[Photo: Before and after mountain top removal for coal extraction. Devastation brought to you by the Koch Brothers. Credit: Earth Justice.]

=By= The Real News Network

 

From The Real News Network

Scientists say Temperatures Will Rise to Critical 2° by 2050

The Real News Network is Building a Global Climate Change Bureau

2014 and 2015 each set the record for hottest calendar year since scientists began measuring surface temperatures over 150 years ago, and 2016 is shaping up to be even warmer. This will be the first time that we’ve seen three consecutive years with record-breaking temperatures.

A temperature increase of two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels will now be reached much sooner than earlier predicted according to a report by seven leading climate scientists.

“The 1.5°C target could be reached by the early 2030’s and the 2°C target by 2050” says the report that included Sir Robert Watson, former Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The scientists say that even if all the pledges made by the signatory countries to the Paris agreement are fully implemented, climate will pass this dangerous mark in 34 years.

This is a threshold that most scientists have warned cannot be crossed without dire consequences, including a rise in sea levels of several feet that would flood many coastal cities in the U.S., longer droughts, more intense heat waves that cause a major disruption in the world’s food supply, and large migrations of people from countries of the global south.

It is also a point where it becomes far more difficult to reverse the warming trend. Some scientists suggest temperatures by the end of the century could rise as much as 4-6°C above pre-industrial levels. [1°C equals 1.8°F, so this is a temperature rise of 7.2-10.8°F]

The report titled The Truth About Climate Change says, “Much of the public believes that climate change is only going to happen by the end of the century,” and that this is a misunderstanding of the urgency. Unless there is a dramatic change in current public policy, most people alive today will live to see the 2°C threshold crossed.

The report continues: “Climate change is happening now, and much faster than anticipated.” Climate change related floods, droughts, more intense storms, heat waves, and wildfires have already had devastating effects on livelihoods, infrastructure, and lives.”

If the 2°C threshold is to be avoided, the report calls for far more aggressive targets than those set by the Paris Agreement and for that action to begin immediately. The report says, “To meet the 2°C target, global CO2 emissions should be net zero by 2060-2075.”

The threat is catastrophic, the science overwhelming. So why aren’t solutions to the climate change crisis at the top of the political agenda?

Why don’t we see millions of people in the streets demanding decisive action? Why isn’t this a major issue in the election debates? Why are politicians who deny the existence of human-caused climate change even elected to office?

The lack of American public engagement in the climate crisis is a global concern. If U.S. policy doesn’t change, human life as we know it and thousands of other species will not survive.

According to a Yale survey, 70% of Americans now believe global warming is real. If so, why isn’t there more political pressure to face up to the crisis?

Dig further into the numbers and the state of public opinion is more fully revealed.

• Of those who believe climate change is real, only half (53%) think that global warming is mostly human caused. One in three (34%) believe it is due mostly to natural changes in the environment.
• Only about one in ten Americans understand that nearly all climate scientists (more than 90%) are convinced that human-caused global warming is happening.
• Over half of Americans (58%) say they are at least “somewhat worried” about global warming, but only 16% say they are “very worried.”

Why are only 16% of people surveyed very worried about what 90% of scientists think is a catastrophic threat?

The Koch Brothers’ war on science certainly plays a major role in promoting doubt about the overwhelming scientific evidence of human-caused climate change. They spend millions financing witch hunts against climate scientists and funding “research” designed to confuse public opinion.

The Kochs and other billionaires with a vested interest pour hundreds of millions into the coffers of politicians willing to obstruct legislation that would regulate fossil fuel and promote a green sustainable economy.

Perhaps as responsible for the gap between public opinion and scientific evidence is corporate television news, “The gatekeeper of public consciousness.”

Firstly, they ignore the crisis. The report cited above was not the lead story on television newscasts. We can’t find evidence it was carried by any U.S. television news outlet at all.

According to a Media Matters report, the four major corporate TV networks aired a total 146 minutes of climate change coverage in 2015. ABC only aired 13 minutes of coverage and Fox’s coverage consisted mostly of “criticism of efforts to address climate change.”

The report continues:

CNN aired almost five times as much oil industry advertising as climate change-related coverage in the one-week periods following the announcements that 2015 was the hottest year on record and February 2016 was the most abnormally hot month on record.

Only 16% of Americans are “very worried” about global warming because corporate TV news doesn’t want us to worry about it.

