Tuesday, February 24, 2015

Ready for Nuclear War over Ukraine?

EDITOR'S CHOICE | 24.02.2015 | 21:46
 
A senior Ukrainian official is urging the West to risk a nuclear conflagration in support of a “full-scale war” with Russia that he says authorities in Kiev are now seeking, another sign of the extremism that pervades the year-old, U.S.-backed regime in Kiev.
In a recent interview with Canada’s CBC Radio, Ukraine’s Deputy Foreign Minister Vadym Prystaiko said, “Everybody is afraid of fighting with a nuclear state. We are not anymore, in Ukraine — we’ve lost so many people of ours, we’ve lost so much of our territory.”
Peter Sellers playing Dr. Strangelove as he struggles to control his right arm from making a Nazi salute.
Prystaiko added, “However dangerous it sounds, we have to stop [Russian President Vladimir Putin] somehow. For the sake of the Russian nation as well, not just for the Ukrainians and Europe.” The deputy foreign minister announced that Kiev is preparing for “full-scale war” against Russia and wants the West to supply lethal weapons and training so the fight can be taken to Russia.
“What we expect from the world is that the world will stiffen up in the spine a little,” Prystaiko said.
Yet, what is perhaps most remarkable about Prystaiko’s “Dr. Strangelove” moment is that it produced almost no reaction in the West. You have a senior Ukrainian official saying that the world should risk nuclear war over a civil conflict in Ukraine between its west, which favors closer ties to Europe, and its east, which wants to maintain its historic relationship with Russia.
Why should such a pedestrian dispute justify the possibility of vaporizing millions of human beings and conceivably ending life on the planet? Yet, instead of working out a plan for a federalized structure in Ukraine or even allowing people in the east to vote on whether they want to remain under the control of the Kiev regime, the world is supposed to risk nuclear annihilation.
But therein lies one of the under-reported stories of the Ukraine crisis: There is a madness to the Kiev regime that the West doesn’t want to recognize because to do so would upend the dominant narrative of “our” good guys vs. Russia’s bad guys. If we begin to notice that the right-wing regime in Kiev is crazy and brutal, we might also start questioning the “Russian aggression” mantra.
According to the Western “group think,” the post-coup Ukrainian government “shares our values” by favoring democracy and modernity, while the rebellious ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine are “Moscow’s minions” representing dark forces of backwardness and violence, personified by Russia’s “irrational” President Putin. In this view, the conflict is a clash between the forces of good and evil where there is no space for compromise.
Yet, there is a craziness to this “group think” that is highlighted by Prystaiko’s comments. Not only does the Kiev regime display a cavalier attitude about dragging the world into a nuclear catastrophe but it also has deployed armed neo-Nazis and other right-wing extremists to wage a dirty war in the east that has involved torture and death-squad activities.
Not Since Adolf Hitler
No European government, since Adolf Hitler’s Germany, has seen fit to dispatch Nazi storm troopers to wage war on a domestic population, but the Kiev regime has and has done so knowingly. Yet, across the West’s media/political spectrum, there has been a studious effort to cover up this reality, even to the point of ignoring facts that have been well established.
The New York Times and the Washington Post have spearheaded this journalistic malfeasance by putting on blinders so as not to see Ukraine’s neo-Nazis, such as when describing the key role played by the Azov battalion in the war against ethnic Russians in the east.
On Feb. 20, in a report from Mariupol, the Post cited the Azov battalion’s importance in defending the port city against a possible rebel offensive. Correspondent Karoun Demirjian wrote:
“Petro Guk, the commander of the Azov battalion’s reinforcement operations in Mariupol, said in an interview that the battalion is ‘getting ready for’ street-to-street combat in the city. The Azov battalion, now a regiment in the Ukrainian army, is known as one of the fiercest fighting forces­ in the pro-Kiev operation.
