Hello Dear Readers, What Moscow calls a limited military operation in Ukraine has been met with an incredible series of Western economic sanctions and information warfare since it began late February, 2022. What so far has been missing owing to unprecedented NATO censorship of all media is the context of the Russian military action. The following are two pieces relevant to this in a most complex situation that has the potential to escalate into a new global war. The first essay is a brief summary of events since 1991 in Ukraine regarding Russia, NATO and Washington. The second is an essay I wrote in 2014 for my German book on Ukraine following the CIA coup d’etat in Kiew. As with most every major war of the past century, the reality is far more complex than presented. If you have not yet, please consider a donation of support for my online voice. The relentless censorship of the Internet and social media by the private corporate social media companies since the 2020 Corona virus, and now the war in Ukraine, is alarming and damaging and can only be compared with book burnings in the Germany of the 1930s, or the Medieval Inquisitions of the Catholic Church with book burnings and torture of heretics. I thank you for your interest and support, William Engdahl
www.williamengdahl.com Ukraine and the Deeper Global Suicide Agenda By F. William Engdahl 8 March, 2022 The decision by the Russian President to order military action in neighboring Ukraine beginning February 22, 2022 has shocked many, myself included. The question at this point almosttwo weeks into military action by Russian and other forces inside Ukraine, is what pushed Russia into what Western media portrays as unilateral unwarranted war of aggression. A public threat by Ukrainian president and comedian Volodymyr Zelenskyy on February 19, during meetings with top-level NATO officials and others in the annual Munich Security Conference, provides a largely-ignored clue to Moscow actions. In addition more recent reports of numerous US Pentagon bioweapons labs across Ukraine add to the background threats. Did Moscow believe Russia faced a literal do-or-die reality? Some essential history The current conflict in Ukraine has its seeds in the 1990’s and the US-backed collapse of the Soviet Union. During high-level Two Plus Four Treaty talks pertaining to Germany’s reunification in 1990, talks between US Secretary of State James Baker III and then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, along with France, the UK and the West German government, over unification of Germany, Baker gave a verbal promise that NATO would not move “one inch” to the East to threaten former Soviet territories, in return for the USSR allowing German reunification within NATO.[i] For years Washington has lied about the exchange, as they moved one after the other former Warsaw Pact countries including Poland, Czech Republic, Romania, Hungary, Baltic States into NATO and closer to striking distance to Russia. Recently Putin cited the 1990 Baker agreement to justify Russian demands that NATO and Washington give binding legal assurances that Ukraine would never be admitted into the NATO alliance. Washington until now has categorically refused to do so. Putin’s 2007 Munich Speech At the 2007 annual Munich Security Conference, as the Bush-Cheney administration had announced plans to install US missile defense systems in Poland, Romania and the Czech Republic to,“guard against rogue states such as North Korea or Iran,” Russia’s Putin delivered a scathing critique of the US lies and violation of their 1990 assurances on NATO. By that time 10 former communist Eastern states had been admitted to NATO despite the 1990 US promises. Furthermore, both Ukraine and Georgia were candidates to join NATO following US-led Color Revolutions in both countries in 2003-4. Putin rightly argued the US missiles were aimed at Russia, not North Korea or Iran. In his 2007 Munich remarks Putin told his Western audience, “It turns out that NATO has put its frontline forces on our borders, and we continue to strictly fulfil the treaty obligations and do not react to these actions at all. I think it is obvious that NATO expansion does not have any relation with the modernization of the Alliance itself, or with ensuring security in Europe. on the contrary, it represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? Where are those declarations today? No one even remembers them.” Putin added, “But I will allow myself to remind this audience what was said. I would like to quote the speech of NATO General Secretary Mr Woerner in Brussels on 17 May 1990. He said at the time that: “the fact that we are ready not to place a NATO army outside of German territory gives the Soviet Union a firm security guarantee”. Where are these guarantees?” [ii] That was 15 years ago. The 2014 Maidan Coup d’Etat By November 2013 an economically corrupt and floundering Ukraine under elected and also very corrupt President Viktor