Larry Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, says:

While US foreign policy is mostly responsible for the growth of militant terrorist groups, the threat of a nuclear terrorist attack is existential. Think about what we’ll do when 500,000 people are killed in New York City. We will declare martial law nationwide. We will be the most draconian tyranny you’ve ever seen on the face of this earth. But still I consider climate change a greater danger because it is a threat to the very survival of the human race.

What are the reasons for corporate TV’s lack of interest in the major news story of the century?The obvious answers are pressure from certain advertisers, the interests of corporate ownership, and the political intrigues of the fossil fuel industry.

But I think it goes even deeper.

In 2009, two years after the Fourth IPCC Assessment Report said, “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal,” TV coverage of climate change was at its height – a whopping 205 minutes for the entire year. Even former Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich appeared in an ad with Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi calling for action on climate warming.

Then something happened.

A large section of the elites looked at what it would really take to meet the target scientists said was necessary to mitigate and stop the terrible consequences of climate change. They said, “No way.”

The transformation required to drastically reduce the use of fossil fuels and move to a green economy would change who has power and how business is done. There is no way to achieve the necessary reduction in carbon emissions without serious government regulation, a strengthening of the public sector, and massive public investment. All this requires a reduction in the political power of the fossil fuel industry and the financial elites associated with it.

Gingrich renounced the Pelosi ad in 2011.

The majority of the billionaires who control the commanding heights of the economy and politics are more interested in short-term profits and immediate personal gratification than some “long-term” threat. They either fight against all climate change legislative action or support relatively weak measures to reduce carbon emissions – better than nothing, but far from what scientists say is required.

For most people of wealth it comes down to a simple calculation: My family and I will be ok. As the IPCC puts it: “Risks are unevenly distributed and are generally greater for disadvantaged people and communities in countries at all levels of development.”

People who understand the scale of the systemic risk are marginalized by corporate media and thus are marginalized in politics.

A critical task in engaging large numbers of ordinary people in fighting and voting for a rational climate change policy is breaking the corporate monopoly on daily video news. We must create an independent, uncompromising source of global climate change news and investigative reports.

The very first story ever produced by TRNN in 2007 was an interview series with George Monbiot on the urgent climate change threat. We produced a series titled “Who Cares About Bangladesh” soon afterwards.

We reported directly from the COP21 Climate Conference in Paris.

We did in-depth interviews with climatologists like Dr. Alan Robock and Dr. Michael Mann who both worked on the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Economist Robert Pollin has appeared in numerous interviews with specific proposals for a transition to a green economy.

We recently interviewed the esteemed actor Emma Thompson while she was onboard a Greenpeace vessel in the Arctic.

We’ve reported on environmental activism from all over the world.

We will soon be releasing the documentary “The Doubt Machine: The Koch Brothers War on Climate Science” narrated by Emma Thompson.

With our limited resources we have produced more than 535 reports on climate change since the fall of 2007 when we started our service. In 2015, we produced 1029 minutes of programming about climate change. That’s more than seven times of all the major networks combined.

We have produced more than 10,000 reports and interviews overall since we began our daily production. We also cover international and national news and now have a bureau in Baltimore reporting on the problems and solutions to the crisis of urban America. Millions of people have watched. We average 1.5 million views per month.

While we have worked hard to keep a focus on climate change, what we have accomplished is far from enough. We need a Climate Bureau with sufficient resources to become a major daily video climate news service for online and TV.

The power of daily video news is what shapes most people’s world view and the field is dominated by news organizations that will not seriously address the problem or are in fact, part of the “doubt machine.”

It is clear that a radical change in the way the world produces and uses energy is required. Currently, about 82% of energy produced in the world is obtained by burning fossil fuels. How we produce energy without burning fossil fuels will be critically important as the world population is expected to grow by 40% to 10 billion by 2050.

 

Please go to The Real News in order to read the rest of their plans for their new Global Climate Change Bureau (GCCB).

 

Learn more about The Real News’ Global Climate Change Bureau. The Real News Network

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=By= Patrick Cockburn

It is fortunate for Saudi Arabia and Qatar that the furore over the sexual antics of Donald Trump is preventing much attention being given to the latest batch of leaked emails to and from Hillary Clinton. Most fascinating of these is what reads like a US State Department memo, dated 17 August 2014, on the appropriate US response to the rapid advance of Isis forces, which were then sweeping through northern Iraq and eastern Syria.

