Puppet Masters
The discourse about "pro-Russian" separatists is a misleading attempt to hide the real nature of the protests against the regime, which is opposition to a coup. The main issue is one of anti-coup protesters versus a junta and not separatists and federalists versus Kiev. To refer to the junta in Kiev as the government of Ukraine is to reject or ignore its illegality.
Welcome to Ukraine Nulandistan
Wherever the US government says it is promoting democracy and freedom, as US Assistant-Secretary of State Victoria Nuland professes about Ukraine, there has been destruction, impoverishment, sectarianism, fighting, and death. Welcome to post-coup Ukraine or Nulandistan. It follows the precedents and traditions of destabilization and violence honoured by US officials like Senator John McCain in the Syrian Arab Republic (McCainistan) and by Hillary Clinton in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya (Clintonistan).
Arseniy Petrovych Yatsenyuk, who has illegally taken the post of Ukrainian prime minister with the support of the US and European Union, was never favoured by many of the authentic protesters in Euro-Maidan or even the grassroots members of his allies. When, without any election or public discussion, he was arbitrarily given the office of prime minister, many in the Euro-Maidan protest movement booed him and some even cried "bullet to his head." His party boss, the infamously corrupt Yulia Volodymyrivna Tymoshenko, was booed too after she arrived. In reality, Yatsenyuk and the other Ukrainian politicians identifying themselves with Euro-Maidan, like the ultra-nationalist Svoboda's Oleh Tyahnybok, appropriated the hopes and dreams of the Ukrainians that were protesting against not only the Ukrainian government of Viktor Fedorovych Yanukovych, but the entire corrupt Ukrainian political establishment. Hiding behind the protesters, Yatsenyuk and Tymoshenko's Batkivshchyna Party used the militias of their ultra-nationalist political allies to launch a violent coup in Kiev.
There is no functioning democracy in Ukraine and, with the full support of the European Union and the US government, free speech inside Ukraine is under attack by the new regime and its thugs. Yatsenyuk's coup-installed regime has cracked down on media freedoms, sent the Ukrainian military and security forces to attack anti-coup protesters under the pretext of NATO-backed anti-terrorism operations, and started purges and witch hunts all over Ukraine. This started with the head of the National Television Company of Ukraine, Aleksandr Panteleymonov, being threatened and beaten into resigning by Svoboda deputies Igor Miroshnynchenko and Andrey Ilyenko.
German dairy farmer, Gottfried Glöckner, has told William Engdahl about attempted blackmail, character assassination and, ultimately, wrongful imprisonment he suffered when he refused to back off his charges that the Anglo-Swiss GMO company, Syngenta, had provided him with highly toxic GMO Maize seeds that ruined his prize dairy herd and his land.
After spending two years in prison, Glöckner is traveling round the world to tell the story and warn the public of the extreme danger of GMO seeds.

Local 'terrorists' at the rally devoted to the results of the 'illegal' referendum on the status of the Lugansk republic in the square in front of Taras Shevchenko monument in Lugansk on May 12, 2014.
"The two so-called 'people's republics' in Donetsk and Lugansk regions are terrorist organizations, which have a clear hierarchy, financing, and channels of weapons supplies," Ukraine's deputy prosecutor general, Nikolay Golomsha, said.
Comment: Where's a facepalm when you need one? We know psychopaths are notorious for blaming others for what they themselves are doing -- e.g., establishing a terrorist organization they call a government, with a clear hierarchy (picked by Western politicians), financing (from Western governments and organizations), and channels of weapons (soon to come from the US of A) -- but this is ridiculous. At least the U.S. and Israel have the courtesy of manufacturing a plausible facade when they want to pull one over on the world public: false-flag ops, patsies, bearded bogeymen threatening Western values on grainy low-fi digital videos. The Kiev loonies can't be bothered to do even that! Instead, they skip right to the punchline, declaring obviously innocent people 'terrorists' without any of the necessary prep work.
The statement confirmed a similar statement made by Ukraine's minister of justice, Pavel Petrenko. The minister said the two "were created for assaulting people, intimidation, sabotage, terrorist attacks, beatings, and murder of our citizens."
Comment: Psycho-speak translation: "Our joke of a government was create to assault you, the people who refuse to lick our boots; to intimidate you into toeing the party line; to sabotage your attempts at self-determination; to terrorize you; to beat you; to murder you. Just like we did in Mariupol and Odessa. And just like we'll continue to do until you submit."
Comment: Readers of SOTT, and people in general with an iota of political awareness, should be extremely grateful to the Kiev junta. With increasing frequency, their statements cross the border of nonsense and into the realm of complete and utter absurd idiocy. Thankfully, Kiev's bumbling ineptitude reveals what SOTT has been saying for years: the real terrorists are the ones calling others terrorists. In this case, the truth couldn't be more obvious.
TOMMY VIETOR: Bret, a couple of things. I was in the Situation Room that night, okay. We didn't know where the ambassador was definitively.
BAIER: Was the president in the Situation Room?
VIETOR: No. And the fact that your network at one time reported that he watched video feed of the attack as it was ongoing is part of what I think is a pattern of inaccurate --
BAIER: Where was the president?
Of course, an inequality gap has been widening into an abyss for decades now, but when it comes to the present boom in old-fashioned words that once went with being really, really, obscenely wealthy and powerful, give the Occupy movement of 2011 credit. After all, they were the ones who took what should already have been on everyone's lips -- the raging inequality in American society -- out of the closet and made it part of the national conversation. 1%! 99%!

