[ Editor’s note: Brother Engdahl gives us a wonderful recap on the West’s disastrous attack on Russia via its Ukraine coup. It is now just another regime change that has spun out of control, and Washington seems to be trying to catch its breath while dealing with its ISIL proxy terrorist rebellion in Syria and Iraq.
It seems that ISIL has wandered off the plantation, no longer satisfied with being on the end of the puppet chain. With their outsourced CIA support that includes marketing their stolen oil, they can continue the fun part of Jihad, robbing, raping and pillaging… and have a phony religious cause to hide their depredations behind.
We have yet to see an ISIL support base in Turkey bombed, or anyone in big oil arrested for funding terrorism by laundering their stolen oil. That of course, means the politicians are getting a good cut of the take.
We have the folly of Muslim imams who had supported the Sunni-Shia religious war backing off their orders from heaven, but I have yet to see them reverse their “temporary marriage” fatwa, the pre-forgiveness for the raping of pious Muslim women and girls. For this they all deserve to lose their heads, and other parts. I long to watch the videos.
The atrocities of the Right Sector-Oligarch brigades are coming public… on their slam-dunk terrorist campaign for which the Oligarchs should face total asset seizure and international warrants for aiding and abetting terrorism.
But having been made official units of the Ukrainian National Guard, though a separate one, that will be a thin veil if the will to prosecute them is there. They are guilty as hell under the Nuremberg precedent of “waging an offensive war.” The world public will be on trial for this crime, also. Nothing will be done unless they demand it.
We will keep you posted as more independent reporters get into the region and the horror stories surface, just in time for the Kiev parliamentary elections. But we need to make America’s involvement in state-sponsored terrorism a campaign issue ourselves, as both the Democrats and Republicans have done the Zombie walk on this Ukraine craziness, the way they act when AIPAC is telling them what to do. We have all been there before… Jim W. Dean ].
First published September 23, 2014
True Heroes Behind the Kiev Ceasefire
by William Engdahl, with New Eastern Outlook, Moscow
Republics
The Kiev government of President Petro Poroshenko has suddenly agreed to, of all things, a ceasefire proposal based almost identically on a proposal unveiled by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The ceasefire, which seems to be more or less holding after several days, has caught Washington completely by surprise and forced the Obama Administration hawks to pressure the EU at their recent summit to agree on new sanctions on Russia anyway.
It all underscores the hypocritical nature of the war in Ukraine as a move by Washington Warhawks to split Russia from the EU, especially from Germany and make a new Cold War with Russia, again the “Empire of Evil.” It’s not working out as planned, however.
Some weeks earlier Poroshenko and the regime in Kiev announced with great bravado the launching of its “Anti-Terrorist Action” to ostensibly put down armed rebellions in various parts of eastern Ukraine demanding autonomy and rights including rights to continue speaking and writing Russian.
Now, some four months into what has become a civil war, as one well-informed blogger put it:
The (Ukrainian Army) is not retreating in one, two, or even three directions — The Ukrainian Army is retreating everywhere (except north of Lugansk). Entire battalions are leaving the front under orders of their battalion commanders and without the approval of the Junta leaders. At least one such battalion commander is already being judged for desertion.
The entire Ukrainian leadership seems to be in a panic mode, especially Yatsenyuk, and Kolomoisky, while the Nazis are mad as hell at the Poroshenko administration. There are constant rumors of an anti-Poroshenko coup by outraged Nazi nationalists.
Nonetheless, as of September 4, according to Ukrainian reports, the following units of the Ukrainian Armed Forces had been destroyed:
* 1st Armoured Brigade–50 T-64 Bulat tanks and other armored vehicles. The only Ukrainian unit to host the modernized T-64BM “Bulat” variant. (76 units as of October 2011). Served in the northern Lugansk front.
* 24th Mechanized Brigade–Yavoriv, Lviv oblast. One battalion was destroyed in Southern Cauldron. The other two battalions were destroyed 12-14 August in battles in Saur Mogila. Remnants of the brigade have been declared “deserters,” and are waiting for judgment in Melitopol.
* 30th Mechanized Brigade– Novohrad-Volynskyi, Zhytomyr oblast. 1st and 3rd battalions were been beaten in the Krasny Luts region in the first half of August. 2nd battalion was destroyed in Stepanovka August 12th-14th. Out of 4000 soldiers, only 83 survive. Other units withdrew from the territory on August 27.
