“I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am, let’s face it. ~ Marlon Brandon, from On the Waterfront
Ukraine continues its saga of a Shakespearian tragedy with its latest example of “the gang that can’t shoot straight”. Enough time has passed since the attempted terror attacks on Crimea to not only confirm what really happened, but also to gauge world response to it. Both are bad news for Ukraine, who has played the sad roll of the aging boxer volunteering itself to be used and abused.
Most pundits were anticipating the West’s automatic support of Kiev plus another barrage of “Russian aggression” charges, aided by the claim that Moscow made the whole story up. But I was less sure. Putin doesn’t do make believe. It is beneath him.
Over the summer we had the continuing buildup of Kiev attacks along the Donbass truce line, punctuated by the severe wounding of Igor Plotnitsky, head of the Luhansk People’s Republic, in a car bomb assassination attempt. He is lucky to be alive.
All eyes were instantly on Kiev as the number one suspect attempting a decapitation attack in advance of new pending hostilities. So reports of the Russian Security Forces intercepting a large terrorist sabotage unit entering northern Crimea and the ensuing shoot out came as no surprise.
Given the history of Kiev’s fractured post-coup command structure, and since the Ukie volunteer battalions have engaged in all kinds of rogue attacks and atrocities on their own initiative, or given the possibility of a rogue military faction with Rada backing, we could not instantly blame Kiev for being behind the attack. We waited for further developments.
The FSB nails Ukraine’s Defence Ministry
We did not have to wait long for a confirmed suspect, as the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) August 10th press release confirmed the attacks were planned by Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense Intelligence Dept. The initial attack was on the evening of August 6 and 7, where the explosives and weapons cache was captured after a shootout, along with two suspects who were captured and confessed.
But despite the blown first mission, Ukraine Special Forces attempted two border penetrations on the evening of August 8th, assisted by heavy fire from armored vehicles on the Ukraine side. Another Russian security officer was killed. We still have no confirmed numbers on killed or wounded Ukrainians. Military experts were aghast that Ukraine would attempt another border attack when Crimean forces were obviously on full alert. There was a suspicion that we were watching an act of desperation, but what for?
Kiev’s lunacy continued with a new surprise by asking for a UN Security Council meeting to review the incident. Although this was a nonpublic event, it did give the Russian ambassador the opportunity to get his evidence of the attacks on the record, and the motion was a huge mistake by Ukraine. While news outlets waited for the expected Western support for Kiev, none was forthcoming.
Vice President Joe Biden could only come up with a plea for “urging restraint” on both sides, essentially a diplomatic non response. From Europe there was no response at all, to speak of. NATO, which often places itself in the Russian basher role, made itself an utter spectacle through its statement:
“We note that Ukraine has strongly rejected Russia’s accusations, and made clear that Kiev is devoted to restoring its territorial integrity exclusively through political and diplomatic means. We further note that Russia has not provided any tangible evidence for its accusations against Ukraine.”
An EU spokesman followed suit with a similar “no proof” assertion. But the larger point is that no one was supporting Kiev’s claims, as if they already knew better. Mind you that NATO and the EU were onboard all the endless claims of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the MH17 shoot down, where Kiev’s showing any verifiable evidence did not seem to matter.
What some experts felt might have been a ploy by Kiev to set up Russia for making a fake terror attack claim – a ploy that the West would immediately support in order to use as a continuing sanctions extension tool – blew up in its face. Many feel that Kiev would not have taken such a gamble on its own without some prearranged support from a major Western backer.
Ukraine’s Three Stooges terror recruits
So now we must consider that Kiev or a rogue faction inside the Defense Ministry might have done this on its own. And there is some evidence for that in the amateurish aspects of the mission, where disposable flunkies seemed to have been used instead of deep-cover, highly trained operatives.
The confession of the saboteur captured seven days earlier, Ridvan Suleymanov, who had been assigned to scout the Simferopol airport and bus station for good places to plant bombs, provides us a good example. Not only was he ordered to scout locations for bombs, but also to plant a fake one. But then the plot gets more bizarre. He was ordered to call the bomb threat in using a three-way call, with the handler on the phone to prove that the call had been made. This made the handler traceable on the call.
But it gets crazier still. The handler wanted the fake bomb planter to wait at the airport and take photos of the Crimean authorities responding to the call, but of course they arrested the guy taking photos of them.
Once the saboteur pretending to be a Jihadi had called in the bomb threat, his cel phone location would have shown him at the airport. The police would have contacted the camera surveillance people at the airport to begin reviewing their tapes for anyone putting packages into possible bomb locations. These are the kinds of mistakes that no professional operative and handler would ever make…only inexpensive rookies.
What does this do to Minsk II?
Kiev is twisting in the wind at this point. In addition, Putin has canceled the Normandy Four meetings that had been planned for the sidelines of the G-20, which is a reasonable move after Kiev’s backers grossly abused the Minsk II accords as a sanctions trap for Moscow. NATO’s France and Germany, which were supposed to guarantee Kiev’s compliance to the ceasefire, have never done their job, and shamelessly exhibit little concern or embarrassment.
Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May has reached out to Putin to discuss repairing relations in their post-Brexit new world, and the UK’s Foreign Minister Boris Johnson was quick to follow up on this topic with Lavrov two days later. The game board is changing.
Germany’s FM Steinmeier meets Lavrov on August 15th, as his boss Merkel is also leaning toward normalization with Russia. What we may be seeing with these recent Kiev provocations is an attempt to delay Western rapprochement with Russia by using the only card it feels it has to play – cranking up the hostilities with the Republics to force the West to intercede on its behalf. This is a dangerous roll of the dice, nonetheless.
Prime Minister Medvedev has said that a break in diplomatic relations is definitely a possibility if Kiev’s attacks continue AND the West does nothing to stop them. If Moscow were to walk out on Minsk 2, where would that leave the Western manipulators and their puppet government in Kiev?
West’s Foreign Policy is another overaged boxer
Another geopolitical boomerang surfaced out of the blue with China’s offer of a military alliance with Russia to counter the West’s push toward a new Cold War containment strategy. And, Turkey, with its fast improving Russian relations, is also in play with its accusing the US and NATO of backing a Gulen coup against Erdogan. The Turkish Stream project has already gotten the green flag, with Turkey getting half the gas flow and Russia getting a hard fought pipeline foothold into the southern EU gas market, making the Saudis very unhappy.
If the Syrian War gets wrapped up somehow, we might see a number of countries begin to worry about where all those hard-core, trained jihadis are going to go to next.
I said it when it started, and will repeat it again. The US policy of regime change has been a disaster – economically and militarily for the US, and for all the families in the various victimized countries.
They have been destroyed over what was always a scam by the military industrial complex gang and their shady friends to make some big money via the worldwide mayhem they love so much. It is way past time we turned that around on them while we still can.
Jim W. Dean, managing editor for Veterans Today, producer/host of Heritage TV Atlanta, specially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.