A False Narrative
Official Washington's "group think" on the crisis has been driven by a completely phony narrative of what has happened in Ukraine over the past year. It has become the near-monolithic view of insiders that the crisis was instigated by Putin as part of some diabolical scheme to recreate the Russian Empire by seizing Ukraine, the Baltic states and maybe Poland.
But the reality is that the crisis was initiated by the West, particularly by Official Washington's neocons, to pry Ukraine away from the Russian sphere of influence and into Europe's, a ploy that was outlined by a leading neocon paymaster, Carl Gershman, the longtime president of the U.S.-funded National Endowment for Democracy.
On Sept. 26, 2013, Gershman took to the op-ed page of the Washington Post and pronounced Ukraine "the biggest prize" and an important interim step toward toppling Putin and putting down the resurgent and willful Russia that he represents.
Gershman, whose NED is financed by the U.S. Congress to the tune of about $100 million a year, wrote: "Ukraine's choice to join Europe will accelerate the demise of the ideology of Russian imperialism that Putin represents. ... Russians, too, face a choice, and Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself."
In other words, from the start, Putin was the target of the Ukraine initiative, not the instigator. Beyond Gershman's rhetoric was the fact that NED was funding scores of projects inside Ukraine, training activists, supporting "journalists," funding business groups.
Then, in November 2013, Ukraine's elected President Viktor Yanukovych balked at an association agreement with the European Union after learning that it would cost Ukraine some $160 billion to separate from Russia. Plus, the International Monetary Fund was demanding economic "reforms" that would hurt average Ukrainians.
Yanukovych's decision touched off mass demonstrations from western Ukrainians who favored closer ties to Europe. That, in turn, opened the way for the machinations by neocons inside the U.S. government, particularly the scheming of Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, the wife of arch-neocon Robert Kagan.
Before long, Nuland was handpicking the new leadership for Ukraine that would be in charge once Yanukovych was out of the way, a process that was ultimately executed by tightly organized 100-man units of neo-Nazi storm troopers bused in from the western city of Lviv. [See Consortiumnews.com's "NYT Discovers Ukraine's Neo-Nazis at War."]
Worsening Crisis
The violent overthrow of President Yanukovych led to resistance from south and east Ukraine where Yanukovych got most of his votes. Crimea, a largely ethnic Russian province, voted overwhelmingly to secede from the failed Ukrainian state and rejoin Russia, which had been Crimea's home since the 1700s.
When Putin accepted Crimea back into Russia -- recognizing its historical connections and its strategic importance -- he was excoriated by Western leaders and the mainstream U.S. media. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton likened him to Hitler, as the narrative took shape that Putin was on a premeditated mission to conquer states of the former Soviet Union.
That narrative was always fake but it became Official Washington's conventional wisdom, much like the existence of Iraq's WMD became what "everyone knew to be true." The "group think" was again so strong that not even someone as important to the establishment as former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger could shake it.
In an interview last month with Der Spiegel magazine, Kissinger said that "The annexation of Crimea was not a move toward global conquest. It was not Hitler moving into Czechoslovakia."
The 91-year-old Kissinger added that President Putin had no intention of instigating a crisis in Ukraine: "Putin spent tens of billions of dollars on the Winter Olympics in Sochi. The theme of the Olympics was that Russia is a progressive state tied to the West through its culture and, therefore, it presumably wants to be part of it. So it doesn't make any sense that a week after the close of the Olympics, Putin would take Crimea and start a war over Ukraine."
Instead Kissinger argued that the West -- with its strategy of pulling Ukraine into the orbit of the European Union -- was responsible for the crisis by failing to understand Russian sensitivity over Ukraine and making the grave mistake of quickly pushing the confrontation beyond dialogue.
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