Exclusive: As much as President Obama needs
President Putin’s help on Syria, Iran and other global hotspots, he has
fallen in line behind U.S. hardliners in seeking to ratchet up the
confrontation over Ukraine and now is trying to bring the Europeans
along at the G-7, writes ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.
By Ray McGovern
The
“G-7 summit” at a resort in Germany’s picturesque Bavaria region is
likely to show whether “G-7” should be called “G-1-plus-6” – number
“one” being what President Barack Obama continues to call the “only
indispensable country in the world”; the “six” being those countries
that Russian President Vladimir Putin has labeled Washington’s “junior
partners.”
The “G-7” – consisting of Germany, France, Italy, the
UK, Japan, Canada and the U.S. – formerly was known as the “G-8” until
Russia was booted last year after being blamed for the violent aftermath
of the U.S.-sponsored coup d’etat in Kiev on Feb. 22, 2014.
Last year, the West was in high dudgeon over what it deemed “Russian
aggression” and what Secretary of State John Kerry termed Russia’s
“Nineteenth Century behavior.” After all, the U.S. and its allies are
well known for always respecting the territorial integrity of other
countries regardless of the circumstances. Okay, well, maybe not.
However,
at the Bavarian summit, the U.S. is hoping to rekindle some of that old
outrage to get the European Union to extend economic sanctions on
Russia, though they are hurting the EU’s struggling economies, too.
The
main question is whether German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French
President Francois Hollande, who have witnessed up-front-and-personal
the behavior of Washington’s neocon policymakers and their Ukrainian
puppets, will summon the courage to act like adults.
Will the
leaders of Germany and France continue to bend to the U.S. diktat? Or
are they more likely, this time, to stand up on their own feet and
resist pressure from the U.S. and its UK lackey for continued punitive
sanctions against Russia?
Merkel and Hollande have had the chance
personally to take the measure of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko
and his client relationship with the U.S. At a very different kind of
summit on Feb. 11-12 in Belorussia, with U.S. representatives pointedly
not invited and only Poroshenko reflecting U.S. objectives, Merkel and
Hollande worked out with him and Putin the so-called “Minsk II” package
agreement that included a ceasefire – which pretty much held until just
recently – and a mechanism for resolving the political confrontation
between the post-coup regime in Kiev and the ethnic Russian resistance
in the east.
Merkel and Hollande are no political novices. And, if
they know their history, they know what a Pétain or a Quisling looks
like. In any case, they cannot have failed to recognize what Poroshenko
looks like and how he continues to do the bidding of the neocons running
U.S. policy on Ukraine, who are hell-bent on demonizing Putin and
ostracizing Russia – all with little heed to the economic and
longer-term security damage inflicted on “junior partners” like Germany
and France.
Shortly after Minsk II was signed, the hard-line
Ukrainian parliament, led by U.S. favorite Prime Minister Arseniy
Yatsenyuk, approved implementing legislation that was designed
not
to implement the political side of the agreement. A “poison pill” was
inserted that, in effect, required the ethnic Russian rebels in the east
to surrender before negotiations proceeded. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “
Ukraine’s Poison Pill for Peace Talks.”]
Sinking Peace
Poroshenko
signed the law to the delight of U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for
European Affairs Victoria Nuland, the neocon operative who had
hand-picked Yatsenyuk before the coup, telling U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey
Pyatt that “Yats is the guy” while also repudiating the European Union’s
more cautious approach back then with the pithy remark, “Fuck the EU.”
Yatsenyuk
remains Nuland’s go-to guy when it comes to not resolving the Ukraine
crisis — and surely not restoring the pre-crisis working relationship
that Obama had with Putin, a tandem that had undermined neocon dreams of
more “regime change” in the Middle East, especially in Syria and Iran,
by instead working on diplomatic solutions to those difficult problems.
Now,
with many EU economic sanctions against Russia due to expire this
month, the neocons and their clients in Ukraine understood the need to
again kick-start the Putin bashing – and almost on cue there was a
pre-summit uptick in ceasefire violations in southeastern Ukraine that
the West’s mainstream news media predictably blamed on Putin.
