Thursday, August 14, 2014

Kiev Regime Blocking Relief Supplies to City It’s Besieging

In a challenge to the Kiev regime’s assault on its “own” people in the east, Russia is sending food and other relief supplies to besieged civilians in the city of Luhansk. The Kiev cabal has vowed to block it at the border. This is occurring in the context of a months-long campaign of bombing and shelling of eastern Ukraine, in particular the cities of Donetsk and Luhansk, including shelling a hospital twice. Currently a humanitarian crisis is looming.

The Western-installed satrapy regime in Kiev, Ukraine, has now killed a total of around 2,000 civilians in the eastern half of “its” country, The death toll doubled in the past week, reports The New York Times, a paper that has editorially gone all-in supporting the U.S. coup, painting Russia in editorial after editorial as the Bad Guy that “annexed” Crimea, is “destabilizing” Ukraine, and demanding that it stand down, quash the rebellion/self-determination forces, and abandon the east to its western-ordained fate.

Referring to the cities of Donetsk and Luhansk, the Times reports that:

“Shelling there and elsewhere in the region by the Ukrainian forces has taken a heavy toll on civilians, with the death toll in the war doubling in the last week to more than 2,000, the United Nations’ Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights reported on Wednesday.
“Conditions in Luhansk, under siege by Ukrainian government forces, are particularly dire. City officials said Tuesday that its 250,000 residents had been living without power, water and a sewage system since Aug. 3, and that only essential food was available.

“Nevertheless, both Kiev and its Western allies have warned that the Russian aid convoy was just a cynical ploy to get much-needed military assistance to rebel fighters in Luhansk, who are running low on ammunition, or — in the worst case — the first step in an invasion of southeastern Ukraine.” [1]

Arseniy P. “Yats” Yatsenyuk, the “prime minister” of Ukraine hand-picked for his post by high-ranking U.S. State department apparatchik Victoria Nuland, ruled out any aid except from the Red Cross. (Of course, the Kiev regime has made it impossible for the Red Cross to enter the region under attack.) [2]

And in a self-described official statement, Arsen Avakov, the interior minister who oversees the Kiev regime’s secret police and regular police, snarled: ““A provocation by the cynical aggressor on our territory is unacceptable,” it apparently being “provocative” to try and relieve a besieged city by providing necessities to the civilian population. (Granted, it wouldn’t be surprising if the armed rebels helped themselves to some of the supplies.)

Of course, there’s an easy solution to the situation: the Kiev regime could stop waging war on the population of the eastern part of Ukraine.

Russia’s Foreign Ministry claims the 260 truck convoy, which left from Moscow and as of yesterday was idling 200 miles (about 334 kilometers) from the Ukrainian border, is hauling 2,000 metric tons of supplies, including 400 tons of cereals, 100 tons of sugar, 62 tons of baby food, 54 tons of medical supplies, 12,300 sleeping bags and 69 generators. The Kiev regime is all but accusing Moscow of secreting military supplies in the cargo.

The Kiev regime insists that all 260 trucks will have to be unloaded at the border and reloaded onto other trucks- a massive undertaking. (No word on who would supply replacement trucks more to the Kiev cabal’s liking. Presumably not Russia. The regime surely doesn’t have 260 spare cargo trucks sitting around, even if they were inclined to break their own blockade of Luhansk.)

In an obviously political countermove, the Kiev cabal has suddenly added false promises to its rhetoric, claiming it will break its own siege by sending its own aid convoy. (I wouldn’t bet any money on that actually happening if I were you. It’s hard to imagine they would deliver supplies to areas under “rebel” control. (It might be more accurate to call them self-determinationists, although that term doesn’t deal with the complication of Russian nationals’ involvement in the autonomy/separatist movement, especially in leadership roles. I certainly don’t question the fact of Russian state involvement. But whose border is Ukraine on? Russia’s? Or the U.S.’s? And who has an absolutely geostrategically vital naval base there? So who arguably has greater interests there? Oh, by the way, there are plenty of ethnic Russians who speak Russian in Ukraine. How many Americans are citizens there? Remind me again.)

The U.S. subalterns of the “European Union” are meeting on Friday, August 15th,  to plot their next move in all this.

Here’s something awkward for the U.S. imperialist bloc, which could explain why the NY Times relegated it to the very last paragraph of the aforementioned article:

“Since the conflict erupted in March, Russia has argued that Kiev does not respect the needs or interests of the mainly Russian speaking population of southeastern Ukraine, and the confrontation over the aid convoy risked confirming Moscow’s point.”

