The
Russia-obsessed corporate media continues to peddle the narrative
that Donald Trump has turned the United States into a client-state of
Russia, even while he directly provokes the former Soviet Union by
providing Russia’s foe — Urkaine — with the largest lethal
assistance to a country on its border.
by
Darius Shahtahmasebi
Part
3 - The State Department promoting neo-nazism in Ukraine
Eventually,
it was reported that a man named Petro Poroshenko would be taking up
the reins after Yanukovych’s abdication. According to a cable
obtained by WikiLeaks, Poroshenko previously worked as a mole for the
U.S. State Department. The State Department even referred to
Poroshenko as “our Ukrainian insider.”
For
those who truly believe the U.S. protects and promotes democracy
while challenging tyranny and dictatorships across the globe, the
truth about Washington’s support for puppet regimes that fail to
garner the support of their own people is even worse than any
anti-imperialist commentator could ever have imagined. In March last
year, Foreign Affairs reported that Poroshenko had an approval rating
as low as 17 percent. In September last year, the Japan Times
reported that his approval rating had dropped to a single digit. Some
reports say it was as low as 2 percent. October last year saw his
approval rating grow to its highest in recent times, reaching a
stratospheric 14 percent.
In
other words, the Trump administration is actively propping up a
failed administration in Europe, which does not have the support of
15 percent of its people. Even the far-right militias in Ukraine seem
to have more support than the current government. Meanwhile, the U.S.
has done nothing but its utmost to tear apart the respective
democratically elected governments in Syria and Iran, both of which
have far greater approval ratings than do Poroshenko and his
administration.
Russian
Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said Washington’s recent
decision to arm Ukraine will only make the conflict more deadly and
suggested that Russia could be forced to respond. “[The U.S. is]
not a mediator. It’s an accomplice in fueling the war,”
Ryabkov said in a statement. Clearly, Russia has a vested interest in
not seeing another NATO ally on its borders, capable of pointing
American missiles in its face on a daily basis.
As
The National Interest learned at the end of last year from recently
declassified material, the U.S. did indeed break a promise at the end
of the Cold War that NATO would expand “not one inch eastward.”
George Washington University National Security Archives researchers
Svetlana Savranskaya and Tom Blanton wrote in the National Security
Archives:
“The
[recently declassified] documents show that multiple national leaders
were considering and rejecting Central and Eastern European
membership in NATO as of early 1990 and through 1991. That
discussions of NATO in the context of German unification negotiations
in 1990 were not at all narrowly limited to the status of East German
territory, and that subsequent Soviet and Russian complaints about
being misled about NATO expansion, were founded in written
contemporaneous memcons and telcons at the highest levels.”
The
documents appear to confirm Russia’s assertion that Soviet leader
Mikhail Gorbachev accepted the proposal for German reunification
(which Gorbachev could have vetoed) only in reliance upon these
assurances from its American counterparts that NATO would not expand
into Eastern Europe. This history is reminiscent of how Russia was
further duped out of using its veto power on a U.N. Security Council
Resolution in Libya in 2011, after having received assurances that
the coalition would not pursue regime change.
“I
believe that your thoughts about the role of NATO in the current
situation are the result of misunderstanding,” then-British
Prime Minister John Major told Gorbachev, according to British
Ambassador Rodric Braithwaite’s diary entry of March 5, 1991: “We
are not talking about strengthening of NATO. We are talking about the
coordination of efforts that is already happening in Europe between
NATO and the West European Union, which, as it is envisioned, would
allow all members of the European Community to contribute to enhance
[our] security.”
The
documents also show that Russia had received these assurances from a
number of other high-level officials. These officials included
then-Secretary of State James Baker; President George H.W. Bush; West
German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher; West German
Chancellor Helmut Kohl; former CIA Director Robert Gates; French
leader Francois Mitterrand; Margaret Thatcher; British Foreign
Minister Douglas Hurd; and NATO Secretary-General Manfred Woerner.
Since
that time, NATO has clearly expanded into Europe to the detriment of
Russia. Since the end of the Cold War, NATO has grown to include the
Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia,
Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia, Albania and Croatia, and
Montenegro.
These
developments are crucial because, when one is honest about America’s
infamous history since World War II, it is clear that NATO exists as
an entity only to counter and contain Russian influence. Its sole
purpose is to oppose Russia at every corner and this is no secret
even in the corporate media.
According
to the Telegraph, NATO was formed in “Washington on 4th April, 1949
after the end of the Second World War, largely to block Soviet
expansion into Europe.” This can be seen clearly in the complete
rejection of the Soviets’ attempt to join NATO itself after Joseph
Stalin’s death.
In
a 2016 interview with The New Yorker, Douglas Lute, a former
three-star general and then-U.S. Ambassador to NATO also patently
admitted that “…NATO was founded on the premise of preventing
an attack by the Soviet Union in Central Europe, where the U.S. would
have to come to the aid of Europe … For the first forty years, nato
focussed on its greatest risk—the threat that the Soviet Union
posed to Western European security.”
At
the time the unrest broke out in 2014, then-NATO Secretary General
Anders Fogh Rasmussen’s comment that the proposed IMF-EU package
presented to Ukraine would have been “a major boost for
Euro-Atlantic security” suggested that NATO had set its sights on
bringing Ukraine into the military alliance. In July of this year,
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg met with Poroshenko in Kiev
to further discuss this prospect, already pledging support to Ukraine
on some level.
Now
Ukraine’s bid to join NATO seems almost irrelevant, as the U.S. is
formally involving itself deeper in the Ukrainian conflict and
providing arms to a regime that has flirted with an approval rating
lower than 10 percent, all the while provoking Russia to take further
measures in response.
What
could possibly go wrong?
Meanwhile,
the Russia-obsessed corporate media continues to peddle the narrative
that Donald Trump has turned the United States into a client-state of
Russia, even while he directly provokes the former Soviet Union by
providing lethal assistance to a country on its border. Not only is
Trump maintaining an Obama-era policy, he is aggravating and
converting Obama’s Ukraine policy into a much more dangerous one —
ultimately aimed at provoking an aggressive response from Russia in
the weeks or months to come.
***
Source,
links:
https://www.mintpressnews.com/trump-continues-obama-era-saber-rattling-russia-arming-ukraine/236101/
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