The Russian Military Finally Speaks! – The Saker with Comment

By Michael Collins

[R]rus-MH17areaplanes

Introduction (The Saker article in full below)

The Russian Military held an extraordinary press conference today regarding the downing of the Malaysian civilian airliner over Ukraine. RT covered the event in detail. The Independent also headlined an abbreviated version of the presentation. Other than that, the U.S.-NATO media/steno pool followed the lead of President Barack Obama and ignored the stunning claims. This was done for a very good reason. The Russians presented evidence that they claim shows:

The Saker

A Ukrainian aircraft was near the downed plane just before it was hit. It seems the earlier reports are true. This is a major shift in the battle for information about the disaster. The Ukrainians refuse to release their air traffic control recordings. Now, if Russia’s presentation is accurate, they’ve been lying about the presence of their aircraft. Why would they lie?

Russia is right next door to Ukraine. Their air tracking and very capable air defense systems are deployed and especially focused given the civil war just over the Russian border. The Russians clearly have the ability to make these claims.

The Russians released a significant amount of information in a drawn out press briefing Monday morning. Their move illustrates what some of us refer to as the Russian chess compared to Obama-Kerry checkers (see 3/20). The radar records used to make the point were from civilian sources. The Russians have their military radars but have not released them. Russia asked the United States to release U.S. satellite imagery (the satellite was right over the area where MH17 was attacked).

The first Russian move was today’s press conference and the data released. They held back the military radar records. The next move is up to Obama-Kerry. Will Obama-Kerry release the satellite imagery? If they don’t, the next move by Russia would be a release of the military radar records and another challenge to release the U.S. on satellite releases.

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Head of General Staff of the Armed Forces Lt. Gen. Andrey Kartopolov ( left) and chief of the Air Force Main Staff Lt. Gen. Igor Makushev ( right) at a media conference in Moscow, July 21 (RIA Novosti / Vadim Savitsky)

rus-RadarMapsMH17accid

A detailed presentation by the Russian Federation showed the existence of an airborne object close to the doomed airliner, but such object was not a missile but probably a Ukrainian fighter jet controlled by the Kiev air force.

If highly respected investigative reporter Robert Parry is right in his July 20, 2014 article, there may be real reason to avoid any such release.

Robert Parry, ConsortiumNews.com, July 20 also at OpEdNews.Com.

Maybe the Russians knew this before Parry did. If not, they certainly knew it before the Monday, 7/21 press conference by simply reading the Parry column.

Their move with the extensive military briefing forces the issue on the U.S. – release the satellite images – at a point where they know or see a high probability that the images will inculpate Ukraine’s government. That’s chess.

Are we moving toward check? Are the U.S. satellite images checkmate?

President Obama ignored the Russian military presentation. He also ignored the continued military operations by Ukraine in the general area of the crash site. He was well scripted but at some point facts do matter.

The following analysis is from Vineyard of the Saker, one of the most active sources of information and analysis on Ukraine. It’s brief and to the point. Robert Parry has covered this crisis from the start herehere, and here. Tyler Durden of ZeroHedge has done an extraordinary job of reporting and analysis herehere, and here.

The war hysteria generated against Russia regarding the Ukraine follows the same storyline used during the chemical weapons attack in Syria last summer. Obama-Kerry claim the U.S. has undisputable proof that the “bad guys” caused the attack, gear up for serious hostilities, and, when the whole effort falls flat, bury the factual findings that the administration had no basis for its over confidence. From the day of the downing, the propaganda machine cranked up claims that the Ukraine resistance shot down the plane, implied that Russia may have done it, and so forth. The facts may be emerging in real time, rather than much later as they did in Syria.

We’ll see. Michael Collins

SPECIAL COMMENT

John D Rachel 22 July 06:28
http://bit.ly/WuQIhX

 

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The Russian military finally speaks!

Vineyard of the Saker 7/21 (Reposted with permission)

Finally! The Russian military has decided to speak out about some of what it knows about what happened to MH17. It was a typical Russian event: the interpreters were nothing short of *terrible* (I speak as a former military interpreter myself), the visual aids were badly designed (the shape of a SU-24 bomber was used to represent a totally different SU-25 close air support aircraft), and there was no Q&A. See for yourself:

(Video of Russian Military presentation, 7/21)

Still, a few very interesting things came out of this press conference.

