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Because this article states so many things that might be likely to contradict what most people in Western countries have been led to believe, readers here are especially strongly encouraged to click onto any allegation which seems at all questionable, in order to get to the sources behind any given questionable allegation. And wherever a clicked-onto source turns out to be another article, one is encouraged similarly to do the same there, so that the reader will be able, in this way, to probe down to the ultimate sources, which are the sources upon which this article is finally based.
After having expanded NATO right up to Russia’s borders and essentially surrounded Russia with US military installations, the United States is now using the pretext of Russia’s having allowed the people of Crimea in 2014 to rejoin Russia (after the Soviet dictator Khrushchev had transferred Crimea from Russia to Ukraine in 1954) as being an excuse for arming and soldiering Russia’s northwestern borders sufficiently to be able to launch as soon as 2017 a ground invasion of Russia, which would then be backed up by US air power and nuclear arms.
In the United States and Europe, the promotion for this action presents the plan as purely defensive against ‘Russian aggression’, for Russia’s having ‘seized’ Crimea in 2014. Promptly, US President Barack Obama slapped economic sanctions against Russia for Russia’s accepting Crimea back into Russia. It was actually hardly a ‘seizure’; it was a protection of the residents there, 75% of whom had voted for the man who had recently been overthrown in a violent coup (which was presented in the West as being a ‘democratic revolution’.)
However, the US had virtually forced Russia to accept the pleas of the residents of Crimea to become again a part of Russia, after the anti-Russian coup in Ukraine – which the head of Stratfor has called «the most blatant coup in history» – after that coup had terrified the residents of Crimea, whom even Western-backed polling of Crimeans had shown that they wanted to rejoin with Russia, even before the US took control of Ukraine in its very bloody coup. (Ever since that coup, there has been no action condemned by the US White House, on the part of the thus-installed anti-Russian Ukrainian government. Now, instead, the condemnations of the Ukrainian government are coming from Moscow, against Russia now having such a rabidly anti-Russian-led nation along Russia’s longest European or western border. (It’s as if Canada were being led now by anti-American bigots who had been installed by the world’s superpower in a world in which the US were only the #2 power. The US would then be extremely disturbed at that type of situation; and, so, too, are Russians, naturally.)
The anti-Russian Cato Institute calls Russia «a defensive, paranoid, nuclear power». Cato doesn’t call the US by a phrase that actually fits the US but certainly not post-Soviet Russia: «the greatest threat to peace in the world today». That’s because America’s aristocracy want the American people and the people in the nations controlled by their allied aristocracies to view Russia as being «a defensive, paranoid, nuclear power», instead of as being an intensely threatened nation – threatened by the US, the nation that is actually generally viewed as being, by far, «the greatest threat to peace in the world today».
The US has expressed full support for Ukraine to become a part of NATO, but some other member-nations of NATO haven’t yet allowed that to happen.
The United States government, via its USAID, and NATO, and Atlantic Council, and Brookings Institution, and American Enterprise Institute, and Open Societies Foundations, and Cato Institute, and all of the other foreign-affairs ‘charities’ run by the US aristocracy, is promoting this preparation for WW III, by repeating the US White House’s line, that the coup in Ukraine was no coup but just a ‘democratic’ overthrow of the democratically elected President of Ukraine (Viktor Yanukovych), done in order to eliminate a corrupt (but democratically elected – his having been democratically elected is not being disputed) President, but conveniently ignoring that all Presidents of post-Soviet Ukraine have been corrupt, and none of them would even have been able to win that office in any other way.
Furthermore, the US-installed regime there is yet more corrupt than was the one the US overthrew. Yet, still, the US isn’t condemning its new client-state. ‘Corruption’ was an excuse for the coup, not the actual cause of any ‘Maidan Revolution’ – and now the residents even within the formerly pro-overthrow portion of Ukraine regret the overthrow. (And how!) (And, for Gallup, there, to compare the favorability rating of the post-coup President, Poroshenko, who rules a country which no longer includes Donbass, which had voted 90% for the man whom Obama overthrew, and also no longer includes Crimea, which had voted 75% for the man whom Obama overthrew, isn’t at all fair – even though Gallup still did find that Yanukovych’s approval-rating «was never as low as Poroshenko’s is now». Poroshenko was bombing Donbass, which is the dark purple part of that map, and he still wants to go to war against Crimea; so, his approval rating in those two former parts of Ukraine, would be about zero – which would lower his approval in all of the former parts of Ukraine, even lower than it showed in Gallup’s recent poll.)
You can see here and here what the Obama regime was actually sponsoring in Donbass: the bombing of the cities and villages there, while labeling all of the residents there as ‘terrorists’ and this bombing campaign against them as an ‘Anti Terrorist Operation’ or ‘ATO’. And here are the international laws that the Obama-imposed Ukrainian regime was violating. The goal of this bombing was to kill as many of the residents as possible and drive the rest into Russia as refugees, so as to clear Donbass for gas-drilling by US-backed companies – and maybe set up US nuclear missiles there, also. The plan didn’t succeed, though it did produce lots of corpses and refugees.
