Washington’s Hysteria Towards Russia Hides US Regime Change by Finian Cunningham

by Finian Cunningham
Writer, Dandelion Salad
East Africa
Crossposted from Strategic Culture Foundation
March 6, 2014

Legally, Washington and its European allies haven’t a leg to stand on. Both can be rightly accused of violating international law from their gross interference in Ukrainian sovereign affairs – from the instigation of violent street protests that led to the sacking of an elected president and government, to the subsequent climate of lawlessness and fear sweeping across Ukraine and felt in particular by the majority Russian ethnic population in the east and south of the country.

The latest revelations that killings in Kiev’s Maidan Square among protesters and police were covertly carried out by snipers working for the Western-backed agitators are further proof that a coup d’état was orchestrated. A leaked phone call between EU foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton and Estonian foreign minister, Urmas Paet, dated February 25, indicates that snipers were used as provocateurs during the demonstrations, with the intention of heightening violence and blaming it on the government of President Viktor Yanukovych.

In the phone call, reported by Russia Today, Paet is heard to say: “There is now stronger and stronger understanding that behind the snipers, it was not Yanukovych, but it was somebody from the new [Western-backed] coalition”.

Ashton replied: “I think we do want to investigate. I mean, I didn’t pick that up, that’s interesting. Gosh”.

The evidence for Western-sponsored subversion in Ukraine is so glaring – from the parade of American and European politicians over the past four months whipping up protesters in Kiev, to documented infiltration of civic organizations by the CIA, USAID, National Endowment for Democracy, Freedom House, the Adenauer Foundation, among others, to their own words of admission from the likes of State Department official Victoria Nuland on the desired formation of a new governing administration in Kiev – that in order to distract from this mountain of damning evidence, the Western governments and their servile media are trying to shift the terrain of discourse away from the panoramic obvious.

The latest revelation of snipers used as provocateurs adds a new sinister twist.

However, against all the evidence, it is not the West that is in violation over Ukraine; it is Russia – so they claim.

More than this, the Western leaders and media have gone into hysterical mode, accusing Russia of “brazen aggression” and “bringing the region to the brink of war”. Ironically, given the astounding denial of reality by the West, it is now turning around and accusing Russia of peddling propaganda over recent events in Ukraine. One France 24 headline read: “The fanciful claims of Russian propaganda”.

Never mind fanciful claims, how about just some hard facts – facts that Western media are in abject denial of?

Apart from the above litany of outrageous Western interference in Ukrainian politics, the fact is that President Viktor Yanukovych was ousted in a violent putsch at the end of last month.

Yanukovych was elected in 2010; and in a constitutional democracy his removal from office requires a vote by the electorate, not the diktats of a bunch of gun-wielding paramilitaries. We may not have liked Yanukovych’s alleged authoritarian style of governance or accusations of cronyism, but the only legal way to correct that would have been for an orderly constitutional process of elections or some other form of due process.

Yanukovych signed a national unity deal with political opponents on February 21, which European Union ministers had been involved in brokering. But his opponents immediately trashed the deal with threats of violence unless Yanukovych stood down.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is therefore correct when he told a press conference this week that what has happened in Kiev is “an unconstitutional coup” and “an armed seizure of power”.

Legally speaking, and even under the terms of the EU-brokered national unity accord signed on February 21, Viktor Yanukovych is still the lawful president of Ukraine. When Yanukovych subsequently sent a formal letter to Putin requesting military assistance in the light of unconstitutional and violent upheaval, the Russian Federation had a legal and moral mandate to enter into Ukrainian territory.

The differing responses to the February 21 “event” are instructive. Both Washington and Brussels immediately recognized the new office holders in Kiev as the “legitimate government” of Ukraine with its self-declared president Oleksandr Torchynov and prime minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk. The new cabinet, comprising members of the fascist Svoboda party who had been previously waging street war, was also conferred with official Western recognition. The Western media have since gone on to use euphemisms like Kiev’s “fledgling government”.

A more accurate definition of the new administration in Kiev is an unelected, self-imposed junta. But the violent, unconstitutional means of taking political power has not stopped British foreign secretary William Hague coming to Kiev this week, followed by US secretary of state John Kerry, to shake hands with the junta. Brussels also invited the mob rulers in Kiev to a ministerial summit this week.

By contrast, Russia is calling for a return to the national unity deal signed on February 21 – a deal which recognizes Yanukovych as the president in office until mutually agreed constitutional reforms are worked out and mandated by the entire electorate of Ukraine – as the legal starting point for any future political settlement. This is the most reasonable and constitutionally legal way forward. Let the people decide whom they want in government by voting, that is by democracy, which, pointedly, Western leaders do not seem able or willing to countenance. The latter prefer imposing governance by force according to their diktat because the real agenda is the economic pillaging of Ukraine by Western capital, an outcome that the Ukrainian people would not vote for if they truly had a democratic choice in the matter.