First, the Ukies have been caught lying about their military aircraft in the area of the disaster. They had claimed that no UAF aircraft were in the area. The Russians have shown the recorded radar tracks which reveal the following: there was what appears to have been a military aircraft (with no transponder) flying below 5000m which suddenly began climbing just before MH17 was hit by some kind of missile. This unidentified aircraft then stayed and observed as MH17 fell to the ground. The Russians added that a SU-25 armed with a R-60 air to air missile could have shot down MH17. Maybe. But what is certain is that the civilian radars did detected this strange Ukie aircraft.

Now, these radar tracks are from *civilian* radars. The Russians apparently are not willing to share the data from their military radars. This is why this mysterious Ukie aircraft ‘appears’ at 5’000m altitude and then ‘disappears’ again, but you can be certain that their military radars, especially on their A-50 AWACs did track that aircraft before and after its strange maneuver. Again, I think that the Russians hope that the experts will come to the correct conclusions on the basis of what they have shown today and that they will not have to reveal more. But we can be certain that they have the full picture and that they know exactly what happened.

Second, the Russians are challenging their American colleagues to show the images they claim show the launch of the BukM1 rocket. They also point out at the interesting coincidence that an US experimental launch detection satellite was exactly over the area at the moment of the tragedy. Clearly, they are tossing the world experts some kind of lead here, but I am not sure what this is.

Third, the Russians have shown their own space-based imagery which shows that one battery of BukM1 had been moved just prior to the incident (See for yourself here). It will be interesting to see if the Ukies explain what is shown on these picture and, if yes, how?

As a public information this conference gets a C+ but as a lead for experts I would give it a much higher A-. We know have hard proof that the Ukies lied at least twice. They lied about the footage of the Buk missiles being moved back to Russia (the footage was taken in Ukie-occupied territory) and they most definitely lied when they denied having any military aircraft in the area when in reality they had one in the immediate proximity of MH17. That is a huge lie which the Ukies will have a very hard time dismissing.

As I said in my first post about MH17, I have no hope whatsoever that the western plutocracy will ever admit that the junta did it. Ditto for the corporate presstitues of the MSM, but I do hope that the world will see this tragedy for what is clearly was: a deliberate false flag on the part of the Nazi junta in Kiev. As David Chandler correctly points out about 9/11, the proof of a cover up is in itself already a proof of a conspiracy.

The Saker

Posted by VINEYARDSAKER: at 15:22

END

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Researcher, writer DC Area Attack on Syria – Struggle for Turkey – Attack on Libya – The Money Party = Survival – End Times – Obama Administration – Politics and Policy – Election fraud – Pennsylvania Sexual Abuse Scandal – Murdoch press scandals




Amnesty International and the War in Ukraine

Manipulating Facts

by VLADISLAV GULEVICH

[A]mnesty International recently released a report on “stomach-turning” violence in Eastern Ukraine (“Abduction and Tortures in Eastern Ukraine,”  – see for example BBC coverage here). According to the report, the acts of violence are perpetrated chiefly by pro-Russian separatist groups.

The Amnesty International report and its conclusion about rebel responsibility for the majority of violence doesn`t hold water and has little in common with reality. The violence in Ukraine in general is not properly analyzed, and report is quite biased. Rather than the rebels, it is the Ukrainian army and the pro-EuroMaidan forces that are responsible for the abductions and abuses.

Firstly, rebels in Eastern Ukraine enjoy almost 100% support of the local population. There is no need for them to commit any kind of violence targeting the locals. The Ukrainian army, on the contrary, is viewed as a cruel enemy and Ukrainian soldiers feel the animosity of the locals. Simple logic would argue that it is the army that has felt the need to repress its local adversaries through violence. Moreover, it suffices to speak with any of the thousands of refugees from Eastern Ukraine and listen to their stories about the barbaric methods used by the army to break the resistance, to be persuaded that the Ukrainian army bears the responsibility for the majority of kidnappings and tortures.

Secondly, it`s well known that EuroMaidan was supported by Ukrainian neo-Nazi organizations. After the success of EuroMaidan its leaders enrolled their neo-Nazi supporters into newly formed police and National Guard battalions (“Azov”, “Donbas” and so on). From time to time foreign media speak of the neo-Nazi background of such Ukrainian military units, but most of the time this fact is hidden. It`s hard to expect any respect for human rights or any other kind of law observance from these soldiers.

The facts show that EuroMaidan authorities started the terror campaign promptly after toppling the former government, that is to say long before the start of the war. The spiral of violence raging now in Eastern Ukraine is the sequel of the geopolitical drama called EuroMaidan.

