more to confront Russian-backed militants. So, especially after a few drinks, people are ready to take down the Russian Army themselves.”

Kristof also repeated the U.S. “conventional wisdom” that the resistance to the coup regime among eastern Ukrainians was entirely the work of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who, Kristof wrote, “warns that Ukraine is on the brink of civil war. But the chaos in eastern cities is his own creation, in part by sending provocateurs across the border.”

However, when the New York Times finally sent two reporters to spend time with rebels from the east, they encountered an indigenous movement motivated by hostility to the Kiev regime and showing no signs of direction from Moscow. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Another NYT ‘Sort of’ Retraction on Ukraine.”]

Beyond the journalistic risk of jumping to conclusions, Kristof, who fancies himself a great humanitarian, also should recognize that the clever depiction of human beings as animals, whether as “bears” or “Colorado beetles,” can have horrendous human consequences as is now apparent in Odessa.

Reagan’s Nazis

But the problem with some western Ukrainians expressing their inconvenient love for Nazis has not been limited to the current crisis. It bedeviled Ronald Reagan’s administration when it began heating up the Cold War in the 1980s.

As part of that strategy, Reagan’s United States Information Agency, under his close friend Charles Wick, hired a cast of right-wing Ukrainian exiles who began showing up on U.S.-funded Radio Liberty praising the Galician SS.

These commentaries included positive depictions of Ukrainian nationalists who had sided with the Nazis in World War II as the SS waged its “final solution” against European Jews. The propaganda broadcasts provoked outrage from Jewish organizations, such as B’nai B’rith, and individuals including conservative academic Richard Pipes.

According to an internal memo dated May 4, 1984, and written by James Critchlow, a research officer at the Board of International Broadcasting, which managed Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe, one RL broadcast in particular was viewed as “defending Ukrainians who fought in the ranks of the SS.”

Critchlow wrote, “An RL Ukrainian broadcast of Feb. 12, 1984 contains references to the Nazi-oriented Ukrainian-manned SS ‘Galicia’ Division of World War II which may have damaged RL’s reputation with Soviet listeners. The memoirs of a German diplomat are quoted in a way that seems to constitute endorsement by RL of praise for Ukrainian volunteers in the SS division, which during its existence fought side by side with the Germans against the Red Army.”

Harvard Professor Pipes, who was an adviser to the Reagan administration, also inveighed against the Radio Liberty broadcasts, writing on Dec. 3, 1984 “the Russian and Ukrainian services of RL have been transmitting this year blatantly anti-Semitic material to the Soviet Union which may cause the whole enterprise irreparable harm.”

Though the Reagan administration publicly defended Radio Liberty against some of the public criticism, privately some senior officials agreed with the critics, according to documents in the archives of the Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California. For instance, in a Jan. 4, 1985, memo, Walter Raymond Jr., a top official on the National Security Council, told his boss, National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane, that “I would believe much of what Dick [Pipes] says is right.”

What the Reagan administration apparently didn’t understand three decades ago and what the U.S. State Department still has not seemed to learn today is that there is a danger in stirring up the old animosities that divide Ukraine, east and west.

Though clearly a minority, Ukraine’s neo-Nazis remain a potent force that is well-organized, well-motivated and prone to extreme violence, whether throwing firebombs at police in the Maidan or at ethnic Russians trapped in a building in Odessa.

As vengeance now seeks vengeance across Ukraine, this Nazi imperative will be difficult to hold down, much as Dr. Strangelove struggled to stop his arm from making a “Heil Hitler” salute.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com). For a limited time, you also can order Robert Parry’s trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The trilogy includes America’s Stolen Narrative. For details on this offer, click here.

-----Original Message-----
From: Peace [mailto:peace-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of C. G. Estabrook via Peace
Sent: Sunday, November 24, 2019 6:30 PM
To: baldwinricky at yahoo.com
Cc: peace-discuss at anti-war.net; C. G. Estabrook via Peace-discuss; Peace
Subject: Re: [Peace] [Peace-discuss] Ukrainegate

That the 2014 coup against an elected president in Ukraine was engineered by the sitting US administration (notably in the person of Victoria Nuland) is hardly in doubt. (Even Wikipedia admits it: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Ukrainian_revolution>.) 

The result was the first government in Europe containing explict nazis since 1945 - another accomplishment of the president who said, “Turns out I'm really good at killing people. Didn't know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine” (WaPo). The government that Obama's administration installed killed thousands in the Ukrainian region of Donbass (Donetsk and Luhansk) who wouldn’t accept the coup government.

