ERIC ZUESSE -- How the Ukrainian Civil War Started

How the Ukrainian Civil War Started

Posted on May 26, 2014 

By Eric Zuesse

Fortunately, the origin of the Ukrainian civil war is remarkably well-documented in tapped phone-conversations and in cell-phone videos that have been posted online for all the world to see, despite what might have been the intentions of the planners and of the perpetrators. This cannot be a pleasant reality for U.S. President Barack Obama, and for his Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Asia, Victoria Nuland. President Obama might wish his employee, Nuland, to take all the blame for his policy on Ukraine, but he’s not firing her. It’s his policy, not hers. She was hired to do this, and so she is.

“US support of violent neo-Nazis in Ukraine: Video Compilation” is an hour-long documentary, dated 18 March 2014, which covers the background of the U.S. overthrow of the democratically elected pro-Russian President of Ukraine, which took place in December 2013 through February 2014, under the cover of popular anti-corruption “Euro-Maidan” demonstrations against that elected President, who (like all of his post-USSR predecessors) was corrupt. The documentary was produced by stpetes4peace, and it uses mainly film-clips of the actual events in Ukraine, coming from Russian government TV (RT) and from British government TV (BBC). There is nothing in it from private corporate or “nonprofit” media, NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS, NPR, nor from any of the U.S. major news media. There’s no New York Times, no Washington Post, no The Atlantic, no Harpers, no Foreign Policy, no New York Review of Books. There are two hostile, anti-Russian, interviews shown there, on Fox News (of U.S. politicians Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich), and a third such hostile interview shown on CNN (of Columbia University Russia-scholar Stephen Cohen), all three of which interviews are opinion, not news-reporting, anyway; otherwise, there’s nothing at all in this film that’s from the U.S. media.

Mainly, this documentary is direct news-reporting from Ukraine itself, as the events were unfolding there, and as U.S. news-media were doing little more than to transmit stenographically (totally uncritically), whatever the White House said about these matters (even if false, as this documentary proves to have been often the case).

However, in order really to understand this documentary, one needs first to understand the background of the effort that was started by U.S. President Bill Clinton, and that’s now being continued (in overdrive) by President Barack Obama, to surround Russia with U.S. and other NATO missiles, basically so as to complete what President Ronald Reagan had started with his “Star Wars” missile-defense program, which started as little more than a boondoggle for U.S. military contractors, but which now has become an authentic technological possibility: to encircle Russia (originally the USSR) with U.S. weapons, in order to impose an unchallengeable mono-polar, 100% U.S.-aristocracy-controlled, world, so that the U.S. aristocracy will control all foreign aristocracies and thus all nations’ economies. Stripped of the ideological conflict (“capitalist” versus “communist”), this now-revived Cold War conflict has nothing but lies to stanch it up, as this documentary makes excruciatingly clear. America’s stenographic “news” reporting is exposed here as being pure propaganda, which succeeds even more by virtue of all of the longstanding mass-indoctrination of Americans to think that their own nation’s “news” media aren’t propaganda — that only “Third World” nations do that sort of thing.

But there is a still-deeper level that’s not touched upon in this film: Maintaining control by the U.S. aristocracy requires two things: U.S. military control of the world (as just mentioned), and also continuation of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency — the currency that’s used in international corporate transactions. If anything, the U.S. aristocracy is even more concerned about the latter than the former. Each of these two factors will now be discussed in turn.

The U.S. is the world’s number-one spender on the military, and spends as much on the military as do all the next nine nations in the top ten. That includes (in order, after the U.S.): China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, France, Britain, Germany, Japan, India, and South Korea. Except for numbers 2 & 3 on that list, all of them are U.S. allies; and the U.S., France, Britain, and Germany, constitute 4 of the 28 member-nations in NATO.

NATO is, essentially, the club of purchasers of the weapons and services provided by U.S. military contractors. So: military contractors are an enormous lobby in Washington, and they need continual war, in order to be able to satisfy their stockholders. Expenditure of that military budget is spread throughout the U.S., so virtually every member of Congress relies upon the military lobbies, not only for re-election funds, but also for keeping unemployment down in his or her district or state.

As the reformed former CIA operative Ray McGovern documented on 15 May 2014, headlining “How NATO Jabs Russia on Ukraine,” a historic end of the Cold War was agreed to at the Malta Summit on 3 December 1989, and finalized in February 1990, between George H.W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev, but was violated by Bill Clinton, and is now being utterly trashed by Barack Obama, via his Ukraine gambit (the subject of this documentary film).

