The media is clamoring to get Russia for attacking Ukraine, as if the US has had no influence on events. Yet, the riot in Kiev has a striking resemblance to US-sponsored color revolutions and Arab spring riots.

The template shows US mercenaries hiding behind peaceful protestors, then, igniting violence. The idea is sinister: to co-opt peaceful protestor's legitimate cause, granting some air of legitimacy, followed by a coup to super-impose western imperial demands.

In Kiev, it started, as usual, with peace protests, then, thugs soon joined in as heavily armed trained militia. Western private media, holding its usual bag of secrets, dodges calls to tell us their country of origin.

Turns out, Germany has tried to annex western Ukraine since World War I. Neo-Nazi troops from the Svobada Party, Punch Party, and the Right Sector, totaling some 5,000, attacked the capital in Kiev. Why they were shipped to Ukraine is important.

Neoconservatives from Washington reunified East and West Germany, largely to go after the Soviet Union once again. USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev allowed the rejoining on the promise from George H.W. Bush that he would not send NATO troops eastward. Bush lied.

Plans for a secession referendum in Ukraine's Crimea region on Sunday are the focus of ramped-up attacks on Russia from the Obama administration and its European allies. Additional military forces are being shifted to the region and new threats of sanctions are being issued.

The US, Germany and Britain have denounced the referendum in the majority Russian-speaking autonomous republic as a violation of Ukraine national sovereignty and territorial integrity and a breach of international law. The US ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, said Monday that the US would not recognize the "so-called referendum." He charged that "gangs of pro-Russian thugs" were patrolling the area and there was "an active campaign to stir division in Ukraine."

Pyatt's comments echoed those of Obama, who has declared that any referendum would "violate the Ukrainian constitution and violate international law," and top officials in Britain and Germany. Following a meeting Sunday night between German Chancellor Angela Merkel and British Prime Minister David Cameron, a statement from Downing Street declared that the proposed referendum "would be illegal and that any attempt by Russia to legitimize the result would result in further consequences." Cameron earlier declared Russian actions to be "in flagrant breach of international law."

Such comments bring the level of lying and hypocrisy by the Western powers to new heights. Governments that feel in some way dependent on mobilizing a broader base of public support beyond the military-intelligence apparatus and narrow financial interests concern themselves with matters such as internal consistency and coherence. This is not the case with the supposed proponents of international law in London, Berlin and Washington.

Russia officially absorbed Crimea Tuesday afternoon, moments after President Vladimir Putin declared that Russia has no designs on any other parts of Ukraine.

In a speech to a joint session of parliament, which he used to call for the "reunification" of Crimea with Russia, he said that region has a special role in Russian history that makes it unique.

Ecstatic leaders of the Russian and Crimean parliaments signed a treaty of accession as soon as Putin was done, and the Kremlin said afterwards it considers the treaty to be in force even before parliament has ratified it.

Sevastopol, the city where Russia's Black Sea naval fleet is based, also entered the Russian Federation, as a separate entity.

Former chancellor says Russia's actions have been misunderstood and should be regarded in their historical context

Germany's former chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has embarrassed the government of his successor Angela Merkel by staunchly defending the Kremlin's actions in the Ukraine and claiming that Russia wanted to stay "big and strong" and an equal to the United States.

Mr Schroeder was Germany's Social Democrat leader from 1998 until 2005. He is a personal friend of Vladimir Putin and once described the Russian President as a " flawless democrat". He joined the board of the Russian energy giant Gazprom after losing Germany's 2005 election.

With an outspoken defence of Russia's intervention in the Ukraine, the former German leader has embarrassed Chancellor Angela Merkel's grand coalition government which includes conservatives and his own Social Democrats.

While Mrs Merkel and her government have denounced the Russian intervention as a breach of international law, Mr Schroeder has leapt to the defence of the Russian president.

President Obama's half-brother in Kenya could cause the White House more headaches over new evidence linking him to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and establishing that controversial IRS supervisor Lois Lerner signed his tax-exempt approval letter.

Malik Obama's oversight of the Muslim Brotherhood's international investments is one reason for the Obama administration's support of the Muslim Brotherhood, according to an Egyptian report citing the vice president of the Supreme Constitutional Court of Egypt, Tehani al-Gebali.