But as my quondam colleague Ron Szoke said about the contemporary MSM accounts of those casualties of Obama’s policy, “Donetsk? Don’t tell!” 

It’s not surprising that people as well informed as you don’t know about Obama’s accomplishments. That’s what Giambrone is talking about - more corpses piled around the White House.

See our friend Francis Boyle’s account: <https://www.globalresearch.ca/washington-was-behind-ukraine-coup-obama-admits-that-us-brokered-a-deal-in-support-of-regime-change/5429142>.

—CGE


> On Nov 24, 2019, at 1:49 PM, Ricky Baldwin <baldwinricky at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
> I've read suggestions that the Obama Administration did this, which I don't necessarily doubt any more than anything else that I don't know for sure.  I certainly wouldn't put it past them.  But most sources I'm able to scrounge seem to be adamant that this version - that the Obama Admin trained and funded it all - is either obviously true or clearly false.  
> 
> If I've missed something on this list that's more probative, I apologize, but to be blunt what evidence is there?  (I'm aware of the circumstantial stuff, the hints, the signals, Biden's pressure in the former president of Ukraine to step down, but nothing definitive about this stringer claim about funding/training.) I tend to accept it to some degree, but I'd sure like more.
> 
> Thanks,
> Ricky
> 
> Sent from Yahoo Mail on Android
> 
> On Sat, Nov 23, 2019 at 4:03 PM, C. G. Estabrook via Peace-discuss
> <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote:
> Ukrainegate 13,000 Times Worse Than You Think
> by Joe Giambrone / November 22nd, 2019
> 
> Did you know that Donald Trump had the State Department, USAID, NED, and the CIA fund and train Neo-Nazi, fascist militias to overthrow the government of Ukraine? These riot mobs, primarily Svoboda and Right Sector, stormed the capital, firebombed and shot the police, and destroyed democracy inside Ukraine. When the legitimately elected president was forced out by the rioters, the population which had supported him in the east seceded from the country, tearing the entire nation into pieces and sparking a civil war. The Ukraine civil war has cost the lives of over 13,000 Ukrainians. There is so much blood on Donald Trump’s hands.
> 
> Oh, wait a minute! That was Barack Obama. Change that paragraph, please.
> 
> Since 2014, it’s been glaringly obvious to astute (and honest) observers that the Administration of Barack Obama and Joe Biden supported the most vicious street mobs in Europe, people who considered themselves proud fascists. Western media routinely censored this part of the story. Obama’s Assistant Secretary of State, Victoria Nuland, made deals with their leaders and was caught on an open phone line handpicking the next unelected leader of Ukraine, someone they could sell to the US public: “Yats is the guy.”
> 
> Representative Dennis Kucinich expressed outrage on Bill O’Reilly’s TV show that the Obama Administration had aided this bloody, illegitimate coup. The head of the CIA-linked STRATFOR called Ukraine “the most blatant coup in history.”
> 
> America’s proxy terrorists burned Kiev, seized power violently, and through the power of the purse strings, Obama’s Administration installed friendly-faced fascists, who immediately set about attacking their countrymen in the east, with a policy of mass murder and indiscriminate bombings. Eastern provinces of Crimea and Donetsk, which notably had supported the ousted president, held referenda. The people there voted overwhelmingly to secede from the illegitimate, unelected, foreign-sponsored coup regime in Kiev.
> 
> The above is most certainly not the reason cited this week for Impeachment hearings.
> 
> Aiding and abetting fascist militias to violently siege a foreign capital is not considered a crime in Washington DC, at all. Conversely, it is business as usual, as Bolivians and Venezuelans can attest to.
> 
> Woody Allen directed a film entitled “Crimes and Misdemeanors.” That pretty much sums up the DC circus unfolding in Congress. Everything above is completely true, and yet Barack Obama is heralded as someone in the neighborhood of saints and superheroes. To the belligerent American empire, Obama was a star quarterback. Let’s not even delve into Barack’s support for Al Qaeda in Syria, and another half-million dead there, or we’ll be here all day.
> 
> Donald Trump made a phone call. In his phone call, he is said to have bullied the President of Ukraine a little. He may have even delayed some weapons transfers to that country, which was engaged in a proxy war with nuclear-armed Russia and its separatist allies in the east of Ukraine.
> 
> That’s a crime? A real crime? In light of over thirteen thousand slaughtered and an illegal coup in broad daylight? Trump’s telephone call is the real crime?
> 
> Other Presidents haven’t bullied other client-state puppet leaders, ever?
> 
> And why exactly is the President of the United States of America required to send lethal weapons to foreign fascists at all? Has anyone located that section of the Constitution?
> 
