The Ukraine: The Truth behind the Western media propaganda campaign

Well the Ukraine Drama has really gone through the roof this past week.

To recap:

Thursday Putin sends message to Poroshenko for a cease fire and the removal of heavy artillery
Sunday Ukraine bombs Donetsk with heavy artillery
Monday Poroshenko legislates the addition of 50,000 more military draftees, bringing the total to 250,000 men conscripted
Tuesday Ukraine states Russians on the border- Russia reply's: "Rubbish"
Wednesday Poroshenko Speaks at Davos and says:
.....Russia has invaded Ukraine
.....We need more money....
Wednesday NATO demands that Russian troops leave Ukraine
Thursday Ukraine blows up trolly and trolly stop killing 13 people
Thursday Ukraine army retreats from Donetsk airport
Thursday US sends trainers and  armored vehicles to Ukraine
Thursday NATO states increased Russian involvement in Ukraine

I am posting three articles that I read today, below, that bring a little bit more clarity and insight into what's going on, and some back ground information.

First up, while I've never been a "Salon" fan, this article contains enough truth to get people thinking (at the very least, one would hope).

Salon Original article HERE

Wednesday, Jan 21, 2015 12:00 AM MST

Distortions, lies and omissions: The New York Times won’t tell you the real story behind Ukraine, Russian economic collapse

International papers will cover America's role in the world honestly. Only our best paper willingly blinds itself

Patrick L. Smith

•  

Vladimir Putin (Credit: AP/Mark Lennihan/Photo montage by Salon)

A note arrived a few days ago from one of my best informants in Europe. He had just met across a hotel dining table with a senior German executive, and the topic quickly turned to the crisis in Ukraine and the sanctions regime Washington has imposed on Russia.
I can do no better than give you the pertinent passage in the note:

“… I spoke … breakfast time in Europe… with the head of one of the largest companies in Germany. This declaration was one of the first items he mentioned. I took notes—because it is one of my clients—and here is what he said: ‘It is urgent for Europe to bring Obama and the people making the decisions behind him back to reality. If not, this will spiral first into a financial collapse, which will slam into all of Europe, and then who knows where it goes after that? Everywhere, far-right nationalist forces are building. Look at the last U.S. Congressional elections, and think what is coming. Will America ever have had a more nationalist Congress?  Le Pen would be right at home in this crowd. The course we are on now is folly.  Can’t they see that?’”

I wish I could say the German exec’s question is a good one, but the grim answer is too obvious. They can see nothing in Washington. We witness the single most reckless, destructive foreign policy this administration has yet devised, comparable in magnitude to Bush II’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003.
President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry wanted Middle East peace to stand as their legacy on the foreign side. Now they propose restored relations with Cuba as the bronze monument. Forget about it. The devastation of ties with a global power, the dissolution of Ukraine and very possibly the ruination of Europe’s barely beating economic recovery will be what we live with after this administration makes its exit.
I am awestruck as news of recent events unfolds. Ukraine is more than an economic, political and military mess: It is a major humanitarian tragedy now. As the German CEO wants to know, how can we possibly arm neo-Nazis in Ukraine while right-wing extremists and anti-immigration atavists rise all over Europe?
The body blows the State Department and Treasury are dealing Russia in response to the Ukraine crisis—as precipitated by State, of course—would be irresponsible under any circumstances for the risks they carry. In the current global environment, this starts to shape up as monomania.

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Thoughtful readers point out that this is a standoff between two nuclear powers, and, indeed, this has to be on our minds. But for the moment, and thank goodness, that is in the background. The very immediate menace is a global economic calamity that could make the 2008 crisis look like a blip on the chart.
Last week Fitch, the credit-rating agency, downgraded Russia’s status to BBB, putting it a few notches away from junk status. This is hardball, we had better recognize: You cannot shove the world’s No. 8 economy into the gutter and expect it to land there alone. A lot of suffering beyond Ukraine’s borders, where it is awful enough already, is frighteningly near.
Before I go any further: No, you are not reading much about this in the American press. You can read about it in the German press, the French press and elsewhere on the Continent, in the Czech press, the Russian press (obviously), some of the British press, and even the Chinese press. But all those journalists and all their readers are in a propaganda bubble, the world’s greatest newspaper wants us to know.
It is crowded inside the propaganda bubble and lonely here outside of it, it seems. To this topic we will return.

