Can Putin afford to be indifferent to the plight of ethnic Russians in Ukraine, while complimenting Poroshenko? And complimenting Poroshenko for what exactly?
President Putin back on March 4,2014: "If we are to notice, that these outrages begin in Eastern regions (of the Ukraine), and if people appeal to us for help, as do we already have the official appeal from the legitimate acting president, then we reserve the right to protect those citizens by all means available to us. We believe this would be completely legitimate. Such a decision will only be taken to protect Ukrainian citizens, so let any of their military personnel even attempt to shoot at their own people, behind whom we do stand. Not up front but we do stand behind. Let them even try to shoot at women and children." Vladimir Putin, March 4, 2014, Official transcript
After that, notably beginning with the Geneva Agreement of April 17, the Russian government started moving away from its firm position of the unconstitutionality of the violent coup of February 21-23 and, instead, started granting ever more legitimacy to the Kiev regime, while falling ever more short of confirming legitimacy to the referenda in eastern Ukraine and the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics and Novorossyia, which Putin himself evoked in his four-hours-long interview on March 7. By yielding ever more legitimacy to the Kiev regime, Russia is taking more and more legitimacy from its support for ethnic Russians in Ukraine and from its possible Russian intervention and involvement.
In his interview on June 4, 2014, with Radio Europe 1 and TF1 TV channel, Putin said namely the following in response to a question about the alleged "democratic vote" for Poroshenko: "I’ve already told you and will say it again: we will respect the choice of the Ukrainian people and we will cooperate with Ukrainian authorities. ... Yes, we recognize [Ukraine's] sovereignty." Does this mean recognition of sovereignty as embodied and practiced by the current regime ruling in Ukraine?
In the same interview, Putin also explained again Russia's position on Crimean and its reunification with Russia: "Russian troops were in Crimea under the international treaty on the deployment of the Russian military base. It’s true that Russian troops helped Crimeans hold a referendum on their (a) independence and (b) desire to join the Russian Federation. No one can prevent these people from exercising a right that is stipulated in Article 1 of the UN Charter, the right of nations to self-determination. ... In accordance with the expression of the will of people who live there, Crimea is part of the Russian Federation and its constituent entity. I want everyone to understand this clearly. We conducted an exclusively diplomatic and peaceful dialogue – I want to stress this – with our partners in Europe and the United States. In response to our attempts to hold such a dialogue and to negotiate an acceptable solution, they supported the anti-constitutional state coup in Ukraine, and following that we could not be sure that Ukraine would not become part of the North Atlantic military bloc. In that situation, we could not allow a historical part of the Russian territory with a predominantly ethnic Russian population to be incorporated into an international military alliance, especially because Crimeans wanted to be part of Russia. I am sorry, but we couldn't act differently."
In other words, Putin evoked the principle of self-determination and emphasized its notable expression through a referendum, which happened when the political regime of Ukraine was radically changed from "merely" thieving oligarchy to oligarchy that placed fascist radicals in charge and control of state security, its armed forces and police in the ever escalating campaign of war, terror, and massacre unleashed on those who oppose this unconstitutional change. In other words, oligarchy moved through a violent coup and Molotov cocktails over to only an oligarchic dictatorship, but further to a fascist, military dictatorship. This regime change further greatly increased the risk of this regime making Ukraine into a NATO "bridgehead" 400 miles towards the gates of Moscow, which is actually also precisely what Brzezinski himself defined as the US strategic goal (Grand Strategy. pp. 46, 86, 203).
However, to the threat of NATO aggressive expansion (it is aggressive and not really "peaceful" or stabilizing, as it is presented--one only needs to remember Kosovo, Libya, or Syria), Putin also added the significance of Crimea being the home to Russia's Black Sea Navy. And that's the only one key difference, which I can see, between the case of Crimea and the case of Novorossiya (the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics). The latter happened to have no Russian military base. Yet their case is as good, if not stronger than Crimea's. In Crimea, the referendum was conducted with Russian troops stepping in and preventing outbreak of violence (which was actually planned and prepared by the Right Sector and other elements of the junta). In the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics, the referenda were organized by the new revolutionary and popular organs of power emerging from below and without presence of Russian troops. Moreover, against these new people's republics, the fascist junta has sent the army, the police, the Naz-guard, the Right Sector and private armies (or rather death squads) of Ukrainian mafia oligarchs.
