Crisis in Oekraïne #62 Rusland is een tankstation.

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Op vrijdag 28 maart 2014 14:24 schreef DeJori het volgende:

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pravolivo twitterde op vrijdag 28-03-2014 om 14:01:19 How interesting: reportedly Kremlin's directives on how to cover #Ukraine in media, via @barabanch: http://t.co/GgtORIbmZS”; reageer retweet

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Ukraine leader Turchynov warns of far-right threat


Ukraine's interim President Olexander Turchynov has condemned the ultra-nationalist Right Sector, saying the group is bent on "destabilisation".

Right Sector activists blocked the parliament (Rada) building in Kiev on Thursday night and smashed windows.

They blamed the interior minister for the killing of a Right Sector leader.

Meanwhile, ousted President Viktor Yanukovych has called for a national referendum to determine each region's "status within Ukraine".

He fled to Russia last month after massive demonstrations against him and clashes between protesters and police in which more than 100 people died. The Kremlin says the new government in Kiev came to power illegally.
[..]
Attempt to destabilise

At a parliament session on Friday, Mr Turchynov, called the Right Sector rally outside parliament "an attempt to destabilise the situation in Ukraine, in the very heart of Ukraine - Kiev. That is precisely the task that the Russian Federation's political leadership is giving to its special services".

Right Sector activists are furious over the death of Oleksandr Muzychko, better known as Sashko Bily, one of their leaders. The interior ministry said he died on Monday night in a shoot-out with police in a cafe in Rivne in western Ukraine.

A member of the far-right group in Rivne threatened revenge for the killing of Mr Muzychko.

"We will avenge ourselves on [Interior Minister] Arsen Avakov for the death of our brother. The shooting of Sashko Bily is a contract killing ordered by the minister," Right Sector member Roman Koval was quoted as saying by the Ukrayinska Pravda website.

The Right Sector played a prominent role in the Kiev protests - and the clashes with police - which led to the removal of Mr Yanukovych from power. Its main support base is in western Ukraine.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26784236

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Ex-German chancellor warns of overreaction to Ukraine

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — Former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt has become the latest German politician to express understanding for Moscow’s position on Ukraine as he warned that overreaction by the West could spur Russian President Vladimir Putin to further aggression.

The 95-year-old Social Democrat sharply criticized the sanctions imposed against Russian individuals as “nonsense” and cautioned that serious economic sanctions could hurt the West, especially Germany, as much as Russia.

He said it was a mistake to exclude Russia from the Group of Eight leading nations just when it was important to maintain a dialogue, but felt the G-20 would be a better forum for resolving the issue in any case.

Schmidt’s remarks in the weekly Die Zeit come as a new poll out this week shows a majority of Germans accept Russia’s annexation of Crimea as a fait accompli and believe Moscow views Ukraine as part of its zone of influence.

While a majority polled believe the West’s response has been appropriate, fully a third consider even the weak sanctions imposed so far as excessive.

Schmidt’s critique comes after another former Social Democratic chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, also expressed understanding for Putin’s actions and criticized the European Union for forcing the issue in Ukraine by insisting on an either-or choice between the EU and Russia.

However, Schroeder is considered particularly close to the Russian leadership and was criticized for his links to Gazprom RU:GAZP -13.62% OGZPY +1.21% after he left office, so Schmidt’s remarks are likely to carry more weight.

The Left party in Germany, which has also criticized the Western response to Ukraine and accused the new government in Kiev of being fascist and antisemitic, quickly seized on Schmidt’s remarks as echoing their own.

German ambivalence regarding Russia and Ukraine has to be an important part of any calculation about a U.S. response, since the EU’s biggest country will steer the entire bloc in the direction it wants to go.

Schmidt said Putin’s action in Crimea was “fully understandable.” Yes, it violated international law and territorial integrity, but so did Western action in Libya. Schroeder has compared it to the war in Kosovo during his chancellorship, which he says was also technically a violation of the U.N. charter.

The agitated reaction of the West is dangerous, Schmidt said, because it will lead to a corresponding agitation of Russian public opinion.

As to whether Russia might now invade other areas of eastern Ukraine, Schmidt said: “I think it is conceivable, but I think it is a mistake for the West to act as if it was inevitably the next step. That could possibly result in fueling the appetite on the Russian side.”