* * *

At year-end I predicted in this space that one of two key relationships stood to fracture in the course of this year: These were either Europe’s ties with Russia or America’s with Europe. I continue to think the latter would be the breach that will leave us all better off.
In my read Washington has drastically overplayed its hand with the Europeans from the first round of sanctions onward. Now those overly courteous Europeans are at last taking the kidskin gloves off. We had hints of this before the holidays, when Matteo Renzi, the Italian premier, said at a European summit in Brussels, “Absolutely no to more sanctions.”
Now François Hollande asserts that, no, Moscow has no desire to annex eastern Ukraine, no, there is no need for more sanctions, and yes, sanctions now in place must be lifted if, as Hollande and other European leaders continue to anticipate, what you may read notwithstanding.
This is what it sounds like inside the propaganda bubble, where people such as Renzi and the president of France live and breathe.
Alas, you never know whom you are going to bump into inside the bubble. A couple of weeks ago Heinz Fischer, Austria’s president, rejected sanctions—past and to come—as well as the E.U.’s association deal with Ukraine. The latter, of course, is the holy covenant at the heart of the Ukraine crisis:
“The approach that more and more sanctions should be implemented against Russia until it is weak enough to forcefully accept the E.U.’s own political objectives is a mistake,” Fischer said in an interview with Wirtschaftsblatt, Vienna’s financial daily. “A serious crisis in Russia and an economic collapse would only create more problems.”
And on the E.U.-Ukraine pact: “It was recognized only at the last moment that it was a real ordeal for Ukraine to choose between the E.U. offer and the [comprehensive bailout] offer from Vladimir Putin, which was better suited to the realities faced by Ukraine in the fall of 2013. Ukraine needs to be free to build its own relationships with both Europe and Russia.”
With these kinds of comments in view, it emerges now that Europeans have been seduced. Beginning with the Danes at yearend, they have one by one complained that the intent was never to devastate the huge economy next door but to win Russia’s cooperation in Ukraine.
Washington’s ambitions have been grander from the first. This is the context of Victoria Nuland’s infamous “F the E.U.” remark last February. And we now witness the love act as Nuland and her colleagues at State seem to like it. Rough sex after the seduction, let us say.
The same disregard Washington displays toward Europe seems to be the case in Ukraine itself. The news coming from Kiev starts to make Greece look like the Klondike. The economy shrank 7.5 percent last year and will recede at least as much this. No one knows. It could shrink as much as 10 percent.
Here is what Roland Hinterkoerner, a thoughtful analyst at RBS Asia-Pacific, the Royal Bank of Scotland’s Hong Kong outpost, had to say about Ukraine in a recent economic report:
“The country is clinically dead…. There is nothing government or the central bank can do to stop the decline. The population is being pushed further and further into poverty. Food prices are up 25 percent and rent, electricity, gas and water by 34 percent…. This is the picture of a Ukraine that is looking an economic collapse in the eye. But its government is still attempting to channel money into the military to fend off the big bear’s aggression…. The danger for Ukraine is not Russia. It is its own demise….”
Bloomberg published an interesting report earlier this month on Ukraine’s external position. Read it here. The news in it is that Ukraine’s 2017 bond is now selling at 58 cents, down from par ($1) a year ago. Translation: The markets are now pricing in an across-the-board default. Kiev currently pays a yield of 35 percent on its debt.
Connect a few dots in the Bloomberg piece. Further tranches of the IMF’s $17 billion bailout, launched last April, are now blocked until Kiev makes more and very deep cuts in public spending.
O.K., $17 billion from the IMF, once the government savages its budget. Against this, Kiev has payments of $10 billion in debt service alone due this year—that is interest, not principal. With principal, Bloomberg puts the figure at $14 billion, and an additional $10 billion is due next year. It is not clear it can cover these payments even with the IMF funds.
Do you see what is going on here? The IMF’s bailout is not marked for Ukrainian social services or any other benefit to the citizenry. All that is about to be taken away, in the neoliberal style. The bailout money goes to Kiev and back out again to the Western financial institutions holding Ukrainian debt. In effect, debt held by private-sector creditors is transferred to the IMF, which uses it to leverage Ukraine into a free-market model via its standard conditionality: No austerity, no dough.
Now you know why the new finance minister in Kiev is an American apparatchik with long experience in the Hillary-era State Department. Now you know what Washington means when it uses the words “democracy” and “freedom.”
What makes all this go down so bitterly is the atrocious news coming out of Ukraine these days. Last week a long-scheduled new round of ceasefire talks, set to take place in Minsk, collapsed when the Poroshenko government refused to participate. Why?