“But … it has pulled away from the front lines on a scheduled rest-and-retraining rotation, Guk said, leaving the Ukrainian army — a less capable force, in his opinion — in its place. His advice to residents of Mariupol is to get ready for the worst.
“‘If it is your home, you should be ready to fight for it, and accept that if the fight is for your home, you must defend it,’ he said, when asked whether residents should prepare to leave. Some are ready to heed that call, as a matter of patriotic duty.”
The Post’s stirring words fit with the Western media’s insistent narrative and its refusal to include meaningful background about the Azov battalion, which is known for marching under Nazi banners, displaying the Swastika and painting SS symbols on its helmets.
The New York Times filed a similarly disingenuous article from Mariupol on Feb. 11, depicting the ethnic Russian rebels as barbarians at the gate with the Azov battalion defending civilization. Though providing much color and detail – and quoting an Azov leader prominently – the Times left out the salient and well-known fact that the Azov battalion is composed of neo-Nazis.
But this inconvenient truth – that neo-Nazis have been central to Kiev’s “self-defense forces” from last February’s coup to the present – would disrupt the desired propaganda message to American readers. So the New York Times just ignores the Nazism and refers to Azov as a “volunteer unit.”
Yet, this glaring omission is prima facie proof of journalistic bias. There’s no way that the editors of the Post and Times don’t know that the presence of neo-Nazis is newsworthy. Indeed, there’s a powerful irony in this portrayal of Nazis as the bulwark of Western civilization against the Russian hordes from the East. It was, after all, the Russians who broke the back of Nazism in World War II as Hitler sought to subjugate Europe and destroy Western civilization as we know it.
That the Nazis are now being depicted as defenders of Western ideals has to be the ultimate man-bites-dog story. But it goes essentially unreported in the New York Times and Washington Post as does the inconvenient presence of other Nazis holding prominent positions in the post-coup regime, including Andriy Parubiy, who was the military commander of the Maidan protests and served as the first national security chief of the Kiev regime. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Ukraine, Through the US Looking Glass.”]
The Nazi Reality
Regarding the Azov battalion, the Post and Times have sought to bury the Nazi reality, but both have also acknowledged it in passing. For instance, on Aug. 10, 2014, a Times’ article mentioned the neo-Nazi nature of the Azov battalion in the last three paragraphs of a lengthy story on another topic.
“The fighting for Donetsk has taken on a lethal pattern: The regular army bombards separatist positions from afar, followed by chaotic, violent assaults by some of the half-dozen or so paramilitary groups surrounding Donetsk who are willing to plunge into urban combat,” the Times reported.
“Officials in Kiev say the militias and the army coordinate their actions, but the militias, which count about 7,000 fighters, are angry and, at times, uncontrollable. One known as Azov, which took over the village of Marinka, flies a neo-Nazi symbol resembling a Swastika as its flag.” [See Consortiumnews.com’s “NYT Whites Out Ukraine’s Brownshirts.”]
Similarly, the Post published a lead story last Sept. 12 describing the Azov battalion in flattering terms, saving for the last three paragraphs the problematic reality that the fighters are fond of displaying the Swastika:
“In one room, a recruit had emblazoned a swastika above his bed. But Kirt [a platoon leader] … dismissed questions of ideology, saying that the volunteers — many of them still teenagers — embrace symbols and espouse extremist notions as part of some kind of ‘romantic’ idea.”
Other news organizations have been more forthright about this Nazi reality. For instance, the conservative London Telegraph published an article by correspondent Tom Parfitt, who wrote: “Kiev’s use of volunteer paramilitaries to stamp out the Russian-backed Donetsk and Luhansk ‘people’s republics’… should send a shiver down Europe’s spine.
