Thread: What Is Happening In Ukraine Is Far More Important Than Most People Realize

Reuters
By Aleksandar Vasovic and Gabriela Baczynska
2 hours ago

In Kiev, pro-Western Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk ordered his first deputy prime minister and the acting defence minister to fly to Crimea to "resolve the situation," a senior minister told a cabinet meeting.

But Sergei Askyonov, Crimea's new prime minister since the Russian takeover, said Vitaly Yarema and Ihor Tenyukh were not wanted in Crimea and would not be permitted to land.

Russian forces storm Ukraine naval HQ in Crimea

SEVASTOPOL/SIMFEROPOL, Ukraine (Reuters) - Russian troops and unarmed men stormed Ukraine's naval headquarters in the Crimean port of Sevastopol on Wednesday and raised the Russian flag in a tense but peaceful takeover that signals Moscow's intent to neutralize any armed opposition.

Russian soldiers, and so-called "self-defense" units of mainly unarmed volunteers who are supporting them across the Black Sea peninsula, moved in early in the morning and quickly took control.

Shortly after the incident, Ukraine's acting Defence Minister Ihor Tenyukh said in Kiev that the country's forces would not withdraw from Crimea even though Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a treaty to make it part of Russia.

But an hour later, Ukrainian servicemen, unarmed and in civilian clothing, began walking out of the headquarters.

Interfax Ukraine news agency said the commander of the Ukrainian navy, Admiral Serhiy Haiduk, was among those who left and was driven away by officers of Russia's FSB intelligence service. The report could not be independently confirmed.

View gallery

Ukrainian servicemen pass by armed men while leaving the territory of the naval headquarters in Seva …

The first group of servicemen was followed within a few minutes by a handful of troops in Ukrainian uniform, looking shell-shocked at the dramatic turn of events.

"This morning they stormed the compound. They cut the gates open, but I heard no shooting," said Oleksander Balanyuk, a captain in the navy.
"This thing should have been solved politically. Now all I can do is stand here at the gate. There is nothing else I can do," he told Reuters, appearing ashamed and downcast.

Russia's Itar-Tass news agency reported that Alexander Vitko, commander of Russia's Black Sea Fleet which is based in Sevastopol, had been involved in talks at the headquarters.

Viktor Melnikov, in charge of the "self-defence" unit, said talks were going on to negotiate a surrender.

View gallery

A pro-Russian supporter takes down a Ukrainian flag after breaking into the territory of the naval h …

"We've had difficult negotiations with the command here," he told reporters. "Some Ukrainian servicemen are already leaving, without their uniforms, but there was no violence."

A Reuters reporter saw three armed men, possibly Russian soldiers in unmarked uniforms, at the gate and at least a dozen more inside the compound.

PROTECTION FROM "FASCISTS"

In Kiev, pro-Western Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk ordered his first deputy prime minister and the acting defence minister to fly to Crimea to "resolve the situation," a senior minister told a cabinet meeting.

But Sergei Askyonov, Crimea's new prime minister since the Russian takeover, said Vitaly Yarema and Ihor Tenyukh were not wanted in Crimea and would not be permitted to land.

View gallery

A Ukrainian serviceman carries his belongings as he passes by armed men while leaving the territory …

Thousands of Russian soldiers took control of Crimea in the buildup to a weekend referendum last weekend in which the region, with ethnic Russians in the majority, voted overwhelmingly to leave Ukraine and join Moscow.

Putin said his move to take control of Crimea was justified by what he calls "fascists" in Kiev who overthrew pro-Moscow president Viktor Yanukovich last month after three months of often deadly street protests.

Ukraine and Western governments have dismissed the referendum, which has triggered the worst crisis in East-West relations since the Cold War, as a sham, and say there is no justification for Putin's actions.

Moscow officially denies deploying extra troops and Russian soldiers in the region are wearing unmarked uniforms, making it difficult to verify exactly who is who on the ground.

In Crimea's main city, Simferopol, where one Ukrainian serviceman was killed after a shooting on Tuesday, the situation was calm on Wednesday.
It was the first death on the Black Sea peninsula from a military clash since the region came under Russian control three weeks ago. Ukrainian prime minister Yatseniuk denounced it as a "war crime".

Aksyonov, Crimea's pro-Moscow leader, suggested the incident was the fault of "provocateurs" opposed to the annexation of the region to Russia.
"Unfortunately, two people were killed," he said, speaking in Moscow. "I'm sure we will find these scoundrels. The security service of the Crimean Republic is investigating."

http://news.yahoo.com/russian-forces...105314380.html

Fascist Thugs Beat Up Ukraine TV Boss, Demand Resignation

Alexander Panteleymonov beaten by Svoboda party members

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
March 19, 2014

Russia, Turkey and Cuba reported the beating of Alexander Panteleymonov, the director of Ukraine’s state-run NTU television company, but the story is apparently not important enough to air on American corporate news networks.



