Putin shifts fronts in Syria and Ukraine

By Jackson Diehl

Throughout the summer, Russia’s forces in eastern Ukraine kept up a daily drumbeat of attacks on the Ukrainian army, inflicting significant casualties while avoiding a response by Western governments. On Sept. 1, following a new cease-fire, the guns suddenly fell silent. Optimists speculated that Vladi­mir Putin was backing down.

Then came the reports from Syria: Russian warplanes were overflying the rebel-held province of Idlib. Barracks were under construction at a new base. Ships were unloading new armored vehicles. Putin, it turns out, wasn’t retreating, but shifting fronts — and executing another of the in-your-face maneuvers that have repeatedly caught the Obama administration flat-footed.

It’s not yet clear what Russia’s intentions are in Syria — or, for that matter, in Ukraine, where it continues to deploy an estimated 9,000 regular troops and 240 tanks on top of more than 30,000 irregulars. Some analysts claim that a floundering Putin is meddling in the Middle East out of desperation because his bid for Ukraine has failed. But another way to see it is this: Putin’s use of force succeeded in inducing the West to accept his Ukraine demands — and he is trying to repeat his triumph in a second theater.

Nazis Triumph Over Communists in Ukraine

By Leonid Bershidsky, Bloomberg

It's goodbye Lenin, hello Nazi collaborators in Ukraine these days. Laws signed into effect by President Petro Poroshenko require the renaming of dozens of towns and hundreds of streets throughout the country to eliminate Soviet-era names. At the same time, Ukraine will begin to honor groups that helped Hitler exterminate Ukrainian Jews during World War II.

Ukrainians' desire for a European identity and a break with the country's Soviet past is Poroshenko's biggest political asset, but these latest steps should worry the country's Western allies.

A law Poroshenko signed May 15 bans all Soviet and Nazi symbols, even on souvenirs, and criminalizes "denying the criminal character" of both totalitarian regimes. It bans place names, monuments and plaques glorifying Soviet heroes, Soviet flags and communist slogans. Statues of Lenin have been toppled in many Ukrainian cities since the "revolution of dignity" last year, but the new law goes further.

Big regional centers such as Dnipropetrovsk (named after Grigory Petrovsky, who ran Ukraine in the 1920s and 1930s) and Kirovograd (bearing the name of Sergei Kirov, a Bolshevik leader whose popularity rivaled Stalin's, causing the latter to have him killed), as well as dozens of smaller towns, will need new names. Lots of towns have streets named after Lenin and Soviet saints, and these will also be erased in the next few months, creating lots of confusion for anyone using old maps (or Google maps, for that matter). Soviet emblems will be removed from buildings and bridges, murals in the subway will be altered.

Debaltsevo: life in ruins - in pictures

Reuters photographer Baz Ratner has visited the towns of Debaltseve and Vuhlehirsk in eastern Ukraine to document the destruction caused by fighting between pro-Russian and Ukrainian forces

More pics...

How can the West solve its Ukraine problem?

By Anatol Lieven, Professor, Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service in Qatar

Russia badly overplayed its hand last year when it tried to bring Ukraine into the Eurasian Union against the passionate opposition of many Ukrainians.

The European Union is now risking the same thing by trying to bring Ukraine into the West without reference to economic reality or the willingness of European publics to bear the enormous costs involved, and at a time when the EU itself is in deepening crisis.

Russia is suffering badly as a result of Western economic sanctions - but Ukraine's situation is far worse, with a predicted fall in GDP of 7% this year.

If this decline continues, the Ukrainian state will face collapse.

Throughout the 23 years since the end of the Soviet Union, too many members of the Western media and policy worlds have ignored or misrepresented key aspects of the Ukrainian-Russian economic relationship.

This allowed them in turn to ignore crucial features of the economic balance of power in Ukraine between Russia and the West.

In their zeal to denounce Russia for putting pressure on Ukraine over gas supplies, Western commentators usually neglected to mention that, through cheap gas and lenient payment terms, Russia was in fact subsidising the Ukrainian economy to the tune of several billion dollars each year - many times the total of Western aid during this period.

This allowed the same commentators not to address the obvious question of whether Western states would be willing to pay these billions in order to take Ukraine out of Russia's sphere of influence and into that of the West.

The New York Times Explains Why Kiev Sniper Massacre Was Likely a False Flag

-Describes Yanukovich as a flabby leader whose willingness to appease his opponents demoralized his police
-Means it's not very believable he would order a massacre, or that the police would carry it out for him

By Mark Nicholas

Last Sunday The New York Times had an in-depth article on the overthrow of Yanukovich in Ukraine.

That is if you can call in-depth an article that is full of omissions. Which you can't. So let's just say it was a very LONG article.

We should still be thankful for it, however, because it reminded us of the real Yanukovich.

This was a guy who took it upon himself to negotiate an association treaty with the EU and came within inches of signing it.

Yet in the western Maidan narrative he is cast as a pro-Russian authoritarian hardliner who would rather send out police to pile up bodies of demonstrators than let Ukrainians have democracy.

In reality Yanukovich was a centrist who approximated the policies of pro-western Ukraine politicians to the point where he had lost the active support of eastern Ukraine. Moreover during the Maidan standoff he proved himself an indecisive and timid leader.