Schmidt had praise for the “caution” shown in the crisis by the current chancellor, Angela Merkel. He criticized those in the U.S. like Sen. John McCain who are calling for more forceful intervention, reminding his German audience that “at the end of the 21st century, Russia will still be a big neighbor.”

The former chancellor noted that while Ukraine is certainly an independent state, historians still debate whether Ukraine is actually a distinct nation.

Schroeder, at an event sponsored earlier this month by Die Zeit, suggested the West should allow some time to pass before engaging in negotiations with Putin. It might only be possible after elections in Ukraine for a government “that represents all the people.”

Germany is particularly sensitive to the fact that the current government in Kiev includes members of the Svoboda Party, which in the past has used Nazi symbols and maintained contact to the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party (NPD) in Germany.

Schmidt reminded his readers that in World War II, Russia was on the side of the West and it was Germany that was the enemy.

“It is very important to remember that despite the Second World War, the Russians have put aside hatred of Germans,” Schmidt said. “There is no hatred, no rejection of Germans by the Russian people.”

http://www.marketwatch.co(...)o-ukraine-2014-03-28

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The Danger of False Narrative
_{March 27, 2014 by Robert Parry}

Exclusive: Like a decade ago with Iraq, Official Washington’s pundits and pols are locked shoulder-to-shoulder in a phalanx of misguided consensus on Ukraine, presenting a false narrative that is taking U.S. policy into dangerous directions, writes Robert Parry.

The American people got a nasty taste of the danger that can come with false narrative when they were suckered into the Iraq War based on bogus claims that Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction that he planned to share with al-Qaeda.

Nearly 4,500 U.S. soldiers died in the conflict along with hundreds thousands of Iraqis. The war’s total financial cost probably exceeded $1 trillion, a vast sum that siphoned off America’s economic vitality and forced cutbacks in everything from education to road repair. Plus, the war ended up creating an Iraqi base for al-Qaeda terrorists that had not existed before.

But perhaps an even more dangerous problem coming out of the Iraq War was that almost no one in Official Washington who pushed the false narrative – whether in politics or in the press – was held accountable in any meaningful way. Many of the same pols and pundits remain in place today, pushing similar false narratives on new crises, from Ukraine to Syria to Iran.

Those false narratives – and their cumulative effect on policymaking – now represent a clear and present danger to the Republic and, indeed, to the world. The United States, after all, is the preeminent superpower with unprecedented means for delivering death and destruction. But almost nothing is being done to address this enduring American crisis of deception.

Today, Official Washington is marching in lockstep just as it did in 2002-03 when it enforced the misguided consensus on Iraq’s WMD. The latest case is Ukraine where Russian President Vladimir Putin is accused of committing “aggression” to expand Russian territory at the expense of noble ”democratic” reformers in Kiev.

Not only is this the dominant storyline in the U.S. media; it is virtually the only narrative permitted in the mainstream press. But the real narrative is that the United States and the European Union provoked this crisis by trying to take Ukraine out of its traditional sphere of influence, Russia, and put it in to a new association with the EU.

While there’s nothing inherently wrong with Ukraine joining with the EU or staying with Russia (or a combination of the two) – depending on the will of the people and their elected representatives – this latest U.S./EU plan was motivated, at least in part, by hostility toward Russia.

That attitude was expressed in a Sept. 26, 2013, op-ed in the Washington Post by Carl Gershman, the neoconservative president of the National Endowment for Democracy, which doles out more than $100 million in U.S. funds a year to help organize “activists,” support “journalists” and finance programs that can be used to destabilize targeted governments.

Gershman, whose job amounts to being a neocon paymaster, expressed antagonism toward Russia in the op-ed and identified Ukraine as “the biggest prize,” the capture of which could ultimately lead to the ouster of Putin, who “may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.”

The NED, which was founded in 1983 to do in relative openness what the CIA had long done in secret, listed 65 projects that it was financing in Ukraine, using U.S. taxpayers’ money. In other words, Gershman’s op-ed reflected U.S. policy – at least inside the State Department’s still-neocon-dominated bureaucracy – which viewed the EU’s snatching of Ukraine from Russia’s embrace as a way to weaken Russia and hurt Putin.

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