Panteleymonov, as the video shows, was beaten by Svoboda party fascists and forced to resign his office for daring to air the signing ceremony of Crimea joining the Russian Federation after a popular referendum held last weekend voted to secede from the country.
Igor Miroshnichenko, a Verkhovna Rada MP infamous for an antisemitic slur leveled against Ukrainian Jewish actress Mila Kunis, shoved and punched Panteleymonov.
“Write your resignation! Sit down! I told you, sit down!” the gang of ultra-nationalists yelled at the TV network boss. “You are feasting in my Ukraine!… Here is a paper, pen, write the resignation now quickly, you animal… You Muscovite (a derogatory word for Russian) garbage!”
Svoboda party’s spokesman Alexander Aronets admitted on his Facebook page the Svoboda thugs forced Panteleymonov to resign.
The incident provides further evidence Ukraine’s junta consists in large part of fascists no different than Nazi brownshirts who, prior to Hitler’s ascension to power, attacked, beat and murdered the political opposition. Many were interned in concentration camps and later executed.
Although the corporate media has, to a limited degree, reported on the ultra-nationalists and fascists sharing power in Kyiv, they have minimized this with coverage designed to portray the junta as democrats struggling against Russian domination.
This article was posted: Wednesday, March 19, 2014 at 12:26 pm

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http://www.infowars.com/fascist-thug...d-resignation/

The Dark Side of the Ukraine Revolt

Conn Hallinan and Foreign Policy In Focus on March 6, 2014 - 1:17 PM ET



The Svoboda (Freedom) Ukrainian nationalist party holds a rally in Kiev, January 1, 2014. (Reuters/Maxim Zmeyev)

This article is a joint publication of TheNation.com and Foreign Policy In Focus.

The April 6 rally in Cherkasy, a city 100 miles southeast of Kiev, turned violent after six men took off their jackets to reveal T-shirts emblazoned with the words “Beat the Kikes” and “Svoboda,” the name of the Ukrainian ultranationalist movement and the Ukrainian word for “freedom."
– Jewish Telegraphic Agency, April 12, 2013

