{"id":4921,"date":"2014-07-22T12:51:25","date_gmt":"2014-07-22T18:51:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/myfutureamerica.org\/?p=4921"},"modified":"2014-07-22T13:08:38","modified_gmt":"2014-07-22T19:08:38","slug":"the-silence-of-american-hawks-about-kievs-atrocities-stephen-cohen-in-thenation-com-popular-us-periodical","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/myfutureamerica.org\/?p=4921","title":{"rendered":"The Silence of American Hawks About Kiev\u2019s Atrocities &#8211; Stephen Cohen in TheNation.com, popular US periodical"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"article-teaser\">\n<p>The regime has repeatedly carried out artillery and air attacks on city centers, creating a humanitarian catastrophe\u2014which is all but ignored by the US political-media establishment.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"views-field-value byline\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.thenation.com\/authors\/stephen-f-cohen\">Stephen F. Cohen<\/a><\/div>\n<div class=\"article-info-string\"><span class=\"article-date\">June 30, 2014<\/span>\u00a0\u00a0<\/div>\n<div class=\"item-list\">\n<ul class=\"tweet-string clear clearfix\">\n<li class=\"first\"><a style=\"background: #eceef5; -webkit-border-radius: 3px; border: 1px solid #cad4e7; cursor: pointer; padding: 2px 2px 2px; white-space: nowrap; color: #3b5998; float: right;\" href=\"http:\/\/www.thenation.com\/article\/180466\/silence-american-hawks-about-kievs-atrocities#\"> Share <\/a><\/li>\n<li><\/li>\n<li><\/li>\n<li><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.thenation.com\/printmail\/article\/180466\/silence-american-hawks-about-kievs-atrocities\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.thenation.com\/sites\/default\/modules\/custom\/nation_theme\/images\/button-sharebar-email.jpg\" alt=\"\" \/><\/a><\/li>\n<li>\n<div class=\"text-size\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.thenation.com\/sites\/default\/modules\/custom\/nation_theme\/images\/button-sharebar-text-size.jpg\" alt=\"\" \/> <img decoding=\"async\" class=\"text-size-toggle text-size-dec registerTextSizeHandler-processed\" title=\"Decrease text size\" src=\"http:\/\/www.thenation.com\/sites\/default\/modules\/custom\/nation_theme\/images\/button-sharebar-text-size-dec.gif\" alt=\"Decrease text size\" \/> <img decoding=\"async\" class=\"text-size-toggle text-size-inc registerTextSizeHandler-processed\" title=\"Increase text size\" src=\"http:\/\/www.thenation.com\/sites\/default\/modules\/custom\/nation_theme\/images\/button-sharebar-text-size-inc.gif\" alt=\"Increase text size\" \/><\/div>\n<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/subscribe.thenation.com\/servlet\/OrdersGateway?cds_mag_code=NAN&amp;cds_page_id=105997&amp;cds_response_key=I11BSPRV1\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.thenation.com\/sites\/default\/modules\/custom\/nation_theme\/images\/button-sharebar-subscribe.jpg\" alt=\"\" \/><\/a><\/li>\n<li class=\"last\"><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<div id=\"wysiwyg\">\n<div class=\"field field-type-filefield field-field-image\">\u00a0<\/div>\n<div class=\"field field-type-text field-field-image-caption\">\n<div class=\"field-items\">\n<div class=\"field-item odd\">\n<p><em>Members of the Ukrainian ultra-nationalist Svoboda Party rally in Kiev (Reuters\/Maxim Zmeyev)<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p><em>Editor\u2019s note:<\/em>\u00a0<em>This article was updated on July 7 and July 17.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>For months, the US-backed regime in Kiev has been committing atrocities against its own citizens in southeastern Ukraine, regions heavily populated by Russian-speaking Ukrainians and ethnic Russians. While victimizing a growing number of innocent people, including children, and degrading America\u2019s reputation, these military assaults on cities, captured on video, are generating intense pressure in Russia on President Vladimir Putin to \u201csave our compatriots.\u201d Both the atrocities and the pressure on Putin have increased even more since July 1, when Kiev, after a brief cease-fire, intensified its artillery and air attacks on eastern cities defenseless against such weapons.<\/p>\n<p>The reaction of the Obama administration\u2014as well as the new cold-war hawks in Congress and in the establishment media\u2014has been twofold: silence interrupted only by occasional statements excusing and thus encouraging more atrocities by Kiev. Very few Americans (notably, the scholar Gordon Hahn) have protested this shameful complicity. We may honorably disagree about the causes and resolution of the Ukrainian crisis, the worst US-Russian confrontation in decades, but not about deeds that have risen to the level of war crimes.