However,
the German and French leaders – and of course Putin – are acutely aware
of which side sees advantage in wielding outrage over the increased
fighting as a transparently convenient cudgel to pound Russia and demand
that the U.S. “junior partners” renew the economic sanctions.
Europeans
have a giant economic stake in what happens at the “G1-plus-6” summit
in Bavaria. Trouble is, European press coverage of Ukraine is almost as
poor as what you read in the U.S. media. Odd as it strikes me, having
analyzed Soviet propaganda for decades, the U.S. fawning corporate media
has recently proven to be at least as adept at spreading half-truth and
lies as Pravda and Izvestia in the old Soviet days.
Because of my
previous professional experience, it is hard for me to accept that
President Putin’s account of what went down in Kiev since early 2014 is
far more factually based than what we hear from President Obama or read
in the New York Times, but it is. For instance, here are excerpts from
an interview Putin gave on June 6 to the Italian newspaper
Il Corriere della Sera:
“What
sparked the [Ukraine] crisis? Former President Viktor Yanukovych said
that he needed to think about signing Ukraine’s Association Agreement
with the EU, possibly make some changes and hold consultations with
Russia, Ukraine’s major trade and economic partner. In this connection
and under this pretext riots broke out in Kiev. They were actively
supported by both our European and American partners.
“Then a coup
d’état followed – a totally anti-constitutional act. … The question is:
what was the coup d’état for? Why did they need to escalate the
situation to a civil war? … The result that we have – a coup d’état, a
civil war, hundreds of lives lost, a devastated economy and social
sphere, a four-year $17.5 billion loan promised to Ukraine by the IMF
and complete disintegration of economic ties with Russia…
“I would
like to tell you and your readers one thing. Last year, on Feb. 21,
President Yanukovych and the Ukrainian opposition signed an agreement on
how to proceed, how to organize political life in the country, and on
the need to hold early elections.
“They should have worked to
implement this agreement, especially since three European foreign
ministers signed this agreement as guarantors of its implementation. If
they were used merely for the sake of appearances … they should have
said [after the coup the next day], ‘You know, we did not agree to a
coup d’état, so we will not support you; you should go and hold
elections instead.’”
However, instead of upholding the Feb. 21,
2014 agreement, the EU – under strong pressure from Nuland and the Obama
administration – hastened to recognize the “legitimacy” of the coup
regime in Kiev. The Feb.21 agreement was quickly forgotten and the new
Ukrainian authorities, with Yatsenyuk elevated to prime minister and
right-wing extremists given key ministries, moved to crack down on the
ethnic Russians in the south and east, citizens who had been
Yanukovych’s political base and who resisted the unconstitutional coup.
Perhaps
now is the time for Merkel and Hollande to remember that German Foreign
Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier and French Foreign Minister Laurent
Fabius, in addition to Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski,
mediated the Feb. 21, 2014 agreement and signed it as official
witnesses. An envoy from Russian President Putin, Vladimir Lukin, was
also involved but did not sign as a witness.
There may be no such
thing as a guilty conscience in high-stakes diplomacy. Still, what
happened just one day before the Feb. 22 coup in Kiev is a matter of
record.
Would it be too much to expect of Steinmeier and Fabius to
remind their bosses of this shameless piece of failed diplomacy, before
Merkel and Holland cave in once again to Washington’s diktat – and to
the neocons who could then rush off to a Bavarian Beirgarten to
celebrate the escalation of Cold War II?
Ray McGovern
works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of
the Saviour in inner-city Washington. During his 27 years as a CIA
analyst, he was chief of the Soviet Foreign Policy branch in the 60s,
and Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Western Europe in the
70s. McGovern now serves on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
https://consortiumnews.com/2015/06/07/obamas-g-1-plus-6/
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/06/07/g16-opens-bavaria-will-junior-members-act-adults
VIDEO: http://armakhno.narod.ru/muzon/Gorlovka.mp4