“Recently formed battalions such as Donbas, Dnipro and Azov, with several thousand men under their command, are officially under the control of the interior ministry but their financing is murky, their training inadequate and their ideology often alarming. The Azov men use the neo-Nazi Wolfsangel (Wolf’s Hook) symbol on their banner and members of the battalion are openly white supremacists, or anti-Semites.”
Based on interviews with militia members, the Telegraph reported that some of the fighters doubted the Holocaust, expressed admiration for Hitler and acknowledged that they are indeed Nazis.
Andriy Biletsky, the Azov commander, “is also head of an extremist Ukrainian group called the Social National Assembly,” according to the Telegraph article which quoted a commentary by Biletsky as declaring: “The historic mission of our nation in this critical moment is to lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival. A crusade against the Semite-led Untermenschen.”
The Telegraph questioned Ukrainian authorities in Kiev who acknowledged that they were aware of the extremist ideologies of some militias but insisted that the higher priority was having troops who were strongly motivated to fight.
Azov fighters even emblazon the Swastika and the SS insignia on their helmets. NBC News reported: “Germans were confronted with images of their country’s dark past … when German public broadcaster ZDF showed video of Ukrainian soldiers with Nazi symbols on their helmets in its evening newscast.”
Nazi symbols on helmets worn by members of Ukraine's Azov battalion. (As filmed by
Nazi symbols on helmets worn by members of Ukraine’s Azov battalion. (As filmed by a Norwegian film crew and shown on German TV.)
But it’s now clear that far-right extremism is not limited to the militias sent to kill ethnic Russians in the east or to the presence of a few neo-Nazi officials who were rewarded for their roles in last February’s coup. The fanaticism is present at the center of the Kiev regime, including its deputy foreign minister who speaks casually about a “full-scale war” with nuclear-armed Russia.
An Orwellian World
In a “normal world,” U.S. and European journalists would explain to their readers how insane all this is; how a dispute over the pace for implementing a European association agreement while also maintaining some economic ties with Russia could have been worked out within the Ukrainian political system, that it was not grounds for a U.S.-backed “regime change” last February, let alone a civil war, and surely not nuclear war.
But these are clearly not normal times. To a degree that I have not seen in my 37 years covering Washington, there is a totalitarian quality to the West’s current “group think” about Ukraine with virtually no one who “matters” deviating from the black-and-white depiction of good guys in Kiev vs. bad guys in Donetsk and Moscow.
And, if you want to see how the “objective” New York Times dealt with demonstrations in Moscow and other Russian cities protesting last year’s coup against Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, read Sunday’s dispatch by the Times’ neocon national security correspondent Michael R. Gordon, best known as the lead writer with Judith Miller on the infamous “aluminum tube” story in 2002, helping to set the stage for the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Here’s how Gordon explained the weekend’s anti-coup protests: “The official narrative as reported by state-run television in Russia, and thus accepted by most Russians, is that the uprising in Ukraine last year was an American-engineered coup, aided by Ukrainian Nazis, and fomented to overthrow Mr. Yanukovych, a pro-Russian president.”
In other words, the Russians are being brainwashed while the readers of the New York Times are getting their information from an independent news source that would never be caught uncritically distributing government propaganda, another example of the upside-down Orwellian world that Americans now live in. [See, for example, “NYT Retracts Russian Photo Scoop.”]
In our land of the free, there is no “official narrative” and the U.S. government would never stoop to propaganda. Everyone just happily marches in lockstep behind the conventional wisdom of a faultless Kiev regime that “shares our values” and can do no wrong — while ignoring the brutality and madness of coup leaders who deploy Nazis and invite a nuclear holocaust for the world.