Well, your source of information probably told you the reasons for Kiev’s abrupt withdrawal were “unclear.” DPA, the German news agency, was alone so far as I can make out in explaining it thus:
“Former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma, who represents the government at the talks, had demanded that the separatists send their top leaders—Alexander Zakharchenko and Igor Plotnitsky—instead of envoys, but the separatists refused.”
Absolutely horse manure. These people will make any possible excuse not to progress toward a political solution even as Poroshenko professes to desire one.
In my read, Poroshenko has no choice. Once again, I quote a recent note from a close observer in Europe, and I will leave it as it arrived:
“The presid. of Ukr cannot sue for peace, whatever he says, as the extreme right nationalists will not allow it…. So the only other way to get some resolution is to provoke war with Russia, which would then give cover to the U.S.-led blockade to move to another level. The state of the Ukr economy and politics are such that they desperately need a clash with Russia to draw the US / EU in more deeply….”
Proof of the pudding being in the eating, simultaneous with Ukraine’s withdrawal from the Minsk talks, it launched a new military offensive in eastern regions. Day to day now, the airport at Donetsk, or what is left of it, changes hands as the body count rises toward 5,000.
Sure enough, Kiev now charges (yet again) that Russian forces have crossed the border in support of the Ukrainian rebels. A few points here: (1) It may be true this time. (2) If it is the Russians cannot be rationally blamed. (3) We had better look very closely at who is waging Kiev’s new campaign. (4) It is unlikely on the way to impossible that Kiev would act without direction from Geoffrey Pyatt, the American ambassador to Ukraine (and the other end of Nuland’s porny telephone call last February).
It has been more or less evident for some time that extreme-right nationalists have been key to Kiev’s military strategy as an advance guard and as shock troops in the streets of eastern Ukraine’s cities. Here is a Facebook entry posted the other day on Voice of Ukraine by Right Sector USA, which reps for said right-wing group in the States:
“As promised, here’s the news you are probably aware of by now—the combat has moved into Donetsk. The Right Sector and the 93^rd Mechanized Brigade have wedged themselves into the city and continue to fight. Separatists are suffering heavy losses and keep running away. Despite this, the support is still needed, so we need you to share [this info] for maximum resonance and forcing the authorities to act immediately…. Please offer your support by sharing and sending prayers to our heroes! Glory to Ukraine!”
Horse’s mouth. And there is worse from the same source. Considering the cynical American role in creating and now worsening the Ukraine crisis, the following is a source of shame.
On New Year’s Day members of Svoboda, the extreme-right party that many neo-Nazis count their political home, held a candle-lit parade through Kiev to mark the 106th anniversary of Stepan Bandera’s birth. Bandera was the Jew-hating, Russian-hating, Pole-hating Third Reich collaborator, assassin and terrorist now honored as an icon of Ukrainian nationalism.
Look at the video, provided by Liveleak. Listen to the crazed chanting. Czech President Milos Zeman did, and the images reminded him of similar scenes during Hitler’s occupation of Czechoslovakia. Here is what Zeman said: “There is something wrong with Ukraine.”
Here is what the E.U. said: Nothing.
Here is what the State Department said: Nothing.
Here is what the American press reported: Nothing.
There is yet more, per usual with this bunch in Kiev. The day after the neo-Nazi parade Liveleak posted a video, with transcript, of a lengthy interview Channel 5 TV in Kiev conducted with a Ukrainian soldier. Poroshenko owned the station until he became president last year.
The station did the interview but killed it: “This interview was not aired, because the Ukrainian Government decided that it wasn’t appropriate for their purposes.” This is to put it mildly.
Forget about neo- or crypto- or any of that. This “trooper,” as the transcript unfortunately calls this man, is a right-in-the-open Nazi, worse than the most committed skeptic might have conjured. Ukraine is even better than Europe: “Only gays, transvestites and other degenerates live there.” Then: “When we have liberated Ukraine, we will go to Europe under our banners and revive all national socialist organizations there.”
All sorts of talk about “the purification of the nation,” a phrase Hitler liked, “a strong state,” who can stay in Ukraine and who must go. Now comes repellent language, readers, but we should all know of it:
“First of all, we ought to oust, and if they do not wish to leave, then cut the throats of all of the Muscovites, or kikes—we will exterminate all of them. Our principle is ‘One God, one country, one nation’”—this also from Hitler. “As far as the current government is concerned, can you see that they are the same scum? Poroshenko is a kike….”
The blood boils. And it boils over with the haunting knowledge that American officials support these people. Beyond the sewer consciousness and language, there is the apparent danger: These people have the Kiev government backed into a corner, unable to behave responsibly.

