By Eric Zuesse
In a ‘news’ story published July 9th, Bloomberg ‘News’ reported that «Putin invaded Ukraine in 2014». Previously, US President Barack Obama himself justified his and NATO’s military buildups on and near Russia’s borders, by saying the same thing in less succinct form: «The days in which conquest of land somehow was a formula for great nation status is over,» and he was more explicit there about what he was referring to, by saying that «Mr Putin made this decision around Crimea and Ukraine». That’s the same thing (just in more words) as Bloomberg’s saying, «Putin invaded Ukraine in 2014». And it’s the central ‘justification’ given for NATO’s pouring missiles, tanks, bombers, and troops, to Russia’s borders, and so bringing the world to a repeat of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, except that this time the hostile missiles which could spark World War III aren’t 90 miles off the US coast, they’re right on and near Russia’s borders. This is supposed to be a ‘defensive’ measure against «Russian aggression», as Obama puts it.
However, the truth is that Obama invaded Ukraine before Putin did (if Putin did – and we’ll get to that question later), and that the way in which Obama invaded Ukraine is the way in which US President Dwight Eisenhower had invaded Iran in 1953 and overthrown that country’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh and replaced him by a barbaric dictatorship: the US took over Ukraine by means of a coup (in fact, the Ukrainian operation started no later than 1 March 2013, which was nearly a full year before the US coup there culminated).
Taking over the country by means of a coup, instead of by means of sending in the US military, is just as much an invasion. To avoid calling a coup an «invasion» (if Bloomberg’s ‘journalists’ would want to do that: deny that a coup is an invasion) would be mere playing with words: Obama’s takeover of Ukraine was undeniably an invasion, and an equally successful one as any military takeover of any country; it was also very bloody, as almost all invasions are. Like the coup in Iran, it was done mainly by hired local mercenaries. Even the outcome could be similar to that of the coup in Iran: the US controlled Iran from 1953 until the outraged people of Iran threw our regime out in 1979 – and, when Iranians did overthrow our regime, they hated America just as much as Ukrainians might hate America if ever they manage to get freed from their US-imposed dictatorship, because their foreign-controlled government is at least as bad as Iran’s was under the Shah, and they are coming to know this. American ‘news’ media can ignore the coup now, like they long ignored the coup in Iran, but ignoring it doesn’t mean that the coup didn’t occur.
The US still blames Iran for having ended America’s dictatorship: the US says that the overthrow of our Shah merely replaced one dictatorship with another (the religious one), but this anti-US dictatorship was installed by one faction of Iranians – fundamentalist Shiites – ruling over their own country: it isn’t, like the installed US dictatorship (managed by our Shah) had been, a dictatorship by and for a foreign power. Furthermore, prior to America’s takeover of Iran, the government there had been a new and young democracy, and it had come to power democratically; so, America replaced a democracy there with a dictatorship.
We did it in 1953; and, yet again, in 2014, we did it in Ukraine. Of course, we had done it also in Chile and many other places; these are just two of America’s many coups – the American elite are obsessed with conquest, and this is their preferred way of doing it. And, just as in Iran, they replaced a democracy with a dictatorship, and it’s not reported in their press. But instead, they report things such as «Putin invaded Ukraine in 2014».
When Obama in 2014 installed a group of fascists to control Ukraine, the intention was to replace the democratically elected Ukrainian President, and install a rabidly anti-Russian regime on Russia’s border, and these new leaders certainly were that: they derived from the Ukrainian political faction in Ukraine’s northwest who had welcomed Hitler as being Ukraine’s savior from Stalin, and their ideology is much like that of Hitler but anti-Russian in the way that Hitler was anti-Jew: viscerally, favoring ethnic cleansing to eliminate the unwanted people. They didn’t replace a Stalinist regime, but instead they replaced a democracy; and what they replaced it with was Europe’s first fascist dictatorship since WW II. They quickly established an ethnic-cleansing program. It killed untold numbers of people and expelled (mainly fleeing across the border into Russia) over a million, with their former residences and workplaces largely or wholly destroyed. So, this was at least as much an invasion as was Eisenhower’s invasion of Iran in 1953 – perhaps more so.
Obama’s coup in Ukraine occurred in February 2014, and the breakaway of Crimea from Ukraine and its returning to Russia (of which it had been a part until 1954) occurred less than a month after that. The breakaway of Donbass from Ukraine occurred in May 2014. Russia provided crucial assistance to both Crimea and Donbass, to help protect the people there against the new Ukrainian government, which was intensely hostile against them (because Crimeans had voted 75% for the man, Yanukovych, whom Obama had overthrown, and people of Donbass had voted 90% for him; if those people were to stay alive and inside Ukraine to vote, then Obama’s installed leaders wouldn’t remain in power after the next Presidential election). Therefore, if, in fact, Putin invaded Ukraine in 2014, then it was in response to Obama’s coup in Ukraine, and to what Obama and his team needed to do in order to keep their people in power. But that still doesn’t answer the question: did Putin invade Ukraine in 2014?
(To be continued)
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