In addition, to see the whole scale of violence in Ukraine one should gather information about abductions, tortures and other ill-treatment throughout the country and not only in Eastern Ukraine. And the time period should be enlarged: it`s necessary to take into consideration all of the violence perpetrated since the victory of EuroMaidan and not only since the beginning of the hostilities.

When the new post-EuroMaidan government was formed it unleashed unprecedented repressive measures, which became more and more stringent and violent. Policemen and their families were the first targets. They were threatened anonymously, their apartments burnt and some policemen killed.

Not only policemen were tracked down, but any conspicuous person loyal to the previous government. Unacceptable newspapers were forcibly closed, independent journalists arrested. The most radical pro-European movement, “Right Sector,” put forward the idea that “the revolution continues and we will hunt down the enemies of the revolution”. After that civic activists were subjected to brutal attacks and the most active of them were arrested. Now Kiev goes even further. Following the example of the US in Iraq, the Ukrainian authorities are producing playing cards with faces of the rebel commanders as well as faces of “wrong” journalists, for the soldiers in Eastern Ukraine. The army must either arrest or kill them.

After EuroMidan, Ukraine is a country full of political prisoners. The number of well-known journalists and writers who have had to escape from the country is rather high: Alexander Chalenko, Rostislav Ishchenko, Vladimir Rogov, myself, and many others. Even high-ranking Congressmen of the Ukrainian parliament, such as the anti-EuroMaidan politician Oleg Tsarov, have had to leave Ukraine under the threat of arrest. Before fleeing Tsarov was attacked by a crowd of EuroMaidan activists and savagely beaten. The video of the attack as well as Tsarov with torn clothes and bruises was shown on TV.  His house in Dnepropetrovsk was burnt by Molotov cocktails thrown by well-known “unknown” perpetrators.

Now Tsarov gives juridical assistance to police officers and civil activists persecuted by the new authorities. According to Tsarov, many people are being arrested throughout Ukraine and prisons are filled with political prisoners. The latest case has been the arrest of Alexander Samoylov, the vice-rector of International Slavonic University in Charkov. The picture of Samoylov beaten, with black bruises around his eyes, is circulating on the internet.

The violence against ideological rivals has turned into political advertising for the Ukrainian politicians supporting EuroMaidan, aimed toward dissuasion. Congressmen from the well-known xenophobic nationalistic party Svoboda forcibly entered the office of the Ukrainian National TV Channel director, beat him and forced him to resign. They disliked how the TV channel covered the Crimean conflict between Moscow and Kiev.

Notorious congressman and leader of the Radical party Oleg Liashko is famous for his PR actions in the zone of hostilities. He often shows up there accompanied by a large number of bodyguards and demonstrates his attitude towards the population of Eastern Ukraine. There are many videos showing Liashko humiliating his opponents and threatening to kill them — like in this video where Liashko and his bodyguards rudely force a local deputy in Slawiansk to resign and threaten to lynch him in a town square  –  or threatening to throw them into prison, like in this video where Liashko interrogates a 68-year old man with a sack on his head and threatens to keep him in prison until death.

It`s worth mentioning that in March 2014, a month before the beginning of hostilities between Kiev and the rebel provinces, and when dialogue was still possible, Liashko ordered one of the Eastern Ukrainian leaders, Arsen Klinchaev, to be arrested. This was carried out in a rude and humiliating manner and Liashko himself took part in the action. Klinchaev was arrested in his office and not with arms in hand, but was treated like a dangerous terrorist.

Instead of dialogue, Kiev has chosen violence.

Vladislav Gulevich is a Ukrainian journalist and political analyst who has recently fled to Russia. He can be reached at kwonltd@rambler.ru.




On ‘Human Shielding’ in Gaza

How the Israeli Army has Tried to Justify Striking Civilian Areas

Killed at home.

Killed at home.

by NEVE GORDON and NICOLA PERUGINI, Counterpunch

……..

[A]ll fighting within cities and all bombardments of urban spaces, even the most “precise and surgical”, is a potential death trap for civilians. Consequently, the permeation of war into cities inevitably transforms their inhabitants into potential human shields.

For Palestinians living in Gaza today, simply spending time in their own homes, frequenting a mosque, going to a hospital or to school has become a dangerous enterprise since any one of these architectural edifices can become at any moment a target. One can no longer safely assume that the existence of masses of human bodies – even the bodies of children – in civilian spaces can serve as defence of the weak against the lethal capacity of the hi-tech states.humanShields-neve1-510x336

Where do Gaza terrorists hide their weapons?

