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Additional Titles

THE CRISIS IN UKRAINE: WAR OR RUMORS OF WAR?

 

 

by Benjamin Baruch and Jeffrey Nyquist
August 15, 2015
NewsWithViews.com

Deception is a state of mind… and the mind of the state.

James J. Angleton, former CIA Chief of Counter-Intelligence Staff[1]

The present crisis in Ukraine began on 21 November 2013 when President Viktor Yanukovych refused to sign the European Union Association Agreement. This decision generated mass protests from the Euromaidan movement. In February 2014 unidentified snipers began shooting at both the police and the demonstrators. The resulting bloodshed and national outrage forced President Yanukovych into Russian exile. Following his departure, pro-Russian groups began demonstrations in southeastern Ukraine.

Beginning 26 February 2014, troops began to occupy the Crimean peninsula. Russian authorities initially denied any involvement, and described these troops as “little green men” who were acting only as “local self-defense forces.”[2] On 28 February 2014, Russian forces wearing unmarked uniforms along with Ukrainian Police and civilian sympathizers began to orchestrate the invasion of Crimea. Russian Special Forces, also known as spetsnaz, had already infiltrated Crimea and were seizing key installations including the airport. Russian regular forces then arrived by air and Russia annexed Crimea within three weeks’ time.

On 19 March 2014, BBC correspondent John Simpson wrote: “The annexation of Crimea was the smoothest invasion of modern times. It was over before the outside world realized it had even started.”[3] Simpson was on the ground in southern Ukraine when the invasion occurred and he encountered the first checkpoints which cut Crimea off from the rest of Ukraine on 28 February 2014.

The checkpoints were manned by soldiers wearing a variety of uniforms, alongside Ukrainian police. Any question of what was actually happening was resolved when they greeted Simpson, "Welcome to Russia!" As Simpson noted, “Their uniforms might be Ukrainian, but they were sealing off Crimea on behalf of Moscow. By the next day, it was all over. The outside world was still expecting Russian ships to arrive and capture Crimea. But it had already happened by stealth. The entire operation was very cleverly planned and carried out, but there is absolutely no doubt what it was - a remarkable, quick and mostly bloodless coup d’état.”[4]

Western sanctions were immediately imposed on Russian and Crimean officials. In response to the sanctions, “the Russian Duma unanimously passed a resolution asking for all members of the Duma to be included on the sanctions list.”[5] Putin would later joke regarding the soldiers without any national identity who manned the early checkpoints in Crimea, saying, "To be honest, they are those very same ‘polite people’ – the ones in camouflage gear, with semi-automatic rifles strapped to their waists. I think I'd be wise to keep my distance from them."[6]

Following the invasion numerous Western leaders condemned Russia’s actions in Crimea, comparing them with the policies of NAZI Germany immediately before the start of World War II. On 15 March 2014, the U.S. sponsored a resolution in the United Nations (UN) Security Council in support of Ukraine’s sovereignty. Thirteen members voted in favor of the resolution, China abstained while Russia vetoed the resolution declaring the “Crimean Referendum ... illegal.”[7]

Between 22 and 25 August, Western media published reports that large numbers of Russian troops were crossing the border into eastern Ukraine in what the Russian government described as a “humanitarian convoy.”[8] Russian media claimed an American led coup had toppled the democratically elected government, and that Russian nationals in the eastern part of the country were now under threat from the West. Russian propaganda spun the crisis as an attempt by America to further isolate Russia, and as the next step in the preparation for outright war in which America planned to destroy Russia. In the West, the media reported that Russia was attempting to stop Ukraine from developing closer ties to the Eurozone, and of trying to pull the country back under Moscow’s control.

The crisis in Ukraine is no longer receiving major coverage from the American media which would rather cover domestic events within the United States: removal of the Confederate flag; police shootings of ethnic minorities; or Donald Trump’s latest gaff. The American public has forgotten or has chosen to ignore the first invasion of a sovereign European state, and annexation of its territory, to take place since the end of the Cold War.