At the time, the US government was not admitting that Saudi Arabia and its Sunni allies were supporting Isis and al-Qaeda-type movements. But in the leaked memo, which says that it draws on “western intelligence, US intelligence and sources in the region” there is no ambivalence about who is backing Isis, which at the time of writing was butchering and raping Yazidi villagers and slaughtering captured Iraqi and Syrian soldiers.

The memo says: “We need to use our diplomatic and more traditional intelligence assets to bring pressure on the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to Isis and other radical groups in the region.” This was evidently received wisdom in the upper ranks of the US government, but never openly admitted because to it was held that to antagonise Saudi Arabia, the Gulf monarchies, Turkey and Pakistan would fatally undermine US power in the Middle East and South Asia.

For an extraordinarily long period after 9/11, the US refused to confront these traditional Sunni allies and thereby ensured that the “War on Terror” would fail decisively; 15 years later, al-Qaeda in its different guises is much stronger than it used to be because shadowy state sponsors, without whom it could not have survived, were given a free pass.

It is not as if Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State and the US foreign policy establishment in general did not know what was happening. An earlier WikiLeaks release of a State Department cable sent under her name in December 2009 states that “Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base for al-Qaeda, the Taliban, LeT [Lashkar-e-Taiba in Pakistan].” But Saudi complicity with these movements never became a central political issue in the US. Why not?

The answer is that the US did not think it was in its interests to cut its traditional Sunni allies loose and put a great deal of resources into making sure that this did not happen. They brought on side compliant journalists, academics and politicians willing to give overt or covert support to Saudi positions.

The real views of senior officials in the White House and the State Department were only periodically visible and, even when their frankness made news, what they said was swiftly forgotten. Earlier this year, for instance, Jeffrey Goldberg inThe Atlantic wrote a piece based on numerous interviews with Barack Obama in which Obama “questioned, often harshly, the role that America’s Sunni Arab allies play in fomenting anti-American terrorism. He is clearly irritated that foreign policy orthodoxy compels him to treat Saudi Arabia as an ally”.

It is worth recalling White House cynicism about how that foreign policy orthodoxy in Washington was produced and how easily its influence could be bought. Goldberg reported that “a widely held sentiment inside the White House is that many of the most prominent foreign-policy think tanks in Washington are doing the bidding of their Arab and pro-Israel funders. I’ve heard one administration official refer to Massachusetts Avenue, the home of many of these think tanks, as ‘Arab-occupied territory’.”

Despite this, television and newspaper interview self-declared academic experts from these same think tanks on Isis, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf are wilfully ignoring or happily disregarding their partisan sympathies.

The Hillary Clinton email of August 2014 takes for granted that Saudi Arabia and Qatar are funding Isis – but this was not the journalistic or academic conventional wisdom of the day. Instead, there was much assertion that the newly declared caliphate was self-supporting through the sale of oil, taxes and antiquities; it therefore followed that Isis did not need money from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. The same argument could not be made to explain the funding of Jabhat al-Nusra, which controlled no oilfields, but even in the case of Isis the belief in its self-sufficiency was always shaky.

Iraqi and Kurdish leaders said that they did not believe a word of it, claiming privately that Isis was blackmailing the Gulf states by threatening violence on their territory unless they paid up. The Iraqi and Kurdish officials never produced proof of this, but it seemed unlikely that men as tough and ruthless as the Isis leaders would have satisfied themselves with taxing truck traffic and shopkeepers in the extensive but poor lands they ruled and not extracted far larger sums from fabulously wealthy private and state donors in the oil producers of the Gulf.

Going by the latest leaked email, the State Department and US intelligence clearly had no doubt that Saudi Arabia and Qatar were funding Isis. But there has always been bizarre discontinuity between what the Obama administration knew about Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states and what they would say in public. Occasionally the truth would spill out, as when Vice-President Joe Biden told students at Harvard in October 2014 that Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates “were so determined to take down Assad and essentially have a proxy Sunni-Shia war. What did they do? They poured hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad. Except that the people who were being supplied were al-Nusra and al-Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world”. Biden poured scorn on the idea that there were Syrian “moderates” capable of fighting Isis and Assad at the same time.

Hillary Clinton should be very vulnerable over the failings of US foreign policy during the years she was Secretary of State. But, such is the crudity of Trump’s demagoguery, she has never had to answer for it. Republican challenges have focussed on issues – the death of the US ambassador in Benghazi in 2012 and the final US military withdrawal from Iraq in 2011 – for which she was not responsible.

