November 23, 2014 - There are clear signs that a major war is about to break out in Ukraine: A war actively promoted by the NATO regimes and supported by their allies and clients in Asia (Japan) and the Middle East (Saudi Arabia). The war over Ukraine will essentially run along the lines of a full-scale military offensive against the southeast Donbas region, targeting the breakaway ethnic Ukraine- Russian Peoples Republic of Donetsk and Lugansk, with the intention of deposing the democratically elected government, disarming the popular militias, killing the guerrilla resistance partisans and their mass base, dismantling the popular representative organizations and engaging in ethnic cleansing of millions of bilingual Ukraino-Russian citizens. NATO’s forthcoming military seizure of the Donbas region is a continuation and extension of its original violent putsch in Kiev, which overthrew an elected Ukrainian government in February 2014.
The Kiev
junta and its newly ‘elected’ client rulers, and its NATO sponsors are intent
on a major purge to consolidate the puppet Poroshenko’s dictatorial rule.
The recent NATO-sponsored elections excluded several major political parties
that had traditionally supported the country’s large ethnic minority populations,
and was boycotted in the Donbas region. This sham election in Kiev set
the tone for NATO’s next move toward converting Ukraine into one gigantic US
multi-purpose military base aimed at the Russian heartland and into a
neo-colony for German capital, supplying Berlin with grain and raw materials
while serving as a captive market for German manufactured goods.
An
intensifying war fever is sweeping the West; the consequences of this madness
appear graver by the hour.
War Signs: The Propaganda and
Sanctions Campaign, the G20 Summit and the Military Build Up
The official drum- beat for a widening conflict
in Ukraine, spearheaded by the Kiev junta and its fascist militias, echoes
in every Western mass media outlet, every day. Major mass media
propaganda mills and government ‘spokesmen and women’ publish or announce new
trumped-up accounts of growing Russian military threats to its neighbors and
cross-border invasions into Ukraine. New Russian incursions are
‘reported’ from the Nordic borders and Baltic states to the Caucuses. The
Swedish regime creates a new level of hysteria over a mysterious “Russian”
submarine off the coast of Stockholm, which it never identifies or locates –
let alone confirms the ‘sighting’. Estonia and Latvia claim Russian
warplanes violated their air space without confirmation. Poland expels
Russian “spies” without proof or witnesses. Provocative full-scale joint
NATO-client state military exercises are taking place along Russia’s frontiers
in the Baltic States, Poland, Romania and Ukraine.
NATO is sending vast arms shipments to the Kiev
junta, along with “Special Forces” advisers and counter-insurgency experts in
anticipation of a full-scale attack against the rebels in the Donbas.
The Kiev regime has never abided by the Minsk
cease fire. According to the UN Human Rights office 13 people on average
–mostly civilians –have been killed each day since the September cease fire. In
eight weeks, the UN reports that 957 people have killed –overwhelmingly by Kiev’s
armed forces.
The Kiev regime, in turn, has cut all basic
social and public services to the Peoples’ Republics’, including electricity,
fuel, civil service salaries, pensions, medical supplies, salaries for teachers
and medical workers, municipal workers wages; banking and transport have been
blockaded.
The strategy is to further strangle the economy,
destroy the infrastructure, force an even greater mass exodus of destitute
refugees from the densely populated cities across the border into Russia and
then to launch massive air, missile, artillery and ground assaults on urban
centers as well as rebel bases.
The Kiev junta has launched an all-out military
mobilization in the Western regions, accompanied by rabid anti-Russian,
anti-Eastern Orthodox indoctrination campaigns designed to attract the most
violent far right chauvinist thugs and to incorporate the Nazi-style military
brigades into the frontline shock troops. The cynical use of irregular
fascist militias will ‘free’ NATO and Germany from any responsibility for the
inevitable terror and atrocities in their campaign. This system of
‘plausible deniability’ mirrors the tactics of the German Nazis whose hordes of
fascist Ukrainians and Ustashi Croats were notorious in their epoch of ethnic
cleansing.
G20-plus-NATO: Support of the Kiev Blitz
To isolate and weaken resistance in the Donbas
and guarantee the victory of the impending Kiev blitz, the EU and the US are
intensifying their economic, military and diplomatic pressure on Russia to
abandon the nascent peoples’ democracy in the south-east region of Ukraine,
their principle ally.