The other fact is, as Arsen Avakov, the junta's interior minister, boasted on his FB page, that the Kiev regime succeeded in the meantime to suppress and disperse antifascist opposition in Odessa and Kharkov. And unless anyone was still in any doubt about the nature of the current regime in Kiev (which the Western media and Western politicians keep painting as an incredible democracy), the same Avakov also announced on his FB page that self-defense in eastern Ukraine "must be exterminated like mad dogs; no negotiations."
At the same time, as Poroshenko made it very clear in his inaugural speech, the junta is convinced that, except for the armed resistance in eastern Ukraine, it faces no other significant and effective deterrent or constraint. Its decision, methodically implemented, has thus been ever more violent escalation.
In this situation, the West is working hard to deter, that is, to prevent, any effective counter-measures and defense on the part of Russia and antifascist opposition in Ukraine. This is, in fact, the very strategic idea formulated by Brzezinski: to make such moves and create such conditions that would leave Russia no choice, but to choose what the West would compel it to: "... one thing is certain : [the plan] will move faster if a geopolitical context is shaped that propels Russia in that direction, while foreclosing other temptations [ = choices]. ... the sooner [will] the black hole of Euroasia be filled ... Indeed, for Russia the dilemma of the one alternative [dictated by the US] is no longer a matter of making a geopolitical choice but of facing up the imperatives of survival."(Grand Chessboard, p. 122, last paragraph) As Brzezinski makes it clear elsewhere, "the imperatives of survival" is understood by Brzezinski and other fathers of grand strategy is a matter of Russia's "Darwinian" extinction as a power and civilization "not fit" to continue as part of the intended New World Order: The goal of this "grand plan" for Russia and its civilization is "to acquire ... ethnic conflict [and] political fragmentation" (Grand Chessboard, p. 150).
Are these developments not connected?
Ukraine's new king Petro Poroshenko seems to have an ambition to combine a wrathful Achilles with a crafty Odysseus in his own oligarchic persona in a country that is but a shade of one's mighty Soviet Union. One day after his inauguration at which one of the guards dropped himself right after his rifle, Poroshenko held a three-party meeting with a Russian Ambassador and a representative of the OSCE. There he declared that he wants to have a ceasefire sometime within a week. It seems that part of his "peace plan" might be a demand that all the antifascists from the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics exile themselves to Russia. The rest would need to bow their neck and submit to a new NATO protectorate helped with cheap gas from Russia, while the pool of animosity, instability and chaos would continue as inflammation meant to reach soon enough the root canal of Moscow.
For "security" in this new Ukraine is to be guaranteed by Poroshenko's new "private army" or Poroshenko's own "presidential force"--the Right Sector/National Guard. In fact. the Right Sector, as its leader Dmitry Yarosh explained, wants to be even more than that. The Right Sector wants to the new Praetorian Guard of this fascist dictatorship--the supreme arbiter and power in Ukraine. The goal of the Right Sector is to "create a system of control over the president and the parliament ... so that if the president takes an anti-state course, we will compel him to follow the demands of Maidan."
Meanwhile, Victoria Nuland who was handing out cookies on Maidan to Berkut before they were shot by the same snipers who were also shooting Maidan people, met on June 8 in Odessa with the Right Sector banker Oleg Kolomeysky, also known for issuing bounties for the heads of antifascist leaders and fighters. Nuland discussed with the billionaire who is also the junta-appointed head of the Dniepropetrovsk province, "financial assistance" of the US for the regime. As an added PR exercise, she also paid a visit to a local orphanage where she left the orphans with a box of soccer balls, while on the way of implementing the Empire's policies that produce a mass of new orphans.
Nuland made sure to emphasize that the US is supporting "positive changes in Ukraine and the new government's policy of further stabilization, especially in the east of Ukraine," where "stabilization" is evidently a cipher or euphemism for killing the people by the regime.
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