<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\">* * *<\/p>\n<p>In mid-April, the new Kiev government, predominantly western Ukrainian in composition and outlook, declared an \u201canti-terrorist operation\u201d against a growing political rebellion in the Southeast. At that time, the rebels were mostly mimicking the initial Maidan protests in Kiev in 2013\u2014demonstrating, issuing defiant proclamations, occupying public buildings and erecting defensive barricades\u2014before Maidan turned ragingly violent and, in February, overthrew Ukraine\u2019s corrupt but legitimately elected president, Viktor Yanukovych. (The entire Maidan episode, it will be recalled, had Washington\u2019s enthusiastic political, and perhaps more tangible, support.) Indeed, the precedent for seizing official buildings and demanding the allegiance of local authorities had been set even earlier, in January, in western Ukraine\u2014by pro-Maidan, anti-Yanukovych protesters, some declaring \u201cindependence\u201d from his government. Reports suggest that even now some cities in central and western Ukraine, regions almost entirely ignored by international media, are controlled by extreme nationalists, not Kiev.<\/p>\n<p>Considering those preceding events, but above all the country\u2019s profound historical divisions, particularly between its western and eastern regions\u2014ethnic, linguistic, religious, cultural, economic and political\u2014the rebellion in the southeast, centered in the industrial Donbass, was not surprising. Nor were its protests against the unconstitutional way (in effect, a coup) the new government had come to power, the southeast\u2019s sudden loss of effective political representation in the capital and the real prospect of official discrimination. But by declaring an \u201canti-terrorist operation\u201d against the new protesters, Kiev signaled its intention to \u201cdestroy\u201d them, not negotiate with them.<\/p>\n<p>On May 2, in this incendiary atmosphere, a horrific event occurred in the southern city of Odessa, awakening memories of Nazi German extermination squads in Ukraine and other Soviet republics during World War II. An organized pro-Kiev mob chased protesters into a building, set it on fire and tried to block the exits. Some forty people, perhaps more, perished in the flames or were murdered as they fled the inferno. A still unknown number of other victims were seriously injured.<\/p>\n<p>Members of the infamous Right Sector, a far-right paramilitary organization ideologically aligned with the ultranationalist Svoboda party\u2014itself a constituent part of Kiev\u2019s coalition government\u2014led the mob. Both are frequently characterized by knowledgeable observers as \u201cneo-fascist\u201d movements. (Hateful ethnic chants by the mob were audible, and swastika-like symbols were found on the scorched building.) Kiev alleged that the victims had themselves accidentally started the fire, but eyewitnesses, television footage and social media videos told the true story, as they have about subsequent atrocities.<\/p>\n<p>Instead of interpreting the Odessa massacre as an imperative for restraint, Kiev intensified its \u201canti-terrorist operation.\u201d Since May, the regime has sent a growing number of armored personnel carriers, tanks, artillery, helicopter gunships and warplanes to southeastern cities, among them, Slovyansk (Slavyansk in Russian), Mariupol, Krasnoarmeisk, Kramatorsk, Donetsk and Luhansk (Lugansk in Russian). When its regular military units and local police forces turned out to be less than effective, willing or loyal, Kiev hastily mobilized Right Sector and other radical nationalist militias responsible for much of the violence at Maidan into a National Guard to accompany regular detachments\u2014partly to reinforce them, partly, it seems, to enforce Kiev\u2019s commands. Zealous, barely trained and drawn mostly from central and western regions, Kiev\u2019s new recruits have escalated the ethnic warfare and killing of innocent civilians. (Episodes described as \u201cmassacres\u201d soon also occurred in Mariupol and Kramatorsk.)<\/p>\n<p>Initially, the \u201canti-terrorist\u201d campaign was limited primarily, though not only, to rebel checkpoints on the outskirts of cities. Since May, however, Kiev has repeatedly carried out artillery and air attacks on city centers that have struck residential buildings, shopping malls, parks, schools, kindergartens, hospitals, even orphanages. More and more urban areas, neighboring towns and villages now look and sound like war zones, with telltale rubble, destroyed and pockmarked buildings, mangled vehicles, the dead and wounded in streets, wailing mourners and crying children. Conflicting information from Kiev, local resistance leaders and Moscow, as well as Washington\u2019s silence, make it difficult to estimate the number of dead and wounded noncombatants, but Kiev\u2019s mid-July figure of about 2,000 is almost certainly too low. The number continues to grow due also to Kiev\u2019s blockade of cities where essential medicines, food, water, fuel and electricity are scarce, and where wages and pensions are often no longer being paid. The result is an emerging humanitarian catastrophe.