Given the self-publicized threats of aggression towards ethnic Russians in Ukraine and other perceived political opponents issued by Svoboda and its Right Sector paramilitaries, together with documented acts of recent violence in Kiev, it is was eminently legal and appropriate that Moscow embarked on defensive security measures in Ukraine. Securing military bases and a majority Russian-speaking population in the autonomous southern republic of Crimea this week – at the written requests of President Yanukovych and the Crimean regional prime minister Sergei Aksyonov, as well as under the legal terms of a long-standing bilateral agreement with Ukraine – all that gives Moscow an irrefutable mandate to do so.

Yet, with frothing hysteria, the Western governments and their media have turned reality upside down. There is not a mention of the unlawful Western interference and subversion in the Ukraine or of its hand-in-fist association with neo-Nazi street mobs in executing a violent putsch in Kiev. US ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power brazenly denied reality earlier this week when she accused Moscow of citing “imaginary threats” in Ukraine. The bitter irony of that is that Samantha Power is one of the cheerleaders for the so-called “responsibility to protect” which has given her country the fictitious cover to illegally intervene and militarily overthrow governments in former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya and anywhere else the US deems desirable for regime change.

In a feat of sheer doublethink, the West has accused Russia of “illegal invasion” in Ukraine and of using “pretexts for acts of aggression”. This hysterical rhetoric is being used to cover up the West’s own glaring transgressions in Ukraine and to shift the blame for the turmoil.

Unabashed by its unequivocal involvement in engineering regime change in Ukraine, American and European leaders are demanding that Russia withdraw troops from Crimea or face sanctions. Washington’s top diplomat John Kerry said the US would isolate Russia “economically, politically and diplomatically” if it did not reverse security measures, or as Kerry put it “aggression”.

Meanwhile, there is not a scintilla of indication that the Americans and Europeans have any intention of reversing their unlawful interference in Ukraine. Far from it, Kerry on his visit to the junta in Kiev this week said that the US was offering $1 billion in loan guarantees. The New York Times explained: “The purpose of the loan guarantees is to support Ukraine’s efforts to integrate with the West”.

European Union ministers this week somehow found reserves of €11 billion for the new “Western friendly” administration in Kiev – against the backdrop of millions of EU citizens suffering from unemployment and deprivation. The International Monetary Fund is also drawing up a lure (loan) of $2 billion.

With pro-Western, pro-capitalist Yatsenyuk now at the helm in Kiev (as Nuland prescribed), Ukraine is being steered inexorably into debt bondage by the West. This bondage, facilitated by an unelected junta, will entail an austerity assault on Ukrainian workers, beginning with swingeing cuts in public spending, wages and subsidies on fuel. It will also lead to privatization of Ukrainian oil and gas industries and the full take over of other prodigious Ukrainian natural resources, such as its wheat agriculture, by Western capital. Yatsenyuk, who talks with pride about being willing to commit political suicide for the sake of pro-Western reforms, that is Western subjugation, is exactly the kind of ideologue the West want and need in Kiev, as Nuland duly recognized.

Interestingly, this week the new Ukrainian ambassador to Belarus, Mykhailo Yeshel, admitted in a media interview that loans (lures) from Washington were being offered on condition of the Ukraine permitting the deployment of American missile systems on its territory – right on the border with Russia.

The emerging picture is clear. Despite all the hysterical nonsense being spouted by Western leaders and their media propaganda machine, demanding Russia to “back off” from Ukraine, the Western regime-change operation in that country is not just being consolidated – it is being ramped up.

***

Snipers for US regime change in Ukraine

by Finian Cunningham
Writer, Dandelion Salad
East Africa
Crossposted from PressTV
March 6, 2014

The irony could not be more bitter – or sickening. US Secretary of State John was photographed laying wreaths in Kiev this week and offering “heartfelt” condolences for those killed during recent violent street clashes in the Ukrainian capital.

It now turns out that the killing of protesters and police officers was carried out by covert snipers working for the new Western-backed junta that seized power in Kiev. Kerry was thus laying flowers in memory of victims who were shot on the orders of the very people whom the West has been sponsoring.

Dozens of people were fatally wounded in Kiev’s Maidan Square last month during clashes between security forces loyal to the then incumbent President Viktor Yanukovych. Western media uncritically, or worst knowingly, heightened claims by the organizers of the demonstrations against Yanukovych that the casualties were inflicted by police officers shooting into the crowds.

At the time there were grounds for suspicion that all was not what it seemed. The surge in killings was not in keeping with the relatively restrained conduct of security forces in Kiev during nearly three months of unprecedented street violence. But the outpouring of condemnation from Western politicians amplified by Western news media against the Ukrainian authorities had the effect of piling the political pressure on the Yanukoyvch government to capitulate.