Above all else, Russia doesn’t want to be surrounded by NATO missiles and troops in Russia’s adjoining countries (now NATO-members) of Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and now, especially (though not yet NATO-member), Ukraine (the latter being especially important as it’s the pipeline route for transit of Russia’s gas supplies to Europe, as well as being the long-established base for Russia’s crucial Black Sea fleet). Here is Ray McGovern’s account of the key agreement between G.H.W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev:

“According to Jack Matlock, then-U.S. ambassador to the U.S.S.R. who took part in the Malta summit, the most basic agreement involved (1) Gorbachev’s pledge not to use force in Eastern Europe where the Russians had 24 divisions (some 350,000 troops) in East Germany alone, and (2) Bush’s promise not to ‘take advantage’ of a Soviet withdrawal from Eastern Europe.

In early February 1990, Bush sent Secretary of State James Baker to work out the all-important details directly with Gorbachev and Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze. Ambassador Matlock again was there and took careful notes on the negotiations, which focused on German reunification.

From memory, Matlock told me that Baker tried to convince Gorbachev that it was in Moscow’s interest to let a united Germany remain in NATO. Matlock recalled that Baker began his argument saying something like, ‘Assuming there is no expansion of NATO jurisdiction to the East, not one inch, what would you prefer, a Germany embedded in NATO, or one that can go independently in any direction it chooses.’ [emphasis added]

The implication was that Germany might just opt to acquire nuclear weapons, were it not anchored in NATO. Gorbachev answered that he took Baker’s argument seriously, and wasted little time in agreeing to the deal.

Ambassador Matlock, one of the most widely respected experts on Russia, told me ‘the language used was absolute, and the entire negotiation was in the framework of a general agreement that there would be no use of force by the Soviets and no ‘taking advantage’ by the U.S.”

He added, ‘I don’t see how anybody could view the subsequent expansion of NATO as anything but ‘taking advantage.’”

U.S. President Obama is so determined to tie a noose around the neck of Russia, that he has no hesitation about allying himself with Ukrainian supporters of Adolf Hitler in order to achieve it. And, so, the Ukrainian civil war is the result, and it was sparked by the massacre of hundreds of pro-independence civilians in Odessa on May 2nd, by U.S.-sponsored fascists.

In order to understand why southeastern Ukrainians want separation from the people whom Obama placed in control in the country’s northwest during February, in Kiev, just imagine that you are a Russian-speaking Ukrainian who had voted for the winner of the last Presidential election in Ukraine (Viktor Yanukovych had won overwhelmingly in the eastern half of the country), and that he was ousted in a coup on 22 February 2014, and the Obama-Administration-imposed interim government had perpetrated this massacre on May 2nd in Odessa against supporters (like yourself) of that ousted President, and now of independence from the fascists who (after $5 billion+ of U.S. preparation, plus sending U.S. mercenaries) had ousted him and installed the neo-Nazis who organized and perpetrated the May 2nd massacre of former supporters of that now-ousted President, and thus instigated the Ukrainian civil war. Would you feel safe, being ruled by those people, Obama’s people, the fascists who had killed hundreds, all of whom were civilians, in Odessa’s Trade Unions Building, on May 2nd? Would you want to be ruled by people who have shown themselves committed to your own destruction?

And, thus, we now shall discuss the second point in this story: the primary goal of the U.S. aristocracy being to maintain the U.S. dollar as the world’s international-trading currency.

On 6 March 2014, Paul Craig Roberts bannered, “The Looting of Ukraine Has Begun,” and he wasn’t referring to the long history of kleptocracy in Ukraine, but only to the Obama Administration’s part in that history. “According to a report in Kommersant-Ukraine, the finance ministry of Washington’s stooges in Kiev who are pretending to be a government has prepared an economic austerity plan that will cut Ukrainian pensions from $160 to $80 so that Western bankers who lent money to Ukraine can be repaid at the expense of Ukraine’s poor. It is Greece all over again. … The austerity plan [from the IMF, which is controlled by Europe’s aristocrats] will cut social services, funds for education, layoff government workers, devalue the currency, thus raising the prices of imports which include Russian gas, thus electricity, and open Ukrainian assets to takeover by Western corporations [further implementing control by those aristocrats]. Ukraine’s agriculture lands will pass into the hands of American agribusiness.” It wasn’t of benefit only to Europe’s aristocrats.

