generalspeaking

Annex Crimea? Never!

"[Russia reserves] the right to use all means we have [to protect Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine from violent Ukrainian nationalists]. We don't want to enslave anyone or dictate anything. But we won't be able to stay aside, if we see them being hunted down, destroyed and harassed."
"We have to remind them [the West] about the U.S. action in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, where they acted without any sanction of the United Nations Security Council, or wilfully interpreted its resolution as in the case of Libya."
"In the modern world, where everything is linked and everyone depends on others in one way or another, we can incur damage to one another, but it would be mutual damage."
Russian President Vladimir Putin

Alexey Nikolsky/AFP/Getty Images

The West, he avers, staged the massive protests in Kyiv, maliciously, with the direct intention of diminishing Russia's influence in Ukraine. Radical demonstrators involved in clashes with police had been trained, no doubt about it, by western instructors. ("I have a feeling that they sit somewhere in a lab in America over a big puddle and conduct experiments, as if with rats, without understanding the consequences of what they are doing.") 

Nothing amiss with Ukrainians rallying against Viktor Yanukovych, driven by rage over corruption and nepotism in his government. However, Mr. Putin stated, the new government is simply "replacing some cheats with others", and the removal of Yanukovych represented an "unconstitutional coup and armed seizure of power". Russian-Ukrainian relations class 101 for rank beginners.

Evident enough to anyone with eyes open wide enough to see that the radical nationalists at the core of this whole fiasco were wearing swastika-like bands, and the snipers who shot and killed almost a hundred people during the protesters were obviously provocateurs, not government soldiers. Recognize the Ukrainian election set for May...? "We will not if such terror continues".  And the Russian forces in Crimea are there for security reasons only, aiding local "self-defence forces".

A Ukrainian doctor who oversaw medical treatment for casualties during the Maidan protests reached the conclusion that the similarity of bullet wounds hitting the targeted indicated the shooters were intent on stoking tensions on both sides to spark even greater violence, to topple Yanukovyc. "I think it wasn't just a part of the old regime (that plotted the provocation), but it was also the work of Russian special forces who served and maintained the ideology of the (old) regime", the doctor, now Health Minister Oleh Musiy, commented.

Snipers firing powerful rifles from rooftops and windows shot people in the heart of Kyiv. Some of the victims were opposition protesters, some were uninvolved civilian bystanders and among the dead were medics as well as police. The majority of those shot and killed were  hit by snipers. Interior Minister Arsen Avakov had this to say:

"I can say only one thing: the key factor in this uprising, that spilled blood in Kyiv and that turned the country upside down and shocked it, was a third force. And this force was not Ukrainian."

Labels: Conflict, Crimea, Intervention, Revolution, Russia, Ukraine

posted by Pieface @ Saturday, March 08, 2014