washingtonsblog.com
What You Never Learned In School … or On the News
While Ukraine, Crimea and Russia are in the news, you probably don’t know the background:
- President George H. W. Bush promised Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that – if the Soviets broke up the Soviet Union and dissolved the Warsaw Pact – then NATO would not
move into those former Soviet countries. This assured the Soviets that
NATO would not encircle Russia. But Bill Clinton broke America’s
promise, and the U.S. has pursued a campaign of encircling Russia ever since
- Ukraine is crisscrossed with natural gas pipelines (and much of the world’s geopolitics is actually driven by natural gas):
- Crimea was a part of Russia for 250 years. The Soviet leaders did not ask
the people of Crimea, Ukraine or Russia if Crimea should be transferred
to Ukraine. They just did it by fiat order. Now, a huge number of
Crimeans voted – much more than in any modern American presidential election – and they voted 97% in favor of rejoining Russia
- The U.S. spent more than $5 billion dollars in pushing Ukraine towards the West, and away from Russia
- The head of security for Ukraine at the time of the riots which overthrew the Ukrainian president alleges that the new
Ukrainian government was behind the shootings by snipers which
dramatically escalated the violence. On the other hand, the new
Ukranian coalition accuses Russia of deploying the snipers. We don’t know who was behind the attacks, but sniper violence has long been used
as a tactic to disrupt peaceful protest – or to build momentum for
“regime change” – and no one has yet proved one way or the other who the
culprit was. Russia has called for an investigation into who was behind the violence