I’ve been really busy/frazzled trying to organize my photos (over 4,000) so I can (with the help of one of you) create a website just for the imagery. I’m also in the midst of another MacBook nightmare.
The photos are all from yesterday.
Plus the Ukraine ‘events’ are so complex that the rest of my time has been devoted to understanding the extent of the lies we’re being told about that mess. (With the profound help of William Engdahl, whose newsletter you should have already subscribed to.)
However, I am in the midst of an post on the subject and will try to get it out in the next few days. Meanwhile, you all can prepare yourselves by reading the Engdahl essay I’m pasting in below, and viewing the Oliver Stone produced documentary, ‘Ukraine on Fire.’
Addendum (March 20): This essay from William’s newsletter/website is more up-to-date than his 2014 essay. I suggest you read it first.
This is one of the replies from Bill when I asked for context on the Ukraine issue (the emphases are mine):
I found a foreword to a German book I did in 2015 on Ukrine maybe useful background: Author’s Introduction to Ukraine Book ©F. William Engdahl
Ukraine, like few other Eurasian countries, is a product of its special geography, as it uniquely straddles east and west. It is what Sir Halford Mackinder, the British father of geopolitics—the study of the relations of political power to geography—called a “pivot” state. Ukraine uniquely transforms the geopolitical position of Russia, for better or worse.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Washington did all possible to support a break between Russia and Ukraine, formerly an integral part of the Soviet economy and culture, to split Ukraine from the newly-created Russian Federation. The goal was to use Ukraine as a buffer to block closer integration between Russia and Europe, especially Germany.
In green are NATO nations that Putin must assume are hostile and well armed, including nuclear weapons. Notice how BIG Ukraine is, the length of its Russian border… a missile launched from Ukraine is like 5 minutes from Moscow.
The country Ukraine itself is an historical anomaly. Almost 1000 years ago, Kievan Rus under Vladimir the Great had been the empire of the East Slavic peoples of today’s Ukraine, Russia and Belarus. For more than 350 years, Kievan Rus east of the Dneiper River had been a part of the Russian Czarist empire. After 1795 Ukraine was divided, as a result of wars of partitioning Poland, between the Orthodox Tsardom of Russia and Roman Catholic Habsburg Austria.
As such a pivot state, Ukraine’s history has been tragic. In 1922 it was forced to become one of the founding republics of the Soviet Union after a bloody war with the Red Army. In the 1930’s, Stalin initiated a gruesome chapter in both Russian but especially Ukrainian history, which still burns in the memories of the descendents in the Catholic rural agricultural west of Ukraine. In 1932 and 1933, millions of people, mostly peasants, in Ukraine starved to death in a politically induced famine, the Holodomor, due to Stalin’s “liquidation of the Kulak class,” the more or less independent farmers to introduce forced collectivization of agriculture. Some 6 to 8 million people died from hunger in the Soviet Union during this period, of whom at least 4 to 5 million were Ukrainians. Ironically, Nikita Khrushchev, the man who in the 1950’s initiated de-Stalinization, was the head of the Ukrainian Communist Party in 1935 overseeing Stalin’s Holodomor.
After Stalin’s death, now as head of the Communist Party of Soviet Union, Khrushchev decided to administratively transfer the Crimea to the Ukraine within the USSR in 1954, though the Crimean population was overwhelmingly ethnic Russian.
In the largely agricultural west of Ukraine, the famous “breadbasket of Europe,” the population is historically Roman Catholic, going back centuries. The Eastern parts of Ukraine—Donbass, Donetsk, Crimea—are historically Eastern Orthodox in religion and are Russian-speaking. The east is also the center of most Ukrainian industry from military manufacture to steel, to coal to oil and gas.
Loosely seen, those are the tectonic fault lines on which Washington neo-conservatives in the State Department and CIA have seeded the current bloody Ukrainian civil war.
One of the leading advocates of an American global supremacy, Zbigniew Brzezinski, a Polish-born Cold War Russophobe, and a foreign policy adviser to Barack Obama, described the pivot significance of Ukraine in his 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard. He wrote:
Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire…If Moscow regains control over Ukraine, with its 52 million people and major resources as well as access to the Black Sea, Russia automatically again regains the wherewithal to become a powerful imperial state, spanning Europe and Asia…
Brzezinski, a student of Halford Mackinder geopolitics, described the role of “pivot” states:
Geopolitical pivots are the states whose importance is derived not from their power and motivation but rather from their sensitive location… which in some cases gives them a special role in either defining access to important areas or in denying resources to a significant player…Ukraine, Azerbaijan, South Korea, Turkey and Iran play the role of critically important geopolitical pivots.