While most of the Western media describe the current crisis in Ukraine as a confrontation between authoritarianism and democracy, many of the shock troops who have manned barricades in Kiev and the western city of Lviv these past months represent a dark page in the country’s history and have little interest in either democracy or the liberalism of Western Europe and the United States.
“You’d never know from most of the reporting that far-right nationalists and fascists have been at the heart of the protests and attacks on government buildings,” reports Seumas Milne of the British Guardian. The most prominent of the groups has been the ultra-right-wing Svoboda or “Freedom” Party.
The demand for integration with Western Europe appears to be more a tactic than a strategy: “The participation of Ukrainian nationalism and Svoboda in the process of EU [European Union] integration,” admits Svoboda political council member Yury Noyevy, “is a means to break our ties with Russia.”
And lest one think that Svoboda, and parties even further to the right, will strike their tents and disappear, Ukrainian News reported on February 26 that Svoboda party members have temporarily been appointed to the posts of vice prime minister, minister of education, minister of agrarian policy and food supplies, and minister of ecology and natural resources.
Svoboda is hardly a fringe organization. In the 2012 election won by the now deposed president, Viktor Yanukovych, the party took 10.45 percent of the vote and over 40 percent in parts of the western Ukraine. While the west voted overwhelmingly for the Fatherland Party’s Yulia Tymoshenko, the more populous east went overwhelmingly for the Party of Regions’ Yanukovych. The latter won the election handily, 48.8 percent to 45.7 percent.
Svoboda—which currently has thirty-six deputies in the 450-member Ukrainian parliament—began life in the mid-1990s as the Social National Party of the Ukraine, but its roots lie in World War II, when Ukrainian nationalists and Nazis found common ground in the ideology of anti-communism and anti-Semitism. In April 1943, Dr. Otto von Wachter, the Nazi commander of Galicia—the name for western Ukraine—turned the First Division of the Ukrainian National Army into the 14 Grenadier Division of the Waffen SS, the so-called “Galicia Division.”
The Waffen SS was the armed wing of the Nazi Party, and while serving alongside the regular army, or Wehrmacht, the party controlled the SS’s thirty-eight-plus divisions. While all Nazi forces took part in massacres and atrocities, the Waffen SS did so with particular efficiency. The postwar Nuremberg trials designated it a “criminal organization.”
Svoboda has always had a soft spot for the Galicia Division, and one of its parliament members, Oleg Pankevich, took part in a ceremony last April honoring the unit. Pankevich joined with a priest of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church near Lviv to celebrate the unit’s seventieth anniversary and rebury some of the division’s dead.
“I was horrified to see photographs…of young Ukrainians wearing the dreaded SS uniform with swastikas clearly visible on their helmets as they carried caskets of members of this Nazi unit, lowered them into the ground, and fired gun salutes in their honor,” World Jewish Congress president Ronald Lauder wrote in a letter to the Patriarch of the Ukrainian church. He asked Patriarch, Filret, to “prevent any further rehabilitation of Nazism or the SS."
Some 800,000 Jews were murdered in Ukraine during the German occupation, many of them by Ukrainian auxiliaries and units like the Galicia Division.
Three months after the April ceremony, Ukrainians re-enacted the battle of Brody between the Galicia Division and Soviet troops, where the German XIII Army Corps was trying to hold off the Russians commanded by Marshall Ivan Konev. In general, going up against Konev meant a quick trip to Valhalla. In six days of fighting the Galicians lost two-thirds of their division and the XIII Corps was sent reeling back to Poland. The Galicia Division survivors were shipped off to fight anti-Nazi partisans in Yugoslavia. In 1945, remnants of the unit surrendered to the Americans in Italy, and in 1947 many of them were allowed to emigrate to Britain and Canada.
The US press has downplayed the role of Svoboda, and even more far-right groups like Right Sector and Common Cause, but Britain’s Channel 4 News reports that such quasi-fascist groups “played a leading role” in organizing the demonstrations and keeping them going.
In the intercepted phone call between US Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland and US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt, the two were, as Russian expert Stephen Cohen put it to Democracy Now, “plotting a coup d’état against the elected president of Ukraine.”
At one point in the call, Nuland endorsed “Yat” as the head of a new government, referring to Arseniy Yatsenyuk of the Fatherland Party, who indeed is now acting prime minister. But she went on to say that Svoboda leader Oleh Tyahnybok should be kept “on the outside.”
Her plan to sideline Tyahnybok as a post-coup player, however, may be wishful thinking, given the importance of the party in the demonstrations.
Tyahnybok is an anti-Semite who says “organized Jewry” controls the Ukraine’s media and government, and is planning “genocide” against Christians. He has turned Svoboda into the fourth-largest party in the country, and, this past December, US Senator John McCain shared a platform and an embrace with Tyahnybok at a rally in Kiev.
Svoboda has links with other ultra-right parties in Europe through the Alliance of European National Movements. Founded in 2009 in Budapest, the alliance includes Svoboda, Hungary’s violently racist Jobbik, the British National Party, Italy’s Tricolor Flame, Sweden’s National Democrats and Belgium’s National Front. The party also has close ties to France’s xenophobic National Front. The Front’s anti-Semitic former leader Jean-Marie Le Pen was honored at Svoboda’s 2004 congress.
Svoboda would stop immigration and reserve civil service jobs for “ethnic Ukrainians.” It would end abortion and gun control, “ban the Communist Ideology” and list religious affiliation and ethnicity on identity documents. It claims as its mentor the Nazi-collaborator Stepan Bandera, whose Ukrainian Insurgent Army massacred Jews and Poles during World War II. The party’s demand that all official business be conducted in Ukrainian was recently endorsed by the parliament, disenfranchising thirty percent of the country’s population that speaks Russian. Russian speakers are generally concentrated in the Ukraine’s east and south, and particularly in the Crimean Peninsula.
The US and the EU have hailed the resignation of President Yanukovych and the triumph of “people power” over the elected government—Ambassador Pyatt called it “a day for the history books”—but what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
Before the deployment of Russian troops this past week, anti-coup, pro-Russian crowds massed in the streets in Crimea’s capital, Simferopol, and seized government buildings. While there was little support for the ousted president—who most Ukrainians believe is corrupt—there was deep anger at the de-recognition of the Russian language and contempt for what many said were “fascists” in Kiev and Lviv.
Until 1954, Crimea was always part of Russia until, for administrative and bureaucratic reasons, it was made part of Ukraine. At the time, Ukraine was one of fifteen Soviet republics.
Ukraine is in deep economic trouble, and for the past year the government has been casting about for a way out. Bailout negotiations were opened with the International Monetary Fund and the European Union, but the loan would have required onerous austerity measures that, according to Citibank analyst Ivan Tchakarov, would “most probably mean a recession in 2014.”
It was at this juncture that Yanukovych abandoned talks with the EU and opened negotiations with the Russians. That turnaround was the spark for last November’s demonstrations.
But as Ben Aris, editor of Business News Europe, says, “Under the terms of the EU offer of last year—which virtually nobody in the Western media has seriously examined—the EU was offering $160 million per year for the next five years, while just the bond payments to the IMF were greater than that.”
Russia, on the other hand, “offered $15 billion in cash and immediately paid $3 billion.… Had Yanukovych accepted the EU deal, the country would have collapsed,” says Aris.
The current situation is dangerous precisely because it touches a Russian security nerve. The Soviet Union lost some twenty-five to twenty-seven million people in World War II, and Russians to this day are touchy about their borders. They also know who inflicted those casualties, and those who celebrate a Waffen SS division are not likely to be well thought of in the south or the east of Ukraine.
Border security is hardly ancient history for the Kremlin. As Russian expert Cohen points out, “Since the Clinton administration in the 1990s, the US-led West has been on a steady march toward post-Soviet Russia, beginning with the expansion of NATO…all the way to the Russian border.”
NATO now includes Croatia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia and former Soviet-led Warsaw Pact members Albania, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Romania.
NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen’s comment that the IMF-EU package for Ukraine would have been “a major boost for Euro-Atlantic security” suggests that NATO had set its sights on bringing Ukraine into the military alliance.
The massive demonstrations over the past three months reflected widespread outrage at the corruption of the Yanukovych regime, but they have also unleashed a dark side of Ukraine’s politics. That dark side was on display at last year’s rally in Cherkasy. Victor Smal, a lawyer and human rights activist, said he told “the men in the T-shirts they were promoting hatred. They beat me to the ground until I lost consciousness.”
Svoboda and its allies do not make up a majority of the demonstrators, but as Cohen points out, “Five percent of a population that’s tough, resolute, ruthless, armed and well funded, and knows what it wants, can make history.”
It is not the kind of history most would like to repeat.

