Will Plot Against Ukraine Lead to Coup,
Civil War—or World War III?
by Helga Zepp-LaRouche
Feb. 7—If our sleepwalking and disinterested contemporaries would only wake up, they would have the unique opportunity to experience "live" how World War III is taking place before our very eyes. They would be able to follow—more exciting than any crime thriller—how the official version of events is served up to the credulous public by politicians and the media, and how, under the tip of the iceberg, there lies the much larger story, which involves intelligence agents, diplomats, and gangsters of all kinds.
Insight into this dirty underside of politics was provided by a YouTube posting of a four-minute recording of a telephone conversation between U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and the U.S. Ambassador in Kiev, Geoffrey Pyatt. Nuland can be heard giving instructions about how Ukrainian opposition politician Arseniy Yatsenyuk should quickly be made the new head of the government, and Vitaly Klitschko, who is favored by the EU and German Chancellor Merkel, should be booted out, and how the whole thing should be "glued together" by the UN. With the words "Fuck the EU," Nuland underscored her determination to impose her plans on the European Union. Someone, perhaps the Russian intelligence service, or perhaps a new whistleblower at the NSA, released the recording of the conversation.
If any further evidence were needed, here it is: that the Obama Administration is in direct control of the attempted coup against the legitimately elected President Victor Yanukovych. Several U.S. administrations have spent $20-30 billion over about the past 23 years to break relations between Ukraine and Russia. And currently, according to economist Sergei Glazyev, who is an advisor to President Putin on Ukraine, about $20 million is now being spent per week, including to arm the street fighters, aimed at culminating in a coup by the whole spectrum of Nazi organizations. The support for up to 10,000 violence-prone Nazis, hooligans, and terrorist elements, and their activities beyond Kiev, throughout the country, has led to a split and the beginning of a civil war, whose pre-programmed escalation is intended to provoke an imminent intervention by Russia and thus to provide the pretext for a showdown with Russia itself. If things continue on this road to Hell, we could be just days or weeks from the third world war, a thermonuclear war, which probably no one would survive.
Will Russia Sit Back and Watch?
Can and will Russia sit back and watch until this civil war spreads to its borders and spills over into Russia, as the Financial Times on Feb. 2 said it would? Will it watch as the script for toppling all recalcitrant governments with "regime change"—the policy of a British empire based on the Anglo-American special relationship—is finally applied to Russia as well? With a probability bordering on certainty, it will not.
Sergei Glazyev commented on the coup attempt newly proven by the Nuland audio, that this is a flagrant violation of the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, which was signed on the occasion of Ukraine's giving up its part of the Soviet nuclear arsenal, and in which the United States and Russia jointly committed themselves to responsibility for the security and sovereignty of Ukraine. Under this agreement, he said, Russia would even be obliged to intervene in a situation like this. The U.S. interference, on the other hand, is a clear violation of this accord.
The Azeri news agency ABC reported that the Verkhovna Rada (parliament) of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea on Feb. 19 may adopt laws that would allow the Republic to secede from Ukraine and join Russia. Parliamentarian Vladimir Klychnikov has already prepared an appeal to the Russian President and the Russian State Duma to be a guarantor of the inviolability of the status of Crimea and the rights and freedom of its citizens. Klychnikov based this appeal on the danger posed by the growing power of extreme nationalists in Kiev. Another initiator of the appeal, Serhiy Zekov, stressed the Russian nationality, culture, and language of the autonomous republic, in which many ethnic groups live together peacefully, but which could only be protected by the Russian Federation.
Given the binding nature of the Budapest Memorandum and the imminent appeal by the Parliament of Crimea, a Russian intervention in Ukraine would definitely have a legal foundation. It is part of the scenario, that this would be used in any case as a pretext for a thermonuclear showdown or worse, by the same forces who are launching the coup in Ukraine.
Continuity of Policy
The policies of systematic encirclement of Russia, by the eastward expansion of NATO and the EU, as well as of regime change, represents a continuity of policy since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Margaret Thatcher and the senior George Bush agreed at that time to the neoconservative doctrine that the world should be ruled as an empire based on the Anglo-American special relationship. With the exception of the eight years of the Clinton Administration, the U.S. has been governed since then by puppet administrations of this British Empire: first Bush senior, then eight years of George W. Bush, and finally, five years of Obama.
Victoria Nuland is an example of the continuity of this policy. She is married to Robert Kagan, a co-founder of the Project for the New American Century think-tank, and thus of the imperial ideology of the neocons. He was one of the propagandists for the Iraq War. Nuland herself was deputy foreign policy advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney, U.S. Ambassador to NATO (2005-08), and State Department spokeswoman in the Obama Administration. Her role in the cover-up of the Benghazi scandal, which includes arms shipments to al-Qaeda in Syria, among other things, is currently under investigation.
It is high time for our sleepwalking and disinterested contemporaries to take advantage of the unexpected insight into the reality of imperial politics, which the conversation between Nuland and Ambassador Pyatt affords us, and to wake up and realize what really lies behind the propaganda. At a recent event organized by the World Affairs Council in Washington on the theme of "Where Is Ukraine Going?", former U.S. Ambassadors John Herbst and William Courtney, as well as the Vice President of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), Nadia Diuk, told such incredible lies that one would have to assume that they habitually travel around on Baron Münchausen's cannonball [see picture]!
The NED has an annual budget of $100 million and is one of the main funder of the 2,200 NGOs (!) that have built up a russophobic network in Ukraine over the past two decades. Diuk praised the Maidan, Kiev's Independence Square where opposition demonstrations are being held, as a "physical space" over which the authoritarian President Yanukovych has no control and which dominates the "civil sector," a space where you can breathe the "spirit of the Maidan," and where people persevered despite the cold weather. Not a single word about Svoboda and the other neo-Nazi organizations, about the barricades put up by the demonstrators, the masked stormtroopers, the occupations of ministries and houses, and the armed attacks on police.
In reply to an intervention from the audience, Diuk said that she was completely "uninformed" about any possibility of encirclement of Russia. But Russia is a big country, she said, one-sixth of the land mass of the Earth, so one could not possibly encircle it. She said she had never heard an anti-Semitic word from Svoboda leader Oleh Tyahnybok, and the only thing the protesters want is a better life for their children, in Europe. These people lie with such skill and audacity that it can only be understood as pre-war black propaganda.
The attempted takeover of Ukraine must be viewed in the context of the U.S. missile defense system being deployed in Eastern and Central Europe and the doctrine of "Prompt Global Strike," which, all protestations to the contrary, includes the utopian belief that the nuclear capabilities of the other side could be neutralized by a nuclear first strike. Regarding the U.S. doctrine of "Air-Sea Battle," Russia and also China have made unmistakably clear that if necessary, they will deploy their nuclear arsenals. If Germany and other European nations do not want to be drawn into a thermonuclear conflict within days or weeks, a war which no one on this planet will survive, then they have to identify by name, the fascist character of the coup attempt in Ukraine.
Above all, we must stop behaving like subjects and vassals of the British Empire and its American puppet government. A current example: Clemens Wergin writes in Die Welt, regarding the Nuland-Pyatt recording—for which he of course holds Russia responsible—that "in Europe and NATO they are slow to deal with some of the worst-case scenarios." Worst case? How about the extinction of the human species?
And he concludes: "Like the Wikileaks postings, this short recording actually casts a good light on American diplomacy. It shows how America unifies both pragmatic and goal-oriented strands, brings the UN into play, and seeks to unite the Ukrainian opposition."
Or as Victoria Nuland said, "Fuck the EU!" Obviously some people are happy with that.
Translated from German by Susan Welsh