<\/p>\n<p>Another effect is clear. Kiev\u2019s \u201canti-terrorist\u201d tactics have created a reign of terror in the targeted cities. Panicked by shells and mortars exploding on the ground, menacing helicopters and planes flying above and fear of what may come next, families are seeking sanctuary in basements and other darkened shelters. Even\u00a0<em>The New York Times<\/em>, which like the mainstream American media generally has deleted the atrocities from its coverage, described survivors in Slovyansk \u201cas if living in the Middle Ages.\u201d Meanwhile, an ever-growing number of refugees, disproportionately women and traumatized children, have been desperately fleeing the carnage. In late June, the UN estimated that as many as 110,000 Ukrainians had fled across the border to Russia, where authorities said the actual numbers were much larger, and about half that many to other Ukrainian sanctuaries. By mid-July, roads and trains were filled with refugees from newly besieged Luhansk and Donetsk, a city of one million and already \u201ca ghostly shell.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>It is true, of course, that anti-Kiev rebels in these regions are increasingly well-armed (though lacking the government\u2019s arsenal of heavy and airborne weapons), organized and aggressive, no doubt with some Russian assistance, whether officially sanctioned or not. But calling themselves \u201cself-defense\u201d fighters is not wrong. They did not begin the combat; their land is being invaded and assaulted by a government whose political legitimacy is arguably no greater than their own, two of their large regions having voted overwhelmingly for autonomy referenda; and, unlike actual terrorists, they have not committed acts of war outside their own communities. The French adage suggested by an American observer seems applicable: \u201cThis animal is very dangerous. If attacked, it defends itself.\u201d<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\">* * *<\/p>\n<p>Among the crucial questions rarely discussed in the US political-media establishment: What is the role of the \u201cneo-fascist\u201d factor in Kiev\u2019s \u201canti-terrorist\u201d ideology and military operations? Putin\u2019s position, at least until recently\u2014that the entire Ukrainian government is a \u201cneo-fascist junta\u201d\u2014is incorrect. Many members of the ruling coalition and its parliamentary majority are aspiring European-style democrats or moderate nationalists. This may also be true of Ukraine\u2019s newly elected president, the oligarch Petro Poroshenko, though his increasingly extreme words and deeds since being inaugurated on June 7\u2014he has called resisters in the bombarded cities \u201cgangs of animals\u201d and vowed to take \u201chundreds of their lives for each life of our servicemen\u201d\u2014collide with his conciliatory image drafted by Washington and Brussels. Equally untrue, however, are claims by Kiev\u2019s American apologists, including some academics and liberal intellectuals, that Ukraine\u2019s neo-fascists\u2014or perhaps quasi-fascists\u2014are merely agitated nationalists, \u201cgarden-variety Euro-populists,\u201d a \u201cdistraction\u201d or lack enough popular support to be significant. (A Council on Foreign Relations specialist even assured <em>Wall Street Journal<\/em> readers that these extremists are among Kiev\u2019s \u201cgood guys.\u201d)<\/p>\n<p>Independent Western scholars have documented the fascist origins, contemporary ideology and declarative symbols of Svoboda and its fellow-traveling Right Sector. Both movements glorify Ukraine\u2019s murderous Nazi collaborators in World War II as inspirational ancestors. Both, to quote Svoboda\u2019s leader Oleh Tyahnybok, call for an ethnically pure nation purged of the \u201cMoscow-Jewish mafia\u201d and \u201cother scum,\u201d including homosexuals, feminists and political leftists. (Not surprisingly, physical attacks on Kiev\u2019s <span class=\"mandelbrot_refrag\"><a class=\"mandelbrot_refrag\" href=\"http:\/\/www.thenation.com\/section\/lgbt?lc=int_mb_1001\" data-ls-seen=\"1\">LGBT<\/a><\/span> community are increasing, and on July 5 authoritieis in effect banned a Gay Pride parade.) And both organizations hailed the Odessa massacre. According to the website of Right Sector leader Dmytro Yarosh, it was \u201canother bright day in our national history.\u201d A Svoboda parliamentary deputy added, \u201cBravo, Odessa\u2026. Let the Devils burn in hell.