Kerry’s statement on Ukraine: A lying brief for war

By Alex Lantier

26 April 2014

On Thursday, US Secretary of State John Kerry delivered a lying brief for war aimed at justifying the crackdown by the Western-backed Kiev regime on pro-Russian protests in eastern Ukraine and possible military action against Russia. Declaring confrontation with Russia to be all but inevitable, he turned reality on its head, blaming the crisis entirely on Russia and clearing Kiev of all responsibility.

“The simple reality is you can’t resolve a crisis when only one side is willing to do what is necessary to avoid confrontation,” Kerry declared. Citing the April 17 truce talks in Geneva that halted the Kiev regime’s first attempted crackdown, he said: “One week later, it is clear that only one side, one country, is keeping its word. And for anyone who wants to create gray areas out of black, or find in the fine print crude ways to justify crude actions, let’s get real: the Geneva agreement is not open to interpretation.”

He continued: “The world has rightly judged that Prime Minister Yatsenyuk and the Government of Ukraine are working in good faith. And the world, sadly, has rightly judged that Russia has put its faith in distraction, deception, and destabilization.”

Let us, indeed, get real, Mr. Kerry. These arguments have not a shred of credibility, and neither do you.

Kerry ran unsuccessfully in 2004 as the Democratic Party’s US presidential candidate, posturing as a critic of the Bush administration’s war policy in Iraq, after having voted to authorize the 2003 US invasion. Taking the position of secretary of state under Obama, he became a point man for spreading lies to justify US wars. His speech on August 26 of last year to justify war with Syria was based on the claim that Washington had irrefutable proof that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime had carried out a poison gas attack in Ghouta.

An account by journalist Seymour Hersh, based on intelligence sources, has confirmed numerous reports at the time that it was US-backed opposition forces, seeking to provoke a US attack on Syria that carried out the poison gas attacks in Ghouta. Hersh, moreover, documented the fact that the Obama administration was well aware that its Islamist “rebels” in Syria had developed and previously used chemical weapons.

Kerry based his argument Thursday, that the unelected regime in Kiev is the victim of a malevolent Russian plot, on the tactic of the Big Lie—calculating that the bigger the lies, the harder they are to refute. He said: “From day one, Prime Minister Yatsenyuk has kept his word. He immediately agreed to help vacate buildings. He suspended Ukraine’s counterterrorism initiative over Easter, choosing de-escalation, despite Ukraine’s legitimate, fundamental right to defend its own territory and its own people.”

Kerry’s presentation of Yatsenyuk and his Western backers as defenders of Ukraine’s sovereignty is a repugnant falsification. The Yatsenyuk regime was installed in an imperialist regime-change operation, orchestrated and financed by Washington and Berlin, culminating in the February 22 putsch led by the anti-Russian Ukrainian fascists of the Right Sector militia and the Svoboda party.

The putsch disenfranchised eastern Ukraine, the power base of pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych and home to Ukraine’s main industrial base and ethnic Russian population. One of the Yatsenyuk regime’s first actions was to threaten to eliminate the status of Russian as an official language. A few weeks after the putsch, a leak emerged of a phone call between Kiev regime security officials and oligarch Yulia Tymoshenko, the leader of Yatsenyuk’s Fatherland Party, in which Tymoshenko called for killing Ukraine’s 8 million Russians with “nuclear weapons.”

Amid rising popular opposition and pro-Russian protests in the east, Yatsenyuk earlier this month ordered the Ukrainian army to mount a “counterterrorism offensive” to drown the protests in blood. This crackdown fell apart when large sections of the army refused to fire and went over to the protesters.

Such was the background to the political fraud of the Geneva talks, where Yatsenyuk and his Western backers eagerly agreed to “suspend” the failing crackdown and “help vacate” buildings occupied by pro-Russian protesters. For the Western powers, however, the Geneva talks were simply a delaying tactic to prepare the next crackdown, which began this week, relying directly on Ukrainian fascist militias. Right Sector leader Dmytro Yarosh and business oligarch Igor Kolomoysky are now setting up their own battalions in the east, coordinated with officials in Kiev.

Kerry blamed all the violence on Russia, however. “Prior to Russia’s escalation, there was no violence,” he said. “There was no broad-scale assault on the rights of people in the east.”

He continued: “Having failed to postpone Ukraine’s elections, having failed to halt a legitimate political process, Russia has instead chosen an illegitimate course of armed violence to try and achieve with the barrel of a gun and the force of a mob what couldn’t be achieved any other way.”

Shameless hypocrisy and lies! The Kiev regime is the illegitimate result of a forcible, right-wing putsch, which, after visits by CIA chief John Brennan and Vice President Joseph Biden to Kiev, has deployed troops and armored vehicles to shoot down dissidents in the east. (Two months ago, Kerry was justifying the overthrow of Yanukovych on the grounds that he ordered police to suppress anti-government protests on Kiev’s Independence Square).

Western officials have now admitted, moreover, that their spies are crisscrossing Ukraine.

Given these facts, the question of whether or not Russian spies are involved in eastern Ukraine is a red herring. The Western powers have no basis for indignation over a Kremlin intervention to defend ethnic Russians against the very real dangers posed by the Kiev puppet regime. They have themselves invaded innumerable countries, including Iraq and Libya, on the pretext of protecting the population from dictatorial regimes.

There is no question that if the roles of the United States and Russia were reversed, Washington would be threatening to intervene against a pro-Russian regime in its neighborhood. After the 1959 revolution in neighboring Cuba, the United States repeatedly mobilized its military against the pro-Soviet regime, backing the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and threatening war in the Cuban Missile Crisis a year later.

Is there any question that if Russia somehow backed a putsch to install a client regime in Mexico City, which sent the army to crush opposition protests along the US-Mexico border and threatened to annihilate US citizens with nuclear weapons, Washington would intervene?

In any event, Kerry provides no proof, only more lies, to justify his claim that Russian spies are in Ukraine. In his statement Thursday, he insisted, “Nobody should doubt Russia’s hand in this,” but offered only this evidence: “Some of the individual special operations personnel who were active on Russia’s behalf in Chechnya, Georgia and Crimea have been photographed in Slovyansk, Donetsk and Luhansk. Some are even bragging about it on their Russian social media sites. And we’ve seen weapons and gear on the separatists matching those worn and used by Russian Special Forces.”

This refers to the false photo report planted by the US State Department and published by the New York Times last Monday, which was so quickly exposed as a fabrication that even the Times has had to print two articles retracting it.

Kerry nonetheless brazenly repeated these discredited allegations, then denounced Russian media as a “propaganda bullhorn” for the state. As if the New York Times is not? In fact, it is Kerry who enjoys the support of the biggest propaganda apparatus in world history: the American media.

In his remarks, Kerry went on to threaten that the financial pirates who run the Western banking system would organize capital flight and speculation against Russia’s currency, the ruble, in order to destroy Russia’s financial system and economy.

He said, “Some $70 billion has fled the Russian financial system in the first quarter of 2014, more than all of last year … Meanwhile, the Russian Central Bank has had to spend more than $20 billion to defend the ruble, eroding Russia’s buffers against external shocks. Make no mistake that what I’ve just described is really just a snapshot and is also, regrettably, a preview of how the free world will respond if Russia continues to escalate what they had promised to de-escalate.”

Kerry’s suggestion that the standoff with Moscow cannot be resolved, coupled with the lies and verbal provocations he uses to demonize the Kremlin, must be taken as a warning that the US government is not seeking a resolution to the crisis it has created. It is aggressively pressing ahead. Having installed a far-right regime of oligarchs and fascists in Kiev, it is goading Moscow towards a military intervention in Ukraine with potentially cataclysmic consequences.

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