Vladimir Putin : NATO ALREADY SUPPLYING WEAPONS to Ukraine Which Was ALREADY DEFEATED by Novorossia

EDITOR'S CHOICE | 24.02.2015 | 21:51
 
For a video presentation by President Putin on the Ukrainian situation:
Please find below two subtitled videos and transcripts of two interventions of Vladimir Putin about NATO’s involvment and crushing defeat in Ukraine. They are taken from the Kremlin’s website.
In these two extracts, Putin explicitly denounces the NATO military presence in Ukraine and its involvement alongside Kievboth in men and armaments. Despite this, the People’s Resistance of Novorossia, supported by Russia, defeated decisivelyUkrainian forces. The crisis in Ukraine, shapedentirely by the US and Europe to weaken Russia, ends up in a dramatic victoryfor Moscow andVladimir Putin.
Do not hesitate to publish them & broadcast them.
The 4th Media

Moscow stands for broader support of OSCE monitoring mission in Ukraine - Russia's FM

News | 24.02.2015 | 22:12
 
The Normandy Four states - Russia, France, Germany and Ukraine, will be promoting initiative on broader financing as well as the increase of personnel and equipment of the monitoring mission of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in Ukraine, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Tuesday.
"As it was ordered by [Normandy Four] leaders on February 12 in Minsk, we spoke for the extension of the mandate of the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, for supplementing it with additional personnel, equipment and finances," Lavrov said after the talks of the Normandy Four top diplomats in Paris.
"We will be promoting this initiative at the OSCE headquarters," the Russian foreign minister added.
The Belarusian capital of Minsk hosted on February 12 summit talks of Normandy Four leaders - Russian President Vladimir Putin, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, French President Francois Hollande and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
The 16-hour marathon summit negotiations ended in a package of agreements, which in particular envisaged ceasefire between the Ukrainian conflicting sides starting from midnight on February 15.
The ceasefire agreement reached at the talks in Minsk in mid-February was not the first during the military conflict in Ukraine, which erupted almost a year ago.
The deterioration in Ukraine prompted a diplomatic blitz from Hollande and Merkel early this month as they went first for talks with Poroshenko in Kiev on February 5 and then met with Putin in Moscow the other day.
Currently, the conflicting sides in Ukraine say combat activity on the separation line has decreased.
Thousands have been killed and hundreds of thousands of people have fled Ukraine’s embattled east as a result of clashes between Ukrainian troops and local militias in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions during Kiev’s military operation, launched in mid-April 2014 to regain control over parts of the breakaway territories, which call themselves the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s republics.
 
Tags: OSCE Novorossiya Russia Lavrov
140228-29-CELAC-3-OlivioMartinez 
Heads of 31 Nations Declare a Zone of Peace, Commit to Uprooting Forever the Threat or Use of Force
(Original signed by the Heads of State and Governmenent of the Community of Latin American and Caribbeans States)
The Heads of State and Government of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) gathered in Havana, Cuba on January 28 and 29, 2014 at the Second Summit, on behalf of their peoples and faithfully interpreting their hopes and aspirations,
Reaffirming the commitment of member countries with the Purposes and Principles enshrined in the United Nations Charter and International Law, and aware of the fact that prosperity and stability in the region contribute to international peace and security,
Mindful that peace is a supreme asset and a legitimate aspiration of all peoples and that preserving peace is a substantial element of Latin America and Caribbean integration and a principle and common value of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC),
Reaffirming that integration consolidates the vision of a fair International order based on the right to peace and a culture of peace, which excludes the use of force and non-legitimate means of defense, such as weapons of mass destruction and nuclear weapons in particular,
Highlighting the relevance of the Tlatelolco Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in Latin America and the Caribbean establishing the first nuclear weapon free zone in a densely populated area, this being a contribution to peace and to regional and international security,
Reiterating the urgent need of General and Complete Nuclear Disarmament, as well as the commitment with the Strategic Agenda of the Organization for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in Latin America and the Caribbean (OPANAL), adopted by the 33 Member States of the Organization in the General Conference held in Buenos Aires in August, 2013.
Recalling the principles of peace, democracy, development and freedom underlying the actions of countries members of SICA,
Recalling the decision of UNASUR Heads of State of consolidating South America as a Zone of Peace and Cooperation,
Recalling the establishment, in 1986, of the Zone of Peace and Cooperation of the South Atlantic,
Recalling also our commitment, agreed in the Declaration of the Summit of Unity of Latin America and the Caribbean, on 23 February 2010, to promote the implementation of our own mechanisms for the for peaceful conflict resolution,
Reiterating our commitment to consolidate Latin America and the Caribbean as a Zone of Peace, in which differences between nations are peacefully settled through dialogue and negotiations or other means, fully consistent with International Law,
Cognizant also of the catastrophic global and long-term humanitarian impact of the use of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction, and the ongoing discussions on this issue,
Declare:
1. Latin America and the Caribbean as a Zone of Peace based on respect for the principles and rules of International Law, including the international instruments to which Member States are a party to, the Principles and Purposes of the United Nations Charter;
2. Our permanent commitment to solve disputes through peaceful means with the aim of uprooting forever threat or use of force in our region;
3. The commitment of the States of the region with their strict obligation not to intervene, directly or indirectly, in the internal affairs of any other State and observe the principles of national sovereignty, equal rights and self-determination of peoples;
4. The commitment of the peoples of Latin American and Caribbean to foster cooperation and friendly relations among themselves and with other nations irrespective of differences in their political, economic, and social systems or development levels; to practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbors;
5. The commitment of the Latin American and Caribbean States to fully respect for the inalienable right of every State to choose its political, economic, social, and cultural system, as an essential conditions to ensure peaceful coexistence among nations;
6. The promotion in the region of a culture of peace based, inter alia, on the principles of the United Nations Declaration on a Culture of Peace;
7. The commitment of the States in the region to guide themselves by this Declaration in their International behavior;
8. The commitment of the States of the region to continue promoting nuclear disarmament as a priority objective and to contribute with general and complete disarmament, to foster the strengthening of confidence among nations;
We urge all Member States of the International Community to fully respect this Declaration in their relations with CELAC Member States.
In witness of the undersigned having duly signed this Proclamation in Havana, on the 29th day of the month of January of 2014, in a copy written in the Spanish, English, French and Portuguese languages.