In a news report on Egyptian television of a Gebali speech, translated by researcher Walid Shoebat, a former Palestinian Liberation Organization operative, Gebali said she would like "to inform the American people that their president's brother Obama is one of the architects of the major investments of the Muslim Brotherhood."

"We will carry out the law, and the Americans will not stop us," she said. "We need to open the files and begin court sessions.

"The Obama administration cannot stop us; they know that they supported terrorism," she continued. "We will open the files so these nations are exposed, to show how they collaborated with [the terrorists]. It is for this reason that the American administration fights us."

Russia's quick recognition of Crimea as an independent state is risking a second round of more damaging sanctions that could unleash a new Cold War.

On Monday night, Russian President Vladimir Putin issued a decree to declare Crimea fully independent of Ukraine. The act of defiance came a few hours after the United States and the European Union launched sanctions against about 30 individual Russians and pro-Russian Ukrainians for what was described as their role in threatening the security and the borders of Ukraine.

The sanctions, which consisted of travel bans and asset freezes, are the first retaliatory measures against Russia since Ukraine's pro-Moscow president, Viktor Yanukovych, was ousted on Feb. 22, triggering the Russian military intervention in Crimea and Sunday's referendum, in which Crimeans overwhelmingly approved joining Russia.

Canada joined the U.S. and the EU in imposing sanctions on 10 Russian and Ukrainian individuals.

The confrontation - increasingly reminiscent of the mutual hostility between the West and the Soviet Union - seems set to deepen.

"If Russia continues to interfere in Ukraine, we stand ready to impose further sanctions," U.S. President Barack Obama said.

Washington's plan to seize Ukraine and to evict Russia from its Black Sea naval base has come amiss. But as Lenin said, "two steps forward, one step back."

Do you remember all the tough talk coming from John Kerry, the White House Fool, Hilary Clinton, and the lickspittle Merkel about the harsh sanctions that would "badly damage" the Russian economy unless Russia prevented the referendum vote in Crimea? Well, it was all bullshit, more hot air from the White House sock puppet and the lickspittle German chancellor who is a disgrace to the German nation. As the Russians kept telling John Kerry, sanctions on Russia would destroy Europe and do little damage to Russia.

I wish the Russians had kept this to themselves. I was looking forward to the Washington morons destroying NATO by closing down the European economy.

Why would the United States run the risk of siding with anti-Semitic, neo-Nazis in Ukraine?

One of the keys may be found by looking back at Zbigniew Brzezinski's 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard in which he wrote, "Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire."

Canada is joining the European Union and the U.S. in slapping additional sanctions on those it blames for threatening Ukraine's sovereignty, retaliating against what Prime Minister Stephen Harper has branded the "Putin regime."

Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree on Monday recognizing Crimea as a sovereign state after the Ukrainian region declared itself independent and applied to join Russia following a weekend referendum. The decree, which took effect immediately, says Moscow's recognition of Crimea as independent is based on "the will of the people of Crimea".

Ahead of a Monday afternoon meeting with Ukraine's ambassador to Canada, Mr. Harper once again condemned Sunday's referendum in the breakaway region, calling the move a "dangerous escalation" of the already tense situation in the southern, mostly Russian-speaking region.

Without going into detail, the Prime Minister said the government is going ahead with additional sanctions - economic and travel - on "various senior people in Russia and Ukraine, in Crimea specifically."

Of all the various interpretations Western leaders and commentators have offered for why the president of the Russian Federation has responded the way he has to the events in Ukraine over the course of February and March of 2014 - in refusing to acquiesce to the installation of a neo-fascist regime in Kiev, and in upholding the right of Crimea to self-determination - the most striking and illuminating interpretation is that he has gone mad. Striking and illuminating, that is, something in the West itself.

In times past, the international landscape reflected a multipolar order, a multiplicity of competing ideologies, alternative schemes of social and economic organization. Back then the actions of another country could be understood in terms of its alternative ideology. Even extreme figures - Stalin, Hitler, Idi Amin, Pol Pot - calling them crazy was an example of hyperbole, an intensified way of describing the brazenness with which they pursued their rationally set political goals. But when Chancellor Angela Merkel asks whether Putin is living "in another world," echoing a theme in the narrative presented by Western media, the question seems to imply something quite literal.