Not surprisingly then, Brzezinski, architect of the 1980’s Mujahideen guerilla war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, today advocates NATO arming the Ukrainian state to fight Russia, to, in his words, “stop Putin from restoring the Czarist Empire.”
Brzezinski carefully ignores the steady and escalating US overt and covert actions since the end of the Cold War to bring NATO, contrary to the solemn pledges of Washington’s Secretary of State James baker III to Mikhail Gorbachev, to the door of Moscow. He pretends as though the threat of a US “ballistic missile defense” perimeter in Poland, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria and Turkey did not exist as a direct US strategic threat to Moscow.
A fateful Ukraine debate
In 2013 there was intense debate inside the cabinet of what all sides agree was a democratically elected (if corrupt) Ukrainian President, Viktor Janukovich. The issue was he economic future of the floundering Ukraine—whether east with Russia into the new Eurasian Common Market together with Belarus and Kazakhstan, or to the west with a “special” association (not even a real full membership) with the European Union.
After a period of vacillation, and a final economic offer from Russia that would include a reduction of the price Ukraine would pay for needed Russian natural gas by one third and Russia’s buying of $15 billion of Ukrainian state bond debt to ease the urgent fiscal crisis in Kiev, Janukovich told EU ministers in November, 2013 that Ukraine would postpone talks for EU association and would join Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union, in the situation, a far more attractive proposition for Ukraine.
At that point, within minutes of Janukovich’s announcement, Ukraine’s “Second Color Revolution,” was initiated. The protests started in the night of 21 November 2013, initiated by the man personally pre-selected by the US State Department to become future Prime Minister and opposition party Batkivshchyna faction leader, Arseniy Yatsenyuk. Via Twitter, Yatsenyuk called for protests, which he dubbed as Euromaidan, on Maidan Square, outside the main Government buildings.
What then ensued in Ukraine is to this day almost entirely unknown in the West. The reason is a total media blackout, led by CNN, BBC, the New York Times, Washington Post. It has been a de facto NATO wartime press censorship, originating in Washington at the highest levels. That censorship has turned once-critical German, other EU and US media into apologists for the illegal installation on February 2014 of a gang of unelected criminals and self-styled neo-nazis and the undemocratic coup against a democratically elected government, all, cynically, in the name of democracy.
That 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 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—largely from the anti-Russian western Ukraine where memories of the 1930’s Holodomor have been deliberately revived to foster Russophobia—have waged a savage war inside Ukraine since March 2014, killing Ukrainians indiscriminately and shelling villages to drive the population out, and ultimately, to try 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 Kiev provocatively calls their “Anti-Terror Action” 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.
As of this writing, early September, 2014, a fragile ceasefire on general terms proposed by Russian President Putin, has been agreed by Kiev’s President Poroshenko. If it will hold or is only a ruse to buy time to get more NATO reinforcements to continue the senseless war, is unknown.
As winter approaches the EU, especially Germany and France and Italy face the prospect of no Russian gas for their industry and homes. Indications are that more states in the EU, led by Germany, are getting fed up with being forced to back the Washington agenda of war with Russia over Ukraine. As the gangsters in Kiev face October elections, the economy of Ukraine is in free-fall because of Washington’s push to a new war, first Cold War and perhaps even hot war, using Ukraine as the vehicle.
What is clear is that no one benefits from the stupidity of the Poroshenko-Yatsenyuk government in Kiev, or the stupidity of the neo-conservative warhawks surrounding President Obama in Washington. [As you can tell, William saw recent events coming more than seven years ago.]
—F. William Engdahl, Wiesbaden, 11 September 2014
As you should be aware from the above (the film and Bill’s insights), the magnitude of the lies and lies by omission we’re being subjected to in this matter is on another level; given the possible repercussions of the situation in Ukraine — an almost certain escalation — and given the level of stupidity/evil of the decision-makers (both East and West), runaway inflation may be the least of our worries.
Please, folks, take this seriously. And one more time: Stock up on food and so forth.
More to come.
Allan
24 comments for “Another Level…”