by Jim W. Dean, VT Editor, … with New Eastern Outlook, Moscow
[ Note: My tale of two cities theme has a selection of cities to be paired for analogies to Dickens’ famous novel. You can use Washington and Moscow, or Kiev with Moscow, Donbass or Crimea to pick your tale of misery and intrigue.
Lavrov finally took the gloves off, sort of, on Kiev’s dragging its feet on implementing Minsk2. He said that statements by the representatives of Ukraine’s political sub-group in the Contact Group, Roman Bessmertny and Vladimir Gorbulin, are an even more interesting signal.
“They declare without scruple that Donbass will not get any special status,” the minister said – “that Donbass should receive the same status as all other Ukrainian regions that will be (if at all) realized by the decentralization idea.
And Mr. Gorbulin wrote a program article, saying that Minsk-2 is last year’s snow, and now it is necessary to fulfill the main task Kiev faced during the signing of the Minsk-2 accords, namely to gain time and save its strength. And use the military force after all to solve the problems of Donbass”.
This is not only a total diplomatic fraud against the Donbass people, but more so against Russia, because the US, EU and NATO are holding Russia hostage to the sanctions until Minsk2 is fulfilled. We can clearly see that the Three Western Musketeers are just fine with Minsk2 not being implemented. That makes the whole diplomatic dance a fraud on the American public, part of the new Russian Boogeyman our controllers have lined up as the next manipulation tool.
We have the two Senators submitting legislation to block Russian and Chinese media from the US, and the new push to use Iran’s medium range missiles as a new sanctions whipping boy, when they were not part of the P5+1 agreement; we now see the US’ position of, “Well that does not prevent us imposing US sanctions if we so choose.”
That makes a mockery of the agreement, where the old UN ones, in which Russia and China had participated, can now be replace piecemeal.
Will any aspect of this fraud be a presidential campaign issue, in that it undermines American credibility? No, because the new ones want to be able to renege or waffle or interpret any agreement however they want.
This is why I have always editorialized that we are being treated like an occupied country, as this is exactly the attitude you would expect a conquering power to exhibit to its minions. The only pushback for this horrible situation is a bi-partisan organized campaign to constantly rub “their” faces in it.
But partisan people usually will never be caught dead working with the “other side” on anything, hence we are slaves to the tried and true divide and conquer game, which we are losing… Jim W. Dean ]
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Crimea and Donbass
The second anniversary of Crimea reuniting with Russia brought memories of Charles Dickens’ famous, A Tale of Two Cities, a novel set in Paris and London about the French Revolution. Dickens’ first line is still with us today.
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the Spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us…”
Much like the poor French peasants who suffered under the brutality of their revolution which would turn on itself before the long struggle was over, the present day Ukrainian people suffer from the unanticipated failure of their Western puppet government.
Kiev and the Neo-Nazi nationalists did not wait long. They went after the Russian population in Eastern Ukraine with a vengeance, even having MPs bragging about what they were going to do to them.
I have before me a street protest rally photo of normal looking Ukrainians with a big banner sign that my translator said read, “Death to Russians – More Murder”. Crimea had a better option than the rest of Ukraine did, and took it.
On this second anniversary the Crimean people are happy not to be Donbass. The people there who have signed the Minsk2 peace agreement with Kiev are still being shelled and threatened with a summer military campaign.
Many say it will be a desperate attempt for the Western coupmeisters there to divert attention from the utter failure of their government to move the country forward politically and economically. The two-headed monster of incompetence and corruption are strangling Ukraine and the West will not own up to its own failure, hence the continuing effort to pin the blame on Russia.
France and Germany, who guaranteed Kiev’s good faith compliance with the Minsk2 accords, have done nothing despite well documented obstruction by Kiev.
Hollande and Merkel met with Poroshenko last week and publicly “asked” him to move forward with Donbass elections, but of course said nothing about what they would do if he did not, which would be nothing. Through Kiev’s non-compliance they are keeping the sanctions on Russia.
The whole world also knows that the EU, US and NATO were behind the violent Maidan coup, that went forward anyway after Viktor Yanyukovych had agreed to the protesters demands. All the suckers in Western Ukraine who thought the land of milk and honey was at hand, billions in Western investment, visas to get out of Ukraine and flee to Western Europe, found it was all just a mirage.
The role they had been assigned was to be cannon fodder against Russia as NATO pushed up to the Russian border with its US missile defense shield that it wants to install everywhere it can to block a preemptive strike target from retaliating.
Crimea has had a difficult past two years but nowhere near the suffering of Donbass. Over a million eastern Ukraine refugees are living in Russia, and we never hear anything about them because they are being well taken care of. The West does not want the comparison with the refugees that the freedom and democracy charlatans have been manufacturing for two decades are living, many in squalor like so many Syrians.