Each and every escalation of economic sanctions
against Russia is designed to weaken the capacity of the Donbas resistance
fighters to defend their homes, towns and cities. Each and every Russian
shipment of essential medical supplies and food to the besieged population
evokes a new and more hysterical outburst – because it counters Kiev-NATO
strategy of starving the partisans and their mass base into submission or
provoking their flight to safety across the Russian border.
After suffering a series of defeats, the Kiev
regime and its NATO strategists decided to sign a ‘peace protocol’, the
so-called Minsk agreement, to halt the advance of the Donbas resistance into
the southern regions and to protect its Kiev’s soldiers and militias holed-up
in isolated pockets in the East. The Minsk agreement was designed to
allow the Kiev junta to build up its military, re-organize its command and
incorporate the disparate Nazi militias into its overall military forces in
preparation for a ‘final offensive’. Kiev’s military build-up on the
inside and NATO’s escalation of sanctions against Russia on the outside would
be two sides of the same strategy: the success of a frontal attack on the
democratic resistance of the Donbas basin depends on minimizing Russian
military support through international sanctions.
NATO’s virulent hostility to Russian President
Putin was on full display at the G20 meeting in Australia: NATO-linked
presidents and prime ministers, especially Merkel, Obama, Cameron, Abbott, and
Harper’s political threats and overt personal insults paralleled Kiev’s growing
starvation blockade of the besieged rebels and population centers in the
south-east. Both the G20’s economic threats against Russia and the
diplomatic isolation of Putin and Kiev’s economic blockade are preludes to
NATO’s Final Solution – the physical annihilation of all vestiges of Donbas
resistance, popular democracy and cultural-economic ties with Russia.
Kiev depends on its NATO mentors to impose a new
round of severe sanctions against Russia, especially if its planned invasion
encounters a well armed and robust mass resistance bolstered by Russian
support. NATO is counting on Kiev’s restored and newly supplied military
capacity to effectively destroy the southeast centers of resistance.
NATO has decided on an ‘all-or-nothing campaign’: to seize
all of Ukraine or, failing that, destroy the restive southeast, obliterate its
population and productive capacity and engage in an all-out economic (and
possibly shooting) war with Russia. Chancellor Angela Merkel is on board
with this plan despite the complaints of German industrialists over their huge
loss of export sales to Russia. President Hollande of France has signed on
dismissing the complaints of trade unionists over the loss of thousands French
jobs in the shipyards. Prime Minister David Cameron is eager for an
economic war against Moscow, suggesting the bankers of the City of London find
new channels to launder the illicit earnings of Russian oligarchs.
The Russian Response
Russian diplomats are desperate to find a
compromise, which allows Ukraine’s ethnic Ukraine- Russian population in the
southeast to retain some autonomy under a federation plan and regain influence
within the ‘new’ post-putsch Ukraine. Russian military strategists have
provided logistical and military aid to the resistance in order to avoid a
repeat of the Odessa massacre of ethnic Russians by Ukrainian fascists on a
massive scale. Above all, Russia cannot afford to have NATO-Nazi-Kiev military
bases along its southern ‘underbelly’, imposing a blockade of the Crimea and
forcing a mass exodus of ethnic Russians from the Donbas. Under Putin,
the Russian government has tried to propose compromises allowing Western
economic supremacy over Ukraine but without NATO military expansion and
absorption by Kiev.
That policy of conciliation has repeatedly
failed.
The democratically elected ‘compromise regime’ in
Kiev was overthrown in February 2014 in a violent putsch, which installed a
pro-NATO junta.
Kiev violated the Minsk agreement with impunity
and encouragement from the NATO powers and Germany.
The recent G20 meeting in Australia featured a
rabble-rousing chorus against President Putin. The crucial four-hour
private meeting between Putin and Merkel turned into a fiasco when Germany
parroted the NATO chorus.
Putin finally responded by expanding Russia’s air
and ground troop preparedness along its borders while accelerating Moscow’s
economic pivot to Asia.
Most important, President Putin has announced
that Russia cannot stand by and allow the massacre of a whole people in the
Donbas region.
Is Poroshenko’s forthcoming blitz against the
people of southeast Ukraine designed to provoke a Russian response – to the
humanitarian crisis? Will Russia confront the NATO-directed Kiev
offensive and risk a total break with the West?
James Petras is a Bartle Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York. Latest book: “The New Extractivism. A Post-Neoliberal Development Model or Imperialism of the Twenty-First Century?” Henry Veltmeyer and James Petras. Zed Books. http://petras.lahaine.org/
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