© UnknownPetro Oleksiyovych Poroshenko, current president of the Ukraine coup government
The sanctions against Russia have gotten a lot of media play, as has the gas pipeline issue where Ukraine has kind of agreed to pay but doesn't really want to. Yatsenyuk was hoping that the West could use the sanctions pressure to get Moscow to ease off the "pay me now" demands. The good news is the EU is now trying to pull a lending consortium together to guarantee Ukraine's gas debt and get the gas flowing west once again in time for winter.
That is one reason Russia is not objecting too much to the continued shelling violations of the ceasefire. The EU is dangling some sanctions relief, possibly, with a successful permanent ceasefire agreement, and of course the EU will define what successful is.
When it comes to categorizing the horrors visited upon Ukrainian separatist regions by Kiev's military, you have to go to alternative media. Your average Westerner who has followed some of the war will know little about the evidence coming out about execution graves filled with POWs with their hands tied. And there is basically zero coverage on another item -- the Republics "missing in action" fighters, who are probably in graves that will never be found.
But some things cannot be hidden, like the nuclear-capable Tochka (SS-21) short-range ballistic missile, which miraculously struck a chemical plant in Donetsk on Tuesday, going off like an A-bomb. From the photos we have seen at VT, it was similar to a mini-nuke, but we would need a good video to view frame by frame to look for the telltale signs.
An earlier Tochka was used to hit a Donetsk munitions depot before the ceasefire. The "friends of Ukraine" in the West usually react to these events with no comment. You can just image how that would change if the Republics were firing any weapons like this against Kiev territory. The Murdoch media would be blasting out their "Russia gives ballistic missiles to separatists"... "Latvia invokes its demand for NATO reinforcements", and so on.
To my surprise, there has been some response on the ballistic missile strike from Kiev late on Tuesday. Poroshenko was quoted by news sources during his Dnipropetrovsk trip, "We announce 'artillery silence' and we will see what will happen."
That is one of the strangest statements from a commander-in-chief that I can remember hearing in a long time. It is whimpiness on steroids, and what seems to be an admission that he cannot control his own military during a ceasefire... or is he pretending that he can't?
The people of Donetsk have been good sports about all this. On Tuesday they enjoyed Kiev's sending its regards with heavy artillery, GRAD rocket barrages, and one ballistic missile... and have not called off the truce due to such flagrant violations. Just the city of Donetsk alone has 1500 destroyed houses. I have not seen the count for the region yet, but the damage has been estimated in the several billions. That is nowhere near the $7 billion of estimated damage in Gaza, with a lower KIA count in total, but inflicted during a shorter period and more concentrated bombardment.
We have the damage statistics on Gaza... 17,000 homes destroyed and 5,000 damaged, just for openers. Fortunately $5.4 billion has been pledged for rebuilding; all money that could have been used to develop a peacetime Gazan economy. For example, it had a housing unit deficit of 75,000 BEFORE the Israelis decided to 'mow the lawn" again in Gaza... how the militant Zionists describe their bi-annual bombing.
Shelter Cluster of the Norwegian Refugee Council pointed out another problem -- that Israel's chokehold on the flow of material at the main cargo crossing could drag the rebuilding process out 20 years, based on 100 trucks a day. Israel basically stole an economic generation from the Gazans via their usual collective punishment tactics. And I have not heard a peep from any of these gracious donors about concerns that when Gaza is reconstructed, then Israel might just blow it up once again.
It makes me wonder how the Israelis would like it if they were bombed like the Gazans, after the Mossad did one of their false flag numbers they are so well known for -- like one of their mini-nuke bombings they blame on a terror group. If that were the case, the Zionists would be getting bombed once a month for one thing or another. You could take their support for ISIL as one example.
In a similar way, the billions that will have to be spent on the Ukraine Republics could have gone into the more useful task of helping to turn their stagnant economy around... that is if it can be. And who knows, Kiev might take a page out of Tel Aviv's book and attack E. Ukraine in another two years to keep them in their place.
Another thought is that these war reconstruction funds could have made paying the Russian gas bill much easier and could have been a stabilizing factor for moving forward on both the political and economic fronts in Ukraine. That would require that Kiev stops shelling, rocketing and testing its old ballistic missiles with live-fire exercises on Donetsk.
Kiev is now showing some other cards held close to the vest while the war was going on, by dropping the bomb that $30 billion will really be needed to salvage Ukraine. I am sensing here, suspicious me, that part of the deal for Kiev to get future funding was to launch and continue the E. Ukraine war to set the stage for painting Russia as the aggressor. That gave the cover for expanding NATO further east, and the pretext for modernizing the Ukrainian military.
Where that money is going to come from, God only knows. We are well aware of the rosy economic projections that Kiev has made about potential development, most of which will never come true. I saw this whole Ukraine fiasco early on as one big black hole for swallowing Western taxpayers' money and the EU's bank stability.
The IMF's Christine Lagarde was quick to agree with me back then. She said early on that the Western capital injections and the bad loan rollovers and guarantees would have to be managed very carefully. She said that if the debt tab expanded, as it did in Greece, Ukraine would become another trigger for crashing the world banking system, which was already walking on a razor blade.
So we have the tale of two cities. Three Israeli teens are murdered by some extremists Muslims or Israelis looking for a pretext to destroy the Gazan unity government being formed at the time with Hamas and the PA. Without the murder investigation being over, Netanyahu launched his devastating attack, and when the Gazans responded with the only thing they could -- light rockets -- Israel claimed it was being attacked... always the victim.
In Ukraine, we have a violent Western backed-coup take over the government, where Chechen terrorists who were trained under American auspices in Georgia's Pankisi Gorge -- where training still goes on -- were brought in to do the Maidan sniper killings. Good luck on ever prosecuting them.
The ultra-nationalists who provided the muscle for the coup then swept into the Ukrainian Rada and began making public statements about their plans to ethnically cleanse E. Ukraine. Crimea quickly went under Russia's wing, in what might have been the biggest landslide election in history. This had to happen because Russia never could have left its Black Sea base under the coup-meisters control, and all the Western leaders knew this. They have been crying Crocodile Tears.
So it came as no surprise that some of Ukraine's other eastern states did not want to remain under the threat of the crazies in Kiev. To show that the threats were true, Kiev unleashed the Right Sector thugs, along with the Oligarch private armies to do a lot of the nasty work that we have seen... and Kiev claims to know nothing about.
The icing on the cake is that the US and EU now claim -- after they backed a violent overthrow of Ukraine's legally-elected government -- that it is illegal for anyone in Ukraine to resist their sovereign domination as a violation of national integrity. Silly me, I think the US and EU violated Ukraine's sovereignty! You just can't make this stuff up!
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