The Western press I reviewed over this second anniversary featured the expected verbs like “seized” and “grabbing”, or the noun “annexation”, most of them leaving out the overwhelming vote from the people living there to say they did not want to be victims of the Western coup.
This “Russia hijacked Crimea” game is getting a bit silly, so much so that Putin has done a documentary on how it all went down. There is a trailer out for it already, called Homeward Bound. Of course Russian regular troops were involved and with no lives lost, unlike the Right Sector’s neo-Nazi thugs that the US used to overthrow the Ukrainian government and crush any resistance.
All the military people in the West understand that there was no way that Russia was going to let Crimea, with 1.5 million Russians, 65% of the population, or its main Black Sea military base and fleet fall under the control of the Kiev coupmeisters as a freebie of the Western putsch.
Crimea had always be Russian until it was given to Ukraine by Nikita Khrushchev when he had the power to do so. Ukraine has been heavily subsidized by Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union and a huge trading partner, including high tech defense and space contracting. Economically, it was closer to Russia than Canada is to the US.
Putin has described how in an all-night meeting the Russian command saw the extremist violence running unchecked all over the country and openly threatening the Russian population there, but decided that the Crimeans were going to have the opportunity to vote on their future.
The troops went in four days later, the Kiev boot was removed from their necks, and they had their 96% vote to return to Russia. Mind you, I mentioned that the 2014 census showed just 65% as ethnic Russians, so many others also voted to go with Russia despite the Tartars boycotting the election.
The West has airbrushed anything it desired out of the true Crimea story. Long forgotten are events like the massacre in Odessa, followed closely by Korsun, where eight commercial buses of anti-Maidan protestors were returning from Kiev when they were stopped by a large group of nationalists waiting for them in ambush.
The protestors were beaten, some tortured and some murdered. This had a chilling effect in Crimea, as they saw the interior minister and nationalist Arsen Avakov as being behind these terror events.
The US and NATO responded to with a new smear campaign, claiming that the “attack on Crimea” was the beginning of Russia’s push to take back the former East European Soviet territories.
NATO commander Breedlove actually stated that Russian armored divisions were massed on the Ukrainian border preparing to sweep through Ukraine in three days, but the good general never provided us any aerial photos. Not a word of it was true.
The Kiev incompetents tormented Crimea by cutting off the water, railroad connections and eventually the power, throwing away all the trade income that it desperately needed at the time and for the future, as the quickly-built land bridge brought in water and will have Crimea back to full power this year.
Kiev now admits the strategy was a great failure and cost Ukraine over $1 billion, losses that will remain permanent, since Crimeans will pay utility bills to help finance the cost of Russian supplies coming over the land bridge.
Despite the silly reports from Kiev about an army for a Crimean reconquest being organized, no one believes any of the Interior Minister Avakov’s lies anymore. Crimeans are much better off than their former Ukranian compatriots. Many Ukrainians in the military and civil services took the Russian citizenship that was offered them and now can support their families without oppressing their fellow countrymen.
Reuniting with Crimea brought another major bonus to Russia. Under the former agreement to keep the fleet there, no upgrading or modernization was allowed, so the Baltic fleet sank into disrepair. The Russian defense people shifted their modernization funding to prioritize getting it back into shape, with 15 new vessels having been delivered, and more on the way.
As the US continues moving its missile defense screen closer to its Russia’s borders, it will meet an upgraded counter force in Crimea. In the previous non-confrontational times, Russia had moved military spending into non-military infrastructure development.
The EU was a prime contractor for some of that work, like combat training simulators, but much of that stopped due to the anti-Russian sanctions.
It is not only Kiev that has shown poor leadership. In its own way, the West has done just as badly, especially with its nation destruction program via regime change. That has become such a bad joke that two Senators have now introduced a bill to block Russian and Chinese media from the US, hoping that will stop Americans from finding out about these manufactured threat scams.
Many Americans are embarrassed over our growing list of foreign policy misadventures. The Iran nuclear deal has been the only bright spot, and we have our fingers crossed that Syria can still be saved. But then we look at the waste land of our 2016 presidential contenders and we fear even more for the future. They seem more like security risks in themselves than potential commanders in chief.
After what Bush did to us with 9-11 and the economic implosions, courtesy of our bankster gangster class, we feared that America would never been the same again. Now we have to worry about it getting even worse with the coin toss being Trump or Hillary. The world should worried, because we certainly are.
Jim W. Dean, managing editor for VT, producer/host of Heritage TV Atlanta, specially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
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Jim W. Dean is VT Editor Emeritus. He was an active editor on VT from 2010-2022. He was involved in operations, development, and writing, plus an active schedule of TV and radio interviews. He now writes and posts periodically for VT.
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