Biden in Kiev on US Regime-Change Victory Tour
by Finian Cunningham - SCF
US
vice president Joe Biden flew into Kiev this week to celebrate the
anniversary of the Maidan protests that led to the overthrow of
Ukraine’s government.
With
arms waving and his wife in tow, as he stepped off Air Force One, the
spectacle was tantamount to an unctuous victory lap for American regime
change in the former Soviet republic.
The
fact that Biden’s son, Hunter, was also appointed as a board member of
Ukrainian gas company Burisma since the regime took over adds a certain
personal dimension to the American celebrations of this coup.
The
next US planes to follow Biden’s will be loaded with weapons and other
non-lethal munitions, as earlier this week Washington announced for the
first time that it is to start supplying the Kiev regime with military
hardware. Those weapons are to include anti-tank and air defence
systems, sniper rifles and machine-guns.
Up
to now, the US has been maintaining the fiction that it is only sending
«non-lethal aid» – although unofficially it is understood that military
materiel and private American «security» contractors have already been
flowing to prop up the ultra rightwing regime that the American CIA
helped seize power earlier this year.
Russia
this week condemned the dangerous escalation of US military involvement
in Ukraine. Moscow’s foreign ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich
said the arms announcement «broke all agreements» and that it would
further destabilise the country and make a political resolution of the
conflict less likely.
Biden’s celebratory arrival in Kiev could hardly be more provocative.
The
Kiev regime, headed up by president Petro Poroshenko and his prime
minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, is preparing to scale up its military
offensive in the eastern regions of Ukraine. Last week it announced that
it was cutting off vital public services, including hospitals and
energy, to the breakaway self-declared republics of Donetsk and Luhansk.
That move can be seen as a form of collective punishment paving the way
for military attack.
The
largely ethnic Russian people of the eastern Donetsk and Luhansk
regions have refused to recognise the Western-backed junta in Kiev that
came to power in an illegal coup last February. For the past seven
months, the Kiev regime has been conducting a blitzkrieg in the
dissident east, which has resulted in more than 4,300 deaths – mostly
civilians – and up to one million people displaced from their homes.
That
lethal military onslaught has been fully backed by the US and its
European allies, even though it has been carried out by neo-Nazi
paramilitaries and battalions working alongside regular armed forces. A
ceasefire called on September 5 has been largely ignored by Kiev’s
military units, which have continued laying siege to cities and towns
with indiscriminate shelling of civilian areas. Up to 1,000 people have
been killed over the past two months since the ceasefire brokered in
Minsk was officially declared, according to the latest figures from the
United Nations.
Biden
was instrumental in pushing the regime-change operation in Ukraine. He
led international calls for the elected government of Victor Yanukovych
to stand down, and it was Biden and State Department officials who
whipped up the Maidan anti-government protests that began last November.
The protests were ostensibly sparked by Yanukovych rejecting a proposed
European Union association agreement in favour of maintaining historic
trade ties with Russia.
No
doubt many of the protesters who flocked to Kiev’s Maidan Square had
genuine aspirations for their country to embark on a process of EU
integration and they felt disgruntled by Yanukovych’s spurning of the
association agreement. But, more importantly, there is ample evidence
that Washington had laid the groundwork to hijack the protests with a
«colour revolution» involving rightwing extremists. Paramilitaries
belonging to the neo-Nazi Right Sector and Svoboda (Freedom)
organisations, who had been trained in Poland months before the Maidan
rallies touched off, followed the script for regime change. Their use of
street violence and forcible occupations of government buildings
culminated in the February 20 sniper shootings in which more than 80
people, including police and protesters, were killed. With the help of
Western media, the massacre was blamed on the Ukrainian government. But
forensic and medical evidence shows that the snipers were operated by
the CIA-backed paramilitaries.
In
the final hours of Yanukovych’s presidency – before he was routed by
the Right Sector and Svoboda shock-troops – Biden phoned the doomed
Ukrainian leader and told him that belated reform efforts «were a day
late and a dollar too short», as reported in the New York Times.
Yanukovych fled his office on February 22 and the regime took over. The
cynical indifference of German, French and Polish governments in the
face of this coup also make them complicit in the illegal overthrow of
Ukraine’s constitution and the withering violence that has ensued in
that country.
To
be sure, Moscow is rightly alarmed by the brazen regime change in a
neighbouring country, which has centuries of close cultural, political
and economic ties. Ukraine was a member of the Soviet Union until the
latter’s dissolution in the early 1990s.
The
ongoing violence of the Kiev regime, which adulates the Second World
War Nazi collaborators from the western Ukrainian regions, is motivated
by a visceral hatred of Russian-speaking people in the east and of
Russia. It openly uses Nazi terminology of «sub-humans» and «cleansing»
when referring to the Slavic east.
Washington’s
script for regime change did not stop with the usurpation of the
Ukrainian government. The conflict that the US-backed regime has fuelled
in the eastern regions is aimed at destabilising Russia itself. This is
part of a long-term geopolitical game that US planners have been
working on since the early 1990s, as set out by such strategists as
Zbigniew Brzezinski and like-minded imperialists in the US State
Department. For them the Cold War did not end; it was merely a change in
tactics to subdue Russia and gain access to that country’s awesome
natural resources, in particular Russian oil and gas.
The
plan to turn Ukraine into a political, economic and military
penetration point into Russia’s heartland is a very real existential
threat to Moscow. It follows two decades of encroachment on Russia’s
borders by the US-led NATO military alliance in contravention of
previous American legally binding agreements not to do so.
The
propaganda war has involved turning reality on its head by accusing
Russia of stoking violence in Ukraine, when it should be glaringly
obvious that the past year of deadly unrest has resulted from Washington
and Europe’s intervention in that country.
Earlier
this week, German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier was in
Moscow to hold discussions with Russian President Vladimir Putin on how
to end the violence in Ukraine. Steinmeier appeared to be nonplussed by
Russia’s position that the conflict stems from the illegal overthrow of
the Ukrainian government by a hostile regime. The German diplomat
reiterated the Western trope that Russian subversion is to blame. What
bubble has Steinmeier been living in for the past year?
Even
US government-owned broadcaster Voice of America inadvertently
acknowledged this week that Russia is not supplying weapons or troops
into eastern Ukraine to help the anti-Kiev militia there. In a report
based on interviews with militia members, the VOA noted that «most arms
used by the separatist fighters were looted from Ukrainian weapons
stores». If Russia were sponsoring the rebels, then where are
Russian-supplied weapons?
Similar
inadvertent admissions of Russia’s non-involvement have been reported
previously by the New York Times and CIA-linked Radio Free Europe.
Yet,
in spite of a dearth of evidence, Western governments, NATO and the
Western mainstream media continue to assert that Moscow is the guilty
party for the conflict in Ukraine.
Joe
Biden’s victory lap of honour this week in Kiev, bearing news of a US
weapons bonanza, is proof – if ever proof was needed – of Washington’s
regime change in Ukraine and its hostile anti-Russian agenda.
Washington
and to a lesser extent its European allies are to blame for the
conflict in that country and now its anticipated escalation.
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