US/NATO War on Russia

[Ralf Anders]

I quite liked the movie version of "In the Thick of It" and enjoyed some episodes of "The Mitchell and Webb look" -- otherwise I am not up to date as far as political satire in the UK is concerned.

I couldn't really believe what I saw when the guys from "Die Anstalt" did what they did on 29 April concerning Ukraine and the reporting of our media. At one point Uthoff, playing a cynic and pondering the initiation of a new peace movement, stated: "Whatever it takes to make Josef Joffe puke on his keyboard, I'm with it." I have been watching German television for decades and, believe me, this was a historic moment. Wagner and Uthoff were directly attacking some of the most influential journalists in the country in front of millions of viewers and they didn't take prisoners.

Uthoff's target was this person: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Joffe

As I said, they were sued by two of the most prominent journalists from DIE ZEIT (Joffe, Bittner) for very minor inconsistencies. Since then, the programme, not surprisingly, seems not to have merited a single review in a major newspaper.

You can watch "Die Anstalt" here (in German):
[URL="http://www.zdf.de/ZDFmediathek/kanaluebersicht/2078314#/kanaluebersicht/2078314"]
http://www.zdf.de/ZDFmediathek/kanal...rsicht/2078314[/URL]

The incriminated scene is not available on this site but is still available on the internet of course (in German):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvTWo5ZGcNA

Ralf

P.S. Thanks to all who tried to help me with the paragraphs. It worked as soon as I disabled "No Script." But now Facebook collects my data...

It's a strange thing Ralf. In the UK where we've had a very long history of political satire dating back well over a hundred years, there is not a single TV programme these days that gets close. There are, admittedly a few publications around still, like Private Eye - but even that seems to me to have lost its cutting edge. It's a real loss imo.

[David Guyatt]

I see from your Wiki link that Josse is a Trilat and has a long Vitae of other important elite American connections. Enough said, as we know where that all leads.

[David Guyatt]

Interesting that the Indy wants to relate this to the "Ukraine Crisis". What the article avoids mentioning is exactly where over the Balric Sea this incident took place? Was it close to Russian airspace - it was a Swedish surveillance aircraft after all - in which case the provocation may have been from Sweden not Russia? The facts remains that it is just not possible to trust the spin our media engage in nowadays.

Ukraine crisis: Russian fighter jet passes 'within feet' of Swedish surveillance plane over Baltic Sea



Swedish authorities claimed Russian aircraft have been acting 'aggressively'

LIZZIE DEARDEN

Sunday 05 October 2014

A Russian fighter jet has passed within feet of a Swedish plane over the Baltic Sea in an "unusually provocative" move, according to authorities.

[B][B]Sweden's signals intelligence agency the FRA, also known as the National Defence Radio Establishment, and the country's armed forces have documented an increase in Russian military activity in the region.[/B][/B]
[B][B]The FRA released a statement on Thursday saying Russian fighter jets had approached Swedish surveillance aircraft "on several occasions" over the past six months.[/B][/B]
[B][B]A photograph of a Russian Su-27 fighter jet has been released, appearing to show it within just feet of the Swedish plane and rotated to show its armoury of missiles.[/B][/B]
[B][B]Lena Nyberg, director of the FRA, said: "In general, the military activity over the Baltic Sea has had seen a noticeable increase in recent years.[/B][/B]
[B][B]"Among other things, it has now taken the form of Russian fighter jets on several occasions behaving in a new and more provocative way."[/B][/B]
[B][B]The deputy director of operations for Sweden's armed forces, Anders Grenstad, said Russian activity in the area was being closely monitored.[/B][/B]
[B][B]"They are now showing behaviour that we haven't seen in previous years," he added.[/B][/B]
[B][B]"It's markedly more aggressive flying now."[/B][/B]
[B][B]The news follows revelations last month that two Russian Su-24 fighters had been detected flying in Swedish airspace to the south of Öland, sparking outrage from Swedish politicians.[/B][/B]
[B][B]The FRA gathers intelligence from the Baltic Sea to monitor the actions of foreign militaries and support the Swedish Air Force.[/B][/B]
[B][B]Russia and Sweden have previously been involved in several disputes in the region, most notably in the so-called Catalina affair of 1952.[/B][/B]
[B][B]Russian fighter planes shot down an unarmed Swedish aircraft over international waters, killing the eight crew on board, then targeted a plane sent to search for it days later.[/B][/B]
[B][B]The Soviet Government denied any knowledge of the attacks until 1991, despite the wreckage of one plane being found with shrapnel from Russian MiG ammunition.[/B][/B]
[B][B]Russia has not commented on Sweden's allegations.[/B][/B]

[Magda Hassan]

Sweden is nothing more than a US poodle now. Russia has territory on the Baltic and every reason to be there just as Sweden and Denmark and Finland do.