Policy makers are carefully monitoring this crisis which could escalate into an unexpected war. The last seven years have witnessed a gradual shift in the military balance of power as Russia has begun to deploy new missile weapons. Moscow’s rhetoric is far too alarming to assume this crisis will simply just go away. Given Russia’s renewed military power, the risk of war should not be underestimated.

Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum’s “War in Europe is not a Hysterical Idea,” published in August 2014, states, “Russian Parliament member Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a court jester who sometimes says things that those in power cannot, argued on Russian television that Putin should use nuclear weapons to bomb Poland and the Baltic countries, and show the West who really holds power in Europe.” As Applebaum noted, Russian President Vladimir Putin indulged Zhirinovsky’s comment, saying that he always “gets the party going.” As Applebaum also noted, Russian dissident Andrei Piontkovsky has recently argued that Putin “really is weighing the possibility of limited nuclear war.”

In the West, Piontkovsky’s thinking may appear to be alarmist, or a gross exaggeration of the crisis, but the reality on the ground presents a different picture. Russia has already made public threats against the Baltic States, Poland and Romania. On 11 August 2015, the Daily Mail reported, “Shockwaves reverberated through Eastern Europe after Vladimir Putin boasted he could invade five NATO capitals inside two days.” The article quotes Putin as saying, “If I wanted, Russian troops could not only be in Kiev in two days, but in Riga, Vilnius, Tallinn, Warsaw or Bucharest, too.”

The reality on the ground in Europe today closely resembles the Europe of 1938 to 1939 on the eve of World War II. On 10 August 2015 the UK based Telegraph newspaper reported, “A third of Russians fear a military attack by the United States while state television tells viewers that the U.S. is intent on surrounding and subjugating Russia, with NATO expansion as the key external threat to the country.”[9]

The West views war with Russia as impossible and nuclear war as unthinkable. The West’s attitude today can best be described as complacent. Most Americans believe that the United States is the lone superpower of the world and our only real challenge is from terrorists. The average American thinks he is more likely to be hit by lightning than affected by a future war. The Cold War has long been over, and the West won. Most Americans still believe Russia is now an ally, and any thought of a possible military conflict with the former Soviet Union is viewed as absurd.

The Cold War officially ended in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union. The experts in the West were convinced that America’s economic might had exhausted the Soviets, and the firm resolve of the Reagan administration had broken their will to continue the fight. Capitalism proved to the world that both freedom and prosperity could be delivered. America withstood the challenge of Communism and prevailed. The lights of the shinning City on a Hill never glowed brighter.

The West was exuberant in those days; capitalism and the American way of life triumphed, and the spoils of war would be divided among all in the form of the “Peace Dividend.” The media joined in the chorus, fanning the national celebration, it was the end of history, or so we were told, and the beginning of a new era of permanent prosperity. There were dissenting voices who warned “all is not well”, but their warnings were marginalized by the mainstream media or simply ignored.

One of the dissenting voices was a KGB defector named Anatoliy Golitsyn who defected to the West in 1961. Chief of CIA Counterintelligence Staff James Angleton called Golitsyn, “the most valuable defector ever to reach the West.”[10] Golitsyn wrote New Lies for Old in 1984, warning America that the Soviet Union was planning a massive campaign of deception. This would include fake reforms and a fake collapse of the Soviet Union, designed to fool the West into thinking the Cold War had ended.

Golitsyn’s 1984 warning is now viewed as a conspiracy theory. Other voices echoed similar warnings, but they too received an indifferent response. Nobody seemed to care, for the communists had given up their rotten empire, which was all the West needed to know. Any thought that the collapse of Russia was a clever chess move in a much larger strategic game seemed implausible, thus the idea was simply derided or completely ignored.

Educated opinion in the West accepted the collapse of the Soviet Union as spontaneous and authentic. The West embraced Russia’s new democracy and nothing could correct this misunderstanding. No criticism or warnings from abroad could break the fever of the West’s victory sickness. The greatest genius, the most passionate argument, even the most unanswerable logic could not sway them from their delusions, which would prove too deep-rooted and gratifying to ever be overcome. What was going to happen at the end of this chess game could not be prevented.

