Wednesday, March 26, 2014

Was the first shot of the upcoming Ukrainian civil war just fired?

There are pretty good signs that the shots which killed Aleksandr Muzychko might turn out to be the first ones of the upcoming civil war.

So far, what happened was not a civil war, but a armed insurrection followed by a coup, a revolution for sure, but not a civil war.  What is beginning to take place now is very different.  Consider this:

1)  There are now four very different forces in the Ukraine:
  • the US/EU run oligarchs (Timoshenko, Iatseniuk, etc)
  • the US funded but probably not really controlled neo-Nazi crazies (Tiagnibok and Right Sector
  • the local mobsters pretending to be revolutionaries
  • the Russian speakers
This makes for a very dangerous and volatile combination

2) There are numerous reports of assaults, lynchings, pogroms, murders, intimidations and robberies all over the Ukraine.  Some are committed by the neo-Nazis, some by mobsters pretending to act in the name of the revolution.  The population is very fearful not only for its future, but even for its present.

3) The state, or what remains of it, is clearly controlled by the oligarchs, but there is very little it can do since the only instrument of power which it controls is the SBU, the Ukrainian state security, which is phenomenally corrupt, whose best cadre have left a long time ago and which is basically taking orders from the CIA.  There are also some police forces (special SWAT teams, cops from the western Ukraine), but they are few in numbers.  They can kidnap this or that Russian-speaker or kill some individual (like Muzychko), but they cannot fight the neo-Nazis or mobsters.

4) The Ukrainian military basically exists only on paper.  Most officers are either resigning or trying to join the Russian military.  Many of its weapons depots have been looted, and morale is at rock bottom.  Potentially, the Ukrainian officer corps could be used to crack down on the neo-Nazis and mobsters, but only if they could be convinced that sane people are back in command.

5) The economy - which was already close to death - is degrading at phenomenal speed and absolutely nobody has any plan to resurrect it.

6) The state's policy current is clear: to crack down on the neo-Nazis with brute force and to discredit the Freedom Party politically.  This policy has a very small chance of being successful.  Think of the Right Sector and the Freedom Party as the "Ukrainian Taliban" and you will immediately see why the state simply does not have the means to crush them.

7) The other key tactic of the state is a major cover-up of the true state of affairs.  This is the real reason why all the Russian TV channels have been basically banned in the Ukraine: Russian TV channels are more than happy to report about all the economic problems, security situation, tensions, etc which the state is desperately trying to cover up.  And since the western corporate media is as loyal to the USA as the Ukrainian one is to the regime - the revolutionary regime hopes that by cutting off the info from Russia it will be able to hide the real situation from the general public.

8) The upcoming (in May) presidential elections are going to head for disaster in one way or another: there is simply no way, no way at all, that the current regime would - or even could - organize even minimally decent elections.   They cannot let Milkail Dobkin run or, if they do, they would have to dramatically "correct" the number of votes he will get.  They probably cannot let Iarosh run either.  Dobkin, being under house arrest, could not run a normal campaign either way, as for Iarosh, he might be the next to be assassinated by the SBU/cops.  No matter what the modalities or he outcome, the next presidential elections will be a farce which most people will simply not accept.  The resulting "President" and government will have zero legitimacy.

9) The revolutionary regime is also completely out of touch with reality.  Instead of seriously dealing with the immense problems facing the Ukraine, they are busying themselves with nonsense like issuing a search warrant for the (very cute) new Chief Prosecutor of Crimea Natalia Poklonskaia.

10) Last, but not least, there is already overwhelming evidence that the revolutionary regime is lying about the circumstances of the death of Aleksandr Muzychko who appears to have been executed by a special SWAT unit.  The order to kill him apparently was given or, at least, approved, by the CIA station in Kiev who, according to many reports, is basically running the revolutionary government from the 4th floor of a building in central Kiev.

Now, I fully understand the reasons for the order to execute Muzychko: it gets rid of a armed and protected psychopathic murderer whose antics have been embarrassing the new revolutionary regime.  It also triggers a crisis between the pro-US oligarchs and the neo-Nazis which would allow the former to try to get rid of the latter in the name of "democracy" and "anti-Fascism", hence something which would not only be applauded with both hands in the West, but also give the oligarchs some anti-Nazi credentials and thus help to erase from the collective memory of the TV-zombified morons the fact that this regime only came to power thanks to the violence meted out by these neo-Nazis.

It is in many ways uncanny how much the situation today resembles the absolute chaos which took place in the Ukraine in 1918-1920 when many different factions fought each other, several foreign countries intervened in one way or another, total chaos and anarchy reigned over much of the country while politicians made ridiculous promises (for those who know little about this period, just read the Wikipedia entry under "Nestor Makhno").  Eventually, the situation was "solved", if one can use that word in this context, by the invasion of the Ukraine by the Red Army, a catastrophic war against Poland, Bolshevik terror and WWII.  In other words, 2 years of total chaos turned into 25 years of horror and immense suffering for the Ukrainian people.  That precedent is, indeed, very, very scary.

The good news is, of course, that there is no Red Army today.  The bad news is that the Russian military does no want to intervene in the Ukraine.  At the very best, the Kremlin might be forced to move the Russian military into eastern and, possibly, southern Ukraine to protect Russian-speakers from the violence resulting from a breakup of the Ukraine, but that would be an option of last resort as the Kremlin fully understands that the imbeciles in charge of the major powers in the West could do something truly stupid in reaction to such a Russian move.  Thus, from the Russian point of view the best solution is by far, and I have said that many times here, to have a more or less stable, more or less prosperous, more or less "not anti-Russian" and independent Ukraine as a good neighbor.

When Putin told the Russian Federal Assembly and the rest of the world in his historical speech that Russia did not want to occupy or annex the Ukraine, he was not lying to cover up an imminent invasion, or trying to appease the West or showing how generous and good the Russians are - he was stating a basic reality of Russian pragmatic self-interest: Russia neither needs nor wants the Ukraine, especially now that it got Crimea back.  What Russia does not want is a neo-Nazi Ukraine with NATO bases.

So if the Empire's leaders had any common sense at all, they would understand the basic truth that this is not a zero-sum game and that Russia's interests are quite compatible to the West's as long as the West gives up its crazy idea of setting a neo-Nazi regime in Kiev surrounded by NATO bases.  That crazy shit Russia simply will not accept.  But an independent Ukraine?!  Of course - please, they will even help pay for it as long as it avoids a much more dangerous outcome resulting in a civil war.

Alas, all the signs are that Obama and his EU minions are just not going to accept anything short of a total victory - thereby securing their own total defeat, but at the cost of a complete destruction of rump-Ukraine and a horrible predicament for the people of the Ukraine.  Just look at what these politicians did with Iraq or Libya!  The AngloZionist logic is simple: what I cannot get - I burn down.

Short of a miraculous change of mind of the AngloZionist plutocracy, the bullets that killed Muzychko might well have been the (CIA's) match which will start a fire capable of burning down what is left of the Ukraine.

The Saker