NATO has pledged some 15 million euros to Ukraine, with several of the bloc's member states pledging separate bilateral support and military cooperation, involving medical supplies as well as lethal and nonlethal military equipment.

NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen announced a "comprehensive and tailored package of measures" including the donation of 15 million euros "through NATO" at a joint news conference with the Ukrainian president on Thursday on the first day of the NATO summit in Wales.

He said that this would be in addition to other measures such as advising Ukraine on defense reforms and further bilateral aid.

"This is about improvement of logistics, the improvement of command and control, the improvement of communications, and cyber defense," Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said.

Russia wants the Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 crash over the embattled eastern Ukraine discussed at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), Duma Speaker Sergei Naryshkin told reporters on Tuesday.

Naryshkin, who took part in a session of PACE's Presidential Committee earlier in the day, said it had agreed that the investigation should be open and transparent.

A Malaysia Airlines jet carrying 298 people crashed in east Ukraine on July 17 on a flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. Both sides in Ukraine's conflict accused each other of shooting down the plane with a missile.


A preliminary report on the cause of the crash is almost ready, Dutch Safety Board spokesperson Sara Vernooij told Tass on Tuesday. This will happen either at the end of the week or early next week, she said.

Sara Vernooij said the preliminary report will shed certain light on the cause of the tragedy, but many questions will remain unanswered. Results of a more thorough investigation could be published next spring, she said.

Kiev's military operation designed to regain control over the eastern Ukrainian breakaway Donetsk and Lugansk regions, which on May 11 proclaimed their independence at local referendums, was launched in mid-April and has involved armored vehicles, heavy artillery and attack aviation.

The implementation of NATO's readiness action plan to 'overt' Russian threat, which will be presented at the alliance's summit in Wales on September 4, will involve "several hundred million euros" a year, says the bloc's commander.

"Keeping people on alert carries a certain cost," General Jean-Paul Palomeros, the head of the Allied Command Transformation, which leads military transformation of bloc's forces and its capabilities, told AFP.

According to Palomeros, the plan which was adopted to counter Russia's involvement in Ukraine's crisis could be implemented "by the end of the year."

"It has to be supported financially, but also over time because it is not enough to be reactive for a month, or two, or six," he said, "Once NATO decides it wants these capabilities, it has to have them for the very long term."

Palomeros added that as there are "multifaceted threats" in the world, it is important to have "credible, well trained, well equipped, modern forces." "The world is moving very quickly. We saw that with the Ukraine crisis and we see it in the south, particularly in Iraq," he said. However, French general said that the price of the NATO's readiness action plan was an "investment"worth paying for "a credible defense."

"We will become more efficient," said Palomeros. "These are not colossal figures compared to total budgets in alliance members."

The following is an excerpt from Arundhati Roy's new book, Capitalism: A Ghost Story, (Haymarket Books, 2014).

What follows in this essay might appear to some to be a somewhat harsh critique. On the other hand, in the tradition of honoring one's adversaries, it could be read as an acknowledgment of the vision, flexibility, sophistication, and unwavering determination of those who have dedicated their lives to keeping the world safe for capitalism.

Their enthralling history, which has faded from contemporary memory, began in the United States in the early twentieth century when, kitted out legally in the form of endowed foundations, corporate philanthropy began to replace missionary activity as Capitalism's (and Imperialism's) road-opening and systems maintenance patrol.

Among the first foundations to be set up in the United States were the Carnegie Corporation, endowed in 1911 by profits from Carnegie Steel Company, and the Rockefeller Foundation, endowed in 1914 by J. D. Rockefeller, founder of Standard Oil Company. The Tatas and Ambanis of their time.

Some of the institutions financed, given seed money, or supported by the Rockefeller Foundation are the United Nations, the CIA, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), New York's most fabulous Museum of Modern Art, and, of course, the Rockefeller Center in New York (where Diego Riviera's mural had to be blasted off the wall because it mischievously depicted reprobate capitalists and a valiant Lenin; Free Speech had taken the day off ).

Sudan has ordered Iran to close its cultural centres and given their managers 72 hours to leave the country, officials have said, as a diplomatic row threatens normally close relations.

"Sudanese authorities summoned the Iranian charge d'affaires in Khartoum and informed him of the decision to close the three cultural centres and to give the diplomats who ran them 72 hours to leave the country," the AFP news agency quoting an unnamed official said on Tuesday.

Sudanese media speculated that the expulsions were linked to government concerns that Iranian officials were promoting their Shia brand of Islam in the largely Sunni country, according to the Reuters news agency.

This essay makes the case that the ongoing political crisis in the Ukraine is one which has the potential to explode into a confrontation between the United States-led alliance of NATO states and the Russian Federation.

The implications of this are grave in the extreme as it would inevitably lead to the catastrophic exchange of nuclear weapons.

It makes clear that far from the Western mainstream press's narrative of Russian President Vladimir Putin being the belligerent party who is seeking to create a new Russian imperium, the crisis is actually the result of the application of two canons presently influencing the conduct of American foreign policy namely, that of the 'Wolfowitz Doctrine' and the 'Brzezinski Doctrine'; the former an amoral philosophy permitting the pursuance of American hegemony at almost any cost and the latter, an aggressive policy resolved to prevent the rise of any other nation as a competitor to American global domination.

It strives to place the crisis in the historical context of America's longstanding financial and military domination through the post-World War Two institutions created in the wake of the Bretton Woods agreement and the North Atlantic military alliance, in the process making the case that an expanded North Atlantic Treaty Organisation essentially functions as the enforcer of America's financial and corporate dominance.