\u201d If more evidence is needed, in December 2012, the European Parliament decried Svoboda\u2019s \u201cracist, anti-Semitic and xenophobic views [that] go against the EU\u2019s fundamental values and principles.\u201d In 2013, the World Jewish Congress denounced Svoboda as \u201cneo-Nazi.\u201d Still worse, observers agree that Right Sector is even more extremist.<\/p>\n<p>Nor do electoral results tell the story. Tyahnybok and Yarosh together received less than 2 percent of the May presidential vote, but historians know that in traumatic times, when, to recall Yeats, \u201cthe center cannot hold,\u201d small, determined movements can seize the moment, as did Lenin\u2019s Bolsheviks and Hitler\u2019s Nazis. Indeed, Svoboda and Right Sector already command power and influence far exceeding their popular vote. \u201cModerates\u201d in the US-backed Kiev government, obliged to both movements for their violence-driven ascent to power, and perhaps for their personal safety, rewarded Svoboda and Right Sector with some five to eight (depending on shifting affiliations) top ministry positions, including ones overseeing national security, military, prosecutorial and educational affairs. Still more, according to the research of\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/reconsideringrussia.org\/\" data-ls-seen=\"1\">Pietro Shakarian<\/a>, a remarkable young graduate student at the University of Michigan, Svoboda was given five governorships, covering about 20 percent of the country. And this does not take into account the role of Right Sector in the \u201canti-terrorist operation.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Nor does it consider the political mainstreaming of fascism\u2019s dehumanizing ethos. In December 2012, a Svoboda parliamentary leader anathematized the Ukrainian-born American actress Mila Kunis as \u201ca dirty kike.\u201d Since 2013, pro-Kiev mobs and militias have routinely denigrated ethnic Russians as insects (\u201cColorado beetles,\u201d whose colors resemble a sacred Russia ornament). On May 9, at the annual commemoration of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany, the governor of one region praised Hitler for his \u201cslogan of liberating the people\u201d in occupied Ukraine. More recently, the US-picked prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, referred to resisters in the Southeast as \u201csubhumans.\u201d His defense minister proposed putting them in \u201cfiltration camps,\u201d pending deportation, and raising fears of ethnic cleansing. Yulia Tymoshenko\u2014a former prime minister, titular head of Yatsenyuk\u2019s party and runner-up in the May presidential election\u2014was overheard wishing she could \u201cexterminate them all [Ukrainian Russians] with atomic weapons.\u201d \u201cSterilization\u201d is among the less apocalyptic official musings on the pursuit of a purified Ukraine.<\/p>\n<p>Confronted with such facts, Kiev\u2019s American apologists have conjured up another rationalization. Any neo-fascists in Ukraine, they assure us, are far less dangerous than Putinism\u2019s \u201cclear aspects of fascism.\u201d The allegation is unworthy of serious analysis: however authoritarian Putin may be, there is nothing authentically fascist in his rulership, policies, state ideology or personal conduct.<\/p>\n<p>Indeed, equating Putin with Hitler, as eminent Americans from Hillary Clinton and Zbigniew Brzezinski to George Will have done, is another example of how our new cold warriors are recklessly damaging US national security in vital areas where Putin\u2019s cooperation is essential. Looking ahead, would-be presidents who make such remarks can hardly expect to be greeted by an open-minded Putin, whose brother died and father was wounded in the Soviet-Nazi war. Moreover, tens of millions of today\u2019s Russians whose family members were killed by actual fascists in that war will regard this defamation of their popular president as sacrilege, as they do the atrocities committed by Kiev.<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\">* * *<\/p>\n<p>And yet, the Obama administration reacts with silence, and worse. Historians will decide what the US government and the \u201cdemocracy promotion\u201d organizations it funds were doing in Ukraine during the preceding twenty years, but much of Washington\u2019s role in the current crisis has been deeply complicit. As the Maidan mass protest against President Yanukovych developed last November-December, Senator John McCain, the high-level State Department policymaker Victoria Nuland and a crew of other US politicians and officials arrived to stand with its leaders, Svoboda\u2019s Tyahnybok in the forefront, and declare, \u201cAmerica is with you!\u201d Nuland was then caught on tape plotting with the American ambassador, Geoffrey Pyatt, to oust Yanukovych\u2019s government and replace him with Yatsenyuk, who soon became, and remains, prime minister.