[Paul Rigby]

[video=youtube_share;-uSlFkUwtDk]http://youtu.be/-uSlFkUwtDk[/video]

[David Guyatt]

Numerous media stories over past months have western pols accussing Russia of supplying Ukrainian separatists with weapons. It has been one of the features of Ukrainian war reporting and the making of the "evil Putin" angle that the west has developed.

However, it now is revealed that this hasn't been the case at all. Vast Russian stockpiles were left in Ukraine when the Russians withdrew back in the 1990's.

And the west knows this. See for yourself.

From the MailOnline, March 2014:

Flashback: Senator Obama pushed bill that helped destroy more than 15,000 TONS of ammunition, 400,000 small arms and 1,000 anti-aircraft missiles in Ukraine

• Obama traveled to Ukraine with Sen. Dick Lugar in 2005 just seven months after he became a senator, touring surplus weapons stockpiles
  
• Most of the small arms and ammunition were left over when Soviets withdrew from Eastern bloc nations, and later dumped in Ukraine
  
• The two senators secured U.S. funding to help destroy the weapons instead of leaving them intact
  
  
• Ukraine exported more than 700,000 small arms in 2004-2007, including 101,000 each to Libya and the UK, and 260,000 to the U.S.
  
• But most of the ammunition stockpiles crucial for keeping a standing army battle-ready were destroyed
  
• Ukraine is in a staring match with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has designs on recapturing portions of the former Soviet nation
  
  

By DAVID MARTOSKO, U.S. POLITICAL EDITOR
PUBLISHED: 06:58, 5 March 2014 | UPDATED: 07:06, 5 March 2014
[URL="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2573557/Flashback-Senator-Obama-pushed-destruction-15-000-TONS-ammunition-400-000-small-arms-1-000-anti-aircraft-missiles-Ukraine.html#comments"]

56View comments

[/URL]
As a U.S. senator, Barack Obama won $48 million in federal funding to help Ukraine destroy thousands of tons of guns and ammunition weapons which are now unavailable to the Ukrainian army as it faces down Russian President Vladimir Putin during his invasion of Crimea.
In August 2005, just seven months after his swearing-in, Obama traveled to Donetsk in Eastern Ukraine with then-Indiana Republican Senator Dick Lugar, touring a conventional weapons site.
The two met in Kiev with President Victor Yushchenko, making the case that an existing Cooperative Threat Reduction Program covering the destruction of nuclear weapons should be expanded to include artillery, small arms, anti-aircraft weapons, and conventional ammunition of all kinds.
After a stopover in London, the senators returned to Washington and declared that the U.S. should devote funds to speed up the destruction of more than 400,000 small arms, 1,000 anti-aircraft missiles, and more than 15,000 tons of ammunition.
SCROLL DOWN FOR VIDEO



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Then-Senator Barack Obama inspected decommissioned artillery shells in a warehouse in Donetsk, Ukraine, and argued that Congress should allocate money to speed up the destruction of thousands of tons more




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Obama, then a junior senator on the Foreign Relations Committee, worked with then-Republican committee chair Dick Lugar (L) to oversee destruction of Soviet-era war materiel through an agreement that Lugar had brokered years earlier, covering only nuclear weapons

Photographs from the trip show Obama inspecting a plant where Soviet-era artillery shells and shoulder-fired missiles were collecting dust, leftovers dumped in Ukraine after the USSR withdrew from Eastern bloc nations after the once-mighty communist nation fell apart.
The United Nations had already identified some 7 million small arms and light weapons, and 2 million tons of conventional ammunition, warehoused in more than 80 weapons depots spread across the country.
Many of the artillery shells shown in photographs from Donetsk, multiple weapons experts told MailOnline, would be the same types of ammunition required to repel advancing Russian divisions as they advanced to the west, had they not been destroyed.

Two experts said the ammunition, particularly small-arms rounds, would have been useful to train Ukraine's armed forces and million-strong reserves.