A Hillary Clinton presidency might mean closer amity with Saudi Arabia, but American attitudes towards the Saudi regime are becoming soured, as was shown recently when Congress overwhelmingly overturned a presidential veto of a bill allowing the relatives of 9/11 victims to sue the Saudi government.

Another development is weakening Saudi Arabia and its Sunni allies. The leaked memo speaks of the rival ambitions of Saudi Arabia and Qatar “to dominate the Sunni world”. But this has not turned out well, with east Aleppo and Mosul, two great Sunni cities, coming under attack and likely to fall. Whatever Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and the others thought they were doing it has not happened and the Sunni of Syria and Iraq are paying a heavy price. It is this failure which will shape the future relations of the Sunni states with the new US administration.

Source: The Independent via Znet.

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=By= William Stonkton

This edition of CB News examines the “information war” that has been started against Russia. This is an international effort that provides a drumbeat of propaganda against Russia. These types of orchestrated campaigns are very difficult to counter as it falls it the category of “you hear the same thing everywhere,” and that rapidly turns into just “something that everybody knows.”  Lies become a default truth, and like ripples on a pond the lie spreads out almost evenly across a population. Stonkton illuminates the various perpetrators of this campaign and how it is being carried out. What is really happening here is a “disinformation war.”

William Stonkton  is a Russian videographer living in Omsk, Russia. You can follow him on youtube at William Stonkton Channel.

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Twilight Zones on Planet Earth- China Rising Radio Sinoland for the Moscow-Beijing Express 160706

Download and/or listen to Jeff read this article as a podcast on SoundCloud, or you can do the same at the very bottom of this page:

It has been instructive to travel this summer and get out of China for a while. What is apparent to me, as I read national newspapers and international magazines along the way, is that humanity is living in two parallel worlds, and for the most part, they are mutually exclusive. Rod Serling, the producer of the 1950-60s science fiction television show, Twilight Zone, could not write a more dimension bending script.

On the one hand, the majority of the world’s people are living in Empire World. Their perceptions are molded and manipulated by the West’s owners, those elites (and their army of enablers), who make up the top one-tenth of one percent of the economic and political pyramid. In Empire World, Planet Earth is portrayed as a very scary place, full of monsters, demons and evil leaders, who are all hell bent on threatening the “established order”.

Meanwhile, this Western status quo is depicted as a shining beacon on the hill, towering over the rest of the world’s people, nobly imposing its superior history, civilization, culture, goodness, capitalism, justice, rule of law and civil society on the human race. The subtle message is that non-Westerners who are not empire’s obedient servants are thus ahistorical, uncivilized, uncultured, unjust and lawless savages. This racist propaganda is so ruthlessly pervasive and effective, that most of Planet Earth’s non-Westerners suffer from terrible inferiority complexes and accept their status as second class citizens, in the face of Eurangloland’s relentless juggernaut.

This 85% of humanity, mostly dark skinned and surviving from day to day, are brainwashed into fatalism. It’s their fault that they only own a tiny fraction of their country’s wealth and have little to no control, nor the means to do something about it. They keep telling themselves, “If only…”, “Once I…”, “Except for the fact that…” The vast majority of them don’t even recognize that they and their inherited natural resources are being exploited by Western imperialism and its client state elites, with its noxious cocktail of racism, capitalism, colonialism, false flags, war and fascism (see http://chinarising.puntopress.com/2016/03/27/the-cycle-of-western-empire-a-china-rising-radio-sinoland-modern-day-math-lesson/). Even though they are victims, talking about these components of imperialism is often met with disbelief or denial. The notion that the West is an empire and that colonialism and fascism are alive and thriving in their countries just does not register. Fascism was vanquished in 1945 and colonialism was finished in the 50s-60s, with all the people’s countries gaining their “independence”, right?

Yet, it is perfectly normal that Eurangloland has over 1,000 military installations around the world, that it can freely invade or bomb any country it wants, secretly or in the open, in the Americas, Africa, Asia and even Europe. It is okeydokey that Israel and NATO commit horrific war crimes and genocide, nonstop with total impunity, while Western NGOs, banks, corporations and institutions plunder this 85% and their rightful wealth. The mentality of most of the world’s non-Western peoples is like that of a rape victim,

It’s my fault, I deserve it. And I realize that I should, but it is not worth trying to seek justice, since the system is rigged, even though by not fighting back, this psychopath will continue to rape others.

