Instead, the major U.S. news media, particularly the New York Times, has made great fun by mocking Putin as a liar for saying that, first, he had ordered Russian troops to pull back from the border, and then that he ordered some to return to their bases. The Times conflated these two different statements as one and then favorably quoted NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen as saying there was no evidence of a Russian pullback. Gotcha, another Putin lie!
Yet, while showing their trust in Rasmussen's honesty and forthrightness, the Times and other mainstream outlets haven't bothered to inform their readers that this was the same Anders Fogh Rasmussen who as Danish prime minister last decade was a staunch supporter of the Iraq War and a gullible believer in President George W. Bush's claims about Iraq's non-existent WMD.
For instance, Prime Minister Rasmussen declared...
"Iraq has WMDs. It is not something we think, it is something we know. Iraq has itself admitted that it has had mustard gas, nerve gas, anthrax, but Saddam won't disclose. He won't tell us where and how these weapons have been destroyed. We know this from the UN inspectors, so there is no doubt in my mind."
Pretty much everything in that statement was wrong -- and Rasmussen appears to have been wrong, too, about Russia's pullback of troops, which has now been confirmed, at least in part, by the Pentagon. But, for days, the Times let Rasmussen, in effect, call Putin a liar without any independent checking; just one more sign of the long pattern of U.S. media bias against Russia during the Ukraine crisis. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Twisting Putin's Words on Ukraine."]
Blaming Russia
In line with that bias pervading the mainstream U.S. media for months, the Post's DeYoung added her own inflammatory rhetoric, stating "if Russian-inspired violence breaks out, it could be the start of far more serious and widespread international upheaval." All violence, it seems, must be "Russian-inspired."
DeYoung is presumably referring to the resistance in eastern Ukraine against the imposition of the coup regime's authority. The U.S. media has repeatedly treated these ethnic Russians in the east as Putin's "minions," being armed and directed by Russian special forces although no evidence has emerged to support that allegation.[See Consortiumnews.com's "NYT Retracts Russian-Photo Scoop."]
But DeYoung's characterization of "Russian-inspired violence" fits with Official Washington's "group think" that has treated the Ukraine crisis as instigated by Putin supposedly so he can begin reclaiming territory lost when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.
But the evidence clearly indicates that the uprising in Kiev was driven by a mix of popular dissatisfaction with Yanukovych, Western support and encouragement for the disorders, and violent neo-Nazi militias that despise the ethnic Russians in the east and spearheaded the Feb. 22 putsch that drove Yanukovych from office.
Still, the U.S. mainstream media has insisted on whitewashing the neo-Nazis brown shirts because their key involvement complicates the preferred American narrative of white-hat idealistic protesters taking on black-hat Yanukovych, backed by even blacker-hat Putin. Any reference to the well-documented role of neo-Nazis militias in the putsch is dismissed as "Russian propaganda" or the "Russian narrative." [See Consortiumnews.com's "Ukraine's Inconvenient Neo-Nazis."]
So, instead of a balanced account, the American people have been fed Official Washington's "group think" of some master conspiracy engineered by Putin that requires your believing that Putin first orchestrated the EU's reckless association offer to Ukraine last year, then got the International Monetary Fund to insist on draconian austerity measures which Yanukovych rejected, then arranged the angry demonstrations at the Maidan while also secretly training neo-Nazi militias in western Ukraine to provide the muscle to carry out the February putsch -- all the while pretending that he was trying to save Yanukovych's government and appearing to be distracted by the Winter Olympics in Sochi.
Of course, this grand conspiracy theory never made any sense and also lacked any evidence. What really happened was that neoconservatives in and around the State Department and Congress fed the flames of western Ukraine's discontent against Yanukovych's government that had been elected primarily with votes from the southern and eastern ethnic Russian sections.
The Neocon Role
There were, of course, legitimate complaints about Ukraine's pervasive political corruption, which has been an endemic problem since the hasty privatization that followed the Soviet collapse in 1991 and turned Ukraine into a country dominated by a handful of extremely wealthy oligarchs.
But the evidence is clear that powerful neoconservatives in Washington, including some still ensconced at the State Department, helped organize U.S. support for the protests that led to Yanukovych's ouster.
In late September, the neocons were furious over Putin helping Obama find a way out of an impending U.S. attack on Syria, an intervention that the neocons hoped might notch another "regime change" on their belts. So, their focus quickly turned to driving a wedge between the two leaders, with Ukraine becoming that wedge.
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