<\/p>\n<p>Meanwhile, President Obama personally warned Yanukovych \u201cnot to resort to violence,\u201d as did, repeatedly, Secretary of State John Kerry. But when violent street riots deposed Yanukovych\u2014only hours after a European-brokered, White House\u2013backed compromise that would have left him as president of a reconciliation government until new elections this December, possibly averting the subsequent bloodshed\u2014the administration made a fateful decision. It eagerly embraced the outcome. Obama personally legitimized the coup as a \u201cconstitutional process,\u201d inviting Yatsenyuk to the White House. The United States has been at least tacitly complicit in what followed, from Putin\u2019s hesitant decision in March to annex Crimea and the rebellion in southeastern Ukraine, to the ongoing civil war and Kiev\u2019s innocent victims.<\/p>\n<p>How intimately involved US officials have been in Kiev\u2019s \u201canti-terrorist operation\u201d is not known, but certainly the administration has not been discreet. Before and after the military campaign began in earnest, Kerry, CIA director John Brennan and Vice President Joseph Biden (twice) visited Kiev, followed, it is reported, by a continuing flow of \u201csenior US defense officials,\u201d military equipment and financial assistance to the bankrupt Kiev government. Indeed, American \u201cadvisers\u201d are now \u201cembedded\u201d in the Ukrainian Defense Ministry. Despite this essential support, the White House has not compelled Kiev to investigate either the Odessa massacre or the fateful sniper killings of scores of Maidan protesters and policemen on February 18\u201320, which precipitated Yanukovych\u2019s ouster. (The snipers were initially said to be Yanukovych\u2019s, but evidence later appeared pointing to opposition extremists, possibly Right Sector. Unlike Washington, the Council of Europe has been pressuring Kiev to investigate both events.)<\/p>\n<p>As atrocities and humanitarian disaster grow in Ukraine, both Obama and Kerry have all but vanished as statesmen. Except for periodic banalities asserting the virtuous intentions of Washington and Kiev and alleging Putin\u2019s responsibility for the violence, they have left specific responses to lesser US officials. Not surprisingly, all have told the same Manichean story, from the White House to Foggy Bottom. The State Department\u2019s neocon missionary Nuland, who spent several days at Maidan, for example, assured a congressional committee that she had no evidence of fascist-like elements playing any role there. Ambassador Pyatt, who earlier voiced the same opinion about the Odessa massacre, was even more dismissive, telling obliging\u00a0<em>New Republic<\/em>\u00a0editors that the entire question was \u201claughable.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Still more shameful, no American official at any level appears to have issued a meaningful statement of sympathy for civilian victims of the Kiev government, not even those in Odessa. Instead, the administration has been unswervingly indifferent, tacitly endorsing Kiev\u2019s preposterous claims that its innocent bombing victims were killed by Russian or \u201cseparatist\u201d forces, as it did again on July 15, when at least eleven people died in an apartment building. When asked again and again if her superiors had \u201cany concerns\u201d about the casualties of Kiev\u2019s military campaign, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki has repeatedly answered \u201cno.\u201d Even worse, the German, French and Russian foreign ministers having urged Poroshenko to extend the ceasefire, his decision instead to intensify Kiev\u2019s military campaign was clearly taken with the encouragement or support of the Obama administration.<\/p>\n<p>Indeed, at the UN Security Council on May 2, US Ambassador Samantha Power, referring explicitly to the \u201ccounterterrorism initiative\u201d and suspending her revered \u201cResponsibility to Protect\u201d doctrine, gave Kiev\u2019s leaders a US license to kill. Lauding their \u201cremarkable, almost unimaginable, restraint,\u201d as Obama himself did after Odessa, she continued, \u201cTheir response is reasonable, it is proportional, and frankly it is what any one of our countries would have done.\u201d (Since then, the administration has blocked Moscow\u2019s appeal for a UN humanitarian corridor between southeastern Ukraine and Russia.)