Embedded Journalism: MSNBC Morning Joe with the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion in Ukraine

Embedded Journalism USA style: MSNBC Morning Joe with the Azov Battalion neo-Nazis in UkraineShow more

Protecting the Nazis: The Extraordinary Vote of Ukraine and the USA
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2021/12/protecting-the-nazis-the-extraordinary-vote-of-ukraine-and-the-usa/

NBC’s Richard Engel promotes Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Azov Battalion
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/02/16/ukra-f16.html

Elderly Ukrainian woman pictured around the world learning how to fight off Putin is being trained by 'far right paramilitaries':
Azov Battalion's founders believe minorities are 'sub-human' and proudly wear SS insignia

Pensioners were given civilian combat training by the neo-Nazi Azov battalion

The right-wing militia has been fighting against Russian separatists since 2014

It has also been accused of attacking LBTQ and Roma communities in Ukraine

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10515451/Babushka-battalion-training-Ukraine-organised-neo-NAZIS.html

Israel Is Arming Ukraine’s Blatantly Neo-Nazi Militia the Azov Battalion
https://therealnews.com/israel-is-arming-ukraines-blatantly-neo-nazi-militia-the-azov-battalion

Ukraine’s right-wing Azov Battalion stages own version of Nazis’ ‘Cathedral of Light’ ceremony
https://youtu.be/pHIO-appPac
https://www.rt.com/news/439192-azov-battalion-memorial-lichtdom/

Victoria Nuland is a ticking time-bomb

Who is Victoria Nuland? A really bad idea as a key player in Biden's foreign policy team
A Cold War true believer who sabotaged Obama's foreign policy, Nuland is a huge risk at the State Department

The "Fuck the EU" call went viral, as an embarrassed State Department, never denying the call's authenticity, blamed the Russians for tapping the
phone, much as the NSA has tapped the phones of European allies.

Despite outrage from German Chancellor Angela Merkel, no one fired Nuland, but her potty mouth upstaged the more serious story: the U.S. plot to
overthrow Ukraine's elected government — and America's responsibility for a civil war that has
killed at least 13,000 people and left Ukraine the poorest country in Europe.

In the process, Nuland, her husband Robert Kagan — co-founder of The Project for a New American Century — and their neocon cronies succeeded in sending U.S.-Russian relations into a dangerous downward spiral from which they have yet to recover.

When Ukrainian President Yanukovych spurned a U.S.-backed trade agreement with the European Union in favor of a $15 billion bailout from Russia, the
State Department threw a tantrum.

Hell hath no fury like a superpower scorned.

The EU trade agreement was to open Ukraine's economy to European imports, but without a reciprocal opening of EU markets to Ukraine, it was a lopsided deal Yanukovich could not accept. The deal was approved by the post-coup government, and has only added to Ukraine's economic woes.

The muscle for Nuland's $5 billion coup was Oleh Tyahnybok's neo-Nazi Svoboda Party and the shadowy new Right Sector militia. During her leaked
phone call, Nuland referred to Tyahnybok as one of the "big three" opposition leaders on the outside who could help the U.S.-backed Prime Minister
Yatsenyuk on the inside. This is the same Tyanhnybok who once delivered a speech applauding Ukrainians for fighting Jews and "other scum" during World War II.

Nuland also wants to confront Russia with an aggressive NATO. Since her days as U.S. ambassador to NATO during President George W. Bush's second term, she has been a supporter of NATO's expansion all the way up to Russia's border. She calls for "permanent bases along NATO's eastern border."
We have pored over a map of Europe, but we can't find a country called NATO with any borders at all. Nuland sees Russia's commitment to defending itself after successive 20th-century Western invasions as an intolerable obstacle to NATO's expansionist ambitions.

Nuland's militaristic worldview represents exactly the folly the U.S. has been pursuing since the 1990s under the influence of the neocons and
"liberal interventionists," which has resulted in a systematic underinvestment in the American people while escalating tensions with Russia, China, Iran and other countries.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220113100103/https://www.salon.com/2021/01/19/who-is-victoria-nuland-a-really-bad-idea-as-a-key-player-in-bidens-foreign-policy-team/#

NATO Chiefs Says Prepared for New Armed Conflict Over Ukraine
https://www.thedefensepost.com/2022/01/10/nato-conflict-ukraine/

Bloomberg accidentally reports that Russia invaded Ukraine
https://nypost.com/2022/02/04/bloomberg-accidentally-reports-that-russia-invaded-ukraine/

Please watch this video in which journalist Matt Lee accuses State Dept. spokesman Ned Price of veering into "Alex Jones territory" by
making the claim that Russia plans to stage a "false flag" attack with "crisis actors" -- Price then sneeringly calls Lee a Russian propagandist
https://twitter.com/mtracey/status/1489370596370755587?s=20&t=C4HICgIpSripLpAtMxB51Q

Chomsky: US Approach to Ukraine and Russia Has “Left the Domain of Rational Discourse”

The question of further expansion is more complex. The issue goes back over 30 years, to when the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was collapsing.

