The United States on Monday imposed sanctions against seven individual Russians and 17 Russian companies, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said. ● Carney said the sanctions were in response to Crimea’s reunification with Russia, which the United States does not acknowledge, as well as Russia’s stance on Ukraine. “At the contact group meeting in Geneva on April 17, 2014, Russia, Ukraine, the United States, and the European Union decided on a number of steps to deescalate the situation in eastern Ukraine, including refraining from further violence or provocative acts. Since April 17, Russia has done nothing to meet its Geneva commitments and in fact has further escalated the crisis. Russia’s involvement in the recent violence in eastern Ukraine is indisputable,” Carney said. The United States has imposed sanctions on individuals in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle.

RT.com: EU ‘should be ashamed’ after sanctions on Russia - Moscow
RIA Novosti: Moscow Says Response to Western Sanctions Ready

Britain and France deployed eight fighter jets on Monday to reinforce NATO air patrols over the Baltics as tensions rise with Russia over Ukraine, officials said. Four British Typhoon jets arrived in Lithuania to start their mission while four French Rafale jets touched down in Malbork, northeast Poland, their defence ministries said. British defence minister Philip Hammond said the move would "provide reassurance to our NATO allies in eastern Europe and the Baltic states." "In the wake of recent events in Ukraine, it is right that NATO takes steps to reaffirm very publicly its commitment to the collective security of its members," Hammond said. Around 70 French military personnel have been deployed to Malbork in support of the new planes, French military spokesman Colonel Gilles Jaron said. Britain and France have each also deployed AWACS early-warning aircraft to patrol Polish and Romanian airspace in recent weeks. The Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, which gained independence from the former Soviet Union in 1991, joined NATO in 2004 but lack sufficient aircraft to police their own skies, so larger NATO members take turns patrolling their airspace.

PressTV: Moscow: EU being manipulated by US
Rick Rozoff: U.S. Boosts Warplanes, Airborne Troops In Poland, Baltics

The Saker ■ A very interesting trend is beginning to emerge: the deepening of the rift between the, shall we say, "official" leaders of the eastern Ukraine and their own electorate. I am talking about folks like Mikhail Dobkin, Gennadi Kermes (the one shot today) or the various representatives of the Party of Regions in what is left of the Ukrainian Parliament. The folks leading the anti-regime insurgency are adamant that the Party of Regions and all its members have already betrayed them many times and that the idea of participating in the Presidential elections organized by the junta in Kiev is yet another betrayal. Yesterday, in one of the most popular talkshows on Russian TV ("Sunday Evening With Vladimir Soloviev") one of the supposedly "pro-Russian" representatives of the Party of regions ended up having an ugly shouting match with about half of the guests on the show, including three representatives of the pro-Russian insurgency in the eastern Ukraine, and several well-known Russian analysts. At this point the "least disliked" "official" political figure in the eastern Ukraine might be Oleg Tsarev who was expelled from the Party of Regions and who initially announced that he was running for President, but who dropped out of the race when confronted about that by the local people in Donetsk. He is also the politician who was invited to the Ukie TV show "freedom of speech", who was guaranteed protection and then who ended up several beaten and partially stripped of his clothes by neo-Nazi thugs outside the TV station.

RT.com: Lugansk govt HQ standoff - LIVE
RT.com: http://rt.com/news/155640-protesters-government-building-ukraine/Anti-Kiev protesters take control of govt building in Lugansk Region, east Ukraine

Carl Herman ■ War Is Peace, Freedom Is Slavery, and Ignorance Is Strength || The American people are now overwhelmingly opposed to more war in Ukraine, Syria, Iran and elsewhere. Those who get rich from war (the military-industrial complexers and big banks) and their lackeys are desperate to reverse this trend. As such, they are resorting to more and more outlandish justifications for war.

What does Washington's "containment" policy mean? What threats does it pose? Will it work against today's Russia? And does this mean Washington has declared a new Cold War? CrossTalking with Stephen Cohen and John Mearsheimer.

Rick Rozoff: NATO’s Incremental Absorption of Ukraine ■ This historical review of the relations between NATO and Ukraine puts de facto into perspective one’s analysis of the events in Kiev: since 1991 and its accession to the Atlantic Cooperation Council, Ukraine has concretely moved inexorably closer to the Alliance, without ever consulting the people.

Patrick Martin ■ For sheer cynical doubletalk, it is hard to top the statement issued by President Obama Monday, to mark the annual worldwide commemoration of the Holocaust, one of the greatest crimes in modern history. || The statement concludes, “let us recommit ourselves to the task of remembrance, and to always oppose anti-Semitism wherever it takes root. Together, we must give enduring meaning to the words ‘Never Again’.” The two-paragraph text is posted on the White House web site immediately below a statement issued the same day on US policy in Ukraine, announcing new sanctions against Russia for Moscow’s public opposition to the US-backed takeover of Ukraine by right-wing nationalist forces that hail the Ukrainian Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera. [...] Millions of Soviet citizens, including a million Jews, were slaughtered in Ukraine during the Nazi invasion and three years of occupation. Now the political heirs of those who collaborated with the Nazi genocide are working in lockstep with American imperialism.

Stephen Lendman: Holocaust Remembrance Day Duplicity ■ Never forget. Never again. - Hollow words. Other holocausts go unmentioned. Horrific ones exceed Hitler's final solution. || At 10AM local Israeli time Monday, sirens echoed across Israel. Normal activity stopped. A ritual silence followed. Radio and television stations observed it. Holocaust imagery is duplicitous. It rationalizes occupation harshness. It ignores Israeli state terrorism. It turns a blind eye to its decades of crimes of war, against humanity and slow-motion genocide. It promotes unique Jewish suffering. It characterizes Hitler's extermination policy as unparalleled. It's mindless of far greater genocides. During WW II, three times as many Slavs died as Jews. Native American genocide was the greatest ever by far. An estimated 100 million perished. Ritual slaughter continued for 500 years. Tens of millions of middle passage African slave lives lost don't matter. Nor do countless millions of corpses attesting to Washington's post-WW II barbarity alone.