Yeah, that’s a “risk,” alright. But given the power of the Western media, the risk is minimal. Besides, apparently the U.S. empire has a burning need to absorb Ukraine into its bloc, or at least its sphere of dominance. There’s no rational reason for this, no geopolitical need, just a mindless imperialist compulsion to achieve hegemony over the entire planet, a madness that even self-described “conservative” U.S. “political scientist” John Mearsheimer, a prominent academic at the University of Chicago and ten year military veteran, has repeatedly described and criticized as overreach. (His criticism is pragmatic, not moral. There are youtube.com videos of his public talks.) [3]

1]Confusion and Alarm as Russian Aid Convoy Heads to Ukraine,” New York Times, August 13, 2014. This was the online title as of August 13. On the 14th it was changed to the more soothing "Convoy Said to Pause at Russian Base as Questions Persist."

2] See “U.S. Enlisted UN Stooges in Ukraine Subversion“ for the infamous phone call between Nuland and U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt, a career U.S. imperialist with prior coup experience, in which she designates “Yats,” as she calls Yatsenyuk, as prime-minister-to-be. This smoking gun evidence no longer exists as far as U.S. media and government are concerned, despite the fact that when it was revealed, the U.S. State Department didn’t deny its authenticity, choosing instead to sneer at Russian perfidy and sleaziness in intercepting and revealing it. (I’m referring to top State Department flack Jen Psaki’s official comments when confronted on the matter. To the best of my knowledge, no other U.S. official has deigned to publicly recognize the existence of the damning phone call.) After confirming in a backhanded manner the recording’s authenticity (“I didn’t say it was inauthentic”) she says the release “is a new low in Russian tradecraft.”

Here’s an excerpt from Psaki’s press conference in which she’s questioned about the Nuland-Pyatt conspiracy call. At 4:50 in the video she calls it “a new low in Russian tradecraft." Psaki had the gall to brazenly deny to reporters that the phone call contradicted U.S. public claims that it was leaving it up to the Ukrainians to determine their own government.


                                                     
Notice how Psaki employs the principle of the best defense is a good offense. She doesn’t even bother denying the authenticity of the call, instead brushing the matter aside with supercilious contempt. Brilliant move, Jen! If you ever lose your job at State, you’d make a great dominatrix. Her subordinate State Department flack, Marie Harf, takes after Psaki in her insufferable and unrelenting high-handedness. (Just watch these creeps on youtube.com if you need proof.) For some reason, the State Department flacks are a lot more arrogant and condescending to the media than are their White House counterpart flacks. I haven’t had time to analyze why that is. One possible explanation is that the White House flacks get a lot more media attention, so the image they project is more important. State Department mouthpieces apparently feel free to be as obnoxious and haughty as they like. Another is that the president is an elected official, plus the head of a political party, which worries about elections, whereas the State Department is totally insulated from any democratic accountability at all, and its head, the Secretary of State, is appointed, not elected.

Victoria Nuland, whose official title is Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, has been called a “neoconservative.” In U.S. political parlance that translates as a reactionary within the power structure. Originally the term denoted a small clique of upper caste Jewish reactionaries largely based in New York City and centered around institutions like the rabidly reactionary rag Commentary, a publication of the American Jewish Committee, one of the key centers of organized elite Jewish power in America and a component of Israel’s quasi Fifth Column in the U.S., aka “the pro-Israel lobby.” The word has since bled out to take in various gentiles. The idea was that these people used to be “liberals,” who reacted in revulsion to the anti-Vietnam war movement, the counterculture (“hippies”), and the black “power” movement, which they viewed with fear and hatred. How “liberal” people like Norman “The Frother” Podhoretz, longtime past editor of Commentary, ever actually were, as they allege, is open to dispute, to say the least.

Nuland is married to Robert Kagan, a prominent right-wing imperialist ideologue and co-founder of an aggressively militaristic propaganda mill called “Project for the New American Century,” which promotes U.S. global hegemony. This fountain of imperialist vomit put out a paper called Rebuilding America's Defenses (2000), co-signed by Kagan, his brother Frederick (another right-wing militarist) and their daddy, Donald, yet another reactionary, who squats in a professorship at Yale University, a notorious CIA recruiting ground. Notice two of the three words in the title are extremely dishonest. The U.S. military budget has risen every year since at least 1977, the beginning of the Carter regime. Yet fanatical U.S. militarists are constantly pretending that the U.S. has dismantled its military. As for “Defenses,” of course the U.S. military is offensive and aggressive, with 750 bases outside its national territory, and a two-century-long history of aggression and conquest.

3] To watch a one minute excerpt of a U.S. TV appearance Mearsheimer was allowed, in which he succinctly gives his view of the Ukraine situation, see “Arrogance and Stupidity in Obama Regime Power Grab in Ukraine.” (Dissenters from the U.S. propaganda consensus have been virtually excluded from establishment media.)

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