Paul Craig Roberts

Photo: Ukrainian soldiers arrive to reinforce a checkpoint that troops seized Friday, May 2, in Andreevka, a village near Slavyansk. Two helicopters were downed Friday as Ukrainian "security forces" tried to dislodge pro-Russian separatists from Slavyansk, Ukraine's Defense Ministry said. The operation appears to be the most significant yet by the Ukrainian military against pro-Russian militias that have taken control of swaths of eastern Ukraine.

Washington has no intention of allowing the crisis in Ukraine to be resolved. Having failed to seize the country and evict Russia from its Black Sea naval base, Washington sees new opportunities in the crisis.

One is to restart the Cold War by forcing the Russian government to occupy the Russian-speaking areas of present day Ukraine where protesters are objecting to the stooge anti-Russian government installed in Kiev by the American coup. These areas of Ukraine are former constituent parts of Russia herself. They were attached to Ukraine by Soviet leaders in the 20th century when both Ukraine and Russia were part of the same country, the USSR.

Essentially, the protesters have established independent governments in the cities. The police and military units sent to suppress the protesters, called “terrorists” in the American fashion, for the most part have until now defected to the protesters.

With Obama’s incompetent White House and State Department having botched Washington’s takeover of Ukraine, Washington has been at work shifting the blame to Russia. According to Washington and its presstitute media, the protests are orchestrated by the Russian government and have no sincere basis. If Russia sends in military units to protect the Russian citizens in the former Russian territories, the act will be used by Washington to confirm Washington’s propaganda of a Russian invasion (as in the case of Georgia), and Russia will be further demonized.

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Larisa Shevchenko

Introduction by Paul Craig Roberts: We have heard weeks of bullshit propaganda from the Obama regime and its presstitute media, especially the New York Times, the false reporting of which has finished off whatever remained of the newspaper’s reputation. We have heard the threatening squeals from the Washington-installed stooge government in Kiev. But we haven’t heard from the actual people themselves.

Here is a letter in English sent to a German website and published here. The letter makes it completely clear why so much of Russian-speaking Ukraine, former Russian territories that were attached to Ukraine by Soviet leaders in the 20th century, want nothing to do with the Washington-installed government in Kiev.

Again, ask yourself why “your” government and the presstitute media lie every time they open their mouths or roll the ink. Anyone who relies on the US media, or on the word of the president and secretary of state, is an utter and stupid fool.

Larisa Shevchenko from the eastern Ukrainian city of Lugansk, who has mobilized against the coup activities on the Maidan in Kiev since December last year and so is familiar with the developments in her country firsthand:

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Edward S. Herman

The fool is John Kerry, who has looked bad in his rushing around between Washington and Tel Aviv trying to get in place a “framework” agreement between Israel and the Palestinians that would show progress in the efforts of the honest broker, assailing Nicholas Maduro of Venezuela for his “terror campaign against his own people,” and, of course, denouncing the Russians for their “aggression” against the coup-regime of Ukraine. His statement that “You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on a completely trumped-up pretext,” has to be regarded as an Orwellian classic and may be his signifier in future history books, in the unlikely event that he makes it at all. His punchline has been the subject of many jokes and laughs in the dissident media, but the mainstream media have hardly mentioned it and certainly haven’t made it the butt of jokes and a basis for discrediting the man (just as there has been no discrediting of Madeleine Albright based on her statement on national TV that killing 500,000 Iraqi children via the sanctions of mass destruction in the 1990s—which she helped engineer—“was worth it”).

Of course, it is possible that Kerry really believed he was speaking truths, having internalized the assumptions that flow from U.S. “exceptionalism,” which make words like “invasion,” “aggression” and “international law” inapplicable to us as the world’s police; and what might be a “completely trumped up pretext” if offered by the Russians is only a slight and excusable error or misjudgment when we do it. After all, the New York Times quickly used the word “aggression” in editorializing on the Crimea events (“Russia’s Aggression,” March 2, 2014), whereas it never used the word to describe the invasion-occupation of Iraq, nor did it mention the words “UN Charter” or “international law” in its 70 editorials on Iraq from September 11, 2001 to March 21, 2003 (Howard Friel and Richard Falk, The Record of the Paper).

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