No Weapons to Ukraine! Sign Open Letter to US Senate

No Weapons to Ukraine


Share on FacebookTweet about this on TwitterShare on TumblrEmail this to someoneShare on Google+Share on StumbleUponPrint this page

No Weapons to Ukraine

An Open Letter to the U.S. Senate

No Weapons to Ukraine
Reject S. 452, “A bill to provide lethal weapons to the Government of Ukraine.”

Why is this important?

The United States is the leading provider of weapons to the world, and the practice of providing weapons to countries in crisis has proven disastrous, including Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. Expanding NATO to Russia’s border and arming Russia’s neighbors threatens something worse than disaster. The United States is toying with nuclear war.
U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt played significant roles in orchestrating the political crisis that led to a violent coup overthrowing Ukraine’s elected President. Nuland not only exclaimed “Fuck the EU!” on that recorded phone call, but she also seemed to decide on the new prime minister: “Yats is the guy.”
The Maidan protests were violently escalated by neo-Nazis and by snipers who opened fire on police. When Poland, Germany, and France negotiated a deal for the Maidan demands and an early election, neo-Nazis instead attacked the government and took over. The U.S. State Department immediately recognized the coup government, and Yatsenyuk was indeed installed as Prime Minister.
The people of Crimea voted overwhelmingly to secede, and that — rather than the coup — has been labeled “aggression.” Ethnic Russians have been massacred by constant shelling from Kiev’s U.S.-NATO backed Army, while Russia has been denounced for “aggression” in the form of various unsubstantiated accusations, including the downing of Flight 17.
It’s important to recognize Western interests at work here other than peace and generosity. GMO outfits want the excellent farming soil in Ukraine. The U.S. and NATO want a “missile defense” base in Ukraine. Oil corporations want to drill for fracked gas in Ukraine. The U.S. and EU want to get their hands on Russia’s “largest supply of natural gas” on the planet.
We routinely recognize the financial corruption of the U.S. government in domestic policy making. We shouldn’t blind ourselves to it in matters of foreign policy. There may be a flag waving, but there is nuclear war looming, and that’s a bit more important.
Initial signers (organizations for identification):
David Swanson, World Beyond War.
Bruce Gagnon, Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space.
Nick Mottern, KnowDrones.com.
Tarak Kauff, Veterans For Peace.
Carolyn McCrady, Peace and Justice Can Win.
Medea Benjamin, Code Pink.
Gareth Porter.
Malachy Kilbride, National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance.
Buzz Davis, WI Impeachment/Bring Our Troops Home Coalition.
Alice Slater, Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.
Doug Rawlings, Veterans For Peace.
Diane Turco, Cape Codders for Peace and Justice.
Rich Greve, Peace Action Staten Island.
Kevin Zeese, Popular Resistance.
Margaret Flowers, Popular Resistance.
Heinrich Buecker, Coop Anti-War Cafe Berlin.
Dud Hendrick.
Ellen Barfield, Veterans For Peace and War Resisters League.
Herbert Hoffman, Veterans For Peace.
Jean Athey, Peace Action Montgomery.
Kent Shifferd.
Matthew Hoh.
Bob Cushing, Pax Christi.
Bill Gilson, Veterans For Peace.
Michael Brenner, University of Pittsburgh.
Cindy Sheehan: Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox.
Jodie Evans, Code Pink.
Judith Deutsch.
Jim Haber.
Elliott Adams.
Joe Lombardo and Marilyn Levin, UNAC co-coordinators.
David Hartsough, World Beyond War.
Mairead Maguire, Nobel peace laureate, Co founder peace people.
Koohan Paik, International Forum on Globalization.
Ellen Judd, University of Manitoba.
Nicolas Davies.
Rosalie Tyler Paul, PeaceWorks, Brunswick Maine.