America’s shopping mall regime never wanted conflict with Russia or anyone else. Anyone who wrote of a continuing communist threat was out-of-bounds. The very concept of an “enemy” threatened the shopping paradigm of the regime, thereby negating its hedonistic assumptions. This dynamic become obvious to Kremlin strategists and sociologists who had studied American cultural changes during the 1960s and 70s. They worked covertly to promote, through active measures, many of the social crises which occurred in America during those years. They saw the weaknesses of America’s commercialized society as something to exploit to the fullest extent possible.

Nikolay Popov’s 1989 essay, “We Are All in the Same Boat,”[11] was founded on this point: Russia’s new task was to consciously and intentionally eliminate Stalinism so that America would feel free to set aside her nuclear weapons. The Kremlin long ago understood America’s national psychology. The West preferred shopping and having fun, and this might well would prove fatal, for the only thing holding the West’s defensive strata together was anti-communism (i.e., anti-Stalinism). Therefore, as Popov explained, “Our main task today, in addition to an honest analysis of our past and an elimination of the remnants of Stalinism ... is to divorce Stalinism from communism in the eyes of the world.”

The new Iron Curtain became a curtain of denial constructed by the West; the “peace dividend” meant more welfare pork and less defense spending, so the left was satisfied. It also translated into economic exuberance and a climbing stock market, so the right was triumphant and self-congratulatory. The deception was perfect. Everyone was bought off, emotionally and materially. The truth did not have one chance in a million.

Over 25 years have passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The vacuum of power which was created by the collapse of Soviet Union has led the world, rather than to an era of permanent prosperity and the end of history, to the brink of actual war. Russia merely appeared to embrace democracy and a consumer based economy, but nothing of the sort ever really occurred. Instead, Russia has developed entirely new classes of weapons, which no other nation possesses[12] and has armed itself to the teeth.

The early reports of the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the communist threat now appear at best, to have been greatly exaggerated, or at worst, an intentional deception. Although the intelligence service of the Soviet Era, the KGB, was renamed the Federal Security Service (FSB), it facilitated the rise of Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer, proving the security service is still very much in power within the “new” Russia.

Benjamin Baruch and Jeffrey Nyquist, in The New Tactics of Global War: Reflections on the Changing Balance of Power in the Final Days of Peace, explore the truth of what really happened after the Cold War and why Russia remains the number one threat to the United States.

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The New Tactics of Global War uncovers the reality of the changing balance of power. It offers insight into the thinking of the Russian strategists who first began this game of deception almost one hundred years ago. This book allows the reader to see inside the minds of the men who have conjured this new totalitarian threat, and in so doing, allows the reader a glimpse into the heart of the beast.

And behold a second beast, like a bear, and it raised up itself on one side, and it had three ribs in the mouth of it between the teeth of it: and they said thus unto it, Arise, devour much flesh. Daniel 7:5

The New Tactics of Global War: Reflections on the Changing Balance of Power in the Final Days of Peace will be released in September, 2015.

 

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Benjamin Baruch is a professional financial advisor, author and public speaker.

Benjamin Baruch is the author of the best-selling book; “The Day of the LORD is at Hand.” First released in 1998, it immediately became an underground best-seller, with over 20,000 copies sold. The 7th Edition was released in December, 2014 and includes insight into the today’s major news headlines including the crisis in the Ukraine, and the growing wars of the Middle East. Benjamin also uncovers what has been occurring behind the closed doors of power in the United States offering the reader a clear view of what our rulers are doing in the dark.

Benjamin’s has recently released his second book, a seven volume series; entitled “Search the Scriptures Volume One: Out of the Darkness” which is now available at Amazon.com.

Benjamin Baruch is a Chartered Financial Analyst and a Certified Public Accountant and is a financial advisor to some of the largest privately held real estate companies in America. His academic background includes studies in International Finance and Economics at UCLA and graduate studies in the Middle East conflict at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel. Benjamin is a recognized expert in real estate taxation, and his professional experience includes the management of institutional investment portfolios. For more information, or to book Benjamin for a speaking or media appearance, please contact him through his website.

Amazon authors page: Benjamin Baruch, Author

Website: BenjaminBaruch.net

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