10 Reasons Behind Russia's Invasion of Ukraine

Oil and gas ... oil and gas ... oil and gas.

The conspiracy nuts are always making it about oil and gas.

Total baloney.

 

(Oh, never mind...)

 

I thought Russia's oil and gas went on the world market ? ???


And that's "...oil and gas come from Russia…"

 

Perhaps another way to curb Russian zeal for reconstituting the old Soviet empire is to encourage the country holding largest European oil reserves -- Romania -- to begin producing from them again.

 

Watched Charlie Rose last night and during the interview with Robert Gates, Gates said what Putin wants is a Russian version of the EU and Ukraine to be influenced by Russia instead of the EU, which was the direction they were headed.

 

I respect Robert Gates, but I believe his assessment is wrong. Putin wants nothing less than the old Soviet Union back.

 

Or Obama could approve the Keystone XL pipeline and we could partially neuter Putin's threat to withhold energy from Europe by supplying them.

I know, I know--I'll get me coat.

 

Under the terms of its agreement with Ukraine, Russia is entitled to have 25,000 troops on the peninsula and currently has an estimated 16,000 deployed there. But these troops have to remain on base. Pro-Russian troops have been deployed across Crimea. Moscow insists they are local self-defence forces, but there are widespread reports that they are from Russia.Clearly, the presence of Russian troops in Ukraine, already stationed there permanently long before the West began destabilizing the country are in line with the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. Clearly the covert destabilization of Ukraine by Western backers, as well as both economic and diplomatic coercion via engineered regime change in Kiev to subordinate Ukraine to the West’s (EU’s) own interests is in direct violation of the treaty. The BBC peddles the notion that Russian troops – beyond those already legally stationed there – have been deployed across Crimea. However Russia has officially denied this, and the BBC fails to prove otherwise, simply citing unqualified “widespread reports,” a dubious practice repeated across the West’s mass media and around its diplomatic circles.

Skewed Narrative a Symptom of Weakness and Desperation

We see the wheel of history turning once again with the West determined to challenge Russian sovereignty along its borders and then leverage its immense global media machine to condemn Russia’s logical and prompt response, framing it as an unprovoked “invasion.” The outlandish narratives peddled by the Western media, exemplified in the “Daily Beast’s” article, “Putin’s Crimea Propaganda Machine,” smack of desperation and weakness from yet another ill-conceived Western plot met by calculating Eastern pragmatism.

The Daily Beast makes a number of absurd assertions, including that the Crimea region is not under threat of Neo-Nazis. However, that is because the Neo-Nazis are in Kiev, part of the Western-backed opposition that overthrew the democratically elected government of Viktor Yanukovych, and had Russian troops not been permanently stationed in the Crimea region, Neo-Nazis would probably have infested the east of Ukraine as well.

While the Daily Beast contents there are no “extremists” for the Russians to protect Ukraine from, the burning question is why would the government in Kiev have fled with armed police and military protecting them, if there weren’t heavily armed extremists involved? Stories of snipers brought in by the opposition appear to be only the tip of the iceberg in terms of revealing the true depth and nature of armed operations carried out during the Western-backed putsch.

Perhaps what is worst of all regarding the West’s propaganda regarding Ukraine, is not the hypocrisy and tired lies exposed by its meddling elsewhere, but the fact that Ukraine itself had already been destabilized politically by the West before, admittedly, during the so-called “Orange Revolution.”

http://journal-neo.org/2014/03/06/georgian-background-to-the-western-invasion-hysteria/