All-Out War in Ukraine: NATO’s ‘Final Offensive’
By James PetrasNovember 23, 2014 "ICH" - There
are clear signs that a major war is about to break out in Ukraine: A
war actively promoted by the NATO regimes and supported by their allies
and clients in Asia (Japan) and the Middle East (Saudi Arabia). The war
over Ukraine will essentially run along the lines of a full-scale
military offensive against the southeast Donbas region, targeting the
breakaway ethnic Ukraine- Russian Peoples Republic of Donetsk and
Lugansk, with the intention of deposing the democratically elected
government, disarming the popular militias, killing the guerrilla
resistance partisans and their mass base, dismantling the popular
representative organizations and engaging in ethnic cleansing of
millions of bilingual Ukraino-Russian citizens. NATO’s forthcoming
military seizure of the Donbas region is a continuation and extension of
its original violent putsch in Kiev, which overthrew an elected
Ukrainian government in February 2014.
The
Kiev junta and its newly ‘elected’ client rulers, and its NATO sponsors
are intent on a major purge to consolidate the puppet Poroshenko’s
dictatorial rule. The recent NATO-sponsored elections excluded several
major political parties that had traditionally supported the country’s
large ethnic minority populations, and was boycotted in the Donbas
region. This sham election in Kiev set the tone for NATO’s next move
toward converting Ukraine into one gigantic US multi-purpose military
base aimed at the Russian heartland and into a neo-colony for German
capital, supplying Berlin with grain and raw materials while serving as a
captive market for German manufactured goods.
An intensifying war fever is sweeping the West; the consequences of this madness appear graver by the hour.
War Signs: The Propaganda and Sanctions Campaign, the G20 Summit and the Military Build Up
The
official drum- beat for a widening conflict in Ukraine, spearheaded by
the Kiev junta and its fascist militias, echoes in every Western mass
media outlet, every day. Major mass media propaganda mills and
government ‘spokesmen and women’ publish or announce new trumped-up
accounts of growing Russian military threats to its neighbors and
cross-border invasions into Ukraine. New Russian incursions are
‘reported’ from the Nordic borders and Baltic states to the Caucuses.
The Swedish regime creates a new level of hysteria over a mysterious
“Russian” submarine off the coast of Stockholm, which it never
identifies or locates – let alone confirms the ‘sighting’. Estonia and
Latvia claim Russian warplanes violated their air space without
confirmation. Poland expels Russian “spies” without proof or
witnesses. Provocative full-scale joint NATO-client state military
exercises are taking place along Russia’s frontiers in the Baltic
States, Poland, Romania and Ukraine.
NATO
is sending vast arms shipments to the Kiev junta, along with “Special
Forces” advisers and counter-insurgency experts in anticipation of a
full-scale attack against the rebels in the Donbas.
The
Kiev regime has never abided by the Minsk cease fire. According to the
UN Human Rights office 13 people on average –mostly civilians –have been
killed each day since the September cease fire. In eight weeks, the UN
reports that 957 people have killed –overwhelmingly by Kiev’s armed
forces.
The
Kiev regime, in turn, has cut all basic social and public services to
the Peoples’ Republics’, including electricity, fuel, civil service
salaries, pensions, medical supplies, salaries for teachers and medical
workers, municipal workers wages; banking and transport have been
blockaded.
The
strategy is to further strangle the economy, destroy the
infrastructure, force an even greater mass exodus of destitute refugees
from the densely populated cities across the border into Russia and then
to launch massive air, missile, artillery and ground assaults on urban
centers as well as rebel bases.
The
Kiev junta has launched an all-out military mobilization in the Western
regions, accompanied by rabid anti-Russian, anti-Eastern Orthodox
indoctrination campaigns designed to attract the most violent far right
chauvinist thugs and to incorporate the Nazi-style military brigades
into the frontline shock troops. The cynical use of irregular fascist
militias will ‘free’ NATO and Germany from any responsibility for the
inevitable terror and atrocities in their campaign. This system of
‘plausible deniability’ mirrors the tactics of the German Nazis whose
hordes of fascist Ukrainians and Ustashi Croats were notorious in their
epoch of ethnic cleansing.
G20-plus-NATO: Support of the Kiev Blitz
To
isolate and weaken resistance in the Donbas and guarantee the victory
of the impending Kiev blitz, the EU and the US are intensifying their
economic, military and diplomatic pressure on Russia to abandon the
nascent peoples’ democracy in the south-east region of Ukraine, their
principle ally.
