F. William Engdahl

Members of UNA-UNSO marching in Lviv.

The events in Ukraine since November 2013 are so astonishing as almost to defy belief.

An legitimately-elected (said by all international monitors) Ukrainian President, Viktor Yanukovich, has been driven from office, forced to flee as a war criminal after more than three months of violent protest and terrorist killings by so-called opposition.

His “crime” according to protest leaders was that he rejected an EU offer of a vaguely-defined associate EU membership that offered little to Ukraine in favor of a concrete deal with Russia that gave immediate €15 billion debt relief and a huge reduction in Russian gas import prices. Washington at that point went into high gear and the result today is catastrophe.

A secretive neo-nazi military organization reported linked to NATO played a decisive role in targeted sniper attacks and violence that led to the collapse of the elected government.

But the West is not finished with destroying Ukraine. Now comes the IMF with severe conditionalities as prerequisite to any Western financial help.

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Finian Cunningham

American exceptionalism has gone into overdrive with stern warnings from US President Barack Obama to Russia to respect Ukrainian sovereignty and to not destabilize the region.

By "American exceptionalism" we mean Washington's seemingly unlimited capacity for exceptional arrogance and double think.

Obama has not yet accused Russia outright of "military invasion" in the crisis-torn country, but that was the clear inference from his weekend press conference. In a veiled threat of military confrontation, the American president warned that there would be "costs" for Moscow.

"Any violation of Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity will be deeply destabilizing and the US stands with the international community to affirm that there will be costs [for this violation]," said Obama in a hastily arranged media statement in Washington on Friday.

The White House is obviously rattled by reports of Russian troop movements across Ukraine's southern Crimean Peninsula. Moscow says that its military presence in the autonomous Crimean republic of Ukraine is fully in accord with a long-standing legal agreement to have its soldiers stationed there as part of its Black Sea naval base.

That agreement was renewed in 2010 between Moscow and Kiev for a further 20 years, affording Russian military presence in the Crimea, particularly the naval base at Sevastopol, which is headquarters for Russia's Black Sea fleet.

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