'Vast stocks of conventional munitions and military supplies have accumulated in Ukraine,' Obama said in am August 30, 2005 statement from Donetsk. 'Some of this stockpile dates from World War I and II, yet most dates from Cold War buildup and the stocks left behind by Soviet withdrawals from East Germany, the Czech Republic, Hungry and Poland.'
'We need to eliminate these stockpiles for the safety of the Ukrainian people and people around world, by keeping them out of conflicts around the world.'
More than a year later, President George W. Bush signed into law a proposal authored by Obama and Lugar.



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In 2006 Ukraine President Viktor Yushchenko (L) warmly received Lugar and Obama in Kiev




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Russian infantry vehicles have met no significant resistance from Ukrainian armed forces as they move into the nation's sovereign territory

Obama dismisses Putin's justification for Ukraine intervention










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Sen. Lugar lost his seat in 2012 after it emerged that he no longer lived in Indiana, the state he represented. Obama became president in 2008, and now faces a crisis in the nation he once sought to disarm


Obama said then that the existing Cooperative Threat Reduction Program 'has effectively disposed of thousands of weapons of mass destruction, but we must do far more to keep deadly conventional weapons like anti-aircraft missiles out of the hands of terrorists.'
Much of the Ukrainian small-arms supply was ultimately exported, not scrapped, by a Yushchenko regime that chose revenue from arms dealing over the cost of melting down metal.
In 2008 the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute reported that between 2004 and 2007, the Ukrainian Export Control Service told the UN that it sent 721,777 small arms and light weapons to 27 different countries.

The United States was the top recipient, with more than 260,000 of those weapons, followed by the UK and Libya, which each imported more than 101,000.
That flood of weapons exports has continued, with annual export records showing hundreds of thousands of new exports each year, covering everything from pistols and carbine rifles to heavy machine guns and anti-tank weapons.





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Payback: Obama presented Lugar with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in November 2013




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Russian President Vladimir Putin © sent troops into the Crimea, a Ukrainian peninsula populated by more than 1 million ethnic Russians, without meeting significant military resistance

But while today's 130,000-strong standing Ukrainian military isn't short on AK-47s, Russian troops have met little to no large-scale resistance from armored divisions or heavy artillery as they steamrolled their way into Crimea.
Some of that was Ukraine's own doing it sold 320 tanks to Pakistan in the 1990s, for instance but Obama and Lugar accelerated the pace of the country's arms liquidation.

While the Ukrainian army seems to have been careful to avoid provoking an even larger conflict, it's impossible to know whether Putin would have behaved differently in the face of columns of heavy weapons that once belonged to the Soviet Union in whose KGB he held a high-ranking position.
Sky News video broadcast on Tuesday showed Russian troops firing automatic weapons over the heads of apparently unarmed Ukrainian Air Force personnel near a contested airfield in Crimea.

See also HERE for more on this.

[Lauren Johnson]

David,

What you are saying is true only in part. Yes, the early resistance into June raided these old stockpiles. But as the various Ukrainian units came in with heavy artillery and armor with a 5 to 1 advantage in personnel, the Donbas forces were close to being overrun. Then the so-called Voentorg, was open for business. Several sources freely admit RF covert aid including artillery, heavy armor, experts, advisers, and volunteers. The Novorussia ideal would be long dead by now with only partisan fighting continuing on had it now been for the major assistance from the RF.

The so-called Voentorg was closed down just when the Ukrainians were on the verge of collapse as Putin imposed the Minsk Protocols and closed down the Voentorg. Long story. Now apparently, the Voentorg is now been re-opened as it is apparent the Ukrainians have no intention of stopping fighting. They continue to shell Donetsk every day and are nibbling away at the territory of the Donbas. The Ukrainians have renounced the Minsk accords after Novorussiya held their own elections. It seems that it is only a matter of time before the slaughter begins again.

My point, those old stock piles have required a lot of external help from the east. However, that help has not to all credible accounts not included any Russian armored divisions, no matter what Samantha Power claims.

[David Guyatt]

Lauren, I harbour little doubt you're correct about this, but I doubt it makes any meaningful difference to the bigger picture of the Ukrainian situation, which is where my interest really resides. Allow me to explain please.