Each
and every escalation of economic sanctions against Russia is designed
to weaken the capacity of the Donbas resistance fighters to defend their
homes, towns and cities. Each and every Russian shipment of essential
medical supplies and food to the besieged population evokes a new and
more hysterical outburst – because it counters Kiev-NATO strategy of
starving the partisans and their mass base into submission or provoking
their flight to safety across the Russian border.
After
suffering a series of defeats, the Kiev regime and its NATO strategists
decided to sign a ‘peace protocol’, the so-called Minsk agreement, to
halt the advance of the Donbas resistance into the southern regions and
to protect its Kiev’s soldiers and militias holed-up in isolated pockets
in the East. The Minsk agreement was designed to allow the Kiev junta
to build up its military, re-organize its command and incorporate the
disparate Nazi militias into its overall military forces in preparation
for a ‘final offensive’. Kiev’s military build-up on the inside and
NATO’s escalation of sanctions against Russia on the outside would be
two sides of the same strategy: the success of a frontal attack on the
democratic resistance of the Donbas basin depends on minimizing Russian
military support through international sanctions.
NATO’s
virulent hostility to Russian President Putin was on full display at
the G20 meeting in Australia: NATO-linked presidents and prime
ministers, especially Merkel, Obama, Cameron, Abbott, and Harper’s
political threats and overt personal insults paralleled Kiev’s growing
starvation blockade of the besieged rebels and population centers in the
south-east. Both the G20’s economic threats against Russia and the
diplomatic isolation of Putin and Kiev’s economic blockade are preludes
to NATO’s Final Solution – the physical annihilation of all vestiges of
Donbas resistance, popular democracy and cultural-economic ties with
Russia.
Kiev
depends on its NATO mentors to impose a new round of severe sanctions
against Russia, especially if its planned invasion encounters a well
armed and robust mass resistance bolstered by Russian support. NATO is
counting on Kiev’s restored and newly supplied military capacity to
effectively destroy the southeast centers of resistance.
NATO has decided on an ‘all-or-nothing campaign’:
to seize all of Ukraine or, failing that, destroy the restive
southeast, obliterate its population and productive capacity and engage
in an all-out economic (and possibly shooting) war with Russia.
Chancellor Angela Merkel is on board with this plan despite the
complaints of German industrialists over their huge loss of export sales
to Russia. President Hollande of France has signed on dismissing the
complaints of trade unionists over the loss of thousands French jobs in
the shipyards. Prime Minister David Cameron is eager for an economic
war against Moscow, suggesting the bankers of the City of London find
new channels to launder the illicit earnings of Russian oligarchs.
The Russian Response
Russian
diplomats are desperate to find a compromise, which allows Ukraine’s
ethnic Ukraine- Russian population in the southeast to retain some
autonomy under a federation plan and regain influence within the ‘new’
post-putsch Ukraine. Russian military strategists have provided
logistical and military aid to the resistance in order to avoid a repeat
of the Odessa massacre of ethnic Russians by Ukrainian fascists on a
massive scale. Above all, Russia cannot afford to have NATO-Nazi-Kiev
military bases along its southern ‘underbelly’, imposing a blockade of
the Crimea and forcing a mass exodus of ethnic Russians from the
Donbas. Under Putin, the Russian government has tried to propose
compromises allowing Western economic supremacy over Ukraine but without
NATO military expansion and absorption by Kiev.
That policy of conciliation has repeatedly failed.
The
democratically elected ‘compromise regime’ in Kiev was overthrown in
February 2014 in a violent putsch, which installed a pro-NATO junta.
Kiev violated the Minsk agreement with impunity and encouragement from the NATO powers and Germany.
The
recent G20 meeting in Australia featured a rabble-rousing chorus
against President Putin. The crucial four-hour private meeting between
Putin and Merkel turned into a fiasco when Germany parroted the NATO
chorus.
Putin
finally responded by expanding Russia’s air and ground troop
preparedness along its borders while accelerating Moscow’s economic
pivot to Asia.
Most
important, President Putin has announced that Russia cannot stand by
and allow the massacre of a whole people in the Donbas region.
Is
Poroshenko’s forthcoming blitz against the people of southeast Ukraine
designed to provoke a Russian response – to the humanitarian crisis?
Will Russia confront the NATO-directed Kiev offensive and risk a total
break with the West?
James
Petras is a Bartle Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology at Binghamton
University, New York. Latest book: “The New Extractivism. A
Post-Neoliberal Development Model or Imperialism of the Twenty-First
Century?” Henry Veltmeyer and James Petras. Zed Books. http://petras.lahaine.org/
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