Read Next: John Feffer and Foreign Policy in Focus on the clash of partnerships in Ukraine.

http://www.thenation.com/blog/178716...ukraine-revolt#

Freedom Outpost

Russian Journalist: Western Media Hides the Truth




Russian Journalist: Western Media Hides the Truth

Leon Puissegur 7 hours ago
3 Comments

What does Russia think of Barack Obama? Do they think Obama is weak? Do they think the United States is strong? Just what does Russia think of the United States? It may surprise everyone that Vladimir Putin and Russia think of Obama as a sissy and coward, afraid of his own shadow. They do not respect Obama, and why should they? He lies about everything. In a recent article be Xavier Lerma, who writes articles for Pravda, the Russian news agency, exposes where the money that backs Obama's agenda comes from and who pulls his strings.
Lerma seems to be much more informed than all the reporters within the United States, as this example of his writing indicates, showing who passes out the big money. In a brief part of his article, he demonstrates just how one individual, a man named George Soros, has given money to help politicians like Barack Obama and Arizona Senator John McCain to cause the United States to fall.

"Senator John McCain had been in Georgia then last year in Syria and then in the Ukraine. Bad luck just follows that guy. Senator John McCain is typical of those who stereotype Putin when he said, "I looked into Mr. Putin's eyes and I saw three things - a K and a G and a B". McCain is insinuating that Putin, a former KGB agent, is an old hard line communist like the NKVD was under Stalin. McCain has read Alexander Solzhenitsyn and even did an article about him. However, he really knows nothing about Russia, Solzhenitsyn and Putin otherwise he would know why Solzhenitsyn would vehemently disagree with his KGB statement.

In the Summer of 2008, Alexander Solzhenitsyn's last interview was with Christian Neef and Matthias Schepp. He said, "Putin inherited a ransacked and bewildered country, with a poor and demoralized people. And he started to do what was possible - a slow and gradual restoration. These efforts were not noticed, nor appreciated, immediately." He later praises Putin who was in the KGB. In an interview with German news magazine Der Spiegel he says, "Vladimir Putin - yes, he was an officer of the special services, but he was not a KGB investigator, nor was he the head of a camp in the gulag". Putin was in foreign intelligence in Germany and was later known to follow the advice of Solzhenitsyn regarding the restoration of Russia.