Something highly important was occurring at that very moment: Iskra News in Russian, and also the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee, reported, on 7 March 2014, that “At 2 a.m. this morning … an unmarked transport plane was on the runway at Borosipol Airport” near Kiev in the west, and that, “According to airport staff, before the plane came to the airport, four trucks and two Volkswagen minibuses arrived, all the truck license plates missing.” This was as translated by Michel Chossudovsky at Global Research headlining on 14 March, “Ukraine’s Gold Reserves Secretly Flown Out and Confiscated by the New York Federal Reserve?” in which he noted that, when asked, “A spokesman for the New York Fed said simply, ‘Any inquiry regarding gold accounts should be directed to the account holder.” The load was said to be “more than 40 heavy boxes.” Chossudovsky noted that, “The National Bank of Ukraine (Central Bank) estimated Ukraine’s gold reserves in February to be worth $1.8 billion dollars.” It was 36 tons. The U.S., according to the U.S. State Department’s Victoria Nuland (who selected the leadership of the post-coup interim government) had invested around $5 billion in precipitating the coup. Was Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk now cleaning out the nation’s gold reserves in order to strip the nation so that the Ukraine’s steep indebtedness for Russian gas would never be able to be repaid to Russia’s oligarchs? Or was he doing it as a payoff for Nuland’s having installed him? Or both? In any case: Russia was being squeezed, by this fascist-Ukrainian/U.S. ploy.

Metal.com, the Shanghai Metals Market, headlined on March 14th, “Ukraine Gold Reserves Reported To Be Hastily Aircrafted To U.S.” Nobody would say anything about it, and U.S. “news” media blacked out the matter. However, U.S. sources said that it was done in order to protect Ukraine’s gold in the event that Russia were to invade and steal it (i.e., to take it toward repayment of Ukraine’s $16 billion debt to Russia).

Raul Illargi headlined at The Automatic Earth, “Debt Rattle Mar 9 2014: Big Oil and Gas Wars,” and linked to recent news reports about international oil companies’ efforts to push Russia’s state oil company Gazprom out of Ukraine and replace Russian with Western oil companies’ production. Headlines included: “EU leaders draw up plans to send gas to Ukraine if Russia cuts off supply,” “Ukraine crisis is about Great Power oil, gas pipeline rivalry,” “Ukraine Plans to Cut Russian Gas Imports, Raise EU Supply,” and “Ukraine’s Naftogaz slashes Russian gas imports in February.” The machinations by rightist politicians to shove aside Gazprom were already at a fever-pitch throughout the weeks leading up to the overthrow of Ukraine’s pro-Russian President Victor Yanukovych, especially the last week of February in 2014, when he was replaced by Nuland’s chosen person, Arseniy Yatsenyuk.

So: that’s why the Russian-speakers who live in Ukraine are terrified and are hoping for Russia’s protection of them, and why Ukraine’s neo-Nazis were being unleashed by Obama against them. It’s just one gang of aristocrats trying to muscle another gang of aristocrats off to the side. And we’ll see who wins. But, clearly, the public, throughout Ukraine, will lose, big-time: “collateral damage” from the struggle between two rival gangs of aristocrats.

It’s just history repeating itself, for the zillionth time.

As usual, the winner of the 25 May 2014 election in Ukraine was an oligarch, but it wasn’t the one whom Obama had wanted, Yulia Tymoshenko (the one whose ally, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, Obama’s agent Nuland had selected to run the interim government). She’s a rabid hater of Russia and supporter of the Hitlerites. Instead, it was Ukraine’s chocolate king, Petro Poroshenko, who is perhaps even more dependent upon Vladimir Putin’s goodwill than he is upon Barack Obama’s. At least with Poroshenko at the helm, there is a chance of possibly blocking the fascist future for Ukraine that U.S. President Obama had, by now, so clearly intended. Enough Ukrainians, even in the country’s northwest (since ones in the southeast weren’t voting) opposed fascist rule, to turn away from Obama’s intended ruler of Ukraine. However, Poroshenko inherits a country whose Crimean region had clearly chosen to abandon Ukraine and to become again part of its original country, Russia.

Whether Poroshenko will be able to stop the civil war that started on May 2nd is yet to be seen. If he prosecutes the top people behind the May 2nd massacre, such as the Tymoshenko-allied oligarch of banking, gas, airlines and media, Ihor Kolomoisky, then a civil war among the public will become instead a civil war among the oligarchs themselves. The alternative will be continuation of the existing public civil war, ending in Ukraine’s degenerating into two failed states. That would be disastrous even for Poroshenko’s financial interests, so a reasonable expectation would be for him to do whatever is necessary to do in order to avoid that outcome, though that might bring on the wrath of President Obama.

Perhaps Obama will find a different way to continue the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010,  and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.