The new administration in Kiev, led by so-called interim Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, has now been dubbed the legitimate government of Ukraine by Washington and the European Union.

Revelations about the covert snipers have since been disclosed in a leaked phone call between EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton and Estonia’s foreign minister Usmar Paet.

In the phone conversation dated February 25, and reported by Russia Today this week, Paet is heard to say: “There is now stronger and stronger understanding that behind the snipers, it was not Yanukovych, but it was somebody from the new [Western-backed] coalition.”

Ashton replies: “I think we do want to investigate. I mean, I didn’t pick that up, that’s interesting. Gosh.”

This is by no means the first such evidence that violence in Kiev was orchestrated. There is already ample proof that the US and EU were covertly working to agitate protests against the Ukrainian government. For three months, Western politicians have been issuing statements to whip up demonstrations. Western officials have paraded in Kiev with fascist elements and given the provocateurs legitimacy to carry out outrageous acts of violence against government people and property that would not be tolerated for a second back in their own countries.

The involvement of the American CIA and its various offshoots, such as the National Endowment for Democracy, has also been well documented in Ukraine going back to at least the early 1990s.

The precipitous deployment of organized violence by “protesters” from late November onwards, allegedly as a result of the Yanukovych government rejecting an EU trade pact, also bears the hallmark of an externally driven regime change operation.

A decisive tipping point was reached against Yanukovych with the surge in killings among protesters – apparently by police gunfire – during the last week of February. Yanukovych had already signed a “national unity deal” on February 21 with opponents promising constitutional reforms. But that deal was not enough for his opponents who wanted Yanukovych out of office altogether.

In the wake of the street violence, US vice president Joe Biden reportedly phoned Yanukovych to tell him that it was game over. His efforts at cutting a deal were “a day late and a dollar short,” said the voice from the White House. Yanukovych then fled to Russia within days of Biden’s phone call.

The latest evidence of orchestrated violence in Kiev for political ends – the definition of terrorism – adds to Russia’s claims that what the West has championed as “a people’s revolution” is in actuality nothing but a Western-backed coup d’état by terrorism.

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin this week said that the new regime occupying the government offices in Kiev is not legitimate. It represents an illegal seizure of power by violence.

That is why Russia is right to not recognize the usurpers in Kiev and to take security measures to protect ethnic Russians living in Ukraine and to defend its vital interests in the Crimean Peninsula. The unelected Western-backed regime, which Western media propagandize as “the fledgling government of Ukraine”, comprises neo-Nazis who detest Russians and who have publicly stated their intention to commit the worst kind of violence against ethnic Russians and any other people whom they deem to obstruct their fascistic program of governance.

None of this vile demagoguery has deterred Western so-called democratic leaders from embracing the regime in Kiev. Far from it; this week saw British foreign secretary William Hague in Kiev shaking hands with Yatsenyuk, followed by US top diplomat John Kerry laying his grotesque commemorative wreaths to the dead.

Kerry also announced that he was bearing $1 billion in loan guarantees to support the junta in Kiev. The austerity-racked EU is somehow finding the coffers to offer $15 billion. These “loans” are being welcomed with open arms by the Western-backed junta in Kiev. They will enrich Western capitalists and the Ukrainian elite, like Yatsenyuk and the leaders of the Kiev storm troopers, while throwing the majority of Ukrainians into American and EU-style poverty.

Another condition for the Western financial bribery, as disclosed this week by the new Ukrainian ambassador to Belarus, Mykhailo Yeshel, is that Ukraine will allow US ballistic missiles on to its territory – right on the border with Russia.

What we are witnessing in Ukraine is an imperialist conquest by Washington and its European stooge governments – hand in fist with fascist boot boys.

Russia has every right to be concerned and to take action. Yet, ironically, this week Western media are falling over themselves to tell us that Russia has invaded Ukraine in “a brazen act of aggression”.

No wonder the world seems chaotic when such barefaced Western lies and deception about reality are being churned out. Western “churnalism” at its best.

---

Finian Cunningham, is a columnist at Press TV, the Strategic Culture Foundation and a Writer on Dandelion Salad. He can be reached at cunninghamfinian@gmail.com.

see

US Provokes Russia, Acts Surprised to Get a Nasty Reaction by William Boardman

The Proof is in the Pudding by Bruce Gagnon + Urmas Paet and Catherine Ashton’s Leaked Phone Call: Kiev Snipers Hired by Maidan Leaders

Boxing In The Bear by Bruce Gagnon

Ukraine: The Dangers of Dealing with Delusional Western Leaders + Putin Holds Aces, Obama Deuces by Finian Cunningham

Lighting The Fires For Chaos In Ukraine by Bruce Gagnon

Rick Rozoff: Ukraine: A Nazi-like Victory of US/NATO Lawlessness + Kerry tells Russia ‘one doesn’t invade country on phony pretext’