It's not my intention here to purify Putin or Russia, but rather to show who is guilty of starting this damned war - as a prelude to a new cold war, which has now begun. You and I both were born in and lived through one cold war and one is enough.

it is, therefore, my continuing intention to demonstrate that this entire affair - and the present war in Ukraine - is US driven and that we in the west have been subject to an unremitting propaganda bombard to get the public in line behind a duplicitous neocon agenda.

One the one hand it will rape you, and then loudly shout "rape" and point the finger at someone else to avoid discovery and prosecution - enjoying both guilts equally.

Putin has always and openly made it clear that the Ukraine is a vital security interest of Russia - the same way, I guess, that successive US presidents have repeatedly stated that Saudi Arabia and the Gulf is a vital security interest of theirs. Consequently, it can be no surprise that Putin would engage in Ukraine - a nation that is directly on Russia's borders and has, for over 200 years been considered the cradle of the Rus civilization, and which reverberates deeply in the Russian psyche. In contradistinction, the Arabian Gulf is some 7,500 miles distant from the USA and has no racial or tribal parallels. The US interest there is firstly and foremostly about oil, with a distant second interest being the use of Saudi wealth and assets in deniable deep political events around the world.

As best as I can tell the US has begun a new cold war against Russia for having the temerity to attempt to shed the US dollar as a currency to do business in - and wishes additionally to draw Europe (partly willingly, I suspect) into a new Sino-Russian/BRICS orbit and away from American economic diktat.

The US permitted banking corporations and cartels to destroy the value of the dollar as a reserve currency by closing it's regulatory eyes while it was relentlessly looted several times over - beginning with the Savings & Loan fiasco and ending with the momentous bankrupting of the western banking system circa 2007/8 (and prior years leading up to that). Having permitted this to occur in order to line private pockets at the expense of taxpayers across the world - it now holds no moral remit to impose the dollar on any nation as a continuing reserve currency and it is wholly understandable that large trading nations now seek other options.

The US is a busted flush and has no ethical or moral backbone, and has gone the way all empires go... down the greed toilet.

[Magda Hassan]

It's not my intention here to purify Putin or Russia, but rather to show who is guilty of starting this damned war - as a prelude to a new cold war, which has now begun. You and I both were born in and lived through one cold war and one is enough.

And they started the old one also. A hot war with !3,000 US troops invaded Russia to join 40,000 British troops (and others) already there. There was a short lasting time of mutual co-operation from 1941 to 1946 and then back to hostilities. Never a moments peace to develop on their own terms.

Putin has always and openly made it clear that the Ukraine is a vital security interest of Russia - the same way, I guess, that successive US presidents have repeatedly stated that Saudi Arabia and the Gulf is a vital security interest of theirs.

Even closer to home. Think of Cuba and how important it was to US interests for there not be Soviet installations there. It almost led to WW3. Fortunately there were better men in the Whitehouse in those times. There is no discernible signs of such intelligence in the Whitehouse today. The Soviet Union stood by its agreement at that time. The US never withdrew their missiles from Turkey and now NATO thinks they can place missiles right up against Russia in former Soviet states at that.

The US permitted banking corporations and cartels to destroy the value of the dollar as a reserve currency by closing it's regulatory eyes while it was relentlessly looted several times over - beginning with the Savings & Loan fiasco and ending with the momentous bankrupting of the western banking system circa 2007/8 (and prior years leading up to that).

This system also actively undermined and collapsed the Soviet Union and there after raided and looted that country of its immense wealth impoverishing millions and plummeting the life expectancy and spreading total despair. It has not been forgotten and certainly not forgiven.

The US is a busted flush and has no ethical or moral backbone, and has gone the way all empires go... down the greed toilet.

Sooner the better we will all be better off with out it. We need to build a better model.

[David Guyatt]

Putin has always and openly made it clear that the Ukraine is a vital security interest of Russia - the same way, I guess, that successive US presidents have repeatedly stated that Saudi Arabia and the Gulf is a vital security interest of theirs.

Even closer to home. Think of Cuba and how important it was to US interests for there not be Soviet installations there. It almost led to WW3. Fortunately there were better men in the Whitehouse in those times. There is no discernible signs of such intelligence in the Whitehouse today. The Soviet Union stood by its agreement at that time. The US never withdrew their missiles from Turkey and now NATO thinks they can place missiles right up against Russia in former Soviet states at that.

Yes, a much better example than Saudi - not that Saudi is a bad example...