House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif. on Capitol Hill in Washington. Issa is doggedly pursuing the question of whether military personnel were told to “stand down” during the 2012 deadly assault on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, despite the insistence of military leaders and other Republicans that it never happened.
House Speaker John A. Boehner, Ohio Republican, said Secretary of State John F. Kerry will have to come before Congress to explain why his department refused to release the email until forced to do so by a judge.
Meanwhile, a retired Air Force brigadier general who was in the U.S. Africa Command's headquarters the night of the 2012 attack on the American diplomatic post in Benghazi testified that he and others quickly realized the assault was spawned by terrorists. The general said it was either negligence or willful ignorance that led the White House, amid a re-election campaign, to say the violence was ignited by anger over a video.
Why do we tolerate the threat of another world war in our name? Why do we allow lies that justify this risk? The scale of our indoctrination, wrote Harold Pinter, is a "brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis", as if the truth "never happened even while it was happening".
Every year the American historian William Blum publishes his "updated summary of the record of US foreign policy" which shows that, since 1945, the US has tried to overthrow more than 50 governments, many of them democratically elected; grossly interfered in elections in 30 countries; bombed the civilian populations of 30 countries; used chemical and biological weapons; and attempted to assassinate foreign leaders.
Comment: From Joe Quinn:
"It's highly unlikely that the situation in Ukraine will spark World War 3 between the 'West' and Russia (sorry all you Armageddonites!) and for a very simple reason: money. What we are seeing in Ukraine is perhaps best described as 'squabbling Oligarchs', those of both the pro-Western and pro-Russian variety, although such 'ideologies' are merely a means to an end for such people (and they'd switch 'sides' in a heartbeat if it was financially expedient). None of the billionaires with vested interests in Ukraine have any desire to see their fortunes, or a large part of them, disappear, least of all into the public pursue of some delusional 'revolutionary people's government'. They're willing to endure (or play) the game of 'blood-soaked musical chairs loaded with money', played to the tune of 'oh what a lovely civil war', just as long as there are enough chairs for all players and only in the context that they, the ruling elite, remain the ruling elite. The point being, Putin and his monied supporters have far more in common with European and American billionaire businessmen (and billionaire politician businessmen) than they do with the ordinary people of any part of Ukraine (or anywhere else). And none of us 'little people' should forget it."
Voltaire Network informed its readers as of March 3 and 4 about the presence of Israeli and U.S. mercenaries in Kiev [1]. On 9 March readers of the German weekly Bild am Sonntag got a glimpse of a video showing mercenaries employed by Academi (see below).

The EU is split between those who obey the orders of their US masters and those who see beyond the lies and relize the economics of the situation
While Eastern Europe undergoes an economic crisis, the West continues on dealing with Russian companies even as they threaten Russia with more sanctions. "It is hypocritical," Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico said at a conference today in Bratislava, the nation's capital.
His Czech and Hungarian counterparts, Bohuslav Sobotka and Viktor Orban, said they don't want to lose out on business opportunities.
"We are talking about solidarity here and France is selling warships to Russia," Fico said at a Globsec security conference. "We are talking about how to help Ukraine with its energy security and the very same day we were taking fundamental decisions at the European Council," while Russian gas exporter OAO Gazprom "signed a contract on South Stream," a pipeline, "with German, French and Italian companies."
Naturally, Polish Premier Donald Tusk struck a different tone, saying the EU must show unity and assume its costs.
Comment: Donald Tusk is a good example of a puppet, who obeys his masters in the US, but doesn't have the best interests of Europe at heart. And the price for these sanctions will be borne by the ordinary people in Europe and elsewhere, through belt tightening and austerity measures, pension cuts, healthcare and education cuts etc.












Comment: The economic/financial desperation of Western PTB/Elites appears to be really heating up - maybe embarrassingly so.