Then there are those countries living in the reality of another Twilight Zone. They see the world differently, at least among their leaders and most of their citizens. I call this group the “Anti-West”. It includes Russia and its Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), China and its Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), North Korea, Iran, Syria, Eritrea and the Bolivarian Alliance (ALBA) in the Americas. The fact that many of these countries are officially communist or socialist is telling, as these political systems are the only two that have historically opposed Western imperialism and its aforementioned cocktail of destruction and mayhem.

[dropcap]H[/dropcap]owever, as we have seen recently in Venezuela, Brazil and Argentina, among their political parties and elites, there is a significant percentage of their national populations who drink from the poisoned chalice of Western empire and swallow all that “beacon on the hill” propaganda, as irrefutable gospel. They call themselves “freedom loving”, “capitalists” and “libertarian”. For maybe a few extra crumbs of the colonial pie, they are more than willing to turn their country into a socioeconomic hell hole and Western client state. Most are not even thinking on that level, they just want to emulate super-consuming Westerners and live a more materialistic existence. Ironically, the West is rich only because of its massive theft of these people’s wealth, via its colonial empire. These subversive victims create their own, perverted Twilight Zone alongside the Eurangloland version. They are often called the “fifth column”, being self-serving termites, who are happy to bring down their nation’s tree of commonwealth, for a belly full of wood (see http://chinarising.puntopress.com/2016/06/13/5th-column-attacks-on-china-or-a-sino-new-world-order-china-risings-jeff-j-brown-shadow-of-truth-160611/).

Most of those who support the West are not even thinking on that level, they just want to emulate super-consuming Westerners and live a more materialistic existence.

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he Anti-West has its own propaganda, media, political parties and systems, all flailing away at the overwhelming dominance of colonialism. While the West sees them as threatening monsters, demons of evil, the Anti-West lives in its own, opposing Twilight Zone reality, cooperating and aligning together, while building metaphorical and real bridges of commerce, infrastructure, connectivity and transportation.

The Anti-West is succeeding in all these categories, except in the propaganda and media departments. Yes, it has RT, Telesur, Press TV and China Daily, but the truth is that they are like blood starved fleas on the rump of a raging bull elephant. The West’s soft power and cultural suzerainty totally rule across the planet. Millions of Chinese, Russians, Iranians and ALBA citizens (fanatically) follow Western sports teams, musical artists, Hollywood, television, press, media and fashion. In the background, they underestimate the linguistic hegemony of English, which is the global language of empire. They often don’t make the connection between their countries’ struggles for financial and political independence, freedom from exploitation and aggression, with the Western soft power that they crave. It is as deadly as stealth bombers. Why? Because that’s how the human brain works and the resulting feelings of victimhood, inferiority and powerlessness, which take root.

Western governments, spy agencies, corporations and media work in well-coordinated lockstep to blanket humanity in a fog of withering and highly effective propaganda. It brainwashes the vast majority of world citizens into consumer nihilism, self-satisfying numbness, apathy and helplessness. Neil Postman wrote angrily about this, in his classic takedown of Western soft power, “Amusing Ourselves to Death” (see http://neilpostman.org/).

Western governments, spy agencies, corporations and media work in well-coordinated lockstep to blanket humanity in a fog of withering and highly effective propaganda…The West’s soft power and cultural suzerainty totally rule across the planet. Millions of Chinese, Russians, Iranians and ALBA citizens (fanatically) follow Western sports teams, musical artists, Hollywood, television, press, media and fashion.

China and Russia have already officially joined hands to create a cooperative media effort. Last month, they held their huge Far Eastern Media Summit in Vladivostok, inking numerous agreements (see  http://english.sina.com/news/2016-06-10/doc-ifxszmnz6986152.shtml and http://tass.ru/en/society/880965). It was actually the third summit, the first one taking place in 2014. But this is not enough. Remember those blood starved fleas on the rump of Western empire’s raging bull elephant. Russia and China may tower against the West in the spheres of economy, military, science and technology. But in terms of propaganda and media, they are on the same, humble level as Iran and Venezuela.

Thus, in order to stand up to the West’s global propaganda behemoth, they need to expand their media summit and deal-signing concept, to include all of their allies in the Anti-West. I can die trying to find Press TV, Telesur and RT on cable or satellite in China and I suspect the same problem exists in all these countries. But, I can damn sure get my brain lobotomized by an endless stream of Fox News, CNN, MSNBC and BBC, in even the remotest corners of Latin America, Africa and Asia.