* 51st Mechanized Brigade– Vladimir-Volyn in Volyn region. Partially destroyed in Southern Cauldron at the beginning of August. The third battalion was destroyed in Ilovaisk in late August. Remnants, 500 men teamed up with the 92nd Brigade, but were destroyed in the Amvrosievka pocket by August 30th.
* 72nd Mechanized Brigade–Bila Tserkva, Kyiv region. Destroyed completely in Southern Cauldron at the beginning of August. Approximately 400 men remaining have been declared “deserters” and placed in different locations.
* 79th Airmobile Brigade–Nikolayev and Bolgrad, Odessa region. Destroyed in Southern Cauldron, beginning of August. The remaining 400 men have been returned to their base.
* 92nd Mechanized Brigade–Klugie-Maskirovka, Kharkov region at the Lugansk front. One battalion in the area of Kharkov. A supply convoy was ambushed by partisans on August 29, destroying several vehicles and killing two soldiers. A tactical group of 2,500 men, 16 tanks, self-propelled artillery, armored personnel carriers and trucks – about a hundred pieces of equipment in total was sent to the Ilovaisk front on August 23rd. All were destroyed in the Amvrosievka pocket by August 30th.
Then the following units suffered large losses in recent battles:
* 25th Airborne Brigade– in Dnepropetrovsk region. In April six BMD tanks with crew deserted to Sloviansk. The whole unit was “disbanded” on orders of acting president Oleksandr Turchynov. IL-76 was shot down above Lugansk airport, resulting in 49 KIA. One battalion was destroyed in the Shakhtersk battles in the beginning of August. Another battalion was destroyed a few days ago in the Marinovka-Koževni area.
* 95th Airmobile Brigade—Zhytomyr. Participated in the battles from the beginning, currently the most experienced and efficient Ukrainian ground forces unit. Trapped in Amvrosievka’s pocket on August 24th.
* 17th Tank Brigade–Kryvyi Rih. A large number of tanks destroyed or captured. Some units were eliminated in Ilovaisk.
* 128th Mechanized Brigade–Mukachevo, Zakarpattia region (mountain infantry). Served at the Lugansk front. Lost all its equipment in the Southern Cauldron. One battalion was transferred back to Transcarpathia to quell the uprising there. More dead than alive.
This list begins to make clear why Ukraine’s oligarch President Poroshenko agreed to a ceasefire. Whatever the ousted President Yanukovych may have done with his police at the start of Maidan Square and other anti-regime protests in November 2013, he never ordered such a massive military force to put down occupation by citizens of government buildings.
The government buildings were occupied, it is important to recall, after the newly-installed Kiev coup regime, with openly avowed neo-nazis in key posts as Interior and Defense ministers and a US-chosen Prime Minister, Yatsenyuk, as head of government, debated banning the Russian language and other measures restricting those ethnic Russians in the east.
Once the citizens of Crimea voted in a March 16 referendum, with more than 93% approval, to apply to become part of the Russian Federation and the Russian Parliament accepted, ethnic Russians and others fearful of the new regime in Kiev began a protest to demand a federal system within Ukraine that would guarantee freedom of language and other rights. The response of the gangster US-backed Kiev regime of Yatsensyuk was brute military force.
Kiev’s War of Ethnic Cleansing
Maidan sniper-backer, Ihor Kolomoisky of Ukraine and Switzerland
The Kiev coup regime proceeded after February 22, 2014, to wage a war of extermination and ethnic cleansing in eastern Ukraine — led to a large degree by a private army of neo-nazis from Pravy Sektor — the ones who ran security in Maidan Square and launched a reign of terror against Russian-speaking Ukrainians.
Battalions were formed of such neo-nazi and other mercenaries. They were given state status as “Ukrainian National Guard” soldiers, financed by Ukrainian mafia boss and billionaire oligarch, Ihor Kolomoisky, in part by billionaire oligarch Rinat Akhmetov, or by Oleh Lyashko, a convicted embezzler and Kiev politician.
