By Robert Barsocchini
Just as the USA lied and said it was illegally invading Panama, Grenada, and other tiny, weak countries and barbarically massacring thousands of people to “protect US citizens”, Russia lied and said it re-accepted Crimea into Russia to “protect Russian-speaking people”.
The real reason for re-accepting Crimea was military strategy: to secure one of Russia’s twelve foreign military bases, the Black Sea fleet. (Russia has twelve foreign bases; China has zero; the USA has approximately a thousand in its global empire , the most of any group in history.)
Russia’s Black Sea fleet was used as a piece on the chess board to help deter and prevent the USA from committing overt violent aggression to overthrow and conquer one of Russia’s two Middle East allies, Syria (the other being Iran, though Maliki’s Iraq government is a new contender thanks to US war crimes, including aggression and genocide , against Iraq).
If protecting Russian-speaking people was the true top reason for re-accepting Crimea, then Russia would also staunchly and overtly support independence for Donetsk and Slavyansk, where civilians are being bombed by the fully US-backed, junta-integrated Ukrainian government’s military and neo-Nazi paramilitaries, to which Obama has given full diplomatic and material support, including tens of millions of our dollars, after assisting in the neo-Nazi led overthrow of the elected government of Ukraine.
Evidence illustrates that civilians are intentionally being targeted by US-backed Kiev. Italian Journalist Christian Malaparte :
I kept hearing about these things going on, that the Ukrainian army is targeting civilians and hitting civilian homes over and over. I really didn’t believe it. I thought it was just East propaganda, but once I came here…I see these enormous apartment buildings in the centre just bombarded over and over again.
However, even if we believe that civilian areas are being targeted by US-backed Ukrainian terrorists because rebels might be there, it is still terrorism and war crimes. No one thinks it is okay when Assad targets civilian areas because rebels might be there, even though Assad faces an aggressive and incomparably more brutal, US-backed threat, whereas Eastern Ukrainian regions are simply defending themselves.
Despite the proof of civilians and/or civilian areas being intentionally targeted by US-backed, Kiev-based terrorists, Russia has done very little, if anything, to support the “Russian speakers”, anti-fascist protesters, and others in the East of Ukraine.
This is not because Putin cares about Russian speakers in Crimea but not Russian speakers a few miles away. It is because of military strategy.
Putin and Russian leaders remember the USA’s Afghan Trap, set by Jimmy Carter and continued by Reagan, which drained and collapsed the Soviet Union.
From 1979 , and possibly from the mid 70s , the USA sponsored and trained Islamic jihadist terrorists, the Mujaheddin (holy warriors), and sent them into Afghanistan to commit terrorist atrocities against civilians and force the Soviet Union to invade the country to help its client government, under which Afghan women actually had rights .
Here is National Security Adviser to Jimmy Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski , on the USA’s sponsorship of terrorism, using Islamic jihadists, to provoke the Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan:
According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul.
That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap… The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.
In addition to training militants, the USA also propagandized Afghan children into lives of violent jihad by printing violent jihadist literature in the US and distributing it in Afghanistan to schoolchildren.
After many calls from Afghanistan for Soviet help against the US-sponsored terrorists, the Soviet Union finally invaded and fought a long, costly war against them that ultimately contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union, as well as the destruction of human and women’s rights in Afghanistan, as the USA then brought its terrorist extremists into power in the form of the Taliban.
Zbigniew Brzezinski is one of Obama’s mentors, and a major, open proponent of aggression against Russia.
Obama and the USA are currently repeating the Afghan Trap strategy in Ukraine, sponsoring terrorism, ethnic cleansing, and at least near-genocide there to do what Carter did and provoke Russia into invading and fighting a costly war that will weaken Russia and allow US propagandists to further demonize it and prepare the minds of the US population for new instances of US and Western aggression against Russia and, ultimately, as in Brzezinski’s stated vision, the US-forced break-up of Russia into small parts that can be easily dominated by the US.
If Putin continues to distance himself from the Russian-speakers in Eastern Ukraine, as he has done publicly, he is also at risk of losing support within Russia, where he enjoys far higher popularity than Obama does in the US. Putin’s distancing is also good news for the US and US-funded banking organizations like the IMF, which vowed to cut its austerity-based funding for Ukraine if the gas-rich Eastern regions were not re-taken by the Western military so they could be exploited by Western fossil fuel companies.
For crucial perspective, it must be noted that, contrary to what Western propaganda would have us believe, Eastern Ukraine has been integrated with Russia for hundreds of years as a defense against Western European imperialism, which (including its US offshoot) has been by far the most brutal and ruthless in dominating the globe:
In 1653 the greater portion of the population [of Ukraine] rebelled against dominantly Polish Catholic rule, and in January 1654 an assembly of the people (rada) voted at Pereyaslav to turn to Moscow, effectively joining the southeastern portion of the Polish-Lithuanian empire east of the Dnieper River to Russia. – Riasanovsky, Nicholas V. (1963). A History of Russia. Oxford University Press. p. 199.
Those are the exact regions that today have declared independence from the US-backed junta and Nazi-integrated terrorist forces in Western Ukraine.
Robert Barsocchini is an historical researcher, investigative journalist , and writer for the film industry.
07 July, 2014
Countercurrents.org