Wunderbare Natur: Tapir-Mama mit Kind


Putin: France, Germany genuinely want to find compromise over E. Ukraine

Published time: February 23, 2015 19:25 
Edited time: February 23, 2015 21:01 
Russian President Vladimir Putin (RIA Novosti/Aleksey Nikolskyi)
Russian President Vladimir Putin (RIA Novosti/Aleksey Nikolskyi)
2.8K3643
The leaders of France and Germany genuinely want to find a compromise that would help end the conflict in eastern Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin said in his latest interview.
Speaking to Rossiya 1 TV channel on the conflict and the breakthrough of the Minsk agreement, Putin said that “it seemed to me [the leaders of France and Germany], have a genuine desire to find such compromise solutions that would lead to the final settlement [of the conflict]...”
He cited the Minsk protocol which includes the decentralization of power in Ukraine and a “reference explaining what it implies.” The authors of the reference are "our German and French partners,” he said, adding that this speaks of their sincerity in finding a compromise.
“I had the impression that our partners have more trust in us than distrust, and in any case believe in our sincerity,” Putin said on Monday.
Putin once again underlined the importance of implementing the Minsk agreement reached on February 12 by the Normandy Four – Ukraine, Russia, France, and Germany. “If the Minsk agreement will be implemented, I’m sure the situation will gradually normalize,” he said.

While answering a question about the possibility of Russia waging war with Ukraine, Putin said that “such an apocalyptic scenario is hardly possible, and I hope this will never happen.”
Putin also dismissed as “complete nonsense”claims made by Poroshenko and the head of the Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU), Valentin Nalyvaychenko, that Russia’s presidential aide Vladislav Surkov was involved in tragic events during last year’s protests in Kiev.
Speaking on Crimea, the president urged the international community to respect the region’s choice to rejoin Russia.
“With regard to nationality, the residents of Crimea have made their choice [when they voted to join Russia] and it should be respected. Russia cannot treat it otherwise,” he said.
Commenting on Poroshenko’s statement that Kiev intends to regain Crimea, Putin said that such actions have a “revenge nature.” He stressed that as a large European country, Ukraine should focus on “strengthening the economy and social sector, and mend relations with the southeastern part of the country.”

US to blame for ISIL rise in Iraq: Brahimi

News | 24.02.2015 | 08:36
 
The 2003 invasion of Iraq by the United States led to the rise of the ISIL terror group in the Arab country, former UN-Arab league special envoy to Syria says.
In a live onstage interview with Al-Hayat newspaper on Monday, Lakhdar Brahimi noted that US invasion of Iraq over a decade ago provided a suitable environment for the growth of militancy in Iraq and helped an extremist group like ISIL flourish.
“The US is to be blamed,” Brahimi said, adding, “It created conditions that allowed ISIS (ISIL) to grow.”
The veteran Algerian politician also pointed to Iran’s role in finding a political solution to the conflicts in Syria and Iraq, given the “regional power” Tehran has in both Arab countries.
The ISIL terrorists, many of whom were initially trained by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Jordan in 2012 to destabilize the Syrian government, now control large parts of Iraq and Syria. They have been engaged in crimes against humanity in the areas under their control.
Iran has repeatedly stressed that it will not interfere militarily in Iraq and Syria, but that it will continue to provide support for both countries against ISIL in the form of defense consultation and humanitarian aid. 
Brahimi resigned from his role as UN-Arab League special envoy to Syria in May 2014 after failing to secure a peaceful settlement to crisis there.
He was appointed to the post on August 17, 2012, succeeding Kofi Annan, a former secretary general of the UN, who had also resigned from the post.