This has got to change. China’s and Russia’s Presidents Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin can sign all the commercial, military, educational and S&T deals they want, together and with their Anti-West brethren, but around the world, these success stories are heavily censored and distorted behind the Great Western Firewall (see http://chinarising.puntopress.com/2016/03/02/the-xi-putin-honeymoon-is-over-now-its-time-to-make-the-china-russia-marriage-succeed-long-term/). SCO, CSTO, ALBA and all other Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) countries with state-owned media concerns need to meet regularly and sign tons of cooperative media, cross-cultural and sports agreements. Then most importantly, they must put them into effect and promote the hell out of them, day after day, year after year. Otherwise, the NBA, Lady Gaga, Batman, Game of Thrones, Time magazine, BBC and Versace will continue to win where it really matters, in the minds of the world’s people: perception and the notions of superiority and inferiority that it engenders.

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Introduction by Rowan Wolf, PhD
Voice of Conscience

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]elcome to  another installment of “War in Ukraine – The Unreported Truth” by Dr. Alexander Chopov. This is the second video in the three part Crimes sub-series focuses on Crimea’s separation from Ukraine.  Dr. Chopov clearly addresses the West’s propaganda in a point by point manner, and discusses a series of highly complex issues in an accessible and informative way. In this installment, Chopov addressees the claims of Russia “sneaking” tens of thousands of troops into Crimea; analyzes the Budapest Memorandum – the treaty that Russia has supposedly broken; and takes a quick look at the economy of Crimea before and after Crimea’s referendum to join Russia as an autonomous region.

If you did not see, or do not remember the first video on Crimea, I encourage you to take few minutes and view it [see the end of this article for a quick reference]

This second video in the series is chock full of information, and you may find yourself watching it several times. I have provided a brief guide below to some of the main points, but they definitely do not do the video justice.

Crimea 2: Russia-Ukraine War – Russian invasion, Budapest Memorandum, and Economics of Occupied Crimea

 

Short guide to items in this video

Myth: Russia invaded Crimea by sneaking tens of thousands of troops onto the peninsula.
Truth: First, Russians have been in Crimea since at least 1783, and for over the last 200 years protected local residents. THe Russian troops in Crimea were already stationed there, and their presence had been considered “legal” by all of the Ukrainian presidents who have served since Ukraine seceded from the then USSR.

Myth 2: Actions of the Crimean people in declaring a referendum and voting to separate from Ukraine and rejoin Russia was illegal.
Truth: Crimea’s rights to do this are covered under the UN Charter UN Charter, and this was an issue internal to Ukraine, and not a redrawing of the map. Which takes us to Myth 3.

Myth 3: Russia broke a treaty with Ukraine by accepting Crimea back.
Truth: This “treaty” is the “Budapest Memorandum” and is NOT a “treaty.” No legislator has ratified it. Regardless, the Budapest Memorandum was an understanding drawn up between Ukraine, the US, Britain and Russia, after Ukraine’s decision to leave Russia. The separation left Ukraine (with a foundling government, no real military, and a faltering economy in possession of a large component of Russia’s nuclear arsenal. In fact, it made Ukraine the third largest nuclear power in the world. In the memorandum, Ukraine exchanged its arsenal in return for an honoring of its integrity as a nation.

Dr. Chopov also discusses the economy of Crimea prior to 2014 and since it has rejoined Russia.

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Crimea video 1:

In Russia-Ukraine war – Crimea. 2 years of “occupation” what happened, what do locals think?, Alexander Chopov gives a succinct historical recap of the region and of the post Maidan Revolution, speaks with some of the people in the area asking how they see themselves, and how they feel about rejoining Russia. This video is a critical contribution to cutting through the lies and propaganda about the events in Ukraine, and the continuing allegations of Russian overreach.

 

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Alexander Chopov, Ph.D.  is the Director and Producer of a new YouTube Channel – War in Ukraine – the Unreported Truth. The purpose of the channel is to give the people of Donbass an English voice so they can be heard beyond Donbass. Dr. Chopov  has a double major in International Affairs from George Washington University, and a doctorate in political science from the Diplomatic Academy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia. He interned in the US Congress,  and has lived in US for over 10 years studying both American mentality and politics.

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