US President Barack Obama is a brilliant person, who has thus been able to fool not only many of his fellow Americans, but solid majorities also in the allied nations that the US largely controls, to believe his lie, that the aggression is in Moscow, not in Washington. But fooling people to believe a lie doesn’t make a lie any the more true – it didn’t do that with George W Bush’s ‘Saddam’s WMD’ lie; and it doesn’t do it with ‘the democratic revolution in Ukraine’ lie (where democracy had actually ended with America’s coup there).
On February 6th, I reported:
«NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg announced on February 2nd that he approves of US ‘Defense’ Secretary Ash Carter’s proposal to quadruple US armaments and troops in Europe, against ‘Russian aggression.’
Secretary Carter said earlier that same day, in his announcement of America’s arming for war against Russia:
‘We are reinforcing our posture in Europe to support our NATO allies in the face of Russia’s aggression. In Pentagon parlance, this is called the European Reassurance Initiative and after requesting about $800 million for last year, this year we’re more than quadrupling it for a total of $3.4 billion in 2017.
That will fund a lot of things: more rotational US forces in Europe, more training and exercising with our allies, more preposition and war-fighting gear and infrastructure improvements to support all this.
And when combined with US forces already in and assigned to Europe – which are also substantial – all of this together by the end of 2017 will let us rapidly form a highly capable combined arms ground force that can respond across that theater, if necessary.’
However, the truth is: Russia is not expanding to NATO’s borders; NATO is expanding to Russia’s borders. The baldness of the Western lie to the contrary is an insult to Westerners’ intelligence.
The US is preparing for an invasion of Russia».
However, it turned out that that wasn’t an «insult to the intelligence» of a certain reader at a different site, where an article I had written about the news-media’s failures to report these realities, was posted, and at which a «fuster» responded by saying that «most likely reason why other media wont carry the story is… because the story is false and shoddy». He then insulted me personally, and alleged that I «was predicting that the US was gonna nuke the Russians over the Ukraine».
However, (beside the fact that that reader had apparently not clicked onto the links in the article, which documented the truth of what it was alleging), for me to have said that «The US is preparing for an invasion of Russia» is not at all for me to have said that «the US was gonna nuke the Russians over the Ukraine». There is an important distinction between those two statements, and I shall highlight it here, so that readers can more accurately understand what US policy is, on this very important matter.
For the US to prepare for an invasion of Russia, is not necessarily for the US «to nuke the Russians».
A good example of this distinction is that, when the Soviet dictator, Nikita Khrushchev, tried to place nuclear missiles 90 miles from the US in Cuba in 1962, that could have been seen by him as being a defensive measure against a possible nuclear attack against his USSR, as Khrushchev alleged it to be, but the US President, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, took it, and with good reason, to be instead an aggressive move against the United States – and he was willing to launch a nuclear attack against the USSR if Khrushchev didn’t withdraw those missile facilities (which hadn’t yet been supplied with missiles). The entire world (except for Fidel Castro, who had requested the missiles in order to be able to prevent another Bay of Pigs invasion) agreed with JFK on that; and, on the very same grounds (but even more so) the entire world ought now to support Russia when a succession of US Presidents have expanded NATO right up to the very borders of Russia, and now plan to place thousands of US soldiers and US attack-planes and state-of-the-art tanks, right onto Russia’s borders. This is a no-no, if anything is.
Russia isn’t being faced here with merely one locale, but instead with numerous locales, right on Russia’s very borders, which might soon be bristling with US nuclear missiles against Russia. And, clearly, America’s having basically false-flagged the entire Ukraine-Crimea matter so as to be able now to position yet more nuclear weapons along Russia’s border with Ukraine is intensely aggressive, and would be seen as such by any rational leader of Russia – and should be seen that way by any rational person, in any country.
On top of that, Jens Stoltenberg has recently stated that NATO will now be coordinating more closely with the alliance of Arabic nations that are owned by fundamentalist-Sunni royal families: Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, UAE, Bahrain, and Oman. Those royal families, and their retainers (state-contractors), provided virtually all of the funding to al-Qaeda prior to 9/11, and (according to their friend Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State in 2009) were continuing to do that (and she was requesting them to stop doing it – and she also noted that they were the major funders of other anti-American jihadist groups, which she was hoping they’d stop funding). However, they’re all against Russia; and, so, NATO will be even more actively teaming up with them. (Saudi Arabia also happens to be by far the nation that’s the largest of all purchasers of US-and-EU-manufactured weapons, such as from Lockheed Martin.)
Russia is being surrounded. In such circumstances, if Russia strikes first, its enemies are the ones to blame. One can only hope that ‘the West’ (the US and its stooge-aristocracies) will back down, and finally end its incredibly dangerous attempt to conquer Russia – before the whole world gets ‘conquered’ into nuclear rubble.
Originally published on 2016-04-13
Author: Eric Zuesse
Source: Strategic Culture Foundation
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