Those private mercenaries have waged a savage war inside Ukraine since March 2014, killing Ukrainians indiscriminately, shelling villages to drive the population out, and ultimately, trying to provoke Washington’s ultimate agenda—a Russian military invasion that could be used as a pretext for a NATO mobilization that would transform the political map of Europe, Russia, China, and the world.
Since the beginning of what Kyiv provocatively calls its “Anti-Terror Operation” (ATO), against the rebels in eastern Ukraine in April 2014, 2,593 people have died in fighting in the east of the country, while over 6,033 have been wounded.
According to the UN, the number of internally displaced Ukrainians has reached 260,000, with another 814,000 finding refuge in Russia. The war has raged in and around rebel strongholds in Luhansk, Slovayansk, Donetsk, and Mariupol on the Sea of Azor.
NATO is the real issue
Brzezinski’s “Strategic Vision”
The deeper issue in this war has been systematically blocked out of all mainstream media in Germany, across the EU and in the United States.
The real issue is the threat of the eastward expansion of NATO, a US-led military alliance that by all rights should have slowly dissolved twenty-some years ago after the Soviet Union ended the Warsaw Pact.
Instead of reducing the NATO profile, in violation of solemn pledges Washington made to Russia, US neo-conservative warhawks, beginning during the Clinton years, began expanding NATO eastwards to Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and beyond.
In 2004 Washington initiated successful Color Revolution regime changes in Ukraine and neighboring Georgia, installing presidents in each pledged to bring those two Russian border states into NATO.
The increasing NATO expansion threats to Russian sovereignty crossed the point of reason, as seen in Moscow, when in early 2007 the Administration of President George W. Bush announced that the US was, in effect, going for what the Pentagon called Nuclear Primacy, the ability to launch a nuclear First Strike against Russia with impunity.
Bush had ordered a US installation of ballistic missile bases and special phased-array radar stations in Poland and the Czech Republic that would allow the US to destroy any projected Russian nuclear response to a US nuclear first strike against Russian missile silos and defense bases. Bush officials openly lied that it was aimed at a non-existent “rogue” missile attack from Iran. It was aimed squarely at Russia.
Back in February 2007, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin addressed the annual Munich, Germany International Conference on Security, formerly the Wehrkunde Conference. Delivering a keynote speech that was extraordinary by any standards, Putin declared:
NATO has put its frontline forces on our borders… It is obvious that NATO expansion does not have any relation with the modernization of the Alliance itself or with ensuring security in Europe. On the contrary, it represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact?
Putting Weapons Systems in the Underbelly of Russia — The Caucasus
- George Bush-43 celebrating in The Caucasus
Speaking at NATO headquarters in March 2007, US Ballistic Missile Defense head, General Henry Obering said that Washington also wanted to base an anti-missile radar systems in the Caucasus, most likely in the former Soviet Republics of Georgia and Ukraine.
Notably, one of the few Western leaders at the time to voice alarm over the US announcement of its plans to build missile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic was former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.
Schroeder had earned the status of de facto ‘enemy’ of the Bush Administration after his vocal opposition to the Iraq war in 2003.
Speaking in Dresden on March 11, 2007, several days after President Putin’s Munich remarks, Schroeder declared that the efforts of the United States to establish its anti-missile systems in Eastern Europe were part of an attempt to pursue “an insane encirclement policy against Russia.” Schroeder warned that it risked a new global arms race.
Schroeder’s concerns were all too accurate, as subsequent events have now proven. Failing their first Color Revolution attempt to bring Ukraine and Georgia into NATO, Washington covertly prepared the Maidan Square “revolution” of February 2014, installing a regime of overt psychopaths.
Their ruthless war against their own people along the Russian border in eastern Ukraine as well as threats to cut Russian gas pipeline deliveries to western Europe were carefully designed to try to provoke Russia into a blunder that could give the pretext for NATO to act.
We should all thank God it has not happened, and that Russia has acted with remarkable restraint in the situation. Instead, a rag-tag citizens’ militia across eastern Ukraine — fighting for their homes, their lands, for their families and friends, whether or not in part helped by Russians — have fought an incredible battle.
It has been a battle to stop the insanity put in power in Kiev that US State Department neo-conservative Assistant Secretary Victoria “Fuck the EU” Nuland and CIA Director John Brennan and others in the Obama Administration have brought.