"John McCain funded by Soros since 2001"

It is necessary to note that McCain like Obama, received money from George Soros. McCain is known as one of the most liberal Republicans. I, for one, cannot trust anyone who deals with Soros. Atheist Soros hates and fears Putin. When Soros sees Putin he sees his own end. Long ago I had heard that Soros' Nazi collaborating hand was in Georgia but I had no confirmation until later. Andrew Bolt from the Australia's Herald Sun wrote, "of course, Australia is only one of 50 countries in which Soros works. And his meddling here is nothing given what he's just done in Georgia. He then backed Georgia's former justice minister, Mikhail Saakashvili."

Senator John McCain has also fallen into the George Soros vacuum. McCain seems to be saying one thing, but takes money from a man that does another! What is going on with this George Soros character and just who is he? George Soros is a very rich man who obtains his money from the backs of poor people! Soros uses his money to control groups such as, but not limited to: Open Society Institute, America Coming Together, America Votes, American Bar Association Commission on Immigration Policy, American Civil Liberties Union, American federation of Teachers, American Institute for Social Justice, and many more that read like a list of "Socialist and Communist" ideologies. George Soros has a lot of people under his thumb, including the President of the United States, Barack Obama!

Concerning the view of Obama as weak man by Russia, Lerma writes:

Western media hides the truth

The western media constantly portrays Russia as the same old Soviet Union. I understand their mistrust but they should learn at least to report the facts. When Soros' Georgia attacked innocent civilians the same McCain said, 'we are all Georgians'. Remember it was the American media who told us on August 2008 that Russia was invading S. Ossetia and Georgia while insisting Russia was at fault and should be stopped. Condoleezza Rice kept referring to Russia as though it was the Soviet Union. AP news reported she said that the NATO alliance would "punish Russia". CNN quoted Bush telling Russia, "We strongly condemn bombing outside of South Ossetia". Reuters reported that Obama said, "Georgia's territorial integrity must be respected". Obama says the same today about the Ukraine.

The American media was still eagerly blaming Russia for starting the war even when the young S. Ossetian girl Amanda Kokoeva went on Fox News and thanked the Russians for helping. The truth was unveiled on November 2008 when Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili admitted he did start the war. Oops! Did the American media or politicians such as Senator Obama, President Bush, Condoleezza Rice and McCain admit their mistake in condemning Russia? Did they acknowledge the thousands killed by Saakashvili? No, of course not. Admitting a mistake would lower credibility and network ratings. "We did start military action..." - Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili."

Today Valdimir Putin is laughing at President Obama due to him being so weak! Obama places restrictions on people that don't matter and Russia laughs at him! Putin has asked if maybe Obama had a clown do his work for him! Russia rules while Obama "fiddles." How embarrassing to the people of the United States that love this country for what it was before Obama became president! Obama has done what he sought to do back in 1980, while attending Occidental College. From my interview with Dr. John Drew, you can see the similarities in ideology (LP=Leon Puissegur).

"LP: "How many actual face to face meetings did you have with Obama?"

Dr. Drew: "I never had face to face after Christmas and in Partolo Valley California which is near Stanford. I basically spent the day with him, Chandoo, and Caroline Boss, I was visiting Boss from Cornell where I was studying. I graduated ahead of them but I had come back for the trip to be with Caroline. We hung out with Obama and Chandoo for that day and went out to lunch then we ended up arguing pretty late in the evening about Marxist and politics.

Whether or not there would be a revolution, a Communist style revolution in the United States. The key takeaway there is that I may have been one of the first people in the world to confront Barack Obama's kind of silly belief, Marxist idea that there was going to be an inevitable Communist revolution coming to the United States.

I feel in my heart that I had persuaded him that that wasn't in the cards and it wasn't going to happen and at the end of that time he believed me. I think a bunch of us, Marxist Communist style people were turned off by a Communist style revolution I think that Obama would have heard that from someone else eventually, but from his reaction, I think I was the first person that he could identify as an ally, and a friend and supporter who sincerely believes that there would never be a Communist style revolution. That debate I think helped Obama intellectually, but it helped seal the end of my romantic relationship with Marxist."

LP: "Obama was a student there the whole time?"

Dr. Drew: "Yes he was a student at Occidental College and he was taking classes from Roger Boesche, who was a political theorist on campus. Roger was definitely a Socialist. Most of the students followed him as a Marxist revolutionary, but he was kind of precise with that and did not see himself as a Marxist. I would say that 100% of the students considered him to be a Marxist/Socialist."

Yes, what Obama wanted in 1980 seems to be what he is directing the United States toward today! Wake up America before it is too late!

We will be doing an article to disclose George Soros later.

