Nearly four years ago, after a relatively short hop over the East and the South China seas from Kansai International, and a far-too-long lay over in Kuala Lumpur, I sat on a Malaysia Airlines flight and watched the desert shores of the Caspian Sea slip by some ten thousand metres below, and the plane then headed on over Rostov-on-Don and Eastern Ukraine. That was four years ago, but it could just as easily have happened yesterday, and I - and anyone else who regularly flies between Europe and Asia - could just as easily have been on flight MH17 as it was blasted out of a sky by a missile that was almost certainly fired by either the Russian military or their proxies within Ukraine.
Some people - Tom Friedman being a shining example - are given to talking about the interconnected-ness of the modern world, and how the shared interests this should generate should act to limit conflicts as the damage will no longer be limited to a single area of the globe. If this is at all true then the citizens of all the countries affected by the conflict, particularly those closest to it in Europe, need to finally take a stand against Putin's incursion into the Ukraine, an incursion which has now resulted in the deaths of hundreds of perfectly innocent people. They need to do it now, and they need to do it in a definite and un-ignorable way.
That's why the very first thing that needs to be questioned is whether it is appropriate to be hosting the 2018 World Cup in Russia, and whether the teams of countries whose citizens have been killed by Putin's proxies should really be planning to attend a sports tournament that will be a major PR coup for the Putin government.
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15 comments:
Since Russia has veto on the Security Council, how about a full UN vote to send the peacekeepers into the Ukraine and take away any weapons bigger than an AK-47....
LaoLao
One thing Putin has going for him is credibility, all of his words can be confirmed and verified and in the end "the truth shall set you free" and the truth will out.
The US on the other hand wants to think iitself a master manipulator but in the end is a world class as- and simple low life knuckle dragging pathetic excuse for and upright walking creature with an IQ in the single digits (on a good day).
So keep your cool Russia and Putin, the US's days are coming to an end… .fortunately.
"all of his words can be confirmed and verified"~
You mean like when he denied Russian troops had entered the Crimea, then admitted it? Or do you mean like when his government claimed to be able to negotiate a ceasefire, then denied they controlled the rebels, said they had "lost control" of the rebels? Or like when his government condemned the Maidan demonstrators first as "gays and jews" and then as "fascists and pogromists" (we're still waiting for that pogrom BTW)?
Please crawl back to whatever hole you have emerged from, you and your Russian paymaster have zero credibility.
Ukrainian Neo-Fascists started the whole thing last winter, and John McCain gave them an incitement to riot speech. Ukraine also steals gas, because they are BROKE! And that is Tymoshenko's and Obama's fault. There are 2,000,000 Ukrainian nationals working in Russia; Russia should deport them back to Ukraine, and give Poroshenko 2,000,000 MORE unemployed!!
With the USA in for a fall of unprecedented proportions the effects of these fabricated allegations on Putin will look microscopic in nature. Peter Jennings described how the stupid USA citizens consume the tidal wave of propaganda coming from all the neocon news sources. It is true, the people in the USA are the worst informed people on the planet, and are far too dumb to figure it out.
Russia will emerge from all this turmoil stronger because they have intelligent leaders and well educated citizens. It is the USA that will crash and we will see, if they can endure hardship as Russia did in 1992. And their minion UK is already falling apart, with Scotland wanting to leave that mess the same way Crimea and Donbas wants to leave fascist Ukraine, and join mother Russia.
If a BUK missile system was brought in over the border, the US military would have photos whether day or night. When US said there are 100K Russians on Ukraine's border, no photos were available. When Russians did military games, hundreds of photos were presented. Since then, again no photos because all that is on the border are refugee camps. It was reported that the rebels acquired a BUK system from the national guard, that is how they got the system. In a russophobic western world it will always say Russia did it... Maybe they should look at the money trail and realize that in the Ukrainian situation the USA did it.
More information is beginning to trickle out and unfortunately it all tends to point towards a deliberate attack organised by Kiev and the US and UK.
For myself, I was open to persuasion until I watched the Ukrainian ambassador to the UN speak less than 24 hours after the catastrophe.
He produced video - photographic - and audio evidence and a very slick presentation. We should bear in mind that we are asked to believe that all of this 'evidence' came from an area that is held by the separatists? No - sorry they will have to do better than that. I feel sure Moscow is examining evidence as we speak, while Western propaganda is showing its ugly face. Putin will present the truth to the world soon.
The propoganda organ of the western states i.e its mainstream media is in full swing on propoganda to pin the blame for this horrific incident on Putin and Russia! And this based on mere opinion/speculation. Let us remember that this conflict is engineered by the lunatic neocons in the USA, their EU puppets and the fascist junta in Kiev.
What the hack happened here, FOARP? Since when do you have Russian trolls all over your site? I'd expect Chinese, he he...
Mark
Move over Wu Mao Dang, Putin's 50 Kopeck Crew are in town!
Yeah, basically a whole bunch of paid-for trolls are going around the interwebs posting this kind of garbage, as is indicated by them suddenly turning up in force on a blog that rarely writes about Russia.
Russian trolls have better English than the Chinese wu mao, haha.
I better write something on Russia too. It seems to get a lot of attention.
I'm not terribly familiar with central/eastern/southeastern Europe, but I think this topic deserves further debate.
My offer:
<a href="http://justrecently.wordpress.com/2014/08/09/but-what-if-russia-invades-eastern-ukraine/>But what if ...</a>.
Next try to build a good link:
But what if ....
@Igor Strelnikoff Neither the US or Putin has credibility on their side; in particular Putin is decreasing his credibility rapidly.
There is virtually no doubt that the missile which blow MH17 out of the sky was either controlled by the Russian military directly or by their proxies in Ukraine.
The only party I can think has even the slightest credibility left in this conflict is Ukraine.
The only solution I can see is not a political boycut; which does somewhere near 0 damage to Putin (I believe it would actually strengthen him), but a full economical boycut coupled with military readiness to engage Russia. The very first thing Europe must do (EU most likely) is to put troops in eastern Ukraine. This is not something I say lightly -- Putin has shown more than once that he is out to grab land from other countries and Russia has on more than one occasion stolen vital infrastructure from other countries using "debt" as an excuse (Ukraine has in particular, been a victim of this tactics).
Actually, there is some pretty good evidence that points to the Ukrainian Interim Government, but we could argue about this all day, so lets agree to disagree. I am sure the OP is a cultured person, and as such, he can understand that other people may also have a valid opinion. I am definatly not saying that calling the interim government "neo-facist" is correct, but as a perfectly accepting person, I understand that people may have their own opinions and draw their own conclusions. Such is the building block of democracy.
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