The Washington war faction’s aim was and still is to advance a neo-conservative new war agenda, splitting Russia and Eurasia from the EU, especially from Germany, encircling and ultimately destroying the emerging threat of the Russia-China alliance that is called the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and the related BRICS organization.
Finally — after the declaration of a ceasefire by Ukrainian President Poroshenko — it is time to recognize the debt of gratitude all lovers of world peace and civilized people everywhere owe to the citizens of eastern Ukraine whose refusal to allow the destruction of their lives by a criminal band of US-financed barbarians in Kiev just might have helped avoid a world war.
The most alarming facet of the crisis in Ukraine today is the near utter ignorance in Western Europe, because of a de facto NATO press censorship, of the true stakes of the war in Ukraine. It is nothing less than the question of possible thermonuclear obliteration, not of Washington–whose Warhawks initiated the expansion of NATO and the threat of nuclear First Strike–but of Western Europe.
Such a war would turn Western Europe — from Poland to the Czech Republic and beyond — into the nuclear battlefield of what will ultimately become a new world war. This is something that deserves a sober and open debate in mainstream media.
_______________________________
F. William Engdahl, strategic risk consultant and lecturer, holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
Editing: Jim W. Dean and Erica P. Wissinger
Frederick William Engdahl (born August 9, 1944) is an American writer, economics researcher, historian, and freelance journalist.
He is the author of the best-selling book on oil and geopolitics, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order. It has been published as well in French, German, Chinese, Russian, Czech, Korean, Turkish, Croatian, Slovenian, and Arabic. In 2010 he published Gods of Money: Wall Street and the Death of the American Century, completing his trilogy on the power of oil, food, and money control.
Mr. Engdahl is one of the more widely discussed analysts of current political and economic developments, and his provocative articles and analyses have appeared in numerous newspapers and magazines and well-known international websites. In addition to discussing oil geopolitics and energy issues, he has written on issues of agriculture, GATT, WTO, IMF, energy, politics, and economics for more than 30 years, beginning the first oil shock and world grain crisis in the early 1970s. His book, ‘Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation has been translated into eight languages. A new book, Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order describes the American military power projection in terms of geopolitical strategy. He won a ‘Project Censored Award’ for Top Censored Stories for 2007-08.
Mr. Engdahl has lectured in economics at the Rhein-Main University in Germany and is a Visiting Professor in Economics at Beijing University of Chemical Technology.
After a degree in politics from Princeton University (USA), and graduate study in comparative economics at the University of Stockholm, he worked as an independent economist and research journalist in New York and later in Europe, covering subjects including the politics of energy policy in the USA and worldwide; GATT Uruguay Round trade talks, EU food policies, the grain trade monopoly, IMF policy, Third World debt issues, hedge funds, and the Asia crisis.
Engdahl contributes regularly to a number of international publications on economics and political affairs including Asia Times, FinancialSense.com, 321.gold.com, The Real News, Russia Today TV, Asia Inc., GlobalResearch.com, Japan’s Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Foresight magazine. He has been a frequent contributor to the New York Grant’sInvestor.com, European Banker and Business Banker International and Freitag and ZeitFragen in Germany, Globus in Croatia. He has been interviewed on various geopolitical topics on numerous international TV and radio programs including Al Jazeera, CCTV and Sina.com (China), CCTV (China) Korea Broadcasting System (KBS), and RT Russian TV. He is a Research Associate of Michel Chossudovsky’s well-respected Centre for Research on Globalization in Montreal, Canada, and a member of the editorial board of Eurasia magazine.
Mr. Engdahl has been a featured speaker at numerous international conferences on geopolitical, GMO, economic, and energy subjects. Among them is the Ministry of Science and Technology Conference on Alternative Energy, Beijing; London Centre for Energy Policy Studies of Hon. Sheikh Zaki Yamani; Turkish-Eurasian Business Council of Istanbul, Global Investors’ Forum (GIF) Montreaux Switzerland; Bank Negara Indonesia; the Russian Institute of Strategic Studies; the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST), Croatian Chamber of Commerce and Economics.
He currently lives in Germany and, in addition to teaching and writing regularly on issues of international political economy and geopolitics, food security, economics, energy, and international affairs, is active as a consulting political risk economist for major European banks and private investors. A sample of his writings is available at Oil Geopolitics.net
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