<\/p>\n<p>Contrary to the incessant administration and media demonizing of Putin and his \u201cagents\u201d in Ukraine, the \u201canti-terrorist operation\u201d can be ended only where it began\u2014in Washington and Kiev. Leaving aside how much power the new president actually has in Kiev (or over Right Sector militias in the field), Poroshenko\u2019s \u201cpeace plan\u201d and June 21 cease-fire may have seemed such an opportunity, except for their two core conditions: fighters in the southeast first had to \u201clay down their arms,\u201d and he alone would decide with whom to negotiate peace. The terms seemed more akin to conditions of surrender, and were probably the real reason Poroshenko unilaterally ended the cease-fire on July 1 and intensified Kiev\u2019s assault on eastern cities, initially on the smaller towns of Slovyansk and Kramatorsk, which their defenders abandoned\u2014to prevent more civilian casualities, they said\u2014on July 5\u20136.<\/p>\n<p>The Obama administration continues to make the situation worse. Despite opposition by several NATO allies and even American corporate heads, the president and his secretary of state, who has spoken throughout this crisis more like a secretary of war than the nation\u2019s top diplomat, have constantly threatened Russia with harsher economic sanctions unless Putin meets one condition or another, most of them improbable. On June 26, Kerry even demanded (\u201cliterally\u201d) that the Russian president \u201cin the next few hours\u2026help disarm\u201d resisters in the Southeast, as though they are not motivated by any of Ukraine\u2019s indigenous conflicts but are merely Putin\u2019s private militias. On July 16, Obama imposed more U.S. sanctions, which will be politically difficult to remove and thus will serve only to deepen and prolong the New Cold War. And the tragic shoot-down of a Malaysian airliner over Ukraine, on July 17, makes everything even more perilous.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>In fact, from the onset of the crisis, the administration\u2019s actual goal has been unclear, and not only to Moscow. Is it a negotiated compromise, which would have to include a Ukraine with a significantly federalized or decentralized state free to maintain longstanding economic relations with Russia and banned from NATO membership? Is it to bring the entire country exclusively into the West, including into NATO? Is it a long-simmering vendetta against Putin for all the things he purportedly has and has not done over the years? (Some behavior of Obama and Kerry, seemingly intended to demean and humiliate Putin, suggest an element of this.) Or is it to provoke Russia into a war with the United States and NATO in Ukraine?<\/p>\n<p>Inadvertent or not, the latter outcome remains all too possible. After Russia annexed\u2014or \u201creunified\u201d with\u2014Crimea in March, Putin, not Kiev or Washington, has demonstrated \u201cremarkable restraint.\u201d But events are making it increasingly difficult for him to do so. Almost daily, Russian state media, particularly television, have featured vivid accounts of Kiev\u2019s military assaults on Ukraine\u2019s eastern cities. The result has been, both in elite and public opinion, widespread indignation and mounting perplexity, even anger, over Putin\u2019s failure to intervene militarily.<\/p>\n<p>We may discount the following indictment by an influential ideologist of Russia\u2019s own ultra-nationalists, who have close ties with Ukraine\u2019s \u201cself-defense\u201d commanders: \u201cPutin betrays not just the People\u2019s Republic of Donetsk and the People\u2019s Republic of Lugansk but himself, Russia and all of us.\u201d Do not, however, underestimate the significance of an article in the mainstream pro-Kremlin newspaper\u00a0<em>Izvestia<\/em>, which asked, while charging the leadership with \u201cignoring the cries for help,\u201d \u201cIs Russia abandoning the Donbass?\u201d If so, the author warned, the result will be \u201cRussia\u2019s worst nightmare\u201d and relegate it to \u201cthe position of a vanquished country.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Just as significant were similar exhortations by Gennady Zyuganov, leader of Russia\u2019s Communist Party, the second-largest in the country and in parliament. The party also has substantial influence in the military-security elite and even in the Kremlin. Thus, one of Putin\u2019s own aides publicly urged him to send fighter planes to impose a \u201cno-fly zone\u201d\u2014an American-led UN action in Qaddafi\u2019s Libya that has not been forgotten or forgiven by the Kremlin\u2014and destroy Kiev\u2019s approaching aircraft and land forces. If that happens, US and NATO forces, now being built up in Eastern Europe, might well also intervene, creating a Cuban missile crisis\u2013like confrontation. As a former Russian foreign minister admired in the West reminds us, there are \u201chawks on both sides.\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; color: #bf0e15; font-weight: bold; font-size: 14px; text-align: center;\"><a style=\"font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; color: #bf0e15; font-weight: bold; font-size: 14px; text-align: center; text-decoration: none;\" href=\"https:\/\/subscribe.thenation.com\/servlet\/OrdersGateway?cds_mag_code=NAN&amp;cds_page_id=122425&amp;cds_response_key=I12SART1\" data-ls-seen=\"1\">Please support our journalism. Get a digital subscription for just $9.50!