Janukovich, announced that, rather than accept a “special” association with the EU, Ukraine would take a far more generous offer from Moscow to join the Eurasian Economic Union led by Moscow. Russia had agreed to cut the price of Russian gas to Ukraine by 30% and to buy $15 billion of Ukraine bonds to ease the Kiew financial crisis. At that point, on 21 November, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, the man selected by Washington’s Victoria Nuland and Kiew Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt, together with then-Vice President Joe Biden, launched what were called Maidan Square protests against the Janukovich regime backed by US NGOs. on February 20, 2014 after CIA-organized snipers, reportedly recruited from nearby Georgia, killed dozens of student protesters and also police, leading Janukovich to flee, Yatsenyuk became Prime Minister in a hand-picked US-run regime, hand-picked by Nuland and Biden among others. [iii] Later in December 2014 in an interview with a Russian newspaper, George Friedman of Stratfor, a private firm consulting to the Pentagon and CIA among others, said of the US-led February 2014 Kiew regime change, “Russia calls the events that took place at the beginning of this year a coup d'etat organized by the United States. And it truly was the most blatant coup in history.” [iv] He was boastful in the interview. That Kiev coup regime proceeded after February 22, 2014 to wage a war of extermination and ethnic cleansing of Russian-speakers in eastern Ukraine, led to a large degree by a private army of literal neo-nazis from Pravy Sektor (Right Sector), the same ones who ran security in Maidan Square and launched a reign of terror against Russian-speaking Ukrainians. Battalions were formed of neo-nazi mercenaries. They were given official state status as “Ukrainian National Guard” soldiers, the Azov Battalion, financed by Ukrainian mafia boss and billionaire oligarch, Ihor Kolomoisky, the financial backer of Zelenskyy as president. The Azov soldiers even sport open SS runes as its logo. In 2016, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) accused the Azov Battalion, officially upgraded to a regiment in January 2015, of committing war crimes such as mass looting, unlawful detention, and torture. Today Nuland is Biden’s Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs responsible for Ukraine and Russian affairs. She is well aware of who the Azov Battalion are. Zelenskyy and Munich 2022 On February 19 in Munich, Ukrainian President Zelenskyy made his threat to deploy nuclear weapons on Ukrainian territory. He expressed this as his unilateral revocation of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, although Ukraine was not a signatory of the agreement. Two days later on the evening of February 21, Putin made his speech recognizing the sovereign independence of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, and the start of the military campaign in the Ukraine. He explicitly referenced Zelenskyy’s Munich nuclear weapons pledge: “This is not empty bravado,” Putin stressed in his speech. On March 6 Moscow state news agency, RAI Novosti, quoted a senior Russian SVR foreign intelligence source with details on a secret Ukraine project, reportedly with vital covert Western support, to build a Ukrainian nuclear missile capability and a Ukrainian atom bomb in brazen violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. According to the report, Ukrainian nuclear scientists were disguising the developments by locating them near the high-radiation levels of Chernobyl nuclear reactor site, an explanation for the swift Russian moves to secure Chernobyl. “It was there, judging by the available information, that work was underway both on the manufacture of a “dirty” bomb and on the separation of plutonium,” RIA Novosti quotes the source. The primary bomb research facility was located at the National Scientific Center, “Kharkov Institute of Physics and Technology.” As of this writing reports of fierce fighting underway between Russian forces and neo-nazi Ukrainian Azov fighters who reportedly are planning to blow up the research reactor site and blame it on Russia. [v] The battle for control of the large Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant is also apparently part of the attempt to conceal the illegal Ukraine bomb project. It now begins to become more clear that Putin had serious reason to react at the Ukraine nuclear threat. A Ukrainian nuclear missile within six minutes of Moscow would present existential danger whether Ukraine were in NATO or not. Huge Military Buildup- Biowarfare? There was more. Ukrainian press reported a year ago about new Western-built de facto NATO naval bases in Ochakov and Berdyansk as, “modern infrastructure facilities capable of receiving ships of all types, equipped according to NATO standards and built with the money of the alliance countries.” The media boasted, “In three years we will be