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http://freedomoutpost.com/2014/03/ru...a-hides-truth/

This Is What Happens When A Community Organizer Quarrels With A KGB Agent

March 19, 2014 by Sam Rolley

In recent days American politicians and pundits have evoked the Cold War more frequently than at any point since the sustained state of political tension ended (or didn’t) in the early 1990s. And, as was the case at the height of the actual Cold War, a large part of the national conversation in the U.S. currently revolves around questions of which of the international leaders involved is the strongest.

With Democrats largely quiet on the issue and Republican criticisms flying, the current dynamic of U.S.-Russian relations paints a portrait that looks something like this: A guy in mom-jeans and a pink bicycle helmet trying to figure out how to go toe-to-toe with a man who wrestles bears before breakfast.

Whether the imagery is accurate, or a simple result of the personal image each man has worked to cultivate over the years, doesn’t matter. What matters is that the Obama Administration is publicly fumbling in the midst of a foreign policy situation that could affect American citizens for decades to come.

What’s being said about President Obama’s response to increasing international tension

Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) recently suggested that the Obama Administration is “agonizing” over international law and failing to realize that Russian President Vladimir Putin is in the initial phases of an effort to reassemble the Soviet Union.

“Today his sights are set on Ukraine, but if he continues undeterred tomorrow it could be Estonia, Latvia, Moldova, Romania, the Czech Republic, or Poland,” Cruz said, according to Breitbart.

The Senator said that Obama take steps to withdraw from the new START Treaty and reinstate a cancelled missile defense system in Poland.

“With a few strokes of his pen, Vladimir Putin has in recent days both created the Republic of Crimea and annexed that new entity into the Russian Federation, thereby violating the territorial integrity of Ukraine,” Cruz said. “To hear Putin tell it in his address to the Duma, this action is not only perfectly legal, it also rights a historical wrong in which Russia was ‘robbed’ of its rightful claim to the Crimean peninsula in 1954.”

Cruz went on to suggest that Putin is on a mission to correct what the Russian leader personally views as a mistake in Russian history.

“President Obama has disputed the legality of [Russia’s] actions, observing that ‘President Putin seems to have a different set of lawyers making a different set of interpretations, but I don’t think that’s fooling anyone,’” Cruz said. “The reality, however, is that Putin is not concerned with international law or historical justice. His sole focus is on correcting what he considers to be the ‘greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century’ by reassembling the Soviet Union. Ukraine is only a step in this process. That is the real challenge the United States has to face, which we cannot do when we are agonizing over what our respective legal teams think.”

Representative Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) took a similarly harsh stance during an interview on Fox and Friends Wednesday, explaining, “What you’re seeing … is what you get when a community organizer takes on a KGB agent. It doesn’t go well.

“As you know, you don’t take a knife to a gunfight. Well, this president’s taken a paintball gun to a gunfight: It looks pretty, but it’s not going to accomplish anything,” he went on.

And it isn’t just Republicans criticizing Obama’s perceived weakness in taking on an international thug like Putin. A recent survey of national security insiders conducted by National Journal concluded that 53 percent think that Obama lacks the power to alter Russia’s course.

“Putin holds most of the cards in this conflict, and he’s also taken the measure of Obama and concluded that there’s no downside to pressing his advantage,” one participant said. “If Obama’s red lines in Syria meant nothing, why would they mean anything here?”

Filed Under: Liberty News, Staff Reports

http://personalliberty.com/2014/03/1...h-a-kgb-agent/

Biden Meets With Baltic Presidents To Discuss Russia’s ‘Dark Path’

March 19, 2014 by UPI - United Press International, Inc.

VILNIUS, Lithuania (UPI) — U.S. Vice President Joe Biden assured the presidents of Latvia and Lithuania that Russia is vulnerable to economic sanctions during a meeting Wednesday.
Biden had separate meetings with President Dalia Grybauskaite of Lithuania and Latvian President Andris Berzins in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius. The three then had a working lunch.
“We stand resolutely with our Baltic allies in support of the Ukrainian people and against Russian aggression,” Biden said. “As long as Russia continues on this dark path, they will face increasing political and economic isolation.”
Russia has to deal with a changing and increasingly globalized world, Biden said.
“Global markets and the international community will and should bet in the long run on countries that reject aggression and corruption, embrace openness and live up to their obligations,” he said. “Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania understand this well.”
Grybauskaite spoke of the need to guarantee energy supplies for the Baltic states in a region where Russia is a major supplier of oil and natural gas.