<\/a><\/p>\n<p>More recently, Kiev\u2019s stepped-up assaults on eastern Ukrainian citizens, the fall of Slovyansk and other small shattered cities, and the repeated shelling of Russia\u2019s own bordering territory, which killed a resident on July 13, have fueled more outrage in Putin\u2019s own establishment over his military inaction. The dean of Moscow State University\u2019s School of Television, a semi-official position, even suggested that the Kremlin was part of \u201ca strange conspiracy of silence\u201d with Western governments to conceal the number of Kiev\u2019s innocent victims. He warned that \u201cthose who permit murderers to win\u2026automatically have the blood of peaceful citizens on their hands.\u201d And the state\u2019s leading television news network demanded that the Kremlin take immediate military action, repeating the call for a \u201cno-fly zone.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Little of this is even noted in the United States. In a democratic political system, the establishment media are expected to pierce the official fog of war. In the Ukrainian crisis, however, mainstream American newspapers and television have been almost as slanted and elliptical as White House and State Department statements, obscuring the atrocities, if reporting them at all, and generally relying on information from Washington and Kiev. Why, for example, have <em>The New York Times<\/em>,\u00a0<em>The Washington Post<\/em>\u00a0and major television networks not reported regularly from eastern Ukraine\u2019s war-ravaged cities, instead of from Moscow and Kiev? Most Americans are thereby being shamed, unknowingly, by the Obama administration\u2019s role. Those who do know but remain silent\u2014in the government, media, think tanks, and universities\u2014share its complicity.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"views-field-value byline\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.thenation.com\/authors\/stephen-f-cohen\">Stephen F. Cohen<\/a><\/div>\n<div class=\"article-info-string\"><span class=\"article-date\">June 30, 2014<\/span>\u00a0\u00a0<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-info-string\">\u00a0<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-info-string\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.thenation.com\/article\/180466\/silence-american-hawks-about-kievs-atrocities\">Source<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The regime has repeatedly carried out artillery and air attacks on city centers, creating a humanitarian catastrophe\u2014which is all but ignored by the US political-media establishment. Stephen F. Cohen June 30, 2014\u00a0\u00a0 Share \u00a0 Members of the Ukrainian ultra-nationalist Svoboda Party rally in Kiev (Reuters\/Maxim Zmeyev) Editor\u2019s note:\u00a0This article was updated on July 7 and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4923,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[104,105],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4921","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","category-videos"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/myfutureamerica.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/07\/ukraine_svoboda_img_2.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2SfUR-1hn","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/myfutureamerica.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4921","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/myfutureamerica.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/myfutureamerica.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myfutureamerica.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myfutureamerica.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4921"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/myfutureamerica.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4921\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4925,"href":"https:\/\/myfutureamerica.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4921\/revisions\/4925"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myfutureamerica.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4923"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/myfutureamerica.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4921"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myfutureamerica.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4921"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myfutureamerica.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4921"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}