The real purpose of Russian troops in Ukraine is to undermine the credibility of Nato

If you want to invade a country, it's important to call it a liberation. Over the coming weeks and months, that's what we're going to see in Ukraine. In fact it has started already. Just look at the Crimea.


Troops in unmarked uniforms have started guarding the region's main airport. They're being assisted by some local people. After all, they're just there to help.

Ukraine's President Yanukovych, who was ousted only a week ago, is defining himself as a leader deposed in a coup, and the regional government of Crimea, home of a majority ethnic Russian population, is rejecting the new government in Kiev as illegitimate.

At the same time, Russian troops are flying in to help resist what Moscow is calling the 'Nazis' who have taken over the government of Ukraine.

This is tragic for Ukraine, for the near-abroad and for Nato not because it is taking us by surprise but because we have expected it for so long and seen it before and yet remain incapable of acting. This is the salami-tactics that Yes, Prime Minister joked about decades ago. Slice by slice, Russia is invading Ukraine and weakening the alliance that has kept the peace in Europe for almost 70 years.

The snipers who shot at protesters and police in Kiev were allegedly hired by Maidan leaders, according to a leaked phone conversation between the EU foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton and Estonian foreign affairs minister, which has emerged online.

"There is now stronger and stronger understanding that behind the snipers, it was not Yanukovych, but it was somebody from the new coalition," Paet said during the conversation.

"I think we do want to investigate. I mean, I didn't pick that up, that's interesting. Gosh," Ashton answered.

The upper house of Russia's parliament is mulling measures allowing property and assets of European and US companies to be confiscated in the event of sanctions being adopted against Russia over its threatened military intervention in Ukraine.

The bill's author, Federation Council constitutional legislation committee head Andrei Klishas, said Wednesday that lawyers are currently studying whether the proposed confiscations would be constitutional.

"But we have no doubts that it clearly corresponds to European standards," Klishas told RIA Novosti. "The recent events in Cyprus spring to mind, where the confiscation of assets was the main demand made by the European Union in return for economic aid."

An adviser to President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday that authorities would issue general advice to dump US government bonds if Russian companies and individuals were targeted by sanctions over events in Ukraine.

The European Commission announced Wednesday that it will provide Ukraine with 11 billion euros ($15 billion) in financial assistance to Ukraine, which is struggling to keep its crisis-hit economy afloat amid mounting debt.

European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said the aid package was designed to enable "a committed, inclusive and reforms-oriented government in rebuilding a stable and prosperous future for Ukraine."

The European Commission said in a statement that financial support would be provided over a two-year period from the EU budget and EU-based international financial institutions.

"The most immediate priority for the EU is to contribute to a peaceful solution to the current crisis, in full respect of international law," Barroso said.

The statement said some aspects of the reform program would be carried out quickly, while others would require longer-term planning and preparation.

"Underpinning this approach is the ambition to help Ukraine fulfill the aspirations which have been clearly demonstrated by citizens and civil society in recent weeks in the unprecedented events in Kiev and throughout the country," the statement said.

The Washington Post's Feb. 19 article about the recent spate of unrest in Venezuela took a breathlessly laudatory stance towards the opposition against President Nicolás Maduro. The opening paragraphs offer a good indication of its tenor:

Leopoldo López, the defiant Venezuelan opposition leader taken into custody Tuesday in front of thousands of anti-government protesters, spent last night in a prison on a military base.

But even there, the government couldn't shut him up....

It was the kind of passionate, personal appeal and call to action that showed exactly why the Harvard-educated López has been at the center of the most serious challenge yet to the struggling Maduro, successor to the late Hugo Chávez.

The piece continues in a similarly effusive manner throughout; but what's most interesting about it are the sources which the authors choose to cite as impartial experts. Not only do they appear hostile to the Venezuelan government and supportive of the opposition, they also appear to have serious, unstated conflicts of interest that cast doubt on the integrity of the Washington Post's entire reportage on this issue.

The President of Russia met with media representatives to answer a number of their questions, in particular with regard to the situation in Ukraine.

There is, it seems, something new under the sun.

Geopolitically speaking, when it comes to war and the imperial principle, we may be in uncharted territory. Take a look around and you'll see a world at the boiling point. From Ukraine to Syria, South Sudan to Thailand, Libya to Bosnia, Turkey to Venezuela, citizen protest (left and right) is sparking not just disorganization, but what looks like, to coin a word, de-organization at a global level. Increasingly, the unitary status of states, large and small, old and new, is being called into question. Civil war, violence, and internecine struggles of various sorts are visibly on the rise. In many cases, outside countries are involved and yet in each instance state power seems to be draining away to no other state's gain. So here's one question: Where exactly is power located on this planet of ours right now?