Obama Says He Even Loves America’s Idiots

EDITOR'S CHOICE | 23.02.2015 | 19:31
 
In his weekly radio address, President Barack Obama reaffirmed his love of country, telling the nation, “I love America—even its idiots.”
Expanding on this theme, the President said, “America is made up of all kinds of people: young and old, weak and strong, smart and dumb. And when the really dumb ones get up and act like total clowns, I still love them, because they are part of America. In fact, a really big part.”
 
The Borowitz Report, newyorker.com
Ukrainisches Militär bei Artjomowsk

Kiewer Minister: Ukraine bereitet sich auf „Großkrieg“ gegen Russland vor

© REUTERS/ Gleb Garanich 
POLITIK
(aktualisiert 09:47 22.02.2015) 
Die Ukraine bereitet sich laut dem stellvertretenden Außenminister Wadim Pristajko zu einem „großangelegten Krieg“ gegen Russland vor und benötigt dafür Waffen aus dem Westen.
„Die Einsätze sind sehr hoch. Wir wollen keine Angst machen, aber wir bereiten uns auf einen großangelegten Krieg vor“, sagte Pristajko am Samstag in einem Interview des kanadischen Radiosenders CBC. Die Ausbildungshilfe, die Kanada seit Jahren der ukrainischen Armee erweise, reiche nicht mehr aus, so der Kiewer Vizeaußenminister weiter. „Wir wollen, dass Kanada tödliche Waffen in die Ukraine schickt. Die Waffen, mit denen wir uns verteidigen könnten.“ Auch lege Kiew großen Wert auf die Finanzhilfen, die Kanada und Japan versprochen hätten.
In der Ost-Ukraine tobt seit April 2014 ein Bürgerkrieg. Nach dem Sturz von Präsident Viktor Janukowitsch im Februar 2014 setzt die neue ukrainische Regierung Truppen gegen die östlichen Kohlebergbau-Gebiete Donezk und Lugansk ein, weil diese den nationalistisch geprägten Machtwechsel nicht anerkannt und unabhängige „Volksrepubliken“ ausgerufen hatten. Bei den Gefechten zwischen Militär und Milizen sind laut den jüngsten UN-Angaben mehr als 5700 Zivilisten ums Leben gekommen.
Seit Beginn der ukrainischen Militäroperation berichten Kiewer Politiker regelmäßig über einen russischen „Einmarsch“ und Waffenlieferungen in die Ukraine. Trotz fehlender Beweise werden diese Berichte gerne von westlichen Medien aufgegriffen. Russland weist jede Verwicklung in den Ukraine-Konflikt zurück. Ende Januar gestand auch der ukrainische Generalstabschef offiziell ein, dass keine russischen Truppen am Konflikt im Donezbecken beteiligt seien. Dennoch bittet die Regierung in Kiew die westlichen Staaten, die den dubiosen Machtwechsel in Kiew unterstützt haben, immer wieder um Waffenhilfe.
In den USA drängen ranghohe US-Politiker und Militärs Präsident Barack Obama dazu, den ukrainischen Kriegseinsatz mit Waffenlieferungenzu unterstützen. Russland warnt, dass Waffenlieferungen die Friedensbemühungen scheitern lassen und den Konflikt anheizen würden. Auch die Mehrheit der europäischen Politiker ist gegen Waffenlieferungen in die Konfliktregion. Seit dem 15. Februar gilt in der Ukraine eine Waffenruhe. Der Waffenstillstand, der unter Vermittlung der deutschen Kanzlerin Angela Merkel, des französischen Präsidenten Francois Hollande und des russischen Staatschefs Wladimir Putin ausgehandelt worden ist, wird vereinzelt gebrochen.
Zum Thema:
Kiew schließt 23 Grenzübergangspunkte nach Russland
Ost-Ukraine: Poroschenko drängt auf EU-Polizeimission ohne Russland
US-General beschuldigt Russland militärischer Einmischung in Ukraine
Kreml: Russland trägt weiter zur Lösung der Ukraine-Krise bei


Weiterlesen: http://de.sputniknews.com/politik/20150222/301223475.html#ixzz3SeJffgvZ