But since hi-tech states can and do kill hundreds or thousands of civilians, they have to provide moral justification for their action in order to preserve their standing in the international arena; they have to demonstrate that they are protecting the principles of liberal democracy. It is precisely within this context that we should understand the series of posters recently disseminated by the Israeli military through its Twitter account, Facebook and blogs.

The poster “Where do Gaza Terrorists Hide Their Weapons” is a paradigmatic example, where the subtext does the speaking: Houses, mosques, schools, and hospitals are legitimate targets because they are presumed to be weapon depositories.

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When is a house a home?

This is also the message in “When Is A House a Home?” which simply zooms in on one of the images in the previous poster, showing how Palestinians presumably hide rockets in civilian homes.

The logic is straightforward: insofar as Hamas hides weapons in houses (illegitimate), Israel can bomb them as if they were military targets (legitimate). Within this framework, a single function (hiding weapons) out of many existing functions (home, shelter, intimacy, etc) determines the status of an urban site (in our case the house), so that the edifice’s form loses its traditional signification.

The question “when does it become a legitimate military target?” is merely rhetorical. Its real meaning is: “All houses in Gaza are legitimate targets” since all houses are potentially non-homes.

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Israel uses weapons to protect its civilians

Not unlike colonial as well as other vastly asymmetrical wars, Israel’s legitimisation for its indiscriminate bombing is premised upon a profound moral disjuncture between Israelis and Palestinians. In the poster “Israel uses weapon to protect its civilians. Hamas uses civilians to protect its weapons”, Palestinians are depicted as barbarians who ignore the elementary grammar of international law.

Israel’s warfare is, however, not only about the re-signification of architectural structures, but also about the transformation of human beings into collateral damage, subjects who can be killed without violating international law. This is the subtext of the poster featuring Israel’s Chief of Staff saying: “Even as we carry out strikes, we remember that there are civilians in Gaza. Hamas has turned them into hostages.”

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We remember that there are civilians in Gaza

Again, the logic is clear. All civilians in Gaza are being held hostage by Hamas, which is considered a war crime and a gross violation of international law governing armed conflict. This, then, provides legal and moral justification against the accusation that Israel is the one killing civilians. Presumed human rights violations carried out by Palestinians against Palestinians – taking hostages and human shielding – thus become the legitimisation of lethal and indiscriminate violence on the part of the occupying force.

Hence, the use of human shields is not only a violation. In contemporary asymmetric urban wars, accusing the enemy of using human shields helps validate the claim that the death of ”untargeted civilians” is merely collateral damage. When all civilians are potential human shields, when each and every civilian can become a hostage of the enemy, then all enemy civilians become killable.

humanShields-5neveneve5-510x336Some bomb shelters shelter people…

In order for all this to be convincing, the Israeli military depicts the asymmetric context in which it unleashes its violence against a whole population as symmetric. This is carried out, for instance, through the poster “Some bomb shelters shelter people, some shelter bombs”. Here a radically disproportionate situation is presented as if it were balanced.

The residents of Gaza are bombed by cutting edge F-16 fighter jets and drones, yet they do not have bomb shelters, and they have nowhere to flee. Israel’s residents are bombed mostly by makeshift rockets, many of which have been intercepted by Iron Dome missiles. The majority of the population in Israel has access to shelters and can flee out of the rocket’s range.

These powerful images, spread by the Israeli military through social media, attempt to transform the very presence of civilians as suspect in the areas it bombards, regardless of the fact that the areas it bombs are urban centres.

The crux of the matter is that in the context of contemporary asymmetric warfare, the weak do not have many options. When there are no bomb shelters, people remain at home during extensive bombardment. And if, like in the case of the Palestinians in Gaza, fleeing is not an option – because all exits from the strip have been closed, or because the neighbour’s house is under the exact same threat as one’s own, or because one is already a refugee and does not want to become a refugee anew – staying put, which the high-tech states term “illegal human shields,” constitutes a form of resistance.

Neve Gordon is the author of Israel’s Occupation. 

Nicola Perugini is Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Italian Studies and Middle East Studies at Brown University. His forthcoming book is entitled The Human Right to Dominate. 

 




RT CrossTalk Roundtable on Western Media Disinformation on Ukraine Events

[T]CROSSTALK with Peter Lavelle

TGP Superstation




DO NOT COME TO RUSSIA WITH SWORD IN HAND!

Special—motherland callsVolgaBy Andre Vltchek

I

[I] cannot believe that I am writing this short essay, but I feel that I have to; I simply have no choice; I am a determined internationalist who does not believe in ‘blood’ and ‘nations’.