There were extensive negotiations among Russia, the U.S. and Germany. (The core issue was German unification.) Two visions were presented. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev proposed a Eurasian security system from Lisbon to Vladivostok with no military blocs. The U.S. rejected it: NATO stays, Russia’s Warsaw Pact disappears.

For obvious reasons, German reunification within a hostile military alliance is no small matter for Russia. Nevertheless, Gorbachev agreed to it, with a quid pro quo: No expansion to the East. President George H.W. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker agreed. In their words to Gorbachev: “Not only for the Soviet Union but for other European countries as well, it is important to have guarantees that if the United States keeps its presence in Germany within the framework of NATO, not an inch of NATO’s present military jurisdiction will spread in an eastern direction.”

President H.W. Bush pretty much lived up to these commitments. So did President Bill Clinton at first, until 1999, the 50th anniversary of NATO; with
an eye on the Polish vote in the upcoming election, some have speculated. He admitted Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic to NATO. President George W. Bush — the lovable goofy grandpa who was celebrated in the press on the 20th anniversary of his invasion of Afghanistan — let down all the bars. He brought in the Baltic states and others. In 2008, he invited Ukraine to join NATO, poking the bear in the eye. Ukraine is Russia’s geostrategic heartland, apart from intimate historic relations and a large Russia-oriented population. Germany and France vetoed Bush’s reckless invitation, but it’s still on the table. No Russian leader would accept that, surely not Gorbachev, as he made clear.
https://truthout.org/articles/us-approach-to-ukraine-and-russia-has-left-the-domain-of-rational-discourse/

Biden’s Insane ‘Russia False Flag’ Conspiracy Debunked
The whole thing is reminiscent of the Obama Administration’s absurd suggestion that the attack on the US CIA installation in Benghazi, Libya, was motivated by a laughable anti-Muslim video (instead of a US arms deal gone wrong, as Sen. Paul uncovered).

Price’s pathetic talking point was this: we are declassifying intelligence information that Russia is about to release a fake video of a Ukrainian
attack on Donbas as a false flag to open the door to Russian involvement.

Here’s a summary of what followed:

AP’s Matt Lee replied with a question any normal journalist would ask before our current era: “OK, but what evidence do you have that this is indeed the case?”
Ned: “Well that’s it – my ‘declassified’ claim that Russia is about to do it.”
Matt Lee: “Well, that’s not ‘declassified’ information, that’s just you claiming it. Surely you understand the difference. I mean, crisis actors, fake dead bodies – that’s Alex Jones territory.”
Ned: “You are a Russian propagandist.” Yes this is the Reader’s Digest version, but essentially this is what took place in the extraordinary State Dept. briefing today. The US government’s position position is that if you ask for any evidence of a US government claim…you are a Putin agent!
https://original.antiwar.com/daniel-mcadams/2022/02/04/bidens-insane-russia-false-flag-conspiracy-debunked/

ROBERT PARRY: Ukraine’s Neo-Nazis
Thousands of Ukraine’s neo-Nazis surrounded parliament in Kiev demanding the government honor Ukrainian paramilitary forces who fought for
Adolf Hitler, another embarrassing reminder of the extremism
unleashed by the U.S.-backed coup, Robert Parry wrote on Oct. 15, 2014

For months, The New York Times and other major U.S. news outlets have insisted that it’s just Russian propaganda to say that a significant neo-Nazi
presence exists inside Ukraine, but thousands of these “non-existent” neo-Nazis battled police on Tuesday outside the parliament
building in Kiev demanding recognition of their Hitler-collaborating forebears.

The parliament, aware of the obvious public relations fiasco that would follow if it bowed to far-right demands to honor members of the Nazi-affiliated
Ukrainian Insurgent Army (or UIA), defeated the proposal. That touched off riots by an estimated 8,000 protesters led by Ukraine’s right-wing
Svoboda party and the Right Sektor.

But this neo-Nazi reality continues to be an inconvenient truth about the U.S.-backed coup regime that seized power in Kiev with the overthrow of Yanukovych on
Feb. 22. Several government ministries, including national security, were given to these far-right elements in recognition of their key role in the putsch that forced
members of Yanukovych’s government to flee for their lives.