* * *

This is my report from the propaganda bubble. And I had better explain where this thought originates.
Earlier this month the New York Times published a lengthy takeout purporting to clear a lot of fetid air. This, at last, was to be the definitive piece as to just what happened when Viktor Yanukovych, the Ukrainian president until last February, left office and then left Ukraine.
It was not a coup, two Times correspondents took thousands of words to tell us. It was something closer to a legitimate political defeat. “An investigation by The New York Times into the final hours of Mr. Yanukovych’s rule… shows that the president was not so much overthrown as cast adrift by his own allies, and that Western officials were just as surprised by the meltdown as anyone else.”
Part 1 of this nonsense.  The final hours bit is sheer ruse. Giving the impression of exhaustive reporting—it was hardly an “investigation”—the narrow time frame excludes all context and excuses a vast exercise in omission.
Part 2. Yanukovych’s allies indeed deserted him because the streets were filling with armed putchists and Yanukovych’s people understood, accurately, that their lives were in danger. Here we have a classic distinction without a difference.
Part 3. If Western officials were at all surprised, it was at the speed of the events they—or the Americans, at least—set in motion. There were no other surprises.
Interestingly, the Times correspondents quote Geoffrey Pyatt, the American ambassador then and now and Nuland’s sidekick. In the infamous telephone call, Pyatt was taking orders as to which Ukrainian puppet ought to be directed to do what.
No mention of the Nuland-Pyatt exchanges? No thought that Pyatt may be a compromised source with a conflict of interest the size of the State Department? Shame on you, correspondents, although this little bit of leaving out is hardly the worst of it.
The objectives of this extensive piece, splashed on page one a couple of Sundays back, were two so far as I can make out. One, to salvage the official American narrative in the face of excellent reporting refuting it and a crumbling consensus within the policy cliques, both noted in recent columns. Two, to wash a lot of soiled hands at the Times.
But the big takeout—never mind the quality, feel the weight, as correspondents sometimes quip—demonstrates nothing of any use, unless it is that the Times has finally realized it has dug itself into a hole on Ukraine and cannot get out.
That bubble bit came this way:

Russia attributed Mr. Yanukovych’s ouster to what it portrays as a violent, ‘neo-fascist’ coup supported and even choreographed by the West and dressed up as a popular uprising….  Few outside the Russian propaganda bubble ever seriously entertained the Kremlin’s line. But almost a year after the fall of Mr. Yanukovych’s government, questions remain about how and why it collapsed so quickly and completely.

I love the quotation marks around “neo-fascist.” These people never give up. Consider this passage against those above concerning the recent doings in Kiev. Nobody outside the Russian propaganda bubble, whatever this may consist of, has any need to “entertain the Kremlin line” to entertain the truth. How dare these self-serving hacks suggest otherwise?
In my analysis, the Times — and all the media that never say anything until the Times says it — got caught holding the bag this time. Washington launched off on a reckless adventure, it is not coming good in any dimension, all manner of distortions, lies and omissions are required to sustain it, and the Times thought it was business as usual. Now they are stuck. Good money after bad at this point, but the Times has a lot of it to spend yet.

 http://www.osce.org/om/135686

Weekly update from the OSCE Observer Mission at Russian Checkpoints Gukovo and Donetsk based on information as of 10:00 (Moscow time), 21 January 2015

Kamensk-Shakhtinsky, Russian Federation 22 January 2015

excerpt:

Military movement
At the two BCPs the OM did not observe military movement, apart from vehicles of the Russian Federation border guard service.



http://russia-insider.com/en/2015/01/22/2636

Ex-Czech President Václav Klaus: Crimea Has Always Belonged to Russia

• "the solution can only be found in negotiations, a compromise. Too bad that the political leadership in Ukraine is not able to do that."
• "For me, the conflict is 'Europe and America against Russia,' Ukraine is only a passive instrument in this dispute."
• "But to put the country before the choice of either East or West is to destroy it."
• "It is quite clear that the Crimea was not part of Ukraine, you know it. The Crimea has always belonged to Russia."
• "Without Maidan there would have been no annexation of the Crimea."