Virtually every major Western press agency and the rest of ‘their’ mass media now carry those vitriolic propaganda outbursts exploiting the poor victims of the downed MH17 flight. All lines of decency have been crossed. What we are being fed here now resembles what one can see and hear and read in dusty archives stacked with Nazi Germany’s mementos.

Again, the West is killing, but Russia is declared a ‘villain’, and so is China and Latin America, Iran and Zimbabwe or Eritrea; just about any country or block of nations which refuses to yield to the horrifying terror being spread by Washington, London, Paris and other Western capitals.

The world is now clearly divided; there are two distinct camps:

In one, there are colonial and neo-colonial powers, which have been plundering the planet and its people for centuries. This camp also includes countless servile client states, such as Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Japan, South Korea, Kenya and Colombia.  The people and nature in most of these nations—like Indonesia and Philippines—are still being savagely exploited by dint of being led by utterly corrupt elites in cahoots with their imperial overlords. Shame has no meaning for such regimes.

The other camp is one great rainbow of countries that are standing proudly and determinedly against Western neo-colonialism and fascism: Cuba and Venezuela, Russia and China, Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, South Africa, Eritrea, North Korea, Zimbabwe, Nicaragua, and several others. It consists of various ideologies and numerous economic systems, but it has one underlying principle: all these countries want to serve its people, not the bankers and neo-colonialists in London or Washington. While some are clearly succeeding, others are stumbling, corruption and upper class interests still play a major role, but all are at least making brave attempts.

And there are also several countries like India, that are somewhere in between, or ‘playing it both ways’. Remnants of the “non-aligned” camp we saw in the 1960s.

In the West – Russia, China, Cuba and Venezuela are four nations hated the most. It is because they form the backbone of resistance.

Russia is particularly hated, because for one hundred years it stood against and defeated Western Fascism, then shortly thereafter helped to liberate dozens of nations from European colonialism.

My good friend, Artem Kirpichenok, one of the leading Russian historians; a Jew who lived in Israel for 15 years, but decided to return to his native St. Petersburg after becoming disillusioned with racism and the institutionalized discrimination of the minorities living in the Jewish State, once clarified the issue:

“Nazi Germany, the same as England, USA and France, was based on a racist and colonialist mindset, widely accepted principles among the Western bourgeoisie in the 1930s. Hitler was building his empire in Eastern Europe on the British colonial design in India. Nazi racial theories did not differ too much from the racism in the US South or from the racial theories of French, Belgian, British or Dutch empires implemented in the colonies. The collapse of the Third Reich hit hard on all those ideals of colonialism and racism. And the Soviet Union was mainly to ‘blame’ for that collapse. The ideological basis of the European dominance over Asia, Africa and Latin America had been damaged. That could of course never be forgiven.”

What we see now is the 6th time that the Russian people are being attacked by the West, in just a short historic span of one hundred years!

II

[R]ussia was invaded during the WWI, by German troops. Then, after the greatest revolution in the modern era (October Revolution of 1917), the UK, France and later US, crossed Russian borders (1918) and occupied cities like Vladivostok and Arkhangelsk. Involved were also Canadian and Australian soldiers. By then, the Czechoslovak ‘Legions’ were already plundering and raping all along Trans Siberian Railroad since 1917. President Wilson, who had deviously sent the troops to aid in the multi-nation anti-communist push and to ensure that American investors—in case of chaos—had a share of Siberia’s rich natural resources, did not withdraw the American troops until 1920.

Later came the WWII, and around 26 million Soviet people (mainly Russians, Ukrainians and Byelorussians) died while fighting and defeating Nazism. This was the equivalent of the population of Texas and California combined at the time. The Soviets were not only fighting Germans, but also countless complex plots from London, Paris and Washington, to destroy both Germany and the Soviet Union in one go.

Decades later, Brzezinski, Kissinger and others worked hard to create scenarios—a trap, Brzezinski himself admitted, that would drag the Soviet Union into Afghanistan, and exhaust it there, financially and mentally. The idea was to give the Soviet Union its “own Vietnam.” In Afghanistan, the Soviet Union was fought and mortally wounded by jihadi cadres, including Mujahidin, financed and trained by the United States and the rest of the West, as well as by then close allies of the West –Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

The final blow came in 1989, when both the United Sates and Europe outrageously fooled, outmaneuvered and humiliated a totally and inexplicably naive Soviet leader – Mikhail Gorbachev, who then moved to dissolve the Soviet Union. (1) A few years later, under the leadership of a vicious degenerate, traitor and alcoholic, Boris Yeltsin, the West had managed to implement ‘the Indonesian scenario’ (1965) – Russia was ruined financially, with thousands of members of the opposition murdered, the Parliament (Russian White House) bombed, and the social safety net dismantled. That great country –the Soviet Union – had fallen apart, or, more precisely, been destroyed, from outside.