> This farce is so laughable on its face and so irrelevant to the American people’s interests, that it’s difficult to overstate the insanity—and outrageous hypocrisy—of the Democrats’ contrived “Ukrainegate” case. This impeachment charge has nothing whatsoever to do with right and wrong.
> 
> In 2014, Barack Obama’s White House, “refused to include weapons in an aid package… for embattled Ukraine despite an impassioned plea by Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko for more military assistance.” Obama didn’t send any weapons at all, which would have provoked Russia to an even greater degree, after overthrowing their legitimately elected next-door ally and tearing Ukraine apart. It was obvious that Russia wasn’t “invading” Ukraine, as propaganda memes claimed, but simply responding to these international crimes and to the dangerous destabilization on its border. The US had already done quite enough damage, and they didn’t need to escalate a proxy war against Russia toward nuclear Armageddon.
> 
> Which brings us now to Donald Trump, who became interested in Joe Biden’s obvious corruption inside Ukraine, installing his own son on the board of a Ukrainian gas company, Burisma. Hunter Biden knew absolutely nothing about Ukraine or the natural gas industry. The nepotism was glaring. This was clear graft, payback, kickback, corruption, parasites descending after the violent seizure of the state. Biden the elder was in charge of US Ukraine policy, and specifically the big money spigot, after the illegal, US-supported coup there.
> 
> Then—as Joe will be Joe—Biden bragged publicly about getting Ukraine’s top prosecutor fired to the strains of Washington insider laughter. The Ukrainian prosecutor had been investigating that same company which Biden had arranged his son Hunter onto the board of. Biden’s conflict of interest was so obvious that Trump certainly believed he was onto something. Joe Biden, and media sympathetic to his claims, has predictably tried to cloud the issue, but the corruption is too obvious not to notice. This should, and may, have ended Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential bid.
> 
> What happened in Ukraine was old-timey Smash & Grab, a reckless attack right on Russia’s western border. Joe Biden arrived to grab as much loot from Ukraine’s gas sector as he possibly could through a cut-out, his son. Biden used his leverage over Ukraine’s international “loan guarantees” (which is money the coup leaders receive but don’t have to pay back) to finance their new illegitimate junta.
> 
> Biden’s own quid pro quo, in his own words: “I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch. He got fired.” This is exactly the type of crime they now accuse Trump of perpetrating with his telephone. The hypocrisy is comical.
> 
> The Obama Administration’s corruption, along with a bloody war and thirteen-thousand corpses, is what a real crime looks like. Hold onto that picture.
> 
> Democrats were allegedly the good guys vis a vis Ukraine?
> 
> Weren’t these international war crimes breaching the UN Charter, which demands exclusively peaceful actions between states, Article II?
> 
> "All Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered."
> — United Nations Charter, a ratified Treaty, and the “Supreme Law of the Land”
> 
> Launching a proxy war on nuclear-armed Russia was a sane foreign policy? Sending even more arms to escalate that conflict was allegedly such a glorious idea that any delay in weapons shipments becomes an impeachable offense?
> 
> This unserious charge leveled against Donald Trump distracts from all of his obvious corruption. Trump’s Emoluments violations have been impeachable for years, but the Democrats weren’t interested. Do Democrats long to cash in on the Office of the Presidency next time?
> 
> Multiple deaths of refugee children in US federal custody at the southern border could be considered murders linked directly to official policies of harsh treatment and deliberate neglect. Are Democrats afraid of exposing Obama’s own caging of immigrant children?
> 
> This current Ukrainegate impeachment charade appears to be motivated only by blind partisanship and the desire to insulate corrupt insiders like Joe Biden from any scrutiny of their actions. The farce has gone so over-the-top that even as Democratic partisan media heralded the testimony of Trump’s Ukraine Ambassador, Marie Yovanovitch, Donald Trump’s allies have already used portions of her testimony as a video advertisement for his reelection!
> 
> Yovanovitch blatantly lied in her introductory remarks and was caught admitting that Obama’s own State Department had groomed her to answer uncomfortable questions about Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, and his appointment inside Ukraine’s gas sector. This gift to Trump now undermines the entire endeavor.
> 
> Are Democrats trying to hurt or to help Trump’s reelection?
> 
> [Joe Giambrone has written for WhoWhatWhy, Foreign Policy Journal, International Policy Digest, Counterpunch, GlobalResearch, OpEdNews, and his fabulous new novel is DEMIGODS. 
> This article was posted on Friday, November 22nd, 2019 at 11:13pm and is filed under Barack Obama, Democrats, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Russia, Ukraine.]
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