able to strike at Russian ships in the Black Sea with our mosquito fleet. And if we combine with Georgia and Turkey, the Russian Federation will be blocked,’ Ukrainian military experts boasted. “ [vi] In addition, the US Pentagon had no less than eight, perhaps as many as 30 top-secret bioweapons research labs across Ukraine testing DNA of some 4,000 military volunteers. once Russian soldiers moved to secure the evidence, the US Embassy in Kiew deleted previous mention of the sites from its website, and Ukrainians reportedly moved to destroy the lab evidence. Ukrainian labs in Kharkiv and elsewhere were operating in cooperation with the United States. Stocks of such weapons were being secretly stored in direct violation of international conventions. A full month before the Russian military action on 22 February in Ukraine, independent biowarfare researcher, Dilyana Gaytandzhieva, obtained documents detailing “US Pentagon biological experiments with a potentially lethal outcome on 4,400 soldiers in Ukraine and 1,000 soldiers in Georgia. According to the leaked documents, all volunteer deaths should be reported within 24 h (in Ukraine) and 48 h (in Georgia).” She details the human experiments, which include testing for antibodies against some 14 pathogens including Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, Borrelia species (Lyme disease) and others. According to the documents the labs in Ukraine and Georgia are part of a Pentagon “$2.5 billion Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) Biological engagement program which includes research on bio agents, deadly viruses and antibiotic-resistant bacteria.” [vii] On March 6, in a statement to the official RAI Novosti in Moscow, Major General Igor Konashenkov, spokesman for the Russian Ministry of Defense, stated they had received documents, “from employees of Ukrainian biological laboratories confirming that components of biological weapons were being developed in Ukraine, in close proximity to Russian territory.” He noted, “In the course of a special military operation, the facts of an emergency cleansing by the Kiev regime of traces of a military biological program being implemented in Ukraine, funded by the US Department of Defense, were uncovered." [viii] Added to this evidence of nuclear and bioweapon WMD placements inside Ukraine in recent years, the West NATO member countries have been pouring billions of dollars of military equipment including anti-tank weapons and explosives into Ukraine while Zelenskyy, rumored by opposition to be in hiding in the US Embassy in Warsaw, calls repeatedly for a NATO “No-Fly” zone over Ukraine, an act that would be a direct casus belli of war between Russia and NATO a war that rapidly could go nuclear or beyond. The question is whether this years-long provocation by Washington and NATO of Russian national security via Ukraine is aimed at destroying the viability of Russia as a sovereign nation and military power. Is it a calculated move to use sanctions against Russia to cause global collapse and energy crises, food shortages and worse, all to advance the Davos 2030 Great Reset agenda? Blame it on the “evil Putin” and Russia while BlackRock and the financial powers reorganize the world? It is too early to tell but certain is that whatever prompted the action by Russia on February 22, 2022 had to have been far more serious than CNN or other controlled Western media are telling us. Author’s Introduction to Ukraine © F. William Engdahl 11 September 2014 Ukraine, like few other Eurasian countries, is a product of its special geography, as it uniquely straddles east and west. It is what Sir Halford Mackinder, the British father of geopolitics—the study of the relations of political power to geography—called a “pivot” state. Ukraine uniquely transforms the geopolitical position of Russia, for better or worse. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Washington did all possible to support a break between Russia and Ukraine, formerly an integral part of the Soviet economy and culture, to split Ukraine from the newly-created Russian Federation. The goal was to use Ukraine as a buffer to block closer integration between Russia and Europe, especially Germany. The country Ukraine itself is an historical anomaly. Almost 1000 years ago, Kievan Rus under Vladimir the Great had been the empire of the East Slavic peoples of today’s Ukraine, Russia and Belarus. For more than 350 years, Kievan Rus east of the Dneiper River had been a part of the Russian Czarist empire. After 1795 Ukraine was divided, as a result of wars of partitioning Poland, between the Orthodox Tsardom of Russia and Roman Catholic Habsburg Austria. As such a pivot state, Ukraine’s history has been tragic. In 1922 it was forced to become one of the founding republics of the Soviet Union after a bloody war with the Red Army. In the 1930’s, Stalin initiated a gruesome chapter in both Russian but especially Ukrainian history, which still burns