Filed Under: Breaking Now, Liberty News, Staff Reports

http://personalliberty.com/2014/03/1...iscuss-crimea/

Beaten Obama turns his back on the world

By Michael Goodwin
March 19, 2014 | 2:47am


Photo: AP

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The words came out of my mouth before I could stop them. “I feel sorry for Obama,” I said. As my wife looked at me in disbelief, I quickly added a correction. “Well, almost.”
Beset by failures at home and abroad, the president cuts a lonely and sad figure these days. His aura of grief reflects his profound loss.
His worldview crashed headlong into reality, and reality won. Obamaism is dead, may it rest in peace.
That’s sad for him, but hold the tears — his loss is mankind’s hope. If Obama wakes from his utopian visions and faces the truth, there is a fighting chance to reverse America’s slide and keep the peace.
But first, he must come to grips with the historic dimensions of what has happened, and I’m not sure he’s capable of it. The signs aren’t encouraging.
In many ways, Vladimir Putin’s grab of Crimea is as significant as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan 35 years ago.
Then-President Jimmy Carter quickly understood he had been wrong to trust the Soviets, and shifted to offense. His January 1980, speech was defiant and bold. Compared to Obama’s timid rebukes of Putin, Carter sounded like Churchill rousing Great Britain against Hitler.
Obama is still stuck in the belief that Putin is either crazy, or secretly looking for a way to save face and end the confrontation. He hasn’t accepted Putin for what he is because to do so would mean acknowledging that Obama’s whole approach to international relations has been a mistake.
The world, meaning friend and foe alike, already knows the president is uncomfortable with American power. The result is that his once-magical ability to inspire with words is now an international punch line because they are just words. He promised change and delivered disaster.
From Syria and Iran to North Africa and North Korea, the abdication of American leadership is proving calamitous. And now Putin’s move in Europe demolishes once and for all any illusion that Obama’s election would herald a turning point for mankind. Instead of people the world over beating their swords into plowshares, the 21st century is turning out to be a chaotic and bloody mess.
“The tide of war is receding,” Obama insisted.
Like so many of his pronouncements, he was confusing the ideas in his head with reality. It is not clear if he knows the difference.
The world looks to America, and America looks away. “It it is time to focus on nation-building here at home,” he declared, as though the Earth would take care of itself in a one-big-happy-family kind of way.
It turns out that the committee system is no better at running the global order than it is at running a corner grocery.
Somebody has to take the lead and assume responsibility for success. Somebody has to set the rules and enforce them.
That somebody used to be America, and it is no accident that when America led, the Earth became a better place for more people. The seven decades after World War II marked a historic era of peace and stability around the globe.
As Robert Kagan wrote in “The World America Made,” his 2012 book, “The most important features of today’s world — the great spread of democracy, the prosperity, the prolonged great-power peace — have depended directly and indirectly on power and influence exercised by the United States.”
But the reverse is also true, and that is what we are witnessing today. As Kagan put it, “when American power declines, the institutions and norms American power supports will decline too.”
All is not lost — yet. But Obama must take off his rose-colored glasses and face the facts.
Putin is his most immediate test. The president’s wrist-slap sanctions at a few functionaries were predictably dismissed, and widely regarded as a sign of weakness. That can only embolden the would-be czar.
Even worse was the timing, with talks on Iran’s nuclear program starting again. Bet the farm the mullahs will take their cue from whether Putin pays a serious price for carving up a country.
If he gets away with it, the Iranians won’t even bother to pretend to care what Obama says. Why should they?

Mayor simply failing NY kids

Lily Tomlin said it best: “No matter how cynical you get, it’s impossible to keep up.” She might have been thinking of the city’s Department of Education.
The educrats’ response to the civil-rights lawsuit filed by parents whose kids were blocked from a charter-school expansion in Harlem was a classic of misinformation. “We remain deeply committed to the rights of all students, and ensuring every child has access to a great education,” a department aide claimed.
Look at the facts. The middle-school charter the kids planned to attend, Success Academy IV, was one of the best-performing schools in the city. Its fifth-graders had a 96 percent pass rate on the state math test and 53 percent in English.
By comparison, four other middle schools the students could be assigned to had scores ranging from dismal to disgraceful. The highest was 17 percent passing in math in one school. The three others had rates below 10 percent in both subjects.
But that apparently qualifies as a “great education” by City Hall standards.
The contrast captures the incoherence not just of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s attack on charters, but also of his overall education policy. He refuses to consider closing failing schools, and is missing in action on other mainstream reforms, such as teacher accountability and merit pay.
Add the fact that the charter kids he wants to block are black and Hispanic, and it becomes impossible to reconcile the mayor’s actions with his rhetoric.
Then again, at least the kids involved are learning something. Now they know what “cynical” means.