There is, of course, a single waning superpower that has in this new century sent its military into action globally, aggressively, repeatedly -- and disastrously. And yet these actions have failed to reinforce the imperial system of organizing and garrisoning the planet that it put in place at the end of World War II; nor has it proven capable of organizing a new global system for a new century. In fact, everywhere it's touched militarily, local and regional chaos have followed.

In the meantime, its own political system has grown gargantuan and unwieldy; its electoral process has been overwhelmed by vast flows of money from the wealthy 1%; and its governing system is visibly troubled, if not dysfunctional. Its rich are ever richer, its poor ever poorer, and its middle class in decline. Its military, the largest by many multiples on the planet, is nonetheless beginning to cut back. Around the world, allies, client states, and enemies are paying ever less attention to its wishes and desires, often without serious penalty. It has the classic look of a great power in decline and in another moment it might be easy enough to predict that, though far wealthier than its Cold War superpower adversary, it has simply been heading for the graveyard more slowly but no less surely.

Such a prediction would, however, be unwise. Never since the modern era began has a waning power so lacked serious competition or been essentially without enemies. Whether in decline or not, the United States -- these days being hailed as "the new Saudi Arabia" in terms of its frackable energy wealth -- is visibly in no danger of losing its status as the planet's only imperial power.

What, then, of power itself? Are we still in some strange way -- to bring back the long forgotten Bush-era phrase -- in a unipolar moment? Or is power, as it was briefly fashionable to say, increasingly multipolar? Or is it helter-skelter-polar? Or on a planet whose temperatures are rising, droughts growing more severe, and future food prices threatening to soar (meaning yet more protest, violence, and disruption), are there even "poles" any more?

Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said on Sunday that Ukraine's leaders had seized power illegally, and predicted their rule would end with "a new revolution [and] new bloodshed."

Medvedev said that, while Viktor Yanukovych had practically no authority, he remained the legitimate head of state according the constitution, adding: "If he is guilty before Ukraine - hold an impeachment procedure ... and try him."

"Everything else is lawlessness. The seizure of power," Medvedev said on his Facebook page. "And that means such order will be extremely unstable. It will end in a new revolution. New bloodshed."

The remarks were part of a series of Russian statements attacking the legitimacy of the pro-Western government that has been formed since Yanukovych fled Kiev more than a week ago. He surfaced on Friday in Russia.

Israeli special forces have raided a prison in central Israel after an inmate stole a gun, shot several guards and barricaded himself inside the compound, killing the notorious prisoner who was serving time for a gruesome murder carried out in the US.

Police identified the inmate as Samuel Sheinbein, an American who fled to Israel after murdering and dismembering another man in Maryland in 1997 and whose case sparked a high-profile row between the two allies.

Police special forces rushed to the prison in central Israel after Sheinbein stole a weapon and shot three guards, wounding two of them seriously. He then barricaded himself inside the compound where a standoff ensued, with counter-terrorism units dispatched to the scene. The inmate then opened fire again, wounding three more guards, before the forces shot him dead, police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said.

Hospital officials said one of the wounded guards was fighting for his life. Police and the Israel prison service have opened investigations into the incident. Sheinbein's lawyers told Israeli TV that their client was under duress and that the Israeli prison service has ignored their warnings.

President Barack Obama, issuing a veiled warning to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the eve of talks, said in an interview published on Sunday it would be harder for Washington to defend Israel against efforts to isolate it internationally if U.S.-led Middle East peace talks fail.

Obama, speaking to Bloomberg View, also made clear that he would press Netanyahu to allow him the time needed to test Iran's willingness to curb its nuclear ambitions, despite the Israeli leader's deep skepticism of the West's diplomatic engagement with Tehran.

Responding to the interview, a senior Israeli cabinet minister said the Netanyahu government was serious about peace but would not be pressured into endangering the Jewish state.

Obama said the "the window is closing" for a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians, and called on Netanyahu to "seize the moment" to help achieve a framework agreement that Secretary John Kerry is trying to forge to extend peace talks.

Obama said his message to Netanyahu in a White House meeting scheduled for Monday would be: "If not now, when? And if not you, Mr. Prime Minister, then who?"