in the memories of the descendents in the Catholic rural agricultural west of Ukraine. In 1932 and 1933, millions of people, mostly peasants, in Ukraine starved to death in a politically induced famine, the Holodomor, due to Stalin’s "liquidation of the Kulak class," the more or less independent farmers to introduce forced collectivization of agriculture. Some 6 to 8 million people died from hunger in the Soviet Union during this period, of whom at least 4 to 5 million were Ukrainians. Ironically, Nikita Khrushchev, the man who in the 1950’s initiated de-Stalinization, was the head of the Ukrainian Communist Party in 1935 overseeing Stalin’s Holodomor. After Stalin's death, now as head of the Communist Party of Soviet Union, Khrushchev decided to administratively transfer the Crimea to the Ukraine within the USSR in 1954, though the Crimean population was overwhelmingly ethnic Russian. In the largely agricultural west of Ukraine, the famous “breadbasket of Europe,” the population is historically Roman Catholic, going back centuries. The Eastern parts of Ukraine—Donbass, Donetsk, Crimea—are historically Eastern Orthodox in religion and are Russian-speaking. The east is also the center of most Ukrainian industry from military manufacture to steel, to coal to oil and gas. Loosely seen, those are the tectonic fault lines on which Washington neo-conservatives in the State Department and CIA have seeded the current bloody Ukrainian civil war. One of the leading advocates of an American global supremacy, Zbigniew Brzezinski, a Polish-born Cold War Russophobe, and a foreign policy adviser to Barack Obama, described the pivot significance of Ukraine in his 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard. He wrote: Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire…If Moscow regains control over Ukraine, with its 52 million people and major resources as well as access to the Black Sea, Russia automatically again regains the wherewithal to become a powerful imperial state, spanning Europe and Asia… Brzezinski, a student of Halford Mackinder geopolitics, described the role of “pivot” states: Geopolitical pivots are the states whose importance is derived not from their power and motivation but rather from their sensitive location… which in some cases gives them a special role in either defining access to important areas or in denying resources to a significant player…Ukraine, Azerbaijan, South Korea, Turkey and Iran play the role of critically important geopolitical pivots. Not surprisingly then, Brzezinski, architect of the 1980’s Mujahideen guerilla war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, today advocates NATO arming the Ukrainian state to fight Russia, to, in his words, “stop Putin from restoring the Czarist Empire.” Brzezinski carefully ignores the steady and escalating US overt and covert actions since the end of the Cold War to bring NATO, contrary to the solemn pledges of Washington’s Secretary of State James baker III to Mikhail Gorbachev, to the door of Moscow. He pretends as though the threat of a US “ballistic missile defense” perimeter in Poland, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria and Turkey did not exist as a direct US strategic threat to Moscow. A fateful Ukraine debate In 2013 there was intense debate inside the cabinet of what all sides agree was a democratically elected (if corrupt) Ukrainian President, Viktor Janukovich. The issue was he economic future of the floundering Ukraine—whether east with Russia into the new Eurasian Common Market together with Belarus and Kazakhstan, or to the west with a “special” association (not even a real full membership) with the European Union. After a period of vacillation, and a final economic offer from Russia that would include a reduction of the price Ukraine would pay for needed Russian natural gas by one third and Russia’s buying of $15 billion of Ukrainian state bond debt to ease the urgent fiscal crisis in Kiev, Janukovich told EU ministers in November, 2013 that Ukraine would postpone talks for EU association and would join Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union, in the situation, a far more attractive proposition for Ukraine. At that point, within minutes of Janukovich’s announcement, Ukraine’s “Second Color Revolution,” was initiated. The protests started in the night of 21 November 2013, initiated by the man personally pre-selected by the US State Department to become future Prime Minister and opposition party Batkivshchyna faction leader, Arseniy Yatsenyuk. Via Twitter, Yatsenyuk called for protests, which he dubbed as Euromaidan, on Maidan Square, outside the main Government buildings. What then ensued in Ukraine is to this day almost entirely unknown in the West. The reason is a total media blackout, led by CNN, BBC, the New York Times, Washington Post. It has been a de facto NATO wartime press censorship, originating in Washington at the highest levels. That censorship has turned