In the mid 90’s I witnessed top Soviet academics selling their books, their valuable libraries, in the freezing cold, at the entrances to the underground Metro system, in the city of Novosibirsk. Eventually, academics left, most of those from Tomsk to Argentina, and those from Novosibirsk to Brazil. Pensioners all over the country were dying from hunger and cold.

That is exactly what the West wanted – to turn their ‘biggest obstacle to absolute domination of the world’ – into some banana republic, even if the country never had  single banana!

*

Russia suffered enormously from the Western onslaught throughout the history. And so did China, of course, which was colonized and humiliated by French and British invaders. So were all Latin American countries, and Iran, Korea, South Africa…The list is long and most of you know it well.

The blood spilled in the fight for freedom amalgamates today’s coalition against the Western regime, and against the most terrible ills of the world that Western countries clearly symbolize – racism, fascism, and colonialism. And capitalism, of course, the fount of unending inequality for humans and ruination for the natural world.

Russia is strong again, and it is standing tall, working closely with Communist China and Cuba (it just forgave Cuba a 35 billion dollar debt), with Venezuela and Uruguay, with most progressive nations and movements all over the world.

It is far from perfect, we understand, and although President Putin has restored and implemented many social policies, it is still far from being ‘socialist’. It may be again, in the near future, but even this is not the point, right now.

Words of enlightened Russian ruler, Alexandr Nevsky are what is really ‘the bottom line’: “Go tell all in foreign lands that Russia lives! Those who come to us in peace will be welcome as a guest. But those who come to us sword in hand will die by the sword! On that Russia stands and forever will it stand!”

That’s how it is, and that is how it should be, damn it!

*

Russia made concessions. It went too far making them, I believe. If sanctions continue, it should impose reciprocal sanctions against the West. And so on.

If Russian people in Ukraine will go on being murdered in what is clearly becoming a horrendous campaign of ethnic cleansing, Russia should fight and defend them.

Libya, Syria, Iraq, and Palestine – all are bleeding, destroyed, ruined by Western terror and its inevitable accompaniment, mendacious, pervasive, cynical propaganda. Ukraine is next. In fact she is already well on the road to perdition.

Enough.

Who downed Boeing 777; MH17, is unclear. Who is responsible for the tragedy, is obvious – those who destabilized and destroyed Ukraine and overthrew its government – EU and the United States.

Russia never seeks wars. Now its people are dying again, but the ‘big bear’ is still calm, reasoning with the West, trying to appeal to human logic and decency.

Russia is a huge but peaceful nation. But do not push it to the edge. When attacked, it fights as no other country on earth. And it never loses. Do not provoke it! Go home. Stop killing innocent Russian people… You already did, millions and millions. You killed almost an entire family of mine, too, during the siege of Leningrad; even my mother – just a baby then – survived by miracle.

Do not come close to Russia with swords in your hands! Or you will face the brave Russian people and, most likely, the Internationalist Brigades.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Andre Vltchek is a novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. The result is his latest book: “Fighting Against Western Imperialism”.  ‘Pluto’ published his discussion with Noam Chomsky: On Western Terrorism. His critically acclaimed political novel Point of No Return is re-edited and available. Oceania is his book on Western imperialism in the South Pacific. His provocative book about post-Suharto Indonesia and the market-fundamentalist model is called “Indonesia – The Archipelago of Fear”. His feature documentary, “Rwanda Gambit” is about Rwandan history and the plunder of DR Congo. After living for many years in Latin America and Oceania, Vltchek presently resides and works in East Asia and Africa. He can be reached through his website or his Twitter.

NOTES
(1) The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) ceased to exist on 26 December 1991 by declaration no. 142-H of the Soviet of the Republics of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union,[1] acknowledging the independence of the twelve republics of the Soviet Union, and creating the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). On the previous day, 25 December 1991, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev had resigned, declaring his office extinct, and handed over the Soviet nuclear missile launching codes to Russian President Boris Yeltsin. That same evening at 7:32 P.M. the Soviet flag was lowered from the Kremlin for the last time and replaced with the Russian tricolor.