The larger historical context is that Nazism has been deeply rooted in western Ukraine since World War II, especially in cities like Lviv, where a cemetery to the
veterans of the Galician SS, a Ukrainian affiliate of the Nazi SS, is maintained. These old passions were brought to the surface again in the battle to oust
Yanukovych and sever historic ties to Russia.

The muscle behind the U.S.-backed Maidan protests against Yanukovych came from neo-Nazi militias trained in western Ukraine, organized into 100-man
brigades and dispatched to Kiev. After the coup, neo-Nazi leader Andriy Parubiy, who was commander of the Maidan “self-defense forces,” was elevated to
national security chief and soon announced that the Maidan militia forces would be incorporated into the
National Guard and sent to eastern Ukraine to fight ethnic Russians resisting the coup regime.

The conservative London Daily Telegraph offered more details about the Azov battalion in 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 reality of the Holocaust, expressed admiration
for Adolf 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.”

In other words, for the first time since World War II, a government had dispatched Nazi storm troopers to attack a European population and officials in Kiev
knew what they were doing. 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. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Ignoring Ukraine’s Neo-Nazi Storm Troopers.”]

https://consortiumnews.com/2021/12/23/robert-parry-ukraines-neo-nazis-demand-respect/

How Not to Explain the Ukraine Crisis
The PBS NewsHour invited on just about the worst person in the U.S. government to
help Americans understand the crisis in Ukraine

Victoria Nuland, who choreographed the 2014 coup that overthrew Ukraine’s democratically-elected government and set the current crisis in motion, was
invited by PBS NewsHour on Dec. 7 to explain the standoff in Ukraine.

Typical of Western media, the story began with Russia’s involvement in eastern Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea, which took place in March 2014. The crisis
actually began a week earlier with the violent overthrow of
democratically-elected President Viktor Yanukovych on Feb. 22, 2014. While accusations flew of Russian aggression, invasion and annexation, there was not a word
about the U.S. instigated coup or Nuland’s role in it.

For the sin of declining a Western aid package loaded with austerity measures, and accepting instead an unencumbered Russian package, Yanukovych became a
target for U.S. regime change. Undersecretary Nuland’s role in the coup is essential to the story.

While Senators John McCain and Chris Murphy appeared on-stage in Kiev with far-right opposition leader Oleh Tyahnybok in support of the coup, Nuland
and Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt passed out cookies to anti-government protesters in Maidan Square.
This would be like Russian parliamentarians and diplomats coming to Washington to encourage protesters to overthrow the U.S. government.

Behind the scenes, in an intercepted phone call with Pyatt, Nuland can be heard plotting the make-up of a government to succeed that of Yanukovych.
“Yats is the guy” she said, referring to Arseniy Yatsenyuk, America’s preferred leader for the Ukrainian people.
As for Europe’s competing interests in the outcome of the affair, she infamously said “Fuck the EU.”

Nuland had told the U.S.-Ukrainian Foundation on Dec. 13, 2013, that Washington had spent $5 billion over a decade to
support Ukraine’s “European aspirations,” in other words to pull it away from Russia.

https://consortiumnews.com/2021/12/24/how-not-to-explain-the-ukraine-crisis/

Exclusive: Documents Reveal Erik Prince's $10 Billion Plan to Make Weapons and Create a Private Army in Ukraine
https://archive.is/i9HmL#selection-839.0-839.111

US-funded Belarusian regime-change activist arrested on plane joined neo-Nazis in Ukraine

Belarusian regime-change activist Roman Protasevich, whose arrest on a grounded plane caused a global scandal,
joined Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Azov Battalion and
was cultivated by the US government’s media apparatus
https://thegrayzone.com/2021/05/26/belarus-roman-protasevich-plane-nazis-ukraine/

Supporting Neo-Nazis in Ukraine
Why the Obama administration supported neo-Nazis in Ukraine
https://www.stpete4peace.org/Ukraine

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/us-warns-airlines-flights-near-ukraine-russian-border-2021-04-19/

US-supported coup and illegitimate government

The Western media has also downplayed the 2014 US-supported coup of the democratically elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.
The US wanted a leader of Ukraine to be someone who would want to join NATO. A mostly nonviolent protest of Ukrainians who wanted to
join the EU began after Yanukovych rejected a
bad EU economic aid offer in favor of a much better deal from Russia.

https://original.antiwar.com/Ron_Forthofer/2021/12/23/failure-of-us-media-on-ukraine/

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