http://russia-insider.com/en/2015/01/22/2612

Ukraine - IMF Admits Failure, Scraps Plan A, Goes for Plan B

IMF now admits original aid plan has failed. Has been forced to get behind the more generous Soros Plan. Question is can it work without Russia

Alexander Mercouris

opinion/analysis 13 hours ago

Soros meets the Ukrainians

As the article below from the Financial Times shows, in the face of pending default the West has finally given up on the financial plan for Ukraine it drew up last year.
Briefly, a few weeks ago the Ukrainian government and the IMF admitted that Ukraine needed another $15 billion to get through the next few months.
Attempts to find this money with the western governments have proven unsuccessful.
The US was only prepared to provide a further $1 billion in loan guarantees in addition to the $1 billion in loan guarantees it provided Ukraine last year.
The European Commission has proposed the EU give Ukraine a further 1.8 billion euros.This has not yet been approved by the European Council (the EU’s highest body) where the proposal is likely to meet resistance.
In proposing it the European Commission has said it is as far as the EU can go. A larger amount would drain the EU’s reserves to dangerous levels leaving them short in the event of a crisis.
Lastly, Germany is providing Ukraine with 500 million euros, but this a ring fenced loan for rehabilitation of the eastern Ukrainian regions devastated by the war and cannot be used for the benefit of the Ukrainian economy as a whole.
These sums come nowhere close to the $15 billion the IMF says Ukraine needs.
With default looming the US financier George Soros flew to Kiev and has come up with a plan. This calls for the IMF to drop its existing plan and come up with a new more generous one. At the same time Ukraine’s private western creditors are supposed to voluntarily agree to a cut back or a “haircut” on their loans.
Christine Lagarde, the head of the IMF, says she in principle supports this plan. The details will be worked out over the course of further negotiations that will drag on through January and February.
The first point to make about this plan is that it is an admission that the IMF plan decided on last spring has failed. Many commentators such as Eric Kraus and Elliott Auckland, who both write for RI, always predicted that it would. That is now official.
The second point is that this plan looks like a complicated way to avoid talking to Ukraine’s biggest creditor, which is Russia.
Attempts by the US and the UK governments to find a way for Ukraine to default “legally” on its Russian loans have failed following legal advice that it can’t be done.
Since neither the Ukrainians nor the Western powers want to talk to the Russians about a formal debt restructuring of Ukraine’s debts, they seem to be trying to get around this by adopting Soros’s plan of increasing the amount of IMF lending to Ukraine whilst getting Ukraine’s private western creditors to take a bigger hit than they would otherwise have done.
The third point about this plan is that if the Russians are not party to it then the amount Ukraine owes the Russians is unchanged and the Ukrainians must pay the Russians the same amount they pay now, as the loans say.
It will be interesting to see whether Ukraine’s private creditors agree to the sort of voluntary haircut they are being asked to make. Many of them may not be happy to agree to a haircut so that Ukraine and its Western supporters don’t have to talk to the Russians.
They may very well balk at a plan whose effect would be to privilege loans Ukraine owes Russia over loans Ukraine owes them. No doubt there will be a lot of arms twisting to get them to agree but it is likely the negotiations will be tough.
More to the point is how the Russians will react to all this. Over the last few weeks they have pointedly reminded everyone that the $3 billion loan they extended to Ukraine at the beginning of last year is now due and that Naftogaz, Ukrainian national gas company, owes them $2.4 billion.
They have also said that on 1st April 2015 the discount on the price of gas Ukraine currently gets from Russia will end. Following a cabinet meeting on 21st January 2014 Russia’s Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev pointedly said Russia is not prepared to go on supporting Ukraine’s economy indefinitely.
In a sense the Russians stand to come out of this well whatever happens.  Since they are not being asked to agree to a haircut, as Ukraine’s biggest creditor if the IMF steps up financial support to Ukraine a lot (perhaps most) of the money will end up in Russia.
There has to be a question however about how realistic this plan is.
Russia is Ukraine’s biggest creditor and key trading partner. It is Russia that currently supplies Ukraine with the gas, electricity and coal Ukraine needs to survive. The previous IMF plan failed precisely because it did not involve Russia.
Refusing to talk to Russia makes no economic sense. As the situation in Ukraine worsens over the coming weeks it may prove impossible to avoid talking to Russia to get Russia's agreement to a debt restructuring if there is to be a realistic chance of Ukraine avoiding default. That is the reality, however disagreeable to some in Ukraine and the West it may be.