Flight MH370 ifs, ands, bots

The recent South by Southwest tech conference was filled with dazzling gadgets, including one with special relevance. Cloud robotics connect robots’ “brains” through wireless networks, The Wall Street Journal reports, saying, “This would allow robots to be smarter, more powerful and cheaper.”
OK, smarty bots, go find Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370.

Pols’ new marching orders

To judge from the headlines, it was a borderline tragedy that Mayor de Blasio and other pols refused to march in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade. Nonsense.
New Yorkers don’t need politicians to enjoy a parade and celebrate a holiday. The idea that they do just shows how everything is needlessly politicized. Surely, the pols have work to do and the tradition of marching mayors should die a dignified death.
Here’s a modest suggestion: Next year, parade organizers ought to turn the tables and ban all elected officials. That would be a relief from the annual strife and give St. Patrick his day in peace.

Mayor’s one good call

Finally, something I like about de Blasio. He’s not returning Charlie Rangel’s phone calls. Good move.

Filed under Barack Obama, Crimea, Russia, Vladimir Putin

http://nypost.com/2014/03/19/beaten-...-on-the-world/

Soldier Killed in Crimea: Possible False Flag to Start War - U.S. preparing military assistance to Ukraine's coup government.

http://www.infowars.com/soldier-kill...-to-start-war/

Soldier Killed in Crimea: Possible False Flag to Start War

U.S. preparing military assistance to Ukraine’s coup government

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
March 18, 2014

The establishment media is spinning the shooting death of a Ukrainian soldier in Crimea following a vote to secede from Ukraine. USA Today and other propaganda cartels in the United States are insinuating that violence will be an inevitable result following the vote and the move for Crimea to secede from the rest of Ukraine, now under the control a coup government in Kyiv that violently ejected a democratically elected president in February.



Not surprisingly the media quoted junta prime minister and former central banker Arseniy Yatsenyuk.
“The conflict is moving from a political one to a military one because of Russian soldiers,” Yatsenyuk said at the defense ministry. “Today, Russian soldiers began shooting at Ukrainian servicemen and this is a war crime without any expiry under a statute of limitations.”
Yats, as he is known by his enablers in the State Department, said the junta has authorized Ukrainian soldiers to use firearms in Crimea in response to the shooting.
USA Today based its reportage on information posted on the Ukrainian News Agency website. The story blamed Russian soldiers for the attack and this unsubstantiated assertion was duly echoed by the corporate media in the United States.
A report appearing on the BBC website, however, said the men were unidentified and their commander was taken into custody by Russian soldiers:

An eyewitness told the BBC that armed men arrived in two unmarked vehicles, storming the base in Simferopol and firing automatic weapons.
The Ukrainian government said a junior officer who was on duty in a park inside the base had been killed and another officer injured. A third serviceman had leg and head injuries after being beaten with iron bars, it said.
The government said the commander of the unit was captured by men wearing Russian uniforms.
Defense ministry spokesman Vladislav Seleznyov told Reuters the attack was by “unknown forces, fully equipped and their faces covered.”

The Independent cited local Crimean officials who said shots were initially fired by “fascist snipers” from a nearby residential building. RT also reported on snipers participating in the deadly attack:

The remark by PM Yatsenyuk that “the conflict is shifting from a political to a military stage” indicates the next phase of the orchestrated crisis is now underway.
Arizona Senator John McCain has laid out what will happen next. As violent incidents in Crimea and the east of Ukraine intensify, possibly as the result of additional false flag operations similar to the one occurring earlier today, the United States will move to provide the junta in Kyiv with “modest military assistance” consisting of “some small arms and ammunition, as well as significant non-lethal assistance, such as protective equipment, spare parts, fuel, and sharing of intelligence,” according to McCain.
In addition, the United States should work “with NATO and other partners to support the Ukrainian government in designing and resourcing a long-term assistance program to rebuild and reform Ukraine’s military.” NATO should step up its “force presence, security cooperation, and military exercises, especially in Central and Eastern Europe and the Baltic countries.”
McCain said NATO should fully exploit the situation to “prepare for the expansion of the alliance to include countries such as Georgia and Montenegro as soon as possible,” thus pushing NATO up against Russia’s border and begging a political and possibly a military response from the thermonuclear armed super power.
h/t Brandon Turbeville

This article was posted: Tuesday, March 18, 2014 at 10:31 pm

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• Ukraine Prepares for War After Crimea Vote
• Russian Troops Storm Ukraine Air Force Base In Crimea, Reuters Confirms
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• Ukraine warns Moscow against Russian military movements in Crimea

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