New York Times Exposed: Finally the Truth about Ukraine and Putin

By Patrick Smith (Salon.com)

After a prolonged propaganda campaign, a rare breath of fresh air from The Washington Post, Foreign Policy and Henry Kissinger

Well, well, well. Gloating is unseemly, especially in public, but give me this one, will you?

It has been a long and lonely winter defending the true version of events in Ukraine, but here comes the sun.

We now have open acknowledgment in high places that Washington is indeed responsible for this mess, the prime mover, the “aggressor,” and finally this term is applied where it belongs. NATO, once again, is revealed as causing vastly more trouble than it has ever prevented.

Washington, it is now openly stated, has been wrong, wrong, wrong all along.

The commentaries to be noted do not take on the media, but I will, and in language I use advisedly. With a few exceptions they are proven liars, liars, liars — not only conveying the official version of events but willfully elaborating on it off their own bats.

Memo to the New York Times’ Moscow bureau: Vicky Nuland, infamous now for desiring sex with the European Union, has just FedExed little gold stars you can affix to your foreheads, one for each of you.

How Russia outmanoeuvred the west in Ukrainian finance

By John Dizard

“F*** the EU!”
Victoria Nuland, US assistant secretary of state, commenting on Ukrainian
policy on her mobile phone, as recorded and publicly distributed by the Russian
special services in February 2014

“Treason is a matter of dates.”
Attributed to Prince Charles Maurice
de Talleyrand-Perigord, drawing up European borders at the Congress of Vienna, 1815

The quality of US representation in eastern Europe seems to have declined, sadly, since the days of George Kennan and George Marshall in the 1940s and 1950s. European diplomacy, though, appears to have maintained the tradition of ethical flexibility that Prince Talleyrand embodied.
Whatever your opinion of the morality of Russia’s intervention in Ukraine, or whether the Putin government’s larger strategy will have more gains than losses for the Russian state, there is no doubt the Russians have tactically outmanoeuvred the US and Europe in the financial markets. I am told the Pentagon is already studying Russia’s financial market moves in Ukraine to see how similar tactics might be used in future military crises.

Rethinking the cost of Western intervention in Ukraine

By Katrina vanden Heuvel

Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, recently cautioned Americans against intervention fatigue: “I think there is too much of ‘Oh, look, this is what intervention has wrought’ ... one has to be careful about overdrawing lessons.” Say what? Given the calamities wrought in Iraq, Libya and now Ukraine, one would think that a fundamental rethinking and learning of lessons is long overdue. The United States needs a sober look at the actual costs of supposed good intentions divorced from realism.

Power’s comments come as Ukraine marks the one-year anniversary of the beginning of the Maidan Square demonstrations in Kiev, surely an occasion for rethinking and changing course. One year after the United States and Europe celebrated the February coup that ousted the corrupt but constitutionally elected president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, liberal and neoconservative interventionists have much to answer for. Crimea has been annexed by Russia. More than 4,000 people have lost their lives in the civil war in Ukraine, with more than 9,000 wounded and nearly a million displaced. This month, the Kiev government acknowledged the de facto partition of Ukraine by announcing it was ending all funding for government services and social benefits including pensions and freezing all bank accounts in the eastern districts that are in revolt. The Ukrainian economy is near collapse with nowhere near the billions needed to rebuild it at hand. How Kiev or the cut-off eastern regions will provide heating and electricity to their beleaguered people as winter approaches remains to be seen.

The European Union and the United States have imposed sanctions on Russia, with threats of more to come. Many observers have rightly suggested that we are witnessing the beginnings of a new Cold War. U.S. and NATO forces are being dispatched to buck up the purportedly nervous Baltic nations, now part of NATO’s security guarantee. Meanwhile, the sanctions have added to Europe’s economic woes. Vladi­mir Putin’s popularity has soared within Russia, even as the nation’s economy has suffered. European unity has begun to fray, with several countries worried about the effect of sanctions on their own economies, and officials questioning the sanctions’ effectiveness.

"Kiev will join Novorossiya in 2017"

By Yury Kot Journalist, social activist, UKRAINA.Ru Author

"It’s my 10-page forecast of Ukraine’s near future, based on facts and other things I can so far speak about only allegorically," journalist Yury Kot writes.

Making predictions is a thankless job. The most dangerous part of it is the temptation to indulge in wishful thinking or self-deception. So instead of being guided by my wishes or fears, I will try to remain unemotional and impartial. I’ll only stick to the facts and possible scenarios for what comes next.

Two landmark events occurred over the weekend, which will shape the course of events not only in Ukraine, but throughout the world: a G20 meeting in Australia and a protest rally in Bratislava. The first witnessed some unpleasant but remarkable events involving Vladimir Putin. The second was attended by Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. And then the two men each made statements, as an afterthought. In an interview with the German TV channel ARD, Putin warned the world about the danger of rising neo-fascism in Ukraine, while Poroshenko declared that Ukraine was prepared to war with Russia.

These two statements were preceded by events in Australia and Slovakia. Thus, cold and danger were in the air on the warm continent, so thick you could cut them with a knife. The US and its puppets (now it’s clear where the trillions of dollars went, turning the US into a giant debtors’ prison for ordinary Americans) staged a “show bashing” for the leader of the Russian world. They acted downright boorishly, doing all they could, first, to anger the imperturbable and enigmatically smiling head of the Russian Federation, and second, to endear themselves to the host with his million-dollar smile.