once-critical German, other EU and US media into apologists for the illegal installation on February 2014 of a gang of unelected criminals and self-styled neo-nazis and the undemocratic coup against a democratically elected government, all, cynically, in the name of democracy. That Kiev coup regime proceeded after February 22, 2014 to wage a war of extermination and ethnic cleansing in eastern Ukraine, led to a large degree by a private army of neo-nazis from Pravy Sektor, the ones who ran security in Maidan Square and launched a reign of terror against Russian-speaking Ukrainians. Battalions were formed of mercenaries. They were given state status as “Ukrainian National Guard” soldiers, financed by Ukrainian mafia boss and billionaire oligarch, Ihor Kolomoisky, in part by billionaire oligarch Rinat Akhmetov, or by Oleh Lyashko, a convicted embezzler and Kiev politician. Those private mercenaries—largely from the anti-Russian western Ukraine where memories of the 1930’s Holodomor have been deliberately revived to foster Russophobia—have waged a savage war inside Ukraine since March 2014, killing Ukrainians indiscriminately and shelling villages to drive the population out, and ultimately, to try to provoke Washington’s ultimate agenda—a Russian military invasion that could be used as a pretext for a NATO mobilization that would transform the political map of Europe, Russia, China and the world. Since the beginning of what Kiev provocatively calls their “Anti-Terror Action” against the rebels in eastern Ukraine in April 2014, 2,593 people have died in fighting in the east of the country, while over 6,033 have been wounded. According to the UN, the number of internally displaced Ukrainians has reached 260,000, with another 814,000 finding refuge in Russia. The war has raged in and around rebel strongholds in Luhansk, Slovayansk, Donetsk and Mariupol on the Sea of Azor. As of this writing, early September, 2014, a fragile ceasefire on general terms proposed by Russian President Putin, has been agreed by Kiev’s President Poroshenko. If it will hold or is only a ruse to buy time to get more NATO reinforcements to continue the senseless war, is unknown. As winter approaches the EU, especially Germany and France and Italy face the prospect of no Russian gas for their industry and homes. Indications are that more states in the EU, led by Germany, are getting fed up with being forced to back the Washington agenda of war with Russia over Ukraine. As the gangsters in Kiev face October elections, the economy of Ukraine is in free-fall because of Washington’s push to a new war, first Cold War and perhaps even hot war, using Ukraine as the vehicle. What is clear is that no one benefits from the stupidity of the Poroshenko-Yatsenyuk government in Kiev, or the stupidity of the neo-conservative warhawks surrounding President Obama in Washington. --F. William Engdahl, Wiesbaden, 11 September Endnotes:
[i] Tarik Cyril Amar, Did NATO leaders lie to Russia?, January 15, 2022, https://alethonews.com/2022/01/15/did-nato-leaders-lie-to-russia/; Klaus Wiegrefe, 15.02.2022NATO's Eastward Expansion Is Vladimir Putin Right?, !5 February, 2022, Spiegel International, https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/nato-s-eastward-expansion-is-vladimir-putin-right-a-bf318d2c-7aeb-4b59-8d5f-1d8c94e1964d; [ii] Vladimir Putin, Vladimir Putin’s Historical Speech at the Munich Conference on Security Policy, The Washington Post, February 12, 2007, https://aldeilis.net/english/putins-historical-speech-munich-conference-security-policy-2007/ [iii] Andrei Veselov, 'Shoot at All Targets on Maidan': New Evidence of Georgian Snipers, https://vid1.ria.ru/ig/infografika/golova/inter_en/ [iv] Elena Chernenko and Alexander Gabuev, Stratfor chief George Friedman on the roots of the Ukraine crisis, 17 January, 2015, http://us-russia.org/2902-in-ukraine-us-interests-are-incompatible-with-the-interests-of-the-russian-federation-stratfor-chief-george-friedman-on-the-roots-of-the-ukraine-crisis.html [v] SouthFront, Ukraine Reportedly Was Close To Obtaining Nuclear Weapons When Russia Decided To Act, 6 March, 2022, https://southfront.org/ukraine-reportedly-was-close-to-obtaining-nuclear-weapons-when-russia-decided-to-act/ [vi] Nikolai Storozhenko, How Ukraine has been spoiling relations with Russia for thirty years — NATO has been present in Ukraine for a long time, translated by John Helmer, 3 March, 2022, http://johnhelmer.net/operation-barbarossa-in-slow-motion-this-is-the-offensive-capacity-the-us-was-preparing-in-the-ukraine-until-last-week/#more-47611 [vii] Dilyana Gaytandzhieva, Documents expose US biological experiments on allied soldiers in Ukraine and Georgia, 24 January, 2022, http://dilyana.bg/documents-expose-us-biological-experiments-on-allied-soldiers-in-ukraine-and-georgia/ [viii] Andrei Martyanov, Well, Well, Well: Now Russia's MoD officially confirms, 6 March, 2022, https://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/ |