It argues that NATO's expansion into eastern Europe is in breach of the agreement reached by American and Soviet leaders at the end of the Cold War and that although largely identified with the previous Republican administration of George W. Bush, neo-conservative influence on the policies of the United States are still strong and have not only led to destructive interventions during the Obama administration in both Libya and Syria, but threaten through American policy in Ukraine to push Europe and the world into an abyss.

Iran's President Hassan Rouhani says violence and extremism are threats to the entire world, urging close cooperation and dialog among countries to fight these threats.

"Countries should have more close cooperation [in fighting extremism] and if there is a disagreement, the best solution is negotiations," Rouhani said in a meeting with Lithuania's new Ambassador to Tehran Kestutis Kujmanas on Tuesday.

He criticized the use of military approaches against civilians and said, "Peace requires collective will and process."

Rouhani added that Iran is keen to expand relations with Lithuania in all fields and noted that the presence of Lithuanian businessmen in the Islamic Republic would prepare a very appropriate ground for enhanced trade and economic cooperation between the two countries.

Iran and Lithuania can also bolster political cooperation to find ways to resolve regional and international problems, Rouhani added.

The Iranian president pointed to growing insecurity in the region and noted that the ongoing developments in Ukraine and terrorism in Iraq and Syria are among issues of common concern.

The Case for an Independent Ukrainian War Crimes Tribunal on the 4 Month Anniversary of the Odessa Massacre

The situation in Ukraine today is heart breaking. Ordinary people, women, children, and pensioners, are on the receiving end of deadly rocket and artillery barrages daily, they are gunned down at checkpoints, summarily arrested and put under siege. Refugees have been streaming across the border into Russia with genuine fear of murder and mayhem by Ukrainian punitive brigades and National Guard units out for the blood of the "enemies of Ukrainian unity." Even if the situation was politically and militarily rectified today; the guilty parties must be held accountable for their crimes.


There are well documented crimes and ones yet to be discovered, with allegations flowing on both sides of the conflict that require an impartial and immediate investigation. As a member of the International Criminal Bar, the organization which represents lawyers who practice before the International Criminal Court (ICC), I called for an investigation of the Maidan sniper attacks and Odessa massacre by the ICC. For my efforts I received a form letter. There is no ICC investigation; witnesses are not being interviewed nor is evidence being preserved. The Russian government has collected some evidence; the same cannot be said of Ukraine. But in either case, the partiality of the party will be questioned.


The ICC is supposedly tasked with investigation and prosecution of war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity, I naively assumed the ICC would seize the initiative or at least warn the combatants that war crimes would be prosecuted. What has happened instead is legal maneuvering by Ukraine and the ICC to avoid opening any investigation at all while the crimes are still fresh and ongoing.

This article appeared in the Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung on December 5, 2011.

Book V of Aristotle's Politics describes the eternal transition of oligarchies making themselves into hereditary aristocracies - which end up being overthrown by tyrants or develop internal rivalries as some families decide to "take the multitude into their camp" and usher in democracy, within which an oligarchy emerges once again, followed by aristocracy, democracy, and so on throughout history.

Debt has been the main dynamic driving these shifts - always with new twists and turns. It polarizes wealth to create a creditor class, whose oligarchic rule is ended as new leaders ("tyrants" to Aristotle) win popular support by cancelling the debts and redistributing property or taking its usufruct for the state.

Since the Renaissance, however, bankers have shifted their political support to democracies. This did not reflect egalitarian or liberal political convictions as such, but rather a desire for better security for their loans. As James Steuart explained in 1767, royal borrowings remained private affairs rather than truly public debts. For a sovereign's debts to become binding upon the entire nation, elected representatives had to enact the taxes to pay their interest charges.

By giving taxpayers this voice in government, the Dutch and British democracies provided creditors with much safer claims for payment than did kings and princes whose debts died with them. But the recent debt protests from Iceland to Greece and Spain suggest that creditors are shifting their support away from democracies. They are demanding fiscal austerity and even privatization sell-offs.

This is turning international finance into a new mode of warfare. Its objective is the same as military conquest in times past: to appropriate land and mineral resources, also communal infrastructure and extract tribute. In response, democracies are demanding referendums over whether to pay creditors by selling off the public domain and raising taxes to impose unemployment, falling wages and economic depression. The alternative is to write down debts or even annul them, and to re-assert regulatory control over the financial sector.

The calls presented in the plan of peaceful settlement of the situation in Ukraine by Russian President Vladimir Putin should be heeded in Kiev, Luhansk and Donetsk.

Russia's Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Lavrov has stated this at a meeting with OSCE Parliamentary Assembly Chairman Ilkka Kanerva on Thursday.

"We do not give up. President Vladimir Putin personally makes great efforts in direct contacts with President Poroshenko to find such ways of cooperation that will allow immediately put an end to bloodshed, remove the threat for the civilian population, ensure solution to humanitarian problems, problems of reconstruction of the destroyed infrastructure, and, of course, ensure the beginning of the negotiating political process," the Russian minister said.


After such contacts, the Russian president formulated the seven-point initiative that is aimed at helping Kiev's authorities and the militia of the southeast agree on and take steps in coordination to deescalate the situation, Lavrov said.

"We hope the calls will be heeded first and foremost in Kiev, Luhansk and Donetsk," the minister said. "We will be ready together with OSCE within the framework of the contact group to help the conflicting parties to move along the path of stabilization of the situation in practice."