Russia’s Leader Putin Rejects Ukrainian Separatists’ Aim to Become Part of Russia.
But Separatists Will Almost Certainly Receive Reconstruction Aid from Russia.
Eric Zuesse
RINF Alternative News
The great German newspaper German Economic News, headlined on Saturday, September 20th, “Welcome Russia at the G20 summit: End of Isolation” (German original: “Ende der Isolation: Russland bei G20-Gipfel willkommen”), and reported that, “Because the USA needs Russia in its fight against terror-IS, the G20 speculation to isolate Russia in the world community has been shelved. The conflict in the Eastern Ukraine is therefore classified as [being only] regionally [important].” Moreover, “Americans and Russians agreed behind the scenes on a division of the Ukraine. … The Ukrainian government and the rebels in the east have agreed on the establishment of a buffer zone in the east of the country. … The resulting 30 km wide buffer zone along the [battle] front will be monitored by observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).”
This is, essentially, the announcement introducing truce-lines, such as were established at the end of the Korean War and many others.
However, the foreign-affairs leader of the Ukrainian separatists says that their efforts to get Russia’s President Vladimir Putin to accept their territory as being a part of Russia have been firmly rejected by Putin’s Government; and, so, “We will build our own country.”
This important statement from the foreign-affairs leader Andrei Purgin on Wednesday, September 17th, was not headlined nor even the topic of any U.S. news report; it was instead inconspicuously buried halfway through an AP news story that focused on “East Ukraine Casualties.” It’s common for propagandistic news reports, such as characterize the U.S. media, to bury what’s important in the news story, and not even to headline that crucial information, when that information violates the regime’s propaganda that they’ve been trumpeting. So: this information was buried, and was not headlined. The American media had portrayed Putin as the aggressor behind Ukraine’s war, and had hidden that Obama was actually the aggressor. The extremely violent February 22nd overthrow of Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovych was, as this proves, a fascist coup by the U.S. And as the transcript of the phone conversation between two EU officials shown here documents, they recognized on February 25th that it had been precisely that. Furthermore, President Obama’s agent, Victoria Nuland, on February 4th, had already selected Arseniy Yatsenyuk, whom she affectionately referred to there as “Yats,” to run the country. And her U.S.-engineered coup in Ukraine didn’t occur until February 22nd, and it then installed “Yats” to run the country.
So, this news, that Putin didn’t even want the Ukrainian rebels’ territory, was not something that U.S. media intend the U.S. public to recognize suddenly; it’s instead like the non-existent “Saddam’s WMD” that they had trumpeted during 2002 and 2003 but that were all lies — something to be laid only gradually upon their deceived public, so the masses won’t even notice that they had been lied to.
Russia’s Government has thus now made clear that it is not seeking to add to its territory. While Russia has accepted the approximately million refugees who have fled to Russia from Ukraine’s civil war, Russia does not want any part of Ukraine’s territory.
Crimea was a different case: traditionally part of Russia, throughout the period 1783-1954, until the leader of the Soviet Union gifted Crimea to Ukraine (the nation that was called the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic) in 1954, but the residents of Crimea never accepted that, and they overwhelmingly considered themselves still to be Russians. Furthermore, the Russian Navy’s lease on the Crimean port of Sebastopol for its Black Sea Fleet extended till 2042, and the February 2014 coup-installed Ukrainian Government wanted to cancel it, which threatened crucial Russian national defense. Furthermore, many of those new, Obama-installed, Ukrainian leaders wanted a nuclear war against Russia. So, Putin needed to be concerned about the Black Sea Fleet, and he accepted Crimea back into Russia, but he will not admit more than that from Ukraine, as being added to Russian territory — at least not now.
Crimea is viewed as not being an addition to Russia, but instead as voluntarily rejoining Russia, irrespective of the new Ukrainian Government’s campaign to eliminate ethnic Russians from Ukraine’s southeast. No other part of post-1954 Ukraine had previously been part of Russia, and this includes the southeastern portion of Ukraine, whose residents ethnically descended from Russian immigrants who had settled there.
Consequently, the ethnic-cleansing campaign that has been going on by the new, Obama-installed, Ukrainian Government, against the residents in Ukraine’s southeast, will no longer have Washington’s support. Obama’s hope for that ethnic-cleansing to continue at least long enough for the surviving residents there to shrink to a small enough proportion of the total Ukrainian national electorate so that a nationwide Ukrainian election (which hasn’t been held in Ukraine since the February 2014 coup) will choose leaders who are acceptable to the U.S. Government, appears to have ended. On the basis of his hope to grab all of Ukraine, he had planned and financed that February coup. But now he settles for only the remaining western stump of it. The eastern part he won’t get. Only by killing and driving out enough of those people — the ones in the areas that overwhelmingly voted for the man whom Obama overthrew — would it become possible for an intact entire Ukraine that allies itself with the U.S. to be democratically stable, not reversed by the election of a pro-Russian leader of Ukraine. But instead, Ukraine will lose the land and resources that it had been trying to conquer back from the people who live in Ukraine’s pro-Russian region.
President Putin and President Obama have regularly been in direct contact with one-another ever since Obama’s coup occurred in February. Perhaps Putin’s declining to accept Ukrainian territory into Russia is part of an agreement between the two leaders, in which Obama is, for his part, declining the urgings from congressional Republicans and conservative Democrats for the U.S. to provide weapons to the Ukrainian military to expedite America’s ethnic cleansing campaign in Ukraine.
Obama seems to have decided that his desire to grab Ukraine for the U.S. aristocracy (international corporations) must be abandoned now, because it’s not politically practical at the same time when the U.S. is also escalating its military involvements in the Middle East, where the control of oil is an even bigger factor than the matter of gas is in Ukraine.
Obama is folding his Ukraine deck. And Putin doesn’t want it.
The result will be at least two failed states in the former Ukraine: the western part, which will be a bankrupt burden mainly to regular taxpayers in the EU, and the eastern part, which will be a bombed-out wreck right next door to Russia. Already, Russia is sending in food, clothing, and other aid, to the people still left where Ukraine was bombing and killing them, and was destroying their homes and infrastructure.
And, as this scenario plays itself out, it will all come to the public as if it is new news, and the public won’t even much care that they had been lied to, yet again. When the press is carefully managed, there is no accountability. That’s what the owners of the press want, and it’s why they buy it — to be able to sell to other aristocrats that non-accountability. It’s their racket.
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.=