Russia and Ukrainian Separatists Can't Get Their Stories Straight. Is East Ukraine Russia's South Vietnam?

The Boys Who Keep Crying Wolf (Russian Bear, actually) in Kiev may finally be right this time.

The Kiev regime installed in power with U.S.-bloc connivance is squealing yet again about Russian troops (and, they claim, heavy military equipment) inside Ukraine. Russia is once again denying it. Yet a Ukrainian separatist chieftain went on TV to brag about “4,000” Russians helping fight the Kiev regime's forces. Not very plausibly, he claimed they were volunteers taking their vacation time to fight in Ukraine's civil war.

If there really are 4,000 Russian nationals fighting in Ukraine, I rather doubt they are 4,000 individuals who spontaneously on their own decided to go to Ukraine to fight. (Not many people have the zealous commitment of Jihadists, tens of thousands of whom travel from numerous countries to fight on the latest frontline in their global “Holy War.” In regard to that, the newly self-crowned “Caliph” of the “Caliphate” of the “Islamic State” made a savvy move. Fulfilling the dream of creating the Caliphate is sure to be a strong draw for yet more Islamofascists to join up with him.) So the 4,000 part might be true, or it might be exaggerated, or a boast (the separatist leaders seem given to bluster and bombast) but the part about them all being volunteers acting on their own is far-fetched. [Later today, the U.S. government radio propaganda network NPR reported that U.S. officials say there are 1,000 Russian troops in Ukraine.]

This has been a recurring problem for the Russians. They and the Ukrainian separatists are often reading from different and contradictory (or at least inconsistent) pages. The Russians have their scripts, and the Ukrainian separatists are undisciplined and inexperienced and not under Russian control (contrary to Western propaganda and repeated assertions by government bosses of the U.S. and EU), so they are given to spouting off without thinking or planning the effects of their words. So what they say is more honest in terms of reflecting their real thoughts and attitudes, and potentially more accurate as there is not the careful calculation Russian officials engage in before speaking.

The Ukrainian separatists are constantly stepping on Russia's propaganda lines and various assertions. But this doesn't stop Western “leaders” (government bosses) and propagandists (aka “journalists” and “commentators” and even some “historians”) from constantly painting the separatists as totally under Russia's control, if not puppets.

Meanwhile, in besieged Donetsk, the Kiev regime killed another 15 civilians with their artillery, reports U.S. government radio propaganda network NPR (August 28th, Noon, Washington, D.C. time). [1]

The U.S.' ambassador to the UN, Samantha “I'm So Moral!” Power has been attacking Russia almost daily, today demanding that “Russia has to stop lying and has to stop fueling this conflict.” She attacked Putin by name today for supporting “armed separatists.” (Well who supported armed rioters who overthrew the previous Ukrainian elected government, even AFTER it agreed to early elections, Samantha?) Power refers to the “illegal separatists.” Unlike the South Sudan “legal” separatists, backed by the U.S. Of course, legal in U.S. eyes has always been what the U.S. says is legal. That's why U.S. torture is legal, for example.

A larger power being drawn into another nation militarily to shore up a regime is a common story. Yet the U.S. and its lackey nations keep professing shock and outrage that Russia would do such a thing. They act as if it's some unprecedented violation of international law, an unconscionable tramping of Ukrainian national sovereignty. Doesn't Russia know that borders are inviolate? (Now remind me: who was it that recently invaded Iraq? And Afghanistan? And before that, Haiti, and Panama, and Grenada, and Lebanon, and on and on? And who goes around the world subverting and overthrowing governments- including the previous one in Ukraine? I think it was that nation located about 7,000 miles away from Ukraine, not the one bordering it that is currently the object of Western opprobrium. Oh, excuse me, when referring to the U.S. and its Eurolackeys, I'm supposed to say “the international community.” Okay, “the opprobrium of the international community,” just minus Africa, Asia, and Latin America, in other words, the homelands of 90% of humanity.)

There was one more thing I wanted to say. There's a little bit of a parallel with the U.S. and “South” Vietnam, and Russia and the Ukrainian separatists and their newly declared Republic. The U.S. got drawn in by stages to shore up a client regime, because the client regime was too weak to stand on its own. In the Vietnam case, the regime lacked the support of its own citizens. In the case of Ukraine, my sense is opinion is divided in eastern Ukraine. Some support the new republic. Some support a unified Ukraine. But many, perhaps most, just want the violence and destruction to end. They want a return to something like normal life.

Also the “South” Vietnamese fascist military dictators were not mere U.S. puppets and thus occasionally created complications for the U.S. This is also the case with the Ukraine separatists and Russia. [2]

Of course, while there are parallels with the U.S. in Vietnam, there are important differences.

One very large difference is that Ukraine is an important country to Russia, on its border, with a geostrategically vital Russian naval base in the Crimean peninsula, whereas Vietnam was a country where the U.S. historically had NO strategic interest or ties, and which is located literally on the opposite side of the globe from the U.S. The U.S. still insisted on imposing its will on Vietnam.

So there's one thing that is exactly the same in both situations: the U.S. was and is a hyper-aggressive empire that insists on dominating every square inch of the planet it possibly can.

If certain Western imperialists get their way, NATO will escalate the conflict. Belligerent perma-hawks in the U.S. and Europe have been beating the drums for months to send military aid to the Kiev cabal, and military forces to other countries in proximity to Russia like the Baltics and Poland. Just today the BBC “World Service” (a global radio arm of the British government propaganda network) put on an armchair militarist from Jane's Defense Weekly to loudly shill for military intervention. He said NATO was formed precisely for such a situation, to “defend Europe from Russian aggression.” (Actually it was formed as an anti-Soviet alliance.) When the BBC host pointed out that Ukraine is not a member of NATO, he brushed that off with some verbal parry- I forget his exact words, but it was specious. Guys like him are never fazed by facts or logic that refuge their arguments. (Later U.S. government radio propaganda network NPR similarly put on some “expert” from a “think” tank to beat his little war drum too.)

If the U.S. and its Eurolackeys refuse to cease their tug-of-war with Russia over Ukraine, you better fasten your seatbelts. We're in for a wild ride.

1] An example of obnoxious U.S./Western propaganda was aired at 1pm Washington time by NPR: “NATO is accusing Russia of drastically escalating its war with Ukraine...” defining the Kiev regime as “Ukraine.” Just as the Kiev side are referred to as “the Ukrainians” and the separatists are “pro-Russian separatists” and NOT Ukrainians. Even though they are. This habitual propagandistic nomenclature is followed undeviatingly by U.S. and Western media, marching in lockstep behind U.S. imperialist foreign policy.

One of few visible dissenters inside the U.S. establishment from its propaganda barrage has been Professor John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago. A self-described “conservative,” ten-year military veteran, and friend of the late imperialist Harvard academic and Vietnam war criminal Samuel “Mad Dog” Huntington, Mearsheimer is a “political scientist” of the “realist” school of international relations. (“Mad Dog” is the sobriquet other American imperialists in Vietnam bestowed on Huntington, so you can imagine how bad he was. He also wrote a notorious paper, “The Crisis of Democracy,” on the need to beat back the American populace and keep them out of policy-making and decision-making.) Videos of Mearsheimer's appearances are on youtube.com, including an appearance on the government and corporate funded “Public Broadcasting System” “news” show, the “Newshour,” where he went head to head with an unreconstructed aggressive American imperialist academic. He also just published an article in Foreign Affairs, the publication of the “Council on Foreign Relations,” a sort of shadow State Department where elite poohbahs hang out between their government gigs. [“Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault: The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin,” Foreign Affairs, September 2014.] See also “Cross Talk 28 April . Cohen and Mearsheimer discuss Ukraine,” RT, on youtube.com, for the views of two academics who take objective views of the Ukraine situation, as opposed to the U.S.-chauvinist-centric view predominant in Western media and among elites.

2] The most notorious example of “South” Vietnamese rulers making trouble for the U.S. government was in 1968, when the Lyndon Johnson regime was negotiating a peace agreement with the “North” Vietnamese, and the traitor Richard Nixon, running for president, secretly told the “South” Vietnamese fascist generals to sabotage any deal, since he planned to continue the war. Nixon was elected president that November only because the CIA assassinated the prospective Democratic party presidential nominee, Robert Kennedy, in June. They also assassinated Martin Luther King, Jr., in April, which also aided Nixon by prompting black riots in numerous cities, directly feeding into Nixon's “law and order” propaganda theme, code for “repress the blacks.” White Americans in 1968 were even more racist and fearful of the oppressed African-American population than they are now. The support among whites for increased repression of blacks